White wasn't just another guitarist. As a session musician, he had already played on three Byrds' releases. He was also a bluegrass wunderkind. Though he was only 24 years old, by 1968 he had almost a decade's worth of recording and touring experience, and his early recordings with the Kentucky Colonels had redefined the role of bluegrass guitar.
When he joined the Byrds, White was a relative newcomer to electric guitar, but he would soon innovate a way of playing that instrument. He and his bandmate Gene Parsons (no relation to Gram) invented the StringBender (often called a B-Bender), which let him execute pedal-steel-like bends without taking his hands off the neck.
White's originality and mastery of the instrument put him in the unique position of revolutionizing not one, but two distinct styles of guitar playing. Whole schools, encompassing acoustic flatpickers such as Tony Rice to steel-inspired Tele players like Brad Paisley and Marty Stuart, trace straight back to White. And yet White, despite his stature, remained an understated team player.
“His concern was to make the artist sound good," says Gene Parsons. “He was a minimalist, just putting in what was really necessary. He used to say to me, 'What you don't play is as important as what you do play.' Some of the things he originated, you'll hear guitar players emulate today. The turnarounds, phrasing, and off-time things he used to do have inspired guitar players for the last 50 years."
White, in spite of his resume and extensive discography, was just getting started when he was killed by a drunk driver in 1973. But his legacy lives on. We spoke with his older brother Roland White (whose incredible book, The Essential Clarence White: Bluegrass Guitar Leads, explains the intricacies of his brother's bluegrass playing), Clarence's close associates Parsons and Herb Pedersen, and even some of his musical heirs, like Brad Paisley, to tell White's story.
Going to California
Clarence White was born on June 7, 1944, in Lewiston, Maine. His family was French-Canadian (their last name was originally LeBlanc) and music was an important part of their lives. His father, Eric, was a multi-instrumentalist, as were his father's siblings who lived nearby. Clarence's mother often played their massive collection of country and popular records around the house, and his older brothers and sister sang, harmonized, and played instruments. Between the radio, singing, and practicing instruments, music was ever-present.
White began playing guitar when he was 5, although his father gave him a ukulele to play until he was big enough to handle the larger instrument. By the time the family relocated to Burbank, California, in 1954, the White siblings—Roland on mandolin, Eric junior on banjo, and Clarence on guitar—had the beginnings of a band and, judging by what happened next, they were already somewhat accomplished.
Soon after moving to California, the family band—first calling themselves the Country Kids and then the Country Boys, before finally recording as the Kentucky Colonels—began winning talent contests and performing on local radio and television. They shared stages with established greats like Joe and Rose Lee Maphis, Lefty Frizzell, and many others, and eventually landed a spot performing on the nationally televised The Andy Griffith Show.
“When the show broadcast a few weeks later, we started getting calls from our cousins in Maine," recalls Roland White. “They said, 'We saw you on The Andy Griffith Show, how did you get that job?' I thought it was just a local show. We didn't know it was nationwide."
In 1959, the Country Boys started playing at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles. Their lineup at that point was Roland and Clarence on mandolin and guitar, Eric on bass, plus Billy Ray Latham on banjo, and LeRoy Mack on Dobro. The club was the local center of the then-booming folk revival. It was their first time playing through a proper PA, with onstage monitors, which was the kick Clarence needed to step up as a soloist. “It made it a heck of a lot easier," Roland says about being able to hear themselves play. The club was also their introduction to a more sophisticated, college-educated audience, and connected them to other like-minded musicians their age.
“I met Clarence in Los Angeles in about 1963," says multi-instrumentalist Herb Pedersen. “My band, the Pine Valley Boys—a bluegrass group from Berkeley—came down to play at the Troubadour, which at that time had an open mic on Monday nights. It featured artists like the Kentucky Colonels, David Crosby, and Roger McGuinn as single artists, Chris Hillman was in the Golden State Boys at the time, and that was right around the time I met Clarence. It was just astounding to meet these guys."
White recorded his first album, The New Sound of Bluegrass America, with his band, renamed the Kentucky Colonels, in 1962, when he was just 18. In addition to White, the album features Latham on banjo, Mack on Dobro, and Roger Bush on bass—Roland had been drafted, stationed in Germany, and missed those first sessions—and Merle Travis, Johnny Bond, and Ralph and Carter Stanley all had a role in its production, while Joe Maphis wrote the liner notes. Featuring cross-picking and other advanced techniques, White's lead style had evolved from his first days at the Ash Grove, and the album represented a new stream in bluegrass music with guitar as a prominent lead instrument.
