The Stooges' final (pre-London) gigs, May 1971

The final Stooges gigs in May 1971:

Returning to Ann Arbor, the Stooges were scheduled to play two shows at the Eastown Theater in Detroit, Friday and Saturday, May 21st and 22nd. On his way to the venue, Scott drove the band’s rented equipment truck into a bridge, ruining the truck and $3,000 in band equipment. Scott ended up in hospital with two of the band’s roadies. “We had a rented U-haul truck for taking the equipment,” Ron remembers. “My brother says he wants to go along. He wants to go with the roadies. He lives to drive so they let him drive the truck. So right here in Ann Arbor on Washington St., there’s a train trestle that goes across, though this one is real small and it’s posted at a certain height. He wasn’t paying attention. He was doing about 35 mph, went under the bridge and ‘bam,’ took the top off the truck.”

“Nobody told me it was a twelve-foot-six truck and a ten-foot-six bridge,” says Scott. “I got thrown out of the truck about 15 yards. One guy hit the dashboard and knocked all his teeth out, he was unconscious, and the other guy hit the windshield, which put a big gash in his head and he was wandering around with blood all over his face. I thought the other guy was dead. I was going, ‘Oh no,’ still not knowing what the hell happened and then I turned around and saw that the truck didn’t fit under the bridge. So they made the gig that night without me. They had to put six stitches in my chin, but what I’ll never forget is that stitch they put in my tongue. It was the worst pain I ever had in my whole life. I thought I was gonna snap. I though I was just gonna lose it. You can look at the bridge even now, and you can tell. That bridge is still fucked up.” Fields says of the accident, “They destroyed the truck, destroyed the musical instruments, which were rented, and destroyed the bridge. So they were being sued by the owners of the truck, the owners of the instruments, and the city of Ann Arbor. And they wanted to know, at four o’clock in the morning, what was I gonna do about that. What was I gonna do about it? I was gonna go back to sleep.”

Because of the accident, the Stooges were forced to cancel the first of two shows at the Eastown Theater. With Scott in hospital, Iggy called up former Stooge Steve Mackay to play drums the second night at the Eastown Theater. However, the concert turned out a disaster, with Iggy repeatedly stopping Steve to instruct him how to play the right beat. “It was terrible because he [Steve] just stiffened up,” Ron remembers. “I looked around, he was beet red, spotlight’s on him, he just like… arms of lead. It was disastrous, but it was funny. I was never at first so embarrassed, mad, then laughing because Iggy’s going, ‘Steve, one, two, just the beat, one, two, three, four…’ We stopped songs, the crowd’s going, ‘Ooooh, aaaaah….’ I couldn’t have felt worse than Steve. On the way back… complete silence in the car. Steve wouldn’t take his pay and I just started laughing. I couldn’t stop laughing.”

Scott was back in action for their next gig, scheduled for St. Louis’ Music Palace on Wednesday, May 26th. However, the band encountered more problem as one of their roadies arrived too late with the equipment, causing the crowd to riot at the club when they were informed that there would be no performance. Ron recounts, “We were playing in St. Louis and we were in Michigan and he [a roadie] decided, ‘Well, I’ll take the equipment truck and drive.’ He took it to a wedding instead, made us miss the gig. They rescheduled the job for the next day. It was a terrible little stage at a horrible place. We thought there would be no job, and we waited up all morning ‘till the nine o’clock news. There was a riot at the club we didn’t play at so we went, ‘Yay, hooray!’” The venue officials felt the Stooges’ audience was going to be too rowdy and rescheduled the gig for another venue, the Factory in St. Charles, a St. Louis suburb.

The Factory show was curtailed after 40 minutes when Iggy accidentally hit Ron in the head with his microphone. Iggy told the crowd that they couldn’t finish the show because Ron needed medical attention. Afterwards, Iggy hung out in the lobby and talked to people because the band felt bad about cutting the show short. As a result of the shortened set and the additional costs caused by the rescheduled show, the promoter withheld the money and would not pay the band. To make matters even worse, the Stooges discovered that someone had taken their rented car, leaving them trapped in St. Louis without money and mode of transport with scheduled concerts at the Tumbleweed in Walled Lake, Michigan (May 28th), the Toledo Sports Arena (May 29th), and a rock festival in Pittsburgh, the East Coast First Great Lighter Than Air Fair (May 30th). They called Fields, desperately asking him to wire them money so they could return. Still, it was too late and they missed the three gigs.

Fascinating stuff, Per.

An intriguing extra angle to this is that the Stooges has borrowed more money from Elektra in the preceding months. The money got spent (we can guess on what) and the band's only income was from gigs.

THhen around May or June Eletrak sent a letter demanding repayment of the loan - and, in effect, they demanded they receive all their income from live performances. As you can imagine, that was the death knell...