Dog, No Fun, 1969, Cool Time - Iggy & Ron

Probably incomplete and partially incorrect, but here's what I wrote about the late 1968/early 1969 tunes. I think Paul has more complete info - Per

At the time of the signing, the band didn’t have enough material to fill up an album since they normally played very short sets. They spent a great deal of time and effort in the winter of 1968-69 working on new songs for the planned Elektra debut. They expanded their repertoire by writing four new songs: “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “No Fun,” “1969,” and “Real Cool Time.” Iggy attributes the riffs of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “No Fun” to Ron, but claims credit for coming up with the middle-eight sections of the songs. Iggy says he penned “1969” and “Real Cool Time” by himself, “I was writing on this $30 nylon string guitar and I could only play three strings at any given time but it was enough to be able to write good songs.”

Ron came up with the descending three-chord motif of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” According to Iggy, “We took some psychedelics and Ron started playing a lick that was somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and Ravi Shankar, and that was ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog.’ The way he got the lick was by listening to ‘Highway Chile’ [from Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, 1967] and just taking the blues and the string-bending out of it.” Ron explains how the title came about, “It came from one of those things you say to a beautiful chick when you wanna say you like her but you don’t wanna be too crude, ‘Hey baby, I wanna be your dog!’ All our titles were things we used to say. They were part of the band lingo. Iggy turned it into lyrics. We were pretty much living those lyrics.”

They followed “I Wanna Be Your Dog” with a piece that eventually became “No Fun.” It began life as a simple two-chord exercise by Ron, with Iggy screaming a different lyric each time they played it, depending on his mood. “That was just the three-finger chord moving up and down, press on the chord and then release it,” Ron remarks. “It was always very rhythmic, though, always tied right into the bass and drums, so it was all one huge dynamic sound.” Iggy recollects, “We were stoned on our smoke, Ron repeated those two chords and, boom, we had our song. I used Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk The Line’ [1956 hit for Cash] as a model for it, just the sort of phrasing, the Stones provided us with the middle eight, and the Velvets gave us the repetition thing.”

I still dont beleive that Iggy came up with any of the guitar parts on The Stooges or Fun House maybe with the rythm of the music but not the chords. Ron has said that at the time of Fun House Iggy used to show him rythm bits that he wanted on the song by playing them on one string.

G, F#, E wrote:

I still dont beleive that Iggy came up with any of the guitar parts on The Stooges or Fun House maybe with the rythm of the music but not the chords. Ron has said that at the time of Fun House Iggy used to show him rythm bits that he wanted on the song by playing them on one string.

i think you may be missing the whole thing, like maybe ron or iggy or even dave started a basic riff or something, but the band filled it out, iggy wrote the lyrics of course, but i dunno, i dont believe - whether iggy or ron claim to have written things - that any of them wrote the whole song or a whole riff or anyhtin by themselves, of course iggy wrote i got a rigt by himself, otherwise it was a band effort in my eyes

Iggy does love to take as much credit as possible though.

maybe, he used to, i remember being really surprised how possessive he was of the songs, like writing credits, in that mojo interview from like 96 or something, he was like ''funhouse was a band creation, but tv eye that was my fuckin baby" - thats paraphrasing obviously, il look for the magazine,bt it was exactly like that

but i think since then - esp w/ the reunion he's a bit more generous

Yeah I'd agree. TV Eye is defenetly Ron's riff anyway.

probly, but one of the things that make stooges stooges is they have that like one 'real o' mind, u'no esp at that time 69/70 they had one head and were very similar u'no so u'd never know unless one (and i'd lbelieve ron first) can remember exactly who came up with what first