An early White family band photo of the Country Boys, taken in the 1950s. The lineup included siblings JoAnne White on bass, Roland White on mandolin, Eric White on banjo, and Clarence White on guitar. Photo courtesy of White Family
“Doc Watson was one of the first lead guitar players on acoustic guitar," Pedersen says. “He played fiddle tunes on the guitar and that was pretty amazing. But Doc's style was pretty rigid: It was pretty much note-for-note, and it didn't swing all that much. He just played the fiddle tune like you'd hear it on a fiddle. But with Clarence, he would incorporate different little push beats and that kind of thing. He was a very sly guitar player. He would sneak things over on you and you had to pay attention."
After Roland's discharge from the army, the band did a number of East Coast tours, which included shows in New York, Boston, and a feature at the Newport Folk Festival, and recorded a second album, Appalachian Swing!, in 1964. White's guitars at this time were a duo of Martins: a D-18 and his iconic D-28 Herringbone (now owned by Tony Rice), although the guitars suffered their share of abuse. In addition to manhandling his instruments (He filled one guitar with sand and shot the D-28 with a BB gun.), he ran over both guitars one evening after a gig in Massachusetts, doing significant damage to the D-18. The guitars were repaired at Herb David Guitar Studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which White claimed improved the sound of the D-18.
White was a discerning musician, but a utilitarian gearhead. Consider the humble beginnings of his D-28. “We found that in McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica," Roland White says. “We would go to pawnshops once a month in L.A., and we went by McCabe's and there was this guitar in the corner. The fingerboard just had tape around it, but it was taped to the neck. We asked, 'What do you want for that as it is?' The guy went back and talked to his boss and I think he said either $25 or $35, so we bought the guitar. It was Clarence, my brother Eric, Billy Ray, and myself, and we scraped up money and gave it to him. We took it home and my dad said, 'I can't fix that.' So we took it to this guy in L.A., Milt Owen. He said, 'I can put the neck back on there.' But he looked it over, and the top had been sanded thin. He said, 'You'll never be able to use heavy Martin strings on there. You're going to have to use light-gauge strings, because the top will bulge. You won't be able to play it very well.' He put the guitar neck and fingerboard back on there, strung it up, and I think we paid him $15 to do it. We picked it up a week later, brought it home, and Clarence played it a bit. But he said, 'I can't play it with these strings. I'm going to put on some heavy-gauge strings.' Sure enough, the top bulged up at the bridge. The only way he could play it would be in open G or put a capo on to play the G chord like an A, and then after that it would get real sharp."
Much has been written about New York City’s late-’70s punk scene. The term “punk” was coined by critics and applied to a disparate collection of artists working at CBGB, a grimy hole-in-the-wall on the Bowery. It didn’t represent a genre as much as a scene, and applied to the lifestyle and fashions of its participants as much as the music. The hype, if you believe it, idealized a raw, visceral return to basics, and implied—at least musically—amateurism and a distinct lack of chops.
Except that wasn’t the case.
Whether you’re talking about the polyrhythmic complexity of bands like the Talking Heads, the understated virtuosity of Television’s Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine, or even the deep chops of drummer Marc “Marky Ramone” Bell (Dust, Voidoids, Ramones), the punk scene was a wellspring of talent. Punk’s focus, for the most part, was song-centric and eschewed extended jamming, and the scene’s musicians prized restraint, as opposed to flash. But ability—despite their short hair, leather, and safety pins—wasn’t lacking. They were a reaction to the milquetoast fluff on popular radio (Debbie Boone, the Eagles), and took pains to distinguish themselves as misfits. But even the punks had their outliers, and a prominent delegate was guitarist Robert Quine.
Quine was an idiosyncratic force of nature. He was much older than most of his colleagues, he didn’t dress like a punk—he wore sport coats and cheap button-down shirts, and his guitar playing was a synthesis of his eccentric, yet specific, aesthetic. He was a master musician, but he wasn’t a jack-of-all-trades, and his instrumental voice was cultivated and singular.
