Nasty, brutish and surprisingly resilient

TRUST NO ONE

Ron Asheton—who’d been punching the axeman clock in Destroy All Monsters and Dark Carnival before he was stunned by Iggy’s call—sees it the same cynical way. “When I write a piece of music, I always have something in mind, some kinda theme, a certain feeling,” he notes in a separate chat. “So I’m always wondering what Iggy’s gonna come up with. But with this album, it was always right, always something where I’m going ‘Yes!’ It’s my same general feeling—I’ve been kicked around for ages in this business, and all my friends have four legs; my pet cats that I trust more than anything walking on two.”

The Stooges reunion saga began in 2003, when Iggy phoned the Ashetons at the same Michigan number they’ve had for decades and recruited them for four tracks on Skull Ring, his last solo salvo. It clicked well enough for the lineup—with Mike Watt filling in on bass for the late Dave Alexander—to bow at that year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California and steal the show in the process. With original saxophonist Steve Mackay on board, The Stooges mark II began piecemeal work on The Weirdness, hooking up for five-day writing/demo stints, Iggy recalls, “Once every three or four months for three years. Ron had a little amp as big as a toaster oven, I sang through something about the size of a microwave, Scotty played a toy kit, and I recorded the whole thing on a mini-disc. So when we went in the studio, the songs were all written, arranged, rehearsed and ready to go.” Though, with one key exception: the Mackay-punctuated “Passing Cloud,” which was improvised on the spot.

“It comes directly from my loving to look at the clouds in Miami,” elaborates Iggy, who says he always feels two beautiful reactions when he comes off the road: “One of ’em is—as the plane starts coming down through those big, puffy Miami clouds—I just start grinning, because it’s this diffuse and forgiving light, like cotton candy. And I like it. And then when I get near my cottage and see the ’hood, I just relax and smile. Everyone’s walking a little slower and dressing a little brighter than in the other parts of the city.”

Albini’s ball-peen hammer mix captures The Stooges at their retro best, believes Asheton, who nervously shivered all the way to Coachella, only to walk off stage rejuvenated. “That raw and simple sound? That’s basically exactly what we are anyway. We’re not refined, we don’t wanna be overproduced—that’s just how we play, and Steve understood that.”

As his 60th birthday approaches this April, Iggy confesses he’s looking back and cracking a smirk. Two film scripts about his life—as yet unauthorized—are floating around, Penelope Spheeris’ Stooge-centered Search And Destroy, and Nick Gomez’s The Passenger with Elijah Wood possibly playing the ol’ Iguana. Thoughts of legacy, he concludes, “might come more into play now that I finally got this record made, because somehow I felt this was unfinished business. But we got the band up and running again, and sorta like Ahab, I think I managed to get my whale.”