Claiming credit... the Fun House tunes

Who did what? Iggy vs. Ron re. Fun House songwriting

Iggy has claimed that he composed all the Fun House tracks except for the riff for “TV Eye,” “I wrote that record almost entirely on my own. The only thing that Ron came up with was the riff to ‘TV Eye.’ The rest was all mine. The Ashetons were simply not as hard-working as me and as we got more gigs, they wrote less and less.” Ron refutes Iggy’s claims, saying that the album was essentially a collaboration between himself and Iggy, but also with important contributions by Dave Alexander, “Fun House was sitting in my room and the basic foundation was coming up with a chord riff. ‘Iggy come down here.’ He’d pop his head in, ‘I hear something I like…’ I’d be sitting in my apartment in the band house. He’d say, ‘That sounds cool, why don’t you work around those lines.’ Or I’d say, ‘Hey, listen to this,’ and we’d both digest it or he’d say, ‘Maybe… turn that around.’ He helped out with arranging it. He always claims that he wrote a lot of the stuff, but it’s really not true because he couldn’t play. We got him a guitar. He was an integral and important part of putting all the music together, of course. Because he’s no dummy. He did write the lyrics. Mostly, I would come up with riffs and then the middle-eight or certain choruses, and he had suggestions. He’d play minimally. He’d say, ‘I can only play it with one note but listen to this.’ We did collaborate an awfully lot together. ‘Dirt’ was Dave Alexander’s riff. We’d get together and practice would always start out with a jam. We’d go over pieces. ‘Fun House’ was also Dave’s riff. He came up with those and we built on them. That’s how the tunes came about: jam sessions and me sitting there playing and Iggy going, ‘I like that.’” Meanwhile, Kathy Asheton, Ron and Scott’s younger sister, claims credit for coining the phrase “TV Eye,” “My girlfriends and I developed a code. It was a way for us to communicate with each other if we thought some guy was staring at us. It meant, ‘Twat vibe eye.’”

We have discussed this before recently...

To be fair, these are the kinds of remarks Iggy makes when he goes off on one. Then if you call him on it he usually backs down. I think he often says one thing in one interview, then the opposite in another, just to be controversial. As we mentioned elsewehre, the only songs he consistently claims - and this is norne out by Ron - is Down On The Street.... or Down on the Beach, as it was first called, in its romantic early version...

When did this article come out? I thought after the reunion Iggy never talked about this anymore.

Always seemed to me like they just had the perfect 'vibe' in the band. Everyone would contribute and the result would be perfection.

Iggy has commented that Ron would come up with riffs and he would spot them. I think thats pretty much what happened with some input from Dave Alexander.

Paul T wrote:

To be fair, these are the kinds of remarks Iggy makes when he goes off on one. Then if you call him on it he usually backs down. I think he often says one thing in one interview, then the opposite in another, just to be controversial. ...

You know what this reminds me of? the miscredits on Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World. DB had very little to do with that album, musically.

Or so it's said by some of his ex-sidemen.