Quine’s breakout recording, Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation, was released about a month before his 35th birthday, in 1977. It was an unconventional and abrasive, yet sophisticated and important, release. Over 40 years later, young artists still cite it as a primary influence. The Voidoids recorded their follow-up, Destiny Street, in 1982, but by that point, punk’s glory days were nearly a distant memory and Quine was on to other things. His next major project was a contentious, yet fruitful, stint with Lou Reed, followed by about 20 years as a sideman with numerous artists.
Quine was a niche player, yet somehow fit in multiple contexts—whether commercial pop or confrontational art—and was at home on projects by artists as diverse as Matthew Sweet, John Zorn, Lloyd Cole, and Lydia Lunch. He played for the song, didn’t overplay, but stood out anyway. You can always identify Quine on a track, even though his playing is tasteful and song-appropriate. It’s also high-mid focused and unpredictable. He preferred plugging into a Deluxe Reverb’s left channel and cranking it up.
When Quine died in 2004, he had never released a solo album. He was a sideman, except that he wasn’t a studio ace. He’s not that anonymous guitarist on countless jingles and hits. He was an artist and a stylist. He was complex, and his career—like most things Quine—was a paradox.
“The fact is that critics like me because I am a cult figure, which means I’m not really successful,” Quine told writer Jim DeRogatis in an interview for his book, Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic, published in 2000. “I’m not big enough of a target. About every five years, I do a record with someone and magazines are interviewing me again. It works for me a lot where I can do no wrong. I’m not a major success or anything, but I seem to have been a survivor, and I play better than I ever have. When I look around at other people from the era, I seem to have done OK, and the reason is I truly don’t give a fuck. I honestly believe that rock ’n’ roll was pretty much finished by 1961. The atrocities I’ve pulled ... I just don’t give a shit, maybe because I’m such a lovable genius.” Quine was an enigma, but he cared more than he let on.
For this feature we spoke with Quine’s bandmates Richard Hell and Ivan Julian, his longtime collaborator Fred Maher, songwriters Matthew Sweet and Lloyd Cole, disc jockey and author James “the Hound” Marshall, and others.
Becoming a Voidoid
Robert Quine was born on December 30, 1942, and grew up in Akron, Ohio. Music was a constant from early on—from his interest in Gene Autry to whatever his parents played around the house.“I was 12 in ’55, when rock ’n’ roll hit,” Quine told Jason Gross in a 1997 interview for Perfect Sound Forever. “It just completely transformed me. I was getting into Frank Sinatra before that. But when that hit, it was all over. It was raw. The first rock record I bought was Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ ‘Why Do Fools Fall In Love?’ The sax solo in the middle was completely inappropriate. It almost sounds like Albert Ayler. But it was lyrical. That was my obsession.”
That music—early rock ’n’ roll, but with an ear for the freest streams in jazz—was a constant throughout his life. He was passionate about guitarists like Link Wray, Mickey Baker, and James Burton—not to mention Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, whom he saw on a double bill in high school—as well as Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Impulse!-era John Coltrane, and Miles Davis’ ’70s electric output. That formed the foundation of his playing, especially in the ways he phrased his lines and took risks in solos, and it was how he connected with bandmates and friends.
Quine started playing the guitar as a teenager. He learned Chuck Berry songs and played along to Ventures albums. He bought a Strat in 1961—inspired by Ritchie Valens—and that was the model he used for most of his career, although his initial inspiration was a Telecaster.
“I remember him telling me about the thing that really made him want to get a guitar,” says James “the Hound” Marshall, a close friend of Quine’s throughout his years in New York. “There’s a bowling alley in Akron called the Fairlawn Lanes, and the Caps were playing. The Caps were like the local rock stars. They had this almost-hit called ‘The Red Headed Flea.’ They were either sound-checking or rehearsing, and Quine remembers the guitar player sitting on his amp with a Tele and a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, just playing whatever, and that was the coolest thing he’d ever seen.”
Robert Quine was 12 when he first heard rock ’n’ roll in 1955. “It just completely transformed me,” he told Jason Gross in a 1997 Perfect Sound Forever interview. “When that hit, it was all over. That was my obsession.” Photo by Willard Van Orman
Quine graduated from Earlham College in Indiana in 1965 and earned a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis. He passed the Missouri Bar and in the late ’60s moved to San Francisco. While still in college, he discovered the blues and listened to John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins, as well as jazz, from artists like Ramsey Lewis and Bill Evans, to the more adventurous musicians mentioned above.
