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NXNE festivAl guide
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PoP
goes
NXNe
freshly inducted into
the rock ’n’ roll hall
of fame, iggy and the
stooges get set to
tear up yonge-dundas
square at north by
northeast By MICHAEL HOLLETT
Iggy & THE STOOgES at yonge-Dundas square,
saturday (June 19), 9:30 pm. Free. nxne.com.
iggy pop is steering his sleek ferrari
F430 sports car from the Miami
home he shares with his glamorous
wife, Nina Alu, toward Miami Beach.
He’s running some errands during
brief downtime off the road after playing
Europe this spring.
“We’re on a break until July and August. The
only exception is the outdoor show with you in
Toronto, and I’m really psyched,” says Pop of
the NXNE gig he and his resurrected Stooges
headline at Yonge-Dundas Square on Saturday
night (June 19).
Things are sunny in Iggy & the Stooges’
world, and it’s not just the Florida skies that are
bright. The band that invented punk rock now
sells out bigger shows than they ever played in
their early years. The Stooges reunited in 2003
to meet an apparently insatiable appetite for
the punk pioneers’ dangerous rock and Iggy’s
anarchic athleticism.
Their legendary 1973 album, Raw Power, has
been re-released with full remaster treatment,
and a film about the disc’s recording, Search
And Destroy, screens at the NXNE film fest. Pop
also acts in Toronto filmmaker Rob Stefaniuk’s
inspired vampire film, Suck, also screening at
Northby.
And Iggy & the Stooges were finally inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March, with
proto-punk protege Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong
handing them the hardware at the corporate
bunfest at Man hattan’s Waldorf As to ria.
“The Hall is a game, and it operates on a lot of
levels,” laughs Pop, recalling the night at the
Wal dorf, when the Stooges’ deranged performance
of I Wanna Be Your Dog added to the
band’s legend and scared the shit out of the
suits in the front row.
“I think they were a little fascinated,” says
Pop of the stuffed shirts who stuffed the tables,
“a little snake and mongoose thing going on. I
just wanted to let them know I was in town.”
He wasn’t just in town – he was in their laps
also playing
saturday
when he jumped off the stage and stormed
through the crowd trying to incite the expenseaccount
set.
“I had done the Hall once for Madonna [the
Stooges sang two of her songs at her induction],
so I knew there’s a hierarchy of those who can
afford to pay and who ‘deserve’ to sit in those very
front tables. It’s a whole industry power thing.”
While clearly pleased to pick up his prize,
Pop has no illusions about the awards.
“The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame originated to
honour and make amends to the pioneers of
rock who were not educated people and got
screwed, to make the industry look a little more
human and to ultimately boost sales of the back
catalogues. Most important, they set it up to be
able to tie all these great R&B artists into an artistic
ancestry that you could trace to many of the
groups that were making the labels more
money.
“So by the time the whole experience was
over, I thought, ‘My god, I’m Bo Diddley.’”
He laughs.
“But the Hall is the sort of thing that gets outside
the subculture of music lovers. It resonates with
the broader public. And because it is an industry
thing, you feel a little bit of that ‘I prevailed’ thing.
“Other than that, you just want to go, ‘Ah,
fuck off – all of you just fuck off.’”
Industry accolades were unima gin able in the
Stooges’ early days. The promising band from
Ann Arbor quickly became a headache for label
execs who had no idea how to handle the group’s
poor record sales and out-of-control live shows.
“The people we freaked out – you know [the
Who’s] Won’t Get Fooled Again, ‘Meet the new
boss, same as the old boss’? We freaked out the
new bosses. In the late 60s there was an alternative
hippie infrastructure of pod people or
body snatchers that were at every gig. They
con gregated around the local psychedelic ballroom,
the clubs, the FM station and managed
the local bands. They didn’t like us, and neither
did the top of the industry.
“But the people liked us.”
Pop recalls, “The music was very, very hardhitting,
the lyrics and the way the music was
put together daring.”
RaveoNettes coNtRol YoNge-DuNDas
THE RAVEONETTES at yonge- Dundas
square, saturday (June 19), 8 pm. Free.
nxne.com.
I catch Raveonettes guitarist/singer
Sune Rose Wagner at the album cycle
equivalent of low tide.
Now that tours in support of the
Danish garage pop duo’s last album, In
And Out Of Control (Vice), are over, he’s
sneaking in some downtime,
vacationing in london, England, with
friends from Brooklyn band the Drums.
But Wagner and fellow Raveonette
Sharin Foo aren’t resting for long. the
hardworking pair are already writing album
number five (due in 2011) and
prepping a B- side and rarities compilation
for later this year.
“that’s how it works,” says Wagner
over the line. “We do an album, then we
tour, then we immediately get into a
But the Stooges approach
didn’t trans late into record sales:
bad news for record execs, no big
deal to Iggy.
