Originally posted Thursday 27 September 2007.
Doug Currie, who roadie’d for The Stooges in 1973, emailed me a couple of weeks ago with his comments on Open Up and Bleed. He mentioned how the book “brought closure to a star-crossed time”, and I was touched to hear that the book rang true for him. He did mention that he would have liked to read more about Dave Alexander, the Dum Dum boy whom he knew best. I did cut some material about Dave over successive drafts to keep up the momentum of the story, although his crucial role in the Stooges, and influence on Iggy, does come through, I hope. But for Doug, and others, here are some of recollections of Dude Arnett, the lost Dum Dum boy.
Bill Cheatham (Stooges roadie and guitarist): “I was in the Dirty Shames with Ron, Scott and Dave Alexander. Ronnie Scottie Dave and I were all childhood friends from 13, 14 yrs old on. Then at high school they all dropped out. Dave started out playing guitar, and Ron was playing bass. Then when the band formed. Ron wanted to play guitar, he was advancing constantly… you have always been able to hear the bass influence in a lot of the guitar leads, and then Dave started playing bass.
“Dave was crazy. He was a juvenile delinquent, a great guy, one of those guys you thought you could size up by looking at him then realise later there were so many facets to him. But he was nuts, deep down, just a crazy kid. He was first to experiment with anything that came along, he was the guy that could get booze before reefer., We knew reefer was there, and he had his sights set on it… was ready to go all out. He was very interested in the occult, had a real spiritual bent to him. I think he was raised Catholic, lost interest in conventional Christianity, introduced me to a lot of things, introduced me to Aleister Crowley… and Madame Blavatsky, he was into her. He also was fascinated by George Harrison, used him as a compass. But he was really into spiritualism.”
Kathy Asheton: “Actually I met Dave first. I spotted him, he had just moved into the neighborhood, I spotted him walking in the neighborhood, he had long hair and he looked pretty cool, I had noticed him coming in, I wondered who he was, we were living at my mom’s house, the famous 107, I said Scotty there’s this guy, get him over, Scotty whistled got his attention. When I saw him up close it was, please forgive me Dave, but I didn’t like him at all… [he was spotty]… but there was something neat about him, and Scotty and I developed a relationship with him. He would pick me up from school in his yellow Corvair , and that’s the cool thing to be picked up from Jr High with a guy with a car.
“Dave at that time was already into afternoon cocktails in that house. Quite often you’d get in his car and he’d be drunk, and he liked to drive fast. There was one time Scotty and I both got out and made him stop, We don’t wanna be in the car with you, and we got out. Ronny then got involved with Dave after that, I’m sure as they started to converge musically.”
Ron Asheton: “Dave was way deep, way ahead of his time. Dave was a big part of the Stooges thing. Very subtle at times, blatant at others, but no one talks about Dave. And Dave’s also part of the makeup of Iggy. Iggy takes something from everybody, he learns it, and took a lot of personality from Dave and my brother, cause he was fascinated that my brother was a hoodlum. My brother was the guy that kicked ass in high school, did the things that Iggy would fantasise, that maybe James Dean might make movies about, my brother lived it, then Dave went top on that. I remember him, stoned on reds in 1965, me in the car, 110 miles an hour driving up this street, man. Iggy would never do that.. a lot of what Iggy is and Ig did in the past comes from my brother, Dave and myself.”
Esther Korinsky (Dave’s girlfriend): “He had a really big library in his parents’ house, but you know, he’d do all this things – ‘Well Esther, I don’t want you to read this book, I don’t want you to get into this ‘cause this is too intense. So there was a lot of mystery around him, he was a really deep, deep person. He wasn’t like those other guys as far as being real out there, showy, you know – he was really just withdrawn.”
Scott Asheton, Stooges drummer: “Dave was more highly educated than people realise, a book nut, used to bury himself in books, had a massive, great record collection, he was a grade school alcoholic, an only child, his father was a butcher, his mother worked in the thrift shop, resale, mostly clothes, not like guitars and stuff, not like a pawn shop, a clothing thrift shop. When I met him I must have been about 15, 16, and he was 18 or 19, probably 18 and he had a real nice fast car, he was all up on the clothes thing, having the right wardrobe, the happening thing for your image, and he was drinking,.And when I got to know Dave later when he was much more of a friend, I found out that since he was at a very young age they let him drink, and so he, Dave practically drank his whole life. He started when he was like 10 years old, died when he was 27. Those are like growing years, you don’t need alcohol in your body when you’re 10 years old.”
Jimmy Silver (Stooges manager): “When they didn’t have enough songs to make up the [debut] album we ended up doing the Indian chanting from that book I gave Dave to read. I can’t remember exactly who [Jimmy later confirmed it was Swami Ramdas]. It was about an Indian Richi or holy man who went around singing Ram Jai Jai Ram looking for enlightenment. Dave would noodle things out on bass, we didn’t have anything else do so they put this together. I sorta liked it, another in a long line of weird things they were putting out there.”
Ron Asheton: “On the first album, the writing was communal. I Wanna Be Your Dog and stuff, [all those lyrics] were a part of our lingo. She’s Not Right – was one of our sayings. Dave came up with riffs, too, like Dirt was Dave’s bass riff. Fun House was Dave’s riff and I did the other stuff.”
