Boston & Philly, Sept 1969
The next stop of the tour was Boston, where the Stooges opened for Ten Years After during a three-night residency at the Tea Party club, Tuesday to Thursday, September 9th to 11th. “The boys were making fun of them, calling them Five Minutes Later,” Jimmy Silver recalls. “They were kind of annoyed that Ten Years After was getting hype and recognition because they could play speeded-up derivative blues tunes.” The Stooges confronted a crowd that had little interest in them, having come for the headline act. The audience responded with complete silence to each song. The only applause came from Natalie “Stoogeling” Schlossman, who had launched a Stooges fan club from her Philadelphia home.
Rock writer Eric Ehrmann caught up with the Stooges in Boston, interviewing the band and members of the audience for a piece that was published in Rolling Stone in April 1970. He reported that “Iggy incurs most of the injuries unknowingly, often scratching himself with the microphone or burning himself from swirling its long cord around his body, becoming bound up the way the Apaches used to torture the cavalry men.” Iggy explained that “the music drives me into a peak freak. I can’t feel any pain or realise what goes on around me. I’m just feeling the music and when I dive into a sea of people, it is the feeling of the music, the mood. Nobody ever knows how it’s going to end up.”
The Stooges proceeded to Philadelphia, where they opened two sets for Electric Flag, featuring Buddy Miles on drums and Mike Bloomfield on guitar, at the Electric Factory, Friday and Saturday, September 19th and 20th. Miles told the crowd, “OK, unlike some people, I can play music.” The Stooges wasted no time retaliating with a full-blown feedback freak-out while Ron yelled curses against the headliner into a microphone. “Buddy Miles’ idea of a show was to pretend to fall asleep on his drum kit during his drum solo, which brought cheers and applause from the audience,” Silver recalls. “The boys, of course, hooted with derisive laughter, bringing extreme bad vibes and enmity from the superstars, particularly Buddy Miles, who informed us along the lines that we were nobody, going nowhere.”