Quine played in bands throughout college and law school, usually covering songs by groups like the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, and the Byrds. He was also one of the earliest, and most dedicated, fans of the Velvet Underground. He was a regular audience member, befriended the band, and taped hundreds of hours of material at concerts in San Francisco and St. Louis. In 2001, Polydor Records released three discs gleaned from his recordings as Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes.
“The second album [1968’s White Light/White Heat] completely changed my life,” Quine said in that same interview with Jason Gross. “I spent thousands of hours on headphones wearing that out. What Lou Reed did, he actually listened to Ornette Coleman, and deliberately did off-harmonic feedback and the deliberate monotony of it. This stuff is like Jimmy Reed—it’s monotonous or it’s hypnotic. For me, it was hypnotic.”
Quine relocated to New York City in the early 1970s. He got a job writing about tax law for a New Jersey-based law journal, but by 1975, he’d had it. He was already in his 30s and wanted to try making it as a musician. He quit the law journal and started working at Cinemabilia, a Greenwich Village film memorabilia shop, which was where he met coworkers Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, both—at that point—from the band Television.
Quine’s efforts at landing a gig were fraught with frustration. He was bald, which in hyper-fashion-conscious mid-’70s New York was a major liability. He didn’t dress the part, was a decade older than many of his peers, and his sometimes caustic personality rubbed people the wrong way.
“He didn’t have a shag haircut,” Marshall says about Quine’s struggles finding work. “At one point, through mutual friends, he tried for a job playing with Art Garfunkel. He got drunk and told him he thought Simon & Garfunkel were for people too stupid for Bob Dylan. Garfunkel punched him in the nose.”
By early 1976, Richard Hell was no longer with Television. He had also left his next project, the Heartbreakers, which he started with former members of the New York Dolls. He was offered a production deal, which he accepted, and recruited Quine for his new band, the Voidoids.
“This was the chance Quine had been waiting for, for a long time,” Hell says. “Nobody wanted to put a bald-headed old guy in a band. He knew this was like his big break. But he was kind of an alien in this theater of CBGB and he wasn’t sure what I wanted from him, and he was tentative. He was definitely tentative. But I knew what he was capable of, because we’d become really good friends. I spent night after night over at his house listening to records with him. He had a few tapes of his bands from college. I knew what he liked in music, which corresponded almost exactly to what I liked, and I could hear on the live tapes of his college band that he could really tear it up, if he could shake the inhibitions and anxieties or whatever. But as it turned out, I really had to push him.”
Lou Reed and Robert Quine performing at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, October 18, 1984. A huge fan of the Velvet Underground, Quine talked Reed into returning to the guitar—igniting a flame that Reed fanned for the remainder of his own life, even going on to record instrumental albums. Photo by Ebet Roberts
The Debut
Richard Hell and the Voidoids released a three-song EP, Another World, on Ork Records in late 1976, under Hell’s name only. It was followed by their epic and influential full-length debut, Blank Generation, almost a year later. That release, which featured Quine, Hell on vocals and bass, second guitarist Ivan Julian, and drummer Marc Bell (later to become Marky Ramone of the Ramones), put Quine on the map.
Blank Generation is a showcase for many of the hallmarks of Quine’s style. From the twisted-’50s leads on “Love Comes in Spurts” to the bluesy neck-mangling stutters of “Betrayal Takes Two” to his tight interplay with co-guitarist Ivan Julian—it’s all there. His tone varies throughout the album, though it’s often thin, and sitting just at the edge of breaking up. Quine has no songwriting credits on the release, which was a constant throughout his career. He had a singular sound and a specific aesthetic sense, but, ultimately, he was a sideman.
“Bob didn’t really have ambitions beyond being a sideman,” Hell says. “I would push him. And the way I composed songs was I would come up with a series of chord changes and the bass playing I thought suggested what the structure and feel of the song was. Sometimes I would come in with some kind of reference, saying, ‘I hear this as a kind of drive that’s on ‘Paint It Black’ or something like that.’ We’d start jamming and then I would nudge Bob and Ivan in certain directions, but just with a bass line that indicated chord changes I would tell them to play. They would improvise what their rhythm parts were and then I would try to push them this way or another, to get them closer to what I heard in my head.”
