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Ron Asheton (1948-2009) wasn't Jimi Hendrix. But he was the bludgeoning guitarist in the ultimate proto-punk band, Iggy Pop's Motor City scuzzmeisters the Stooges. By way of paying tribute, Simon Reynolds explains how their first two albums ripped rock 'n' roll apart.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Fun House is, no contest, the greatest rock 'n' roll album of all time. And its prequel, The Stooges, is the tremor before the full quake.

From the 1969 debut, "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "No Fun" are the justly famous anthems, but if anything "Real Cool Time" and "Not Right" are even more incendiary. Ron Asheton's wah-wah tongues-of-flame, Dave Alexander's sidling stealth-bass, Scott Asheton's seething drums, all conjure up an organic, monstrous, marauding presence. The Stooges never break loose, thrash or flail--what so many idiots today confuse with intensity--but instead hold all their deadly energy in reserve, brood and simmer.

The Stooges is awesome, but even the best songs sound like sketches for 1970's Fun House, when the band break loose from John Cale's slightly desiccated production and rock out. Right from the start, with "Down On The Street," it's also clear that the band have learned how to play, and leapt from the stilted Troggs-like stomp of "No Fun" to a punk-funk jive 'n' roll so supple, serpentine and swinging you just gotta dance. Fun House is proto-punk and proto-metal, but it's also, in some weird unanalysable way, jazz, even when Steve McKay isn't blowing freeform sax.

"Loose" raises penetration to a sort of existential principle. Iggy boasts "I stuck it deep inside/cuz I'm loose"; he's unleashed, a smart bomb gone truant. "TV Eye" kickstarts with possibly the most apocalyptic riff ever, then descends to another plane of prime-evil, the song uncoiling like a cobra as Iggy lets rip a cyclone-sucking snarl and guttural, winded gasps. Side One mirrors the male sexual dynamic (arousal, penetration, climax), with "Dirt" as post-coital aftermath: a marrow-chilling dirge-beat over which Asheton downpours silvered chords as harrowing and cleansing as "Gimme Shelter". Iggy's a glowing ember of his former inferno, belch-crooning Sinatra-style his philosophy of education-through-abjection: "I've been dirt, but I don't care, cos I'm learning".

The songs on Fun House aren't fast, but they sound full-tilt, all out, like a body trying to surge through a viscous, resistant medium. Which is exactly what Iggy is: Every kid struggling to cut loose from his suffocating environment, and, like Marlon Brando's biker in The Wild One, "just go." It doesn't matter where. In the Stooges, a certain kind of male energy finds its ultimate form of expression. Long before he started using military imagery on "Raw Power," Iggy Pop was all about ballistics--about ignition, blast off and explosive impact. Iggy was on the warrior male trip, with all its attendant dangers of lapsing from Romanticism into Fascism. The stance is midway between Nietzsche and Beavis & Butthead: "I'm bored/let's burn", teen delinquency conflagrating into a war against the world, combat rock without enemies or objectives. Iggy wanted to become pure intransitive speed, go out in a blaze of abstract glory, burn alive. And sometimes burn-out, as in the downered-out entropy of "We Will Fall" (with its mantra-chants and raga drones, like ten seconds from the Doors' "The End" looped for eternity), or the lagoon of lassitude that's "Ann" (where Iggy's drowning in his lover's eyes).

I could unfurl the roll call of the illustrious indebted--the Pistols, Birthday Party, Radio Birdman, Black Flag, Young Gods, Loop/Spacemen 3, even Nirvana--but the Stooges don't merit your respect as a monument in our collective heritage, they warrant full immersion. This is a NOW thing--it's 1969/1970 and Iggy & Co are more alive than you or I'll ever be.

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