The Stooges- A Mystery Solved

The below piece was written in August 2008. This was when YouTube had been in existence for less than three years and before the explosion of social media. Facebook wasn’t a thing yet and most people were still tinkering with their first MySpace pages at the time. Its impossible to conceive of the scenario described below happening these days, as all the required information would just be a mouse click away. Although that would be much more convenient, I suspect it wouldn’t be as satisfying and it definitely wouldn’t make for a good story…

A mystery has been solved. Its been a long, long time and I wasn’t particularly looking for an answer for most if it, because back in those pre-internet days there wasn’t really all that many places to look.

Once upon a time, back in my early teenage years, I purchased a seven inch single from a shop called Red Rhino Records in York. Don’t look for it, its not there anymore. I was young and not particularly knowledgeable at that point and I bought it because I liked the blood splattered design on the centre label. There was no picture sleeve, no record label name, no copyright clause or date information. The artist name was Iggy & The Stooges. The only other text on the label was ‘I Feel Alright’ on one side, ‘TV Eye’ on the other and the words ‘Recorded Live At The Cincinnati Pop Festival’

Upon playing it for the first time, back at home, I found that the ‘TV Eye’ side opens with what sounds like a radio announcer speaking, saying the words “…they watch it all and listen to them tune up and listen to them check speakers. Er…I think we’ve got some action coming up now- we’ll leave Bob Waller for the moment and go to the stage and listen to Iggy and The Stooges”. A particularly thin and trebly recording of a live performance is then faded in. It is a band playing a very basic, very distorted and almost certainly very loud form of rock ‘n’ roll. The song ‘TV Eye’ featured a sick, screeching guitar solo, devoid of melodic or harmonic content, which seemed to be accompanied by the sound of someone either revving a motorcycle or taking a chainsaw to the stage. It was not until a long time and quite a few plays later that I realised that this is the sound of a bass guitar, fuzzed up to the max, fighting to hold the song down. This side of the single ended abruptly with a loud scream from the singer (presumably this Iggy bloke) and the announcer butting in once again. “There goes Iggy, right into the crowd” he says. “We’ve lost audio on him. This seems like a good place to get a message in” Iggy is still screaming his head off in the background as the recording suddenly ends and the stylus of my turntable hits the centre groove, thudding and crackling to its own rhythm as I lay on the bed puzzling over what I’d just heard.

This Iggy person sounded a bit deranged, his vocals alternated between being shouted, growled and screamed and he certainly didn’t seem to be adverse to getting close to his audience. This latter fact was confirmed as I flipped the single over and lifted the needle onto the ‘I Feel Alright’ side. A sudden fade in brought me into the middle of another feral guitar solo and our friend the announcer kindly letting us know that “Since we broke away for our message, Iggy has been in the crowd and out again three different times. They seem to be enjoying it and so does he!”. As if to confirm this fact Iggy screams “I FEEL ALRIGHT, I FEEL ALRIGHT” and when the gonzo ping pong of the song’s main riff kicks in, I realise that I know this one, as The Damned had covered it on their first album. I was pleased that my new purchase was shaping up to be a good addition to my burgeoning punk rock record collection, even if the audio quality was a little ropey and there was some bloke talking over it.

As I was already familiar with this song, I find that I can make sense of the noise and follow what’s going on- kind of. However, the song may be making sense but god only knows what is happening onstage as the announcer has now explained to us that “We seem to have lost him and we are trying to get a light on him now”. As the band enter the song’s final refrain a lone female voice suddenly appears, almost drowned out by the wall of distortion. The voice is hysterical with either excitement or distress and seems to be screaming the word ‘please’ over and over and is pleading to ‘take a piece’ or something like that. The voice is soon sucked back into the confusion and its place is taken by the shrill squeak of a freeform saxophone, wailing its way through an extended version of the song’s final section as a simple pair of powerchords phase their way through a long, elegant swoop. From out of nowhere the disembodied voice of our announcer returns and says with disbelief “That’s peanut butter…!” Hang on, what about peanut butter? What’s he talking about? What’s going on that I can’t see? Suddenly, with a long snare drum roll the song collapses in on itself and stutters to a halt. The recording ends there, cutting the announcer off as he hands over to his companion in the crowd.

