Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

a pair of briefs.
While the Bowies were taking bullet trains all over
Japan, the Stooges were stuck in Los Angeles, their
career in limbo despite the masterpiece that was
Raw Power. In lucid moments, they rehearsed for a
tour that was not destined to come together.
“The whole world was a bit stoned and upsidedown,”
Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton told me in an
interview shortly before his death in 2009. “A wild
unknown frontier. I enjoyed it but it got scary and very
tiresome after a while. All that drug stuff happening
and seeing your world crumbling. Toward the end of
the first Stooges, I was the only one that was not
using, and I’d see pieces of equipment missing
—‘Hey where’s that practice amp? Hey, wait a
minute, where’s that reverb unit?’ And just to see no
interest in music. Music only became the means to
get some more money to get some more drugs.
‘Okay, we played the show, where’s my money?’
And they’d say, ‘Oh, we played for drugs.’”
Hard drugs had sunk in, and they became
impossible to manage or promote. Leee Black
Childers had the unenviable task of minding them
during this period. “There we were, the top of the
Hollywood Hills with nothing happening,” he says.
“We’re thousands of miles from the center of activity,
which was New York, and nothing was happening
but rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals. That was
horrible. And then, right, all of a sudden after this
long period of don’t do anything, let yourself go
flabby, then they were just suddenly pitched out.”