That twin-guitar approach of bands like the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Velvet Underground was a stylistic touchtone for Quine. Despite his idiosyncratic playing, almost his entire catalog features at least one other guitarist. That was an important part of the Voidoids’ sound, and Quine and Julian took pains to make it work.
“We outlined the band so there wasn’t a rhythm guitar player and a lead guitar player,” Julian says. “We both just played guitar. One thing we did was never play any song on the same part of the neck. For example, you’ll never find both of us doing a G chord in first position. If one was playing one thing when we were working out the song, then the other would work out some other way to play it.”
—James “the Hound” Marshall
Blank Generation was recorded twice. The first sessions were in March 1976, at Electric Lady, the studio Jimi Hendrix built in the Village. The album was rerecorded in late June and early July, at Plaza Sound in Midtown. Most of the final release—except for three songs—was taken from the Plaza Sound sessions. Quine brought two Strats and a Bigsby-equipped Tele to the sessions. (Julian used Quine’s Tele for his solo on “Liars Beware.”) Julian played an Ampeg Dan Armstrong clear Lucite guitar and an SG, though for the second sessions he mostly used a Strat.
Blank Generation is mixed with Quine panned hard to one side and Julian to the other—a trick they learned from the Yardbirds’ album Over Under Sideways Down—with the solos right up the middle. For most of his solos, Quine played through a Fender Champ or a small Pignose amp, and sometimes had an MXR Dyna Comp out front.
“Pignoses didn’t have a tone control, so Quine would open and close the cabinet to get however much treble or bass he wanted,” Julian says. “They took a little tiny mic to it, and he had it up on a stool. When we recorded the album the first time, we were at Electric Lady Studios and we were told not to bring our own amps. They had these giant amps there for us—giant by today’s standards. They had Twins and I remember they had Peter Frampton’s Marshall that was left there. We were trying to play solos through that and it just didn’t work out at all.”
Link Wray and Robert Gordon were in the next room, recording the 1977 release Robert Gordon with Link Wray, which was also produced by Blank Generation producer Richard Gottehrer. “Robert loved Link Wray and he borrowed his Ampeg. I think it was a Reverberocket, some kind of trashy amp like that,” says Marshall.
Quine is noted for his soloing, but his rhythm playing is just as important. He was a huge fan of the Byrds’ guitarists Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, and brought an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge to the table.
“Quine had a really great touch and instincts for rhythm playing,” Hell says. “He was so knowledgeable about the whole history of guitars that his repertoire and his mind was just infinite. He had a great sense for propelling a song and keeping it interesting. Bob and Ivan both knew—and clearly we all agreed about this—that I liked the classic interlocking riffs of the two-guitar bands. Where it’s not exactly polyrhythmic, but it takes advantage of what you can do having two instruments, where you’re not simply reinforcing each other. There’s this counterpoint going on.”
Quine never released a solo album, but the closest recordings are his two duo records: 1984’s Basic, with drummer/producer Fred Maher—pictured here—and 1981’s Escape, with guitarist Jody Harris.
Back to Basic
Drummer and producer Fred Maher, who’s helmed albums for Scritti Politti, Lou Reed, and many others, met Quine backstage at CBGB at the tail-end of the 1970s. Maher, along with bassist Bill Laswell and keyboardist Michael Beinhorn, was a member of the New York avant-funk band Material. Following that meeting, Quine joined Maher, Laswell, and Beinhorn as a member of Deadline, the touring band that backed Laswell’s electronic music project with drummer Phillip Willson from the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The project was short-lived, but it marked the beginnings of a collaboration between Quine and Maher, which lasted well into the ’90s.
While working on other projects, Quine and Maher recorded their 1984 duo release, Basic, at Quine’s apartment in the East Village, using a Tascam 4-track Portastudio and an Oberheim DMX drum machine. The album was recorded over a six-month period and, along with the 1981 release Escape, with guitarist Jody Harris, was the closest Quine came to a solo album.
