Today is 50 years since an event that’s both inspiring and sad. For it was 50 years ago that Iggy Pop berated an audience with the words “you missed again, you have to keep trying next week” – but there was no next week, for this was the end of the Stooges. At least, until they reconvened 30 years later for what must surely be rock’s greatest comeback.
I can still remember writing the intro to Open Up and Bleed in just a couple of hours: it’s an evocation of what happened at the Michigan Palace, 9 February 1974. It was written in the typical new journalism verité style, all present tense. But it wasn’t a work of imagination; every line of that intro, every thought described as running through the protagonists’ heads was true, for I spoke to every one of them, as well as the roadies who shared the carnage, the audience members who relished the spectacle or else pitied the band, and to Michael Tipton, the man who immortalised that night by recording the tapes later released as Metallic KO.
Nearly 20 years on from when I wrote that book, I’m sad that so many of those who shared their stories with me are gone: Ron, Scott, Robert Matheu and of course Marc Zermati, who released that album. Here are some words from Skip Gildersleeve, who worked at the Palace, saw key Stooges shows including the Ford Auditorium, plus the Scorpions show the week before the Palace, where Iggy was punched out. Skip later became a key staff member for Rush and sent me this copy of the band’s contract from that night. I miss Skip, for he is gone too, another witness who cared about this story and was crucial in helping me tell it.
Skip Gildersleeve:
“It was nuts. Like I said the Detroit Stooges crowd was crazy. There were people that you thought lived out in the woods and only came out once in a while and went to a Stooges show. You have to keep in mind that the Stooges are from there and have old Manson like followers in that particular area. It’s a strange crowd. I don’t remember what the weather was like. I remember the Michigan Palace at that time was always plagued with sound problems and power cutting out and little heat. Lighting didn’t turn up and it got frightening and it was cold. It was kind of a dump. Compared to places it was like the Glasgow Apollo, only not as active as the Glasgow Apollo. You don’t want to fuck around in the audience at the Glasgow Apollo and you didn’t want to fuck around with the audience at the Detroit Michigan Palace.
You can hear that in Metallic KO tape that Nite Bob gave me. You can hear that they’d given up. I felt bad because I was a fan and liked them. There were no other albums I played as much as the first one and ‘Raw Power’.
I probably listen to those albums more than any other albums so I was sad that people were abusing them. I was sad that they were self destructing because to me the Stooges are and always will be real rock n’ roll. As real as Chuck Berry. I always hated prog rock. It was the end of something really really good. It wasn’t until later that they started getting recognised as being pioneers of something – but for being pioneers they took a lot of arrows.
The photos of what’s left of the Palace are from my last visit to Detroit, in 2008. This was to meet the state’s governor, the impressively smart and charming Jennifer Granholme, who gave the book a Michigan Notable award, and for a book tour in which I gave a reading which was interrupted by a stage-crasher who, the library staff told me, was high on angel dust. Only in Detroit.
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