Free Detroit Rock City by Steve Miller Page B

hit the stage, and he laughed and danced away.
    Dennis Dunaway: The shows with the Stooges at the Eastown Theater always had a lot of violence. Iggy would jump off stage and pick a fight with somebody, and if he picked a fight with you, then you were the hero for the next week or two.
    Stirling Silver: The Stooges opened for everybody, and no one gave a shit.
    Niagara ( Destroy All Monsters, Dark Carnival, vocalist, artist ): Iggy always says, “Everyone says, ‘I was there and I loved you.’” He says we’d have shows where no one was there all the time.
    John Kordosh ( Mutants, bassist, journalist , Creem magazine ): At one point I was seeing the Stooges, like, every weekend.
    Cathy Gisi ( journalist , Creem magazine ): There were people who didn’t bathe for days afterward because there was sweat on them from Iggy.
    Russ Gibb: Iggy did invent the stage dive. The Grande was the only venue in the world where the audience could go right up to the stage. On each side were the dressing rooms, and the girls were crawling all over the place to get with the musicians. And Iggy would do that thing where he would bend over almost all the way backwards. And he fell over backwards, and people thought it was an accident. I don’t think so. He would be in the crowd, and next think you knew, he was floating on the audience. All these things were transpiring while I was trying to figure out if I made any money.
    Mitch Ryder: We learned how to jump into the audience. Iggy started it and got caught. That was good. That was a new one. Of course, nobody would catch you in those days. We would leap into the audience and they would make way for you and you would hit the floor. I didn’t get that memo. And I didn’t get another one. I was talking to James Brown one day way back and I said, “James, you know when you do your knee drop? I do the knee drop in my show too. Man, when I hit those wooden floors, my knees, I feel like they’re gonna break.” He just looked at me for a second, and he said, “Huh, you don’t wear knee pads?” I said, “knee pads?”
    Leni Sinclair: The Stooges had a house out in the country at one point, and I went over there one time. The Stooges were in their garage, and the garage was sound proofed with egg cartons. They were sitting there in the dark listening to Dr. John doing “I Walk on Gilded Splinters.”
    Billy Goodson: They lived in this white house that had this light bulb glowin’ over the back door. All dirt all over the place and cars and stuff. You couldn’t find a neighbor or nothin’. You had to drive there. But it was a very, very bizarre place. Really cold.
    Steve Forgey: I had a friend who was going to trade a Marshall bass amp to Dave Alexander, so he gets in his car and drives over to the Funhouse in Ann Arbor. Everyone is stoned to the bone, sitting around looking at the walls. This is in the middle of the day. So he says he’s got the amp, where is Dave? Pretty soon Alexander comes stumbling down the stairs, one step at a time, dragging his bass behind him, thump thump, thump. And he says, and I quote my friend, “Mph duh ga dewgathao.”
    Iggy Pop: I used to hang out with Glenn Frey at the Birmingham Hideout a lot. At one point after the Stooges had formed, we used to break up every few years. He was trying to start a band with Bob Seger, you know, he said, “I’m sick of working for Bob Seger. Come on, we could start a great band,” you know.
    Rick Kraniak: The Stooges didn’t like me. The band owed Diversified Management money, we were booking them, and I was a junior partner. Dave Leone was booking them. I had to go to the Stooges farm, trail them to the job, and make sure they got there so we could get some of the money they owed us. So I don’t think the band—I don’t think Iggy—saw me as one of them.
    Iggy Pop: We had no idea about a career at all. What was very