Mick Mars vs James Williamson vs Ron Asheton vs David Bowie

I wonder where you read that, dave. It's a little, I don't know, pitiful. Because all my teenage gay NYC fantasies revolved around this song. And they all came true, wheeee!!! Except the jumping in a river holding hands part.

Hm...probably something to do with the perception of LA as land of vibrant youth doing their own thing, man, but the cops bring everyone down by being their usual corrupt/racist selves (random example: the Zoot Suit riots and how a bunch of Chicanos are quite literally beaten up by the fashion police; other random example: cops beating up 'the kids' in the Sunset Strip heyday of the mid-sixties; another random example: punk/hardcore scene of early eighties constantly attacked by cops [if Rollins is to be believed]; completely weird-ass recent fictional example: video for Depeche Mode's "I Feel Love" where the LA rave is going to get busted by them darn cops and their attack dogs). Whereas in NYC everyone figures they'd be like that anyway so nobody's surprised. Er, maybe?

Man,More Stooge-related news (below)….
From: Richard Henderson
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 9:08 AM
Subject: Ex-junkie guitarist makes good (sort of) Scroll down to the 3rd entry on this page (yes, it’s him):

http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/corporate/election/samal-KMW.html

Lunch on Sunday?

The world's truly forgotten boy.

Maybe he can be on a panel with Gorge.

That's utterly insane

Metal Mike Saunders:

yes, sounds like the corporate-speak of a $250k/year vice president to me!

hey, no one in the Stooges camp ever portrayed or described Williamson as anything but a world-class asshole, the "harbinger of doom" (when he joined the 1971 stooges) etc

in fact, i gotta respect the guy for getting the fuck out of music after he

1) contributed his 6 or 7 killer riffs (counting the unrecorded RUBBER LEGS songs), gas tank probalby empty after that (junkies tend to not make great songwriters, too busy scoring drugs) (evan dando could vouch on this count)

2) and getting really fucking lucky with the great Vox AC-30 with treble boost, on the Raw Power studio recordings in London

more Metal Mike, 1-12-09:

i never understood the love for Funhouse even at the time. i'd jam along to the whole first side on guitar now and then because it was easy, and you could do simple bonehead leads to parts of it, but jeez it was a pretty boring set of songs in toto by the time you were done. way too fucking long (i'm thinking of the first two songs especially) for the riffs that were supporting them.

the vocals on Funhouse were world class, really great shit, but the guitar playing, mehhhhhh. Alice Cooper band at the same time could have probably taken those songs -- with the same Stooges on rhythm section -- and really tightened them up. well, Bob Ezrin would have tightened them up. ALL the songs on LOVE IT TO DEATH and KILLER have a very deft editing hand on the song-lengths. (save the obvious Black Ju Ju). Funhouse, like zero.

now compare that to Raw Power, which has very tight songs (and/or arrangements), and i would put that down to Williamson (w/Iggy) writing the riffs not Ron.

i would easily guess there's dozens of guitarists circa 1970-71 in america that could have done a better job (starting with using different equipmen) on Funhouse than Asheton. he wrote some neat bonehead riffs, but i was never crazy about the execution. as a live band they just flat out sucked pre-Williamson, monotonous and dull. just a backdrop for ostogoirg's vaunting screwing around etc. and oh lord please do not put his (Ron's) name in the same paragraph as "lead guitar." Destroy All Monsters anyone? yeah didn't think so.

that said, when me and a passel of Back Door Man zine people knocked on Ron/Scott's famous Sunset Strip apartment doorcirca early 1975 sometime --uninvited and unsolicited -- he was as congenial and as nice a guy as Danny Sugerman (the stooges' social director it seemed) had promised. it was like, "hey man we're watching Three Stooges reruns, have a seat." huge couch or pair of couches, middle of the-room slacker/hippie-style so it's closer to the TV on the wall. and yeah, there was some doobie-passing offered and proffered. just another day to kill watching TV and heshing out. hell, i worked at STAR TREK ENTERPRISES mail order killing 2 years ujtil i got my ass back (to college for the second degree) into the corporate-grind career-mill a few months later. so yeah i can well understand the james williamson syndrome. if not the mind frame that leads a person to a LIFE OF CRIME, er i mean as a high-ranking Sony Corp vice president of whatever the fuck "IT quality standards" are.

i don't recall the Stooges having a lot of "quiality standards" about shooting junk. huh.