Basic, for the most part, is a low-key album and showcases a very different side of Quine’s musical personality—something you don’t hear on many of his recordings as a sideman. Check out the track “’65.” Quine’s tone leans on the single-coil vibe of a Strat, but is enhanced with a generous helping of slapback echo. The chord motion is thick and repetitive, yet also subtly evolving, and modified with standout treble or lead voicings, and whammy-bar warbles. He does similar things on tracks like “Pickup,” although his tone is even cleaner and the whammy warbles more extreme, and the album’s closer, “Village.”
“That was all direct,” Maher says. “It was probably whatever Whirlwind direct box was available at the time. The only constant with Quine would be the Electro-Harmonix Memory Man. But he could have been using any combination of things. He was an aficionado of pedals. He had anything and everything, or he would have tried anything or everything that was available at the time.”
Quine and Maher also worked together on Destiny Street, Hell’s 1982 follow-up to Blank Generation. The album was recorded during a dark period in Hell’s life, when drugs were taking their toll, and during his frequent absences from the studio, Quine—according to Maher—figured the only thing to do was to record more guitars.
“Quine went crazy,” Maher says. “But that wasn’t necessarily him proactively saying, ‘I’ve got an idea and I want to do this.’ It was more, literally, just to fill the time, because there was nothing to do. Between him and the other guitar player, Naux, it was pretty ridiculous.”
Late 1960s Ann Arbor, Michigan—a sleepy college town about 45 minutes west of Detroit—is the unlikely birthplace of punk. But it was there, led by a local band called the Stooges, that America’s most visceral, degenerate export was born.
The Stooges weren’t Eastern Michigan’s most popular band at the time. That honor went to the MC5. But the Stooges may have been the most important—even compared to Michigan artists like Bob Seger, Alice Cooper, and Ted Nugent, that would go on to sell out arenas in the next decade. The Stooges classic songs, like “T.V. Eye” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” have been covered over and over by numerous artists. The chaos they inspired is today standard behavior at most punk, hardcore, alternative, indie, and metal shows. They embraced noise. They were aggressive and confrontational. They weren’t hippies, despite their late-’60s pedigree. They were ahead of their time and—this isn’t clichéd or hyperbolic—pioneered the next half-century of alternative rock.
In addition to his band’s influence, the Stooges’ guitarist, Ron Asheton, made a significant impact as well. He embraced power chords. His tone was grating and jagged. He didn’t play with that vintage tube warmth associated with many of his contemporaries. And he loved feedback and noise. As his band’s only guitarist, he found ways to make his 6-string sound like more than one instrument. He explored non-Western tonalities and experimented with drones.
In hindsight, the Stooges are famous for their nihilistic, antagonistic performances and their lead singer’s self-destructive antics—some say Iggy Pop invented stage diving and crowd surfing—as well as their straightforward, no-nonsense songwriting, and Asheton’s innovative guitar playing. But at the time, no one was interested. The Stooges released three albums that didn’t sell well. They played to half-empty clubs and were taunted and harassed by their audiences. They didn’t have a loyal fan base and they weren’t popular overseas. In 1974, plagued by drug use and mismanagement, the Stooges broke up.
Not that anyone noticed.
But payback is sweet. The mainstream may have ignored the Stooges, but the underground grew to adore them. Over the next three decades, young bands dissected their music, copied their sound, and used them as a starting point to invent new genres and movements. Their legend grew and their albums, while never radio-friendly, continued to sell.
In 2003, after a 29-year hiatus, the Stooges regrouped with Mike Watt on bass for a one-off performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. That performance led to a tour, which led to a full-fledged reunion. But unlike the old days, the reunited Stooges headlined major festivals and played to enthusiastic crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. What’s more, they weren’t a nostalgia act. Their audiences were young and the old-timers kept their distance. It was as if the culture had finally caught up with them.
Ron Asheton died in 2009, and although the Stooges’ story has been told many times over, those retellings usually focus on the band’s iconic countercultural status and Iggy Pop’s larger-than-life persona. Much less has been written about Asheton’s guitar playing, sonic choices, and gear. Our hope is to remedy that. We spoke to his family, roadies, old friends, collaborators, and bandmates, and bring you this picture of an important and influential talent.
The Beginning
Ron Asheton was born in Washington, D.C., on July 17, 1948. His father’s business took the family to Davenport, Iowa, and then, following his dad’s heart attack, to Ann Arbor, Michigan. “Our mom’s parents and family were in Michigan,” Kathy Asheton, Ron’s younger sister says. Ron was the oldest of three siblings. Stooges drummer Scott Asheton was in the middle. “They decided—not sure how our dad would be doing—to move so we could be near family. Sadly, about a year later, our father passed away, in December, 1963.”
