Few bands have benefited - and suffered - from revisionist pop history as greatly as the Stooges. Between 1969 and 1973, Iggy Pop and his Stooges, guitarist Ron Asheton and his brother Scott Asheton on drums, released three garage punk classics ( ldquo;The Stooges, rdquo; ldquo;Fun House rdquo; and ldquo;Raw Power rdquo;) that have been canonized between Led Zeppelin and the Ramones. Everyone from Alice Cooper to Perry Farrell and Rolling Stone magazine to online indie rock cliques have deified the Stooges for pioneering punk, metal, grunge and post-rock.
So when the Stooges - who play the Orpheum on Saturday - reunited to make their first album in 33 years, ldquo;The Weirdness, rdquo; expectations ballooned uncontrollably as the world waited to be reborn in the band rsquo;s gutter glory. Not surprisingly, the album disappointed just about everyone.
 heraldinteractive.com/siteImages/advertisement4.gif> ldquo;We rsquo;ve had to just forge ahead with this album and not worry about people telling us, lsquo;Hey, it rsquo;s not lsquo;Fun House, rsquo; rdquo; said Ron Asheton from his Michigan home. ldquo;Well, they didn rsquo;t like lsquo;Fun House rsquo; back then, so what the hell? What do they want me to do? Take each song off of lsquo;Fun House rsquo; and play it backwards? rdquo; The Stooges rsquo; first three albums flopped. Their live sets were often booed. Critics and fans considered them a joke, an impression bolstered by Iggy rsquo;s onstage habits of rolling in broken glass and smearing himself with peanut butter and by Asheton rsquo;s brutally primitive rhythm work. But after the Stooges broke up they quickly developed a cult that spent three decades clamoring for a reunion record and tour. Now,much of the cult thinks they rsquo;ve tainted their legacy with ldquo;The Weirdness, rdquo; although reviews of the Stooges rsquo; live shows have been favorable. While the CD has gotten a few good reviews, even in today rsquo;s era of absurd grade inflation (if a band can imitate the Strokes or Radiohead for 10 songs they earn a perfunctory B), ldquo;The Weirdness rdquo; is clinging to a C average. ldquo;What I rsquo;ve mostly encountered is that the press people that matter like it. But the people online, these indie dudes, are so indie-ed out that they don rsquo;t get it, rdquo; Asheton said. ldquo;We were dissed all the time back in the day. Every record, all the performances were dissed, but we rsquo;d get all the magazines and just laugh. We got off on how much they hated us. But any press is good press. Even negative press only makes people more curious.
Keywords: Ldquo Weirdness, Lsquo House, Ron Asheton
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