Esther Korinsky (Dave’s girlfriend): “I lived with Dave for eight months. He’d do his thing then go back to his parents, it was like his safety. He loved his room, it was very dark in there all the time. Two real small windows. Candles. Real dark, like a cave. But that’s where we stayed all the time. Dave was very reclusive, very. We’d go down and see Scotty, ‘cause he was right down the street, and he was of the same mind, he’d just sat around his mom’s… except [Scott] was into heavier drugs. We did not do much – I don’t remember us doing anything like normal things, like going to a show. You know, it was really like alcoholic. And that’s what everybody was into, very very heavy. And this stuff was just coming… I mean Goose Lake [the festival performance after which Dave was sacked], I don’t know if you heard about Goose Lake but they just had (whispers) bags of drugs, ha, and about half the time we didn’t even know what the powder was, like somebody would come with this bag of powder and go here, and we were like, Yeah, we’ll try that. I do remember everybody was really separate there. They got together when it was time to go on stage, but it was very strange. I think there was Jethro Tull… and I think Jim was hanging out with those guys, but.. I think me Scotty and Dave drove there and got lost, cow country, and had to ask at a farm and everything. That’s about all I remember, is the drugs.”
Bill Cheatham: “Goose Lake is kind of a blur to me… there was a lot of drugs there, a lot of coke, we played relatively early, and I seem to remember something about Dave fucking up. He wasn’t doing heroin I believe, but he was drinking pretty heavily. He was never round the house, he had his room, but was always at his parents. He was removing himself from the band. I think that more than anything was what took him out. He stopped talking pretty much. He had this defensive way of laughing things off, if you started to talk to him, then he’d find a reason to leave. Then… after he was fired I only saw him a few times.”
Steve Mackay: “I wasn’t aware of the politics of the situation or anything, but I watched him get frozen out. And I’d be around with the band and they wouldn’t invite him.. I could watch the machinations so when it started to happen to me, I thought.. this is gonna happen.”
Ron Asheton: “Dave fucked up [at Goose Lake] because he stopped getting high, and when he knew it was such a nervous, big crowd, he smoked a bunch of dope, drank some whisky and he was with this girl who was a bad influence, and when he got on stage he forgot all the songs, but we powered through enough that it was still good. When we got off stage Jim said, He is fired, he is gone, and he was so adamant about it, that they had their own weird relationship, that he did stay at the house and stuff and I didn’t really want to know, that he was so adamant about firing him. And I didn’t want to do it, but that’s Jim.”
Iggy Pop: “I have a wonderful ability to forget things, which has been really good for me. But I’ve been reminded since working with the group again from time to time, that at one point I said, No I won’t work with Dave any more on bass, and that… the whole thing began to slide apart. However, there I was out on a stage at Goose Lake and there was no bass. [2026 update: on the recently released recording, this is hard to verify]. He just had a complete mental lapse, too stoned, and he couldn’t play a note, he couldn’t play the songs, he didn’t know what he was doing, and er that’s traumatic, for somebody that… I was serious about this shit. So there began… the group never had a focus after that.”
Doug Currie: “There was some heavy psychological baggage [with getting sacked]. He would never talk about it, when he was in a good mood, he wouldn’t say anything bad but it must have been devastating. But I don’t know if it’s the drinking or his own weird psychological state, being an only child who’d always been indulged. Because he’d get moody. He’s the greatest guy one minute, then he’d get into some depression and funk. I remember one time we were leaving a bar in Ann Arbor, driving back to Ron’s house. Dave was standing outside looking morose. We said, Come on Dave, get in the car, he said No, no. We kept insisting and Ron said, Just let him be. And an hour before he’d been in a good mood.
“It was heavy psychological stuff given he practically founded the band, it had to be a devastating thing that he never worked out. He did drink a lot. I remember when we were driving the 600 miles from Ann Arbor to New York [for the Max’s Kansas City shows starting 30 July 1973]… He was just drinking one beer after another and throwing it in the back seat. In a few hours there were 10 or 12 beer cans in there. He drank a lot. I think that’s what killed him.”
Jimmy Silver: “We were living in Cape Ann, when David called us shortly before he died and Dave and I talked, he had left the band or the band was no more. He was into investing in stocks and apparently was really good at it. He sounded completely different from when he was with the band. He was always so shy, retiring, never wanted to say anything, didn’t want to put himself forward. He seemed totally different, just great to talk to. It was August or September and he said he had a few things to take care of and he was going to come and see us in the winter. Then I didn’t hear from him and I tried to get in touch with him and I couldn’t . Then Ron called me or wrote a letter saying that Dave had died and nobody knew what the causes were and his mother had had him cremated right away. It was all kind of mysterious.”
David M. Alexander, aka Dude Arnett, born on 3 June, 1947, died in St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, Ann Arbor, on 10 February, 1975. The cause of death was Pulmonary Edema, with Fibrous Pneumonitis, as a consequence of Pancreatitis – a disease which is common among alcoholics. The attending physician noted severe fatty infiltration (alcoholic) of the liver. He was cremated on 11 February, at the South Michigan Crematorium, in Ann Arbor. The photo heading this story was taken during rehearsals at Columbia Studios in New York, around 28 July, 1973, in the run-up to the Stooges’ dates at Max’s Kansas City on 30 July. Photo is by his ex-girlfriend Esther Korinsky. This was the last time most of the Stooges saw their ex-bassist.
Thursday, 27 September 2007
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