“I’d always thought that was the
right amount to sell. I would say, ‘If this is
handled right, there might be 50,000 in America.’
I couldn’t even conceive of the outside world
yet, who might like this stuff, and that’s fine.
“I didn’t understand the tenets of capitalism.
I thought surely somebody could make a little
profit selling records like that. We could do
shows and we could all live together in a house
and eat brown rice, smoke hash and fuck, listen
to music and read The Teachings Of Don Juan.
What’s the problem?”
Desperate to get a return on its floundering
investment, Elektra tried to get Iggy to ditch
the band.
“I’d hear again and again, ‘Lose the group. I
can get you with some real musicians. You’re
cute and you’ve got an interesting act.’”
Pop says he pushed his band to new extremes
for the Stooges’ second album, Fun
House, but the release sold only half as well as
the first. The label never did formally drop the
band, but did try to get Pop to sign what he calls
a boy band deal.
“I weaselled out,” says Pop. “I didn’t do that.”
Instead, he got introduced to David Bowie,
who encouraged him to move to London. Pop
talked the Stooges into joining him and finishing
Raw Power, with Bowie doing the final mix.
It sold as poorly as the earlier Stooges releases,
and the band eventually collapsed, a victim of
corrosive life on the road, addiction and an industry
grown impatient with their false starts.
But Pop remains proud of the Stooges.
“We tried to do something that had enough
of familiar rock format so that people would
pay attention. But – and nobody else had done
this – we brought influences from John Cage,
Harry Partch, Lebanese belly dancing music,
Turkish orchestral music, Bedouin music, slave
chants, Balinese stuff and Carl Orff, little touches
of all that and jazz.”
Pop says the sleigh bells on I Wanna Be Your
Dog were lifted from avant-garde jazz player
NXNE
rocks
YoNgE
& DuNDas
for the complete
Yonge-Dundas Square
lineup,
see page 62
studio and work on a new album.
“there is very little free time. We try
always to be occupied with creative
stuff.”
these moments between touring
and recording are crucial; they’re when
songs get written and decisions get
made about sound, artistic direction
and whom to include in the creative
process.
on In and out of control, sune and
Foo brought in Danish pop whiz kid
thomas troelsen to co- write and co-
produce. Will they do that again?
“No,” says Wagner forcefully.
“absolutely not.”
a jab at troelsen? Maybe not.
Wagner has a thing for changing up the
process.
“We like to do albums that are very
independent from one another, so after
the last one, which has tons of production
on it, we want to cut back and do
Pharoah Sanders, and there’s
some of Johnny Cash’s I Walk
The Line in No Fun.
“I worked in a record store as a
stock boy, and I’d often stay late restocking
and playing odd records. I
wanted to learn. I listened to Balinese music
and to those monks who blow those big Tibetan
long horns.”
Then Pop unleashes a bellowing blast, an
imitation of the otherworldly horns that inspired
him.
“I like that music – it’s good shit. I still listen
to it. I listen to what people would think is
pretty weird stuff, but it gives me pleasure.”
He got no pleasure, however, from watching
punk finally take hold years after the Stooges
collapsed.
“It was difficult emotionally. I knew I couldn’t
go back. I intuited that they were doing things
based on what I did, but in a more palatable
form, a little more commercialized. New Rose
(by the Damned) and God Save The Queen (Sex
Pistols) and later some of the early Clash stuff,
that’s slicker, a little different.
“And of course they had a smaller, more receptive
country to spring it on.
“In America, it’s like trying to wake up a
large, wet hippopotamus – no, not even a hippo,
something very large, damp and flaccid. And
you’re trying to wake it up, and America won’t
get a stiffy. It’s very hard to get America behind
something, even to notice. In Britain, music is
more important.”
Even now, he says, the pasteurization of
punk continues.
“They figured out a way to defang it. Cutie it
up and we can sell this shit. Especially post-
Green Day, neo-punk has to be kind of cute and
kind of funny. Green Day still has a lot of raw
talent, but when you start getting into Blink-182,
you start getting into jokes.”
Punk’s no joke to Pop, as we’ll see when he
brings his ferocious show to Toronto. 3
michaelh@nowtoronto.com
more online
Interview clips at nowtoronto.com
something raw, noisy and darker-
sounding.”
this love of contrast is also hardwired
into their music.
“I like to write songs that musically
sound really happy but have lyrics that
are actually quite far from happy,”
laughs Wagner. “I like to lure people
into what they think is paradise, but it
turns out to be hell.
“It just messes with their minds.
they think they’re dancing to a cute
little song, but it’s really all about evilness.”
as for the B- sides and rarities collection,
Wagner says they’re still wading
through piles of old recordings to decide
what makes the cut.
“[there will be] a healthy dose of
between 20 and 30 songs,” he promises,
“mainly for our hardcore fans, who
deserve to hear them.” JORDAN BIMM
56 june 17-23 2010 NOW NOW june 17-23 2010 57