I was astonished and confused about what I had just heard. If it wasn’t for the voice of the announcer I would have thought that this was just a bad live recording of some pre-punk garage band that it was OK for me to like because of its link (through the cover version I already knew) with the current UK punk scene.

But the announcer’s descriptions of what was actually going on made me think that there was something chaotic and dangerous happening while this band were performing and this mysterious single almost seemed to be a voyeuristic document of some event that might very well have been completely out of control. I found it fascinating and the fact that there were no clues as to its origin just made it all the more intriguing. It was obviously a non-official release as it had no copyright or pressing information. Who had recorded and issued it? And was there any more of it?

I played it to my friend Mike and the ghostly woman’s voice that is briefly audible scared him shitless and he refused to listen to it again, he said it was creepy. It was obvious that I was going to have to probe into the official catalogue of this chap Iggy and his band The Stooges and over the next few years I bought the three classic albums (The Stooges, Funhouse and Raw Power) as well as a couple of Iggy’s solo works and asked people who might know (and there were not many of those round our way) about them but I could never find any info about my mystery single. It was a live recording of Iggy and the Stooges- that was all anyone knew but that was obvious from just listening to it. It took almost 10 years and a move to a completely different part of the country for another piece of information to fall into place.

Late one night during 1987, a year after I’d moved a couple of hundred miles south to my new home town of Oxford, I was at one of those post pub gatherings at a friend’s house where the music is on and the rizlas are out. This particular friend was a member of a band whom I had just recently joined and we were still in the getting-to-know-you stage of things and it turns out that he is a big Iggy fan. So much so that he buys and collects bootlegs and unofficial releases and it was while I was flicking through his collection that the listing on the back of one particular compilation caught my eye. Because it featured two tracks- ‘TV Eye’ and ‘1970’ which were listed as being ‘Live at the Cincinnati Pop Festival 1970’. The sleeve notes also mentioned that the audio was taken from a TV broadcast. I asked my new friend if these tracks happened, by any chance, to have talking on them. He smiled a stoned smile and replied “That’s peanut butter…!”

They were the same tracks and the sleeve also had a photo of Iggy at this very concert. It’s a fantastic image of him standing bare-chested among a sea of raised hands with his right arm pointing off camera and is a great teaser for what the television footage must be like. Alas, my friend had never seen and had no idea of how to get hold of this footage and we both agreed that it must be presumed lost, otherwise the Stooges collectors grapevine would surely be aware of it. Film of the Stooges live is the holy grail for him but he’s never heard of the existence of any (although there is considerable excitement later that year, when a bootleg video of a Dutch TV biography of Iggy turns up that not only features an interview about the early days with Stooges guitarist Ron Ashton but also features about 30 seconds of silent black and white footage of the band live). The situation deepens a couple of years later, when I find a copy of Iggy and Anne Wehrer’s book ‘I Need More’ which features more pics from this event with a comment from Iggy stating “…the event was filmed and later televised on NBC, coast to coast, as ‘A Midsummer Nights Rock’. The ratings were phenomenal”. He also confirms that the announcer was Jack Lescoulie from ‘The Jackie Gleason Show’. Whatever and whoever that is, I had no idea.

Fast forward another 10 years from the above discovery and I find myself in New York. I’m on tour but we have a day off, so I’ve gone shopping and I find myself in a record store that happens to stock ‘unofficial’ releases. I’m after a copy of the banned Rolling Stones tour film ‘Cocksucker Blues’ and while I am in the video section I check out the Iggy videos. They all contain the usual footage that I’ve seen before (‘Bang Bang’ with the ping pong balls, his live appearance on ‘The Tube’ TV show with Frank Infante from Blondie on guitar as well as the Dutch documentary and so on). But the last one I find, called Iggy Pop Rarities, lists a few minutes of what it calls ‘The Stooges live in 1970 (TV Eye/1970)’.

With excitement, I conclude that it could only possibly be the Cincinnati footage and I buy it. When I finally get to view it, I find that sure enough it is. Unfortunately, it is also the worst quality copy of anything I have ever seen (and I own quite a few bootlegs). Obviously there is no way to be sure what generation copy it is but the visuals are reduced to a series of indistinguishable blurs and it constantly glitches and catches. Its also incomplete (judging by what I know from the audio).