i wonder if Iggy and Williamson have ever spoken in the last 30 years since that lame Iggy solo album. huh. do you think Osto(berg) rang Williamson first before caving in and letting Ron Ahseton have his original Stooges-guitarist spot back? considering what a giant dickhead osterberg is/has always been, i would not be surprised.

i bet Iggo delivers a great "eulogy" at the funeral though. about ron being on the straight and narrow while he and williamson and scotty were selling his equipment for pawn shop cash to score drugs.

metal mike, 1-16-09:

i bet small chunks of his "standards bla bla bla" campaign blatherwould make nice wtf? lyric linesmaybe say one 3 times in a row, like a 1st Stooges lp thing

Williamson butted heads with Mainman bigtime in 1972 in the UK; their counterattack was that he was "on drugs (back in LA, later), and therefore a problem" (duh, like Osto wasn't) (as in osterberg)

= loose translation = even in 1972 in london cutting Raw Power, James W. was a serious "careerist" (not a bad thing if your name is Green Day) and when bowie/mainman "put them on ice) (no gigs, nada, just recording time and a place to live) mr W. talked shit about it. maybe he said something to the UK press? (bowie's produce-Lou Reed trip was also kinda weird, according to Lou Reed fans. since my interest in Lou Reed ends forever the day he pussies out, stay at his folk's house in Long Island and just sits in the bathroom, instead of getting his ass into NYC and raising holy hell with scheming manager Selsnick (?) and the manager's stooge-by-proxy Doug Yule (who winds up singing like fuck, 1/2 of LOADED?). lou did the "fuck it, i quit this shit" move long before album was finished (editing, mixing, oh and VOCALS prior to that) but that bitched about the final (screwed up, definitely) product the rest of his life. ehh wahtever, dude, sorry the drug-abuse thing didn't work out for ya!

let's see, i've badmouthed the stooges and velvet underground in just one paragraph, did i forget anyone? ok how about the Rolling Stones never made a even half-decent (as in listenable, orig mono copies included) album after 1965? is that "counter-intuitive" enough for all the ex-stockbrokers on the address book?

i am fully qualified to "talk shit" on the Stones, because the FIRST TWO lps i ever bought, orig maroon MONO copies from the Tanglewood Drug Store right across the highway/thoroughfare one half block up from 242 Kingsrow, were duh what else (in early 1965) -- ROLLING STONES, NOW and shortly later (a much better collection i thought, then and now) THE ROLLING STONES (1st lp w/insert 8x11 cardboard photo). the 1st Stones lp is still a prettty darned good album (in the mono), almost in fact, 3/4ths? 4/5ths? as good as the seriously good (like 9 on a 10 scale, irrefutable) 1st DOORS ALBUM. like for reals duude. and that one sounded good in the far more common (true) stereo too!

metal mike, 1-19-09

the Wiki bio has only one fairly-long interview (2001) in its links/footnotes. Williamson's a scorpio (oct 29th) and lots of musician facts surface, but absolutely not one piece of info about his post-1975/6 life, except in code. not one word about his parents/family. when you see an interview that is that blatantly censored (missing big pieces of personal history), you figure the interviewer was given a list, written or verbal, of non-discussion items.

ostoberg (iggy) is a taurus so you can guess how well that attempt at a faux richards-jagger setup went. i recall reading (in one book or another) that when they weren't hustling teenage girls (the live-in girlfriend williamson refers to was like 16, for real! long post/journal surfaced a couple years ago (by one of their LA/73 entourage, female) on where else, Myspace journals. probalby on the biggest Stooges "fan page."

"Preparing for his 27 years of experience, Williamson received his BSEE degree from California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, California" is the academic refernece (to where W. got either an EE or a computer-engineering B.A.) on that Sony/association page.

that would be Cal State Poly (at Pomona).

if i'm scanning the school (tiny, barely 1,000 new students each year)'s basic info page correctly, it's a botom feeder in the Cal State system, and if you can spell your name, you've got a shot at getting in

https://collegetoolkit.washingtonpost.com/co/washingtonpost/colleges/admissions/california_state_polytechnic_university-pomona/110529.aspx

http://www.eduers.com/University/California/California_State_Polytechnic_University_Pomona.html

oh, on that second school info/link -- average high school GPA, 3.2

i take back the assertion about everyone in last year's freshman class being able to spell their name.

