A touching interview with Ron Asheton. I spent a couple of days, or rather long nights, interviewing Ron in Ann Arbor back in 1995, exhaustively going through Stooges anecdote after Stooges anecdote. It was heart-warming seeing him and Steve Mackay, back out of the wilderness, after the Stooges Hammersmith show. We followed up with a phone conversation. It was another reminder, if one were needed, of the bizarre nature of the Stooges’ career – to be derided for making their ridiculous music all those years ago, and only now to get the accolades they deserved, at an age when many of their high school contemporaries have retired. I liked Ron, who is arguably more deserving of the title godfather of punk than his singer, although I know there will be things in the book that will displease him. The music biz is like politics, in that most careers ultimately end with getting the sack. In this context, I’m sentimental enough to value this particular happy ending.
RA: “To come back and do it again, when what we wanted was the proper respect from the very beginning. It’s pretty amazing. It’s really fun and it seems so special that it seems almost too good to be true, you’re gonna go whoop, I’m gonna wake up now and gonna be back in the bar playing for 10 dollars a night. It’s just too wonderful. And to be with everyone. But [it’s] even actually better cos everyone had just grown up and it’s not all the crazy madness or the drug stuff from the past. So it’s just like taking this great holiday and getting paid for it.”
PT: I was touched by the way Iggy talks about you guys on stage. It was beyond touching. I felt almost tearful! There was absolute love there!
RA: “That is correct. All the years of animosity or whatever, or non communication actually. [When we] play, it’s like all those years were never between us. It’s like the better times of the beginning when we all just hung out together. We were our own best friends, we always went everywhere together,. We literally, the only times we were apart was when you were sleeping or taking a shit, and it’s great to be back… to see every member, and in the beginning having the same fun like I did in the beginning of watching and seeing what Iggy’s going to do, and enjoying the antics, the performance, but now also watching out to not get hit by those flying mic stands and swinging microphones, which I have been a couple of times. But not hurt.”