This book is one of my treasured recent birthday presents from my better half
Mr. Twister.
Heather Firbank, London Edwardian socialite clotheshorse, eventually waxed impecunious, but in doing so she did an exceptionally intelligent action. Rather than chuck her fashionable wardrobe out when she downsized, she preserved and stored all of these fashionable clothes dating from 1900 - 1925. When she died, the unearthed legacy became the major basis of the vintage collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I'd happily don the first example with a more modern adjustment of the hem; the second with an adjustment of my fitness routine...
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They were the smart-alecks teasing quantum mechanics and particle physics into transistors and microchips who changed the world forever in their positronic conquest, rightly celebrated at C2SV. They were the rock band first detonating the niche into a million smithereens of hardcore, punk rock, speedmetal, thrash and all hardest rock genres thereafter in music’s smoking crater and changed its world forever, rightly celebrated at C2SV.
Although its techfest seminars and multiple band showcases in twelve different venues had been ongoing two of its four days prior, on 9.28.13 C2SV (Create Converge Silicon Valley) Technology Conference and Music Festival combined both factions with one individual who encapsulated both worlds. Selfsame hardest rock game changers Iggy and The Stooges assaulted St. James Park, downtown San Jose live that night after one of their own had given a talk earlier in the afternoon as the featured keynote tech speaker. James Williamson, newly retired Sony Corp. Technology Standards Vice-President is actual Iggy and The Stooges guitarist, most notably of its seminal 1972 release 
Off camera and a coast away, a there-from-the-beginning Stooges insider with initial misgivings recently had declared, “James Williamson saved The Stooges. Twice.” This story can be reviewed in Paraphilia XII (“Open Up and Blood, Sweat, Tears and ‘Fanecdotes,” 2011 by yours truly) and more recent triumphs of his Stooges reunion gigs in Paraphilia 2013 (“Raw and Real Power” also by yours truly.) However, the middle act of Williamson’s life wherein he abruptly switched careers, got in on the beginning of computer technology in the late ‘70s as an engineer, moved to Silicon Valley with his young family, invented away and rose through the ranks to eventual vice-presidency of Sony Corporation hadn’t been heard aloud in the first person until this keynote address.
It was formulated as a Q&A interview with author/writer Jack Boulware (
James mentioned that back in the day as a Stooge, “My lead singer was pissing all the way from the dressing room to the stage, and my hair was five different colors the night I met my future wife Linda.” (The coif was also spiky-cut-short in 1973’s longhaired Eagles’ hippie-o-rama daze, three years before the punks looked, listened and learned from James-era, Iggy and The Stooges 
Best of all, Williamson deconstructed his most famous song “Search And Destroy” playing his guitar. Its novel if hyperspeed rhythms were traced to the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash,” the Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run” and further back to conga-line dancing’s strong beats, revealing that “Search And Destroy, the anthem of Punk Rock, is really based on The Bunny Hop,” duly demonstrated in riffs and hops.
On to the pleine air St. James Park main stage opening acts: Bay Area locals The Bang Girl Group Revue with high-powered rock-soul singers Angeline King and Rachel Mae Havens plus deservedly praised, eclectic guitarist (and acclaimed DJ) Derek See and company; Bosnian Rainbows with Teri Gender Bender from Le Butcherettes along with some former The Mars Voltas, then S.F. surf-ish stylists Thee Oh Sees.
A packed park crowd of disparate, multi-generation, casual to high-trendy Goth Stoogefans excitedly compared