the only way you can tank the average freshman (highschool graduating GPA) all the way down to barely more than a flat "B / 3.0" is to have NO ONE REALLY SMART WANT TO GO TO YOUR SCHOOL!

williamson flat out does not exist on the internet (re Sony) which is five steps beyond puzzling. since all histories/accounts of the Stooges described his 20 year old juvenile delinquent drug-shooting personality as "a black cloud descending" during 1969 / 70 / 71, i pass, someone else can use their Magic 8 Ball to dig up the WORK RESUME on this guy.

he does allude to having spent a huge amount (of the past 25 years) in Japan (i.e, Japan/Sony).

haha ironic/funny that Sony ate CBS which ate the stooges. didn't like the taste, and kicked them to the curb.

http://www.speedylook.com/James_Williamson.html

oh wait. this foreign bio (roughly translated at that) DOES have the family info -- Jim Morrison redux! that would explain not one word ever having been said to the public about his family background. hahahaah, claasic. actually -- it trumps Morrison whose name is Jim. in williamson's case it's a STEPDAD military lifer.

the Stooges timeline (re when he/Ostobonk finished the Kill City "demos"), williamson went straight to school. that's 4 years easy to get an engineering degree anywhere.

money? probably his mom sent the funds.

unless he found a different young female to sponge off of! (a la iggy/osterberg)

based on seeing two of the Stooges 1973 whiskey a go go sets, williamson is DEAD ON CORRECT about ron asheton as a bass player (his original instrument). ron/scott as a rhythm section were phenomenal playing the Raw Power songs on stage. simple driving drum parts, and fluid old-style rock bass with good bass lines everywhere on a great sounding Fender Precision and played so it just grinded and pounded.

i love his attitude. give us more

no don't.

here's a jw interview from abt ten years ago

Metal Mike, today:

yeahh that's like the only Williamson interview of any length in the last 3000 years, and where the Vox AC-30/treble boost (the classic 60's amp he lucked into in London for the Raw Powerrecordings) info surfaced.

it has always seemed ridiculous when people label the stooges some sort of "punk rock" precursor...they were trying REALLY HARD (in the last 1/2 of their lifespan) to be a cool heavy metal band. with a hybrid morrison/sky saxon lead singer for sure, that is no doubt the sole link between 1966 garage rock singers and its redux as 70's punk (singing) 10+ years later. (hell, i can testify as a singer-in-training back then, putting down vocals as the same time as the fuzz guitar to get something like 200 songs onto tape by graduation day May1973/UT austin).
but ron/scott on rhythm section at the Whiskey 1973 were pure balls-to-the-wall hard/fast heavy metal, no doubt about it. they were one of my favorite live rhythm sections i ever heard in my life.

through a stock unmodified Marshall williamson was just average as a live guitarist (same as Jon Tiven critiqued him, in Zoo World i guess). (or maybe his own NHRP zine). also unnoteworthy as a "live performer."

Dave Q and Metal Mike should team up on the ultimate Stooges biography.

According to Mojo, JWilliams(on) (heh) spoke to Iggy after Ron died, and discussed standing in for Ron if they got inducted into the R&R Hall of fame.

For all that JWill was described asnasshol, there's nothing in "Open up and bleed" as to explain why, there's nothing but compliments for Ron's Bass from JWi, eeven to the statement that the drums and the bass are way more important than the guitaring.

there's nothing but compliments for Ron's Bass from JWi, eeven to the statement that the drums and the bass are way more important than the guitaring.

This bit is in reference to the Mojo article, not the book.

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/09/03/stooges-reunite-with-raw-power-guitarist-prep-atp-gig-and-tour/

Threat or menace? May be difficult for James to lose the habits of playing slack key being a conformist square for Sony most of his life.

Williamson played on two of my all time favorite Stooges tracks IIRC: the raw and gruelling "Open up and bleed" and " I got a right", which is the kind of natural, perfect rock'n'roll song that doesn't come along very often. He's OK by me.

If these old codgers can do justice to "Head on", "Heavy liquid" and "Rubber legs" and the rest, and get them down on some sort of newfangled recording device which is not cassette based and hidden in a stolen handbag next to a noisy bar, I'll be very happy indeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lWilnFkMtA

If these old codgers can do justice to "Head on", "Heavy liquid" and "Rubber legs"

Practically speaking, that would mean an old codger jam band.