Asheton’s mother, while still in Iowa, encouraged her children to take music lessons. Ron studied the accordion, Scott—years before discovering rock ’n’ roll—took drum lessons, and Kathy sang. Those music lessons stopped with the family’s move to Michigan—along with the uncertainty that accompanied their father’s illness and early death—and Ron put his interest in music on hold.
At least, until the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show. “The Beatles came in February of ’64, right after our father passed away, and that got Ronny going,” Kathy says. “From that point on, that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to play guitar. He wanted to be the Beatles. So that’s how that started for him.”
With “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “1969,” the Stooges’ 1969 debut alone would be enough to qualify Ron Asheton, at right, just behind Iggy Pop, as a guitar giant. His drumming brother, Scott, is at center, with bassist Dave Alexander at rear.
He also traveled to England, along with future Stooges bassist Dave Alexander, during his senior year in high school. “There was a good friend of his—also from a very good family in Ann Arbor—and they had moved to England,” Kathy Asheton says, putting to rest a number of myths about her brother’s early days. “It wasn’t like he was just floating off into a land of strangers. He had a family connection there, which was part of the, ‘yes, you have permission to go.’ It was the biggest thing. He’d write letters. Ronny wrote letters to Bill Cheatham—who was his best, dearest friend [Editor’s note: Cheatham was a roadie for the Stooges and also played second guitar in the band for a short period, before being replaced by James Williamson.]—saying that he met Ringo. They started a rumor in high school that ‘Ronny met Ringo.’ But it was really a joke. He never did meet anybody. He saw the Who there, but he didn’t meet any of them.”
After he returned, Asheton played bass in a number of local bands, often running through a fuzz pedal and wah-wah, including the Chosen Few, which included future Iggy and the Stooges guitarist James Williamson. He also shared a stage with the Prime Movers, whose drummer was Iggy Pop.
“He met Iggy at the local Discount Records,” Kathy says. “That’s where Iggy worked, and that was the music hub of Ann Arbor, where everybody connected.”
Ron—as a guitarist—started the band that would eventually morph into the Stooges original line-up, featuring Pop, Alexander on bass, and his brother Scott on drums. “We were all shook up when our father passed away, but Scotty took it very hard,” Kathy Asheton says. “He was hanging out with, say, the wrong people and our mom was concerned about that. Ronny took Scotty under his wing and took him to all the Chosen Few shows, just to keep an eye on him. Scotty was like their little roadie at the gigs. He would help out with the drum kit, and that’s when he started taking more interest in playing drums.”
The band’s original name was the Psychedelic Stooges, which was a tip of the hat to the Three Stooges. “Ron was a huge fan of the Three Stooges,” says Deniz Tek, the guitarist in the legendary Australian punk band Radio Birdman and an old friend of Ron’s from Ann Arbor. “At one point, when he was a kid, he was the president of the Three Stooges fan club. Later, when Ron was living in Hollywood, he knew Larry Fine from the Three Stooges. Larry was in a nursing home in Beverley Hills and Ron would often go visit him and help him out with answering his fan mail and stuff like that. He would get cigars and whisky for him.”
The early Stooges didn’t sound like anything else. They were loud, raucous, raw, free, and improvisatory. They didn’t have a set list—or even established songs—and crafted each performance to fit the event. Their focus wasn’t developing a repertoire, but putting on a show and making each night an experience.
“They were doing what they called ‘Energy Freakouts,’ or jams,” Tek says. “It was fascinating to me as a teenager to attend those shows, because I never saw anything like it. Scotty would bang on 44-gallon oilcans with steel pipes. Iggy made noise, putting mics in blenders and things like that. Ron just had this raw guitar mayhem. They would adapt it to the gig.”
“The gigs were one big jam,” Mike Watt (Minutemen, Firehose) says. Watt was the Stooges’ bassist throughout their 2003-’14 reunion. “Ronny told me about making noise with an electric blender, Dave Alexander throwing the amp down to make sounds, and Scotty beating oil drums with their horoscope signs painted on them. It was a whole different thing than what we know from Stooges’ albums.”