Stooges take a bow, wow

Iggy Pop has been given his due, reports Brian McCollum, of the Detroit Free Press.

Seven tries. Seven strikeouts.

Surely you can forgive Iggy Pop a little scepticism about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

When he got the news in mid-December - his Stooges had finally, mercifully made the hall of fame cut - the front man's reaction was understandable.

"My first thought was, 'OK - now what are they going to do to kick us out?'."

The line is followed by Iggy's familiar cackle, but you get the sense he's only half joking.

Iggy's favourite version of the Stooges story is that of the snake-bitten band - a tale of bad breaks, missed chances and untimely self-destruction for a group that cut its teeth on the vaunted Detroit scene of the late 1960s.

But it's probably about time we added "redemption" to that list: the little band that couldn't is now officially the historic force that has.

Reunited in 2003 amid hosannas from younger acts who fully grasped the Stooges' musical import, the band has enjoyed a new lease of life, marred only by last year's unexpected death of founding guitarist Ron Asheton.

And thank goodness the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voters relented and allowed Iggy Pop and the Stooges into the club.

Without the proto-punk rockers on hand, the 2010 awards night dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in New York would have been a pretty tame affair.

This year's class of performer inductees, also including ABBA, the Hollies, Genesis and Jimmy Cliff, proved an exceedingly earnest bunch.

And then there was Iggy.

"This thing is . . . heavy," Pop said, hefting the statue he'd just been handed, then flipping two middle fingers to the crowd of designer-suited men and cocktail-dressed women.

"Well, roll over, Woodstock!" Asked backstage if he had donated any memorabilia to the institution that was honouring him, Pop, having unbuttoned his shirt and flashed his bare chest for photographers, replied, "I told them where to buy all the stuff I sold for drugs in the '70s".

Also shirtless while singing Stooges' standards Search and Destroy and I Wanna Be Your Dog, Pop invited - virtually dared - the well-heeled crowd to join him on stage.

The induction of himself and the Stooges - guitarists Asheton and James Williamson and drummer Scott Asheton - "lets certain people, people who are nervous with losers, this lets them know it's cool to like us", Pop said backstage.

"I didn't think they'd ever have us in that club."

The Stooges became eligible for the rock hall in 1994, quarter of a century after the release of their self-titled debut record.

What followed was like a replay of the band's early days, when respect from hipster quarters failed to convert into a broader embrace.

Seven times the Stooges made the nomination round, handpicked by a committee of rock experts; seven times they were shot down at the finish line by the 500 writers and executives who make up the hall's electorate.

"I kept hearing it's a bunch of 40- to 60-year-old guys," says Iggy (62), referring to the balloters.

"It's funny to me: I still think like a kid, so when I hear 'males 40 to 60', I think, 'Ugh, yeah, they hate us'.

Then I realised, wait a minute - that means they're all younger than me."

That cackle emerges again - a glimpse of the infectious, devil-may-care vibe that still permeates everything Iggy.

It was the same spirit that guided classic work such as Funhouse and Raw Power.

The Stooges' primal rock maelstrom, a sinewy blast of punk and metal before those genres had names, was Detroit through and through.

The Stooges got a taste of hall of fame pizzazz in 2008, when Madonna enlisted them for her induction performance, welcoming the band on-stage as "another ass-kicker from Michigan".

Hours before the show, Ron Asheton had spoken with obvious bemusement about the whole odd affair.

"Basically she was upset that we've been nominated so many times and never made it, so she asked us to play in protest," he said. The Madonna night was to be Asheton's lone hall of fame appearance.

Within 10 months he was dead, having succumbed to a heart attack at home in Ann Arbor.

Filling the guitar role now is a returned James Williamson, whose gritty, roaring riffs drove the Stooges' Raw Power in 1973.

He left the rock 'n' roll life in 1976, and embarked on a business career that made him a vice-president with Sony Electronics.

Grande Ballroom founder Russ Gibb was in the thick of it all in 1968 when the Stooges arrived on the Detroit scene from Ann Arbor, honing what became a legendary live show.

Gibb, who saw Iggy Pop take the Grande stage wrapped in aluminium foil, singing into a prop toilet bowl, is convinced the herky-jerky frontman invented the art of stage-diving with his high-charged Detroit audiences.

"Iggy put a show to rock 'n' roll before rock 'n' roll understood it had a show to put on."