This is very frustrating but it was all part of the bootleg buying game in those days. I had come tantalisingly close to the final piece of a jigsaw that had been ongoing for 20 odd years but had been foiled again. As I sat on the tour bus, running the video over and over again to try to make out identifiable shapes from the mess, I wondered if it would be another 10 years before something else would crop up that would solve the mystery. This would prove to be correct.

The all powerful internet has been bringing the knowledge to the world’s population for a few years now and as I sat idly in front of my computer last week with nothing better to do, I put the words Iggy, Stooges and live into You Tube and up came the result- Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Live in Cincinnati 1970. I was astonished, not only to finally find the elusive footage but also to discover that it has been up there for almost two years, just waiting for me to come and look for it.

As I waited for the footage to load, I hoped that it wasn’t going to be a copy of the same cloudy mess that I had purchased back in 1998. Luckily it wasn’t. It also wasn’t high definition Blue Ray whatnot either but who cares, I’m not a pampered child of the 21^st century. The video is a little fuzzy round the edges and is also timecoded but its all there. The clip opens up with my old mate the announcer, resplendent in suit and tie with his TV composure intact, closing his interview with a comparatively scruffy companion (presumably Bob Waller) and announcing the Stooges.

The first shot of the band is over the neck of Ron Ashton’s guitar and is of a very young Iggy bending over the front row of the audience. He is bare chested and is wearing tight jeans, a spiked dog collar and silver gloves. His naked torso is drenched with sweat and he is bawling into a small silver coloured microphone. He straightens up as the verse finishes, the camera turns to follow him and bass player Dave Alexander comes into view, leaning back as he digs into a Mosrite bass guitar.

The most that is visible of guitarist Ron Ashton is one shoulder and the back of his head. He will be seen from the front later but apart from that, the musicians in the band are barely featured, which is kind of a shame but it doesn’t matter because you know the action is going to come from Iggy. He seems to be gasping for breath and is leaning on the mic stand for support as he regards the audience with a baleful stare that eventually turns into a snarl. He is obviously biding his time and as the song enters a breakdown section, he is off the front of the stage and is lost among the audience members, a silver gloved hand briefly visible trailing behind before being swallowed up. The first half of the footage fades as an ad break comes in. Nice timing for god’s sake…

Part 2 begins with Iggy on all fours. He has lost one glove, has no microphone and is shouting wordlessly at the audience. As he straightens up he is obviously searching the floor for the elusive mic and it is eventually handed to him an audience member. Iggy returns the gesture by jumping back into the crowd (where he will remain for the rest of the song) and manages to complete half of another verse before sinking from view. Confusion reigns, you can’t see anything but a heaving mass of tumbling bodies and Iggy’s shouts are interspersed with that weird female voice shrieking. Eventually a spotlight finds its mark and the first person up out of the mess is a woman with a camera, closely followed by Iggy. That is what the screaming was all about- she was on top of him trying to take a photo and her voice was leaking into the vocal mic. She carries on trying to take photos from close quarters as she (and Iggy) are being jostled from all sides. He eventually abandons the mic by throwing it back onto the stage and climbs onto people’s shoulders. They are holding him up by the ankles when he points at something off screen and that iconic shot is played out. He is showing off, baiting the audience, alternately joining in their game and then mocking them. Then he is holding something, a can or a jar, and is smearing the contents over his chest and flinging handfuls in the air and at audience members. It’s the peanut butter incident, for a long time a rock ‘n’ roll legend, now in its full glory for all to see. The camera angle changes to close up as Iggy is swallowed up by the audience again eventually surfacing, with the help of a number of teenage girls, close to the stage. Gasping, filthy and bedraggled he is helped back onstage as the footage ends.

Its great and I’m overjoyed. It has been almost thirty years since I sat listening to the audio part of this performance and wondering what the hell was going on. I can now put the places, faces and incidents together and have the whole picture. Its all pretty much as I imagined it once I had learned a little bit about the man Iggy (although I did envisage it all taking place indoors). The announcer appeared exactly as I pictured him at first too, although the voice and his delivery made that easy.

It’s an amazing piece of film and a great performance, proper dirty, greasy rock music teetering on the edge of chaos, the kind of stuff that legends are made of and are few and far between these days.  It has also given me one of my favourite rock ‘n’ roll images. The mystery is solved at last and it was worth the long wait.