Once upon a time, there was this amazing music store on Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill, NC, called SchoolKids Records. It was the kind of place where you could ask the guys/girls behind the counter to listen to the new Pharcyde album, inquire when the new Beck was going to drop, and then have a 10-minute conversation about whether John Rutter's recording of Fauré's Requiem was better than Robert Shaw's recording. It was Eden for a music junkie like me.
I knew a few Iggy Pop songs--stuff like "Nightclubbing" from his solo days, mainly via the Trainspotting soundtrack. But I wasn't all that familiar with The Stooges. I'd heard phrases bandied about like "godfathers of punk" in regard to the band, but I didn't know what that meant without context.
One Saturday, I walked down to SchoolKids for the hell of it, just to see what was new. As I stepped through the front door, suddenly this two-chord riff smacked me in the face. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-a-dun...uh-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-a-dun... It was raunchy. Almost stupidly simple. Yet it was perfectly syncopated with the drums and handclaps in the background.
Was this some garage band playing a pep rally at juvenile hall?
Then this sneering voice spat out, "No ffffun. My babe. No fun." And he went on like that for a few stanzas, spewing some more stuff that sounded like it was scrawled by a pissed-off teenager in his spiral-bound notebook during detention.Then this frustrated plea came out of nowhere, "I say, c'mon, Ron...lemme hear you tell 'em how I feel!" and all hell broke loose with this howling, distorted solo that sounded like a wild animal stuck in a barbed wire fence.
As the vocalist's pleas to "Come on!" echoed off the walls, I marched to the checkout counter with my ears burning. The song faded with one more blood-curdling scream for good measure, and the dude behind the counter asked if he could help me.
"I want a copy of whatever that was, right now," I told him.
And that's how I became an Iggy & The Stooges fan.
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