"It was acid, acid, acid, acid, acid! we'd take it every day."

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Darby's mom looked like something out of a John Waters movie. When I was in that house there was shit piled everywhere, years worth of magazines you had to walk through. She was always in another room and she'd scream, 'What, are you drunk, again, you little bastard?!' She just wasn't around a lot, but when she was she barked and screamed a lot. She was a very bizarre woman, Avon collections that should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, weird shit, she's fuckin' weird, man. Darby kept his door locked, and a lot of his friends were just like totally scared of her. There was no regular furniture in her house. She used to have plastic lawn furniture in the living room, with inflated air pillows and water toys hanging from the ceiling. He was always trying to get me naked and playing this chicken game on acid. And then every so often his mom would barge in and growl 'Do you want some potato chips?' She was trying to be friendly, but like while on acid, naked with her son, with the two of us just figuring out that we're faggots, it was all too weird ...

The kids don't need anything but the craziest, insanest, raunchiest shit

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T: The problem is that rock and roll and politics don't mix because you reach a point where you have to give up one for the other. I just think they're all going to reach that point and it'll be interesting to see which side they go for; especially the Dils, because they really do believe in that bullshit . . . it may be bullshit but they really do believe in it .

NO: What do you think they would do if they started making a lot of money, if they started getting really famous?

T: Well, that's what I mean . Their Politics become hearsay ... it doesn't mean anything after a while. They 're rock and roll. It's entertainment.

C: The point was made clear to me when I went to see the Dils at Base's hall and there were posters on the wall saying "Welcome to the workers paradise" and it cost $4 to get in.

Paul Morrissey: I like fantasy & entertainment but it seems nobody puts real life into films. There was a friend of mine who was manager at a porno theatre in New York & they were just showing porno. It was the first early full porno they were having in Manhattan & he had some friend of his who was sort of a poet or something, who was the ticket-taker. Somehow this guy who had no business running a porno theater got the job. So he was the manager, and his friend the poet didn't come in one day to sell the tickets & he said 'Where'd you go yesterday, you didn't come in,' & he said, 'Oh, I had to go to that new film that just opened EASY RIDER.' And I was there and I said 'You went to see what? Why did you go to see that?' … He said 'Oh, I wanted to see my generation on screen,' and I thought that was preposterous, because that film really had nothing to do with even the ten year period within it was made … maybe 10 or 15 years earlier … the beatniks or something. But it just dawned on me. I said 'If you want to see your generation on screen, go inside the theater, in that porno up there, that's your generation.'

They were weird and different and didn't play songs like everybody else

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Lester Bangs: Rolling Stone had flown me up to San Francisco to check me out, since I had been writing for them for about six months. I guess they wanted to see if I was executive timber. I guess I wasn't, because not only did I get moved from Greil Marcus's to Langdon Winner's house after about two days, but I thought it was as curious that they sat around, not even smoking pot, but listening to Mother Earth and Creedence with absolute seriousness, as they were bewildered by my penchant for guzzling whiskey all day while blasting 'Sister Ray' at top volume ... to make a dismal story mercifully short, I discovered a magazine in Detroit called Creem, whose staff was so crazy they even put the Stooges on the cover. Of every issue! So I left my job and school and girlfriend and beer-drinking buddies and moved to Detroit, where my brand of degenerate drool would be not only tolerated but outright condoned, and over the five years I worked at Creem we used our basic love for it to exploit the punk aesthetic and stance in just about every way humanly possible.

black music played by white, working class, bad skin bastards

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People might say, "Well, there's no more Knickerbockers, there's no more Count Five and there's no more Hombres, and there's no more Standells out there." Yeah, but there may be a bunch of people who can give you the same emotional feeling if you spent the time on a Tuesday night to go to the clubs and hear music, you'll see. It's still out there. You have to find it again, because you can only recycle these stories so many times; you can only reissue these songs so many times, and eventually everybody's gonna have these records in their homes. You're going to have all the versions of all this stuff on bootlegs and tape and vinyl. After a while though, you're kid's gonna eat them, you're dog's gonna shit on them and your second wife will throw them out. So why don't you guys go form your own bands, or why don't you go find some and then you'll find some dirty bitches and get laid and you'll have a good time.

teenagers are so prone to anxiety and destruction, music helps them

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“We were playing bar mitzvahs at the Brentwood Temple, house parties—the Jewish kids would have their chaperone dances, and the Catholic kids would have theirs—it was all dogshit,” Kim Fowley remembers. “In between times we’d be stealing golf clubs. We’d chase ambulances and fire engines, and when some rich guy’s house went up in flames we’d go for the golf clubs because we could sell them in the ghetto. Black people wanted to play golf in the ’50s. We’d go down to the black neighborhood, and all the other thieves would be there with the toasters and waffle irons. The bass players were always wandering in and out, and the guitar players were always the hardest to get. So Phil Spector would come by and play sometimes. But he was just a guy who knew the songs that everybody else knew. He didn’t make an impression. Give him ten bucks, or don’t give him anything so we can have more.”

“What kind of trip are you on, man, swimming naked in my pool?”

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The Strip would be packed with people, back then. A lot of them drove by just to see the styles we were wearing. We sure didn’t disappoint them. We were as freaked-out looking as you would want to see. To me, it was just a way of expressing freedom. I never liked suits and still don’t. There we were, the talk of the town, and all from an idea I had about how and what I thought it could be. I’d see a lot of straight people just coming by to look at what they called ‘the freaks.’ The crowds congregating after gigs every night at Ben Frank’s grew so large that the cops were always there. What kind of hangout is it when you’re getting harassed all the time? So we took the crowd somewhere else, a place called Canter’s, on Fairfax, and did we start something or what? Everyone who was anyone would come to Canter’s, after hours. Just about everyone that was in the audience when we played followed us to the place. I didn’t know a sidewalk could fit that many people. I remember playing the Hullabaloo in LA, right across the street from the Hollywood Palladium, on Sunset, where Buffalo Springfield were playing. Our side of the street was packed from corner to corner but their side was practically bare. It’s safe to say we were the number one group on the West Coast when we went to play the Fillmore in San Francisco. We headlined at the Fillmore and I remember I had to stand and listen to Janis Joplin scream. She was the great white hope for the blues, but all she did was scream. You see, people think that when white people scream that it’s soul. But that isn’t soul, it’s just screaming.

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Many people found the band not just surly but intimidating, profoundly at odds with the prevailing spirit of peace and . . . well, love. LA music writer Jerry Hopkins, who briefly managed them, said they should have been called Fist, while in San Francisco they were regarded with even more opprobrium: the fanzine Mojo Navigator called them “a bunch of hoods,” and Pete Albin of Big Brother And The Holding Company referred to them as Hate. . . . When KPIA Beat’s Rochelle Reed interviewed them in June 1966 in the legendary “Castle” . . . they treated her abominably, psyching her out with mind games and telling her they’d met during a gang fight.

‘stoned sloths making music for boring, repressed people’

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It is Saturday 5 July 1969 in Pottawatamie Beach and as the Stooges finish their opening number, Iggy looks blankly at the festival audience and announces, ‘I’d like to dedicate the set today to Brian Jones, the dead Stone. Oh well, being dead’s better than playing here.’

As they battle their way through their set, perhaps a quarter of the audience is entranced, the remainder indifferent or actively hostile. Cub Koda stands by the side of the stage to admire the freeform feedback-saturated jam. As uncontrollable shrieks squeal out of the PA stacks, Dave Alexander takes the neck of his Mosrite bass and jams it into the gap between two Marshall cabinets, then starts to hump them. Ron Asheton, in aviator shades and leather jacket, tosses his Fender Stratocaster to the stage; it moans and howls as he bends the whammy bar with his foot. Drummer Rock Action pounds out a Bo Diddley jungle rhythm on his tomtoms before suddenly losing the beat and starts kicking over the kit. Iggy writhes on the floor, blood trickling from his bottom lip where he’s smacked himself with the microphone. Koda looks on as Iggy leans over and starts to throw up in the middle of the stage, when suddenly he senses someone leaning behind him, trying to get a better view. He glances behind and sees it’s Muddy Waters, the grand patriarch of Chicago blues, who will be playing the headlining set in a couple of hours. Muddy watches for a few seconds. Then he shakes his head, points at the stage and shouts over the feedback: ‘I don’t like that. Those boys need to get themselves an act!’

‘Muddy!’ laughs Cub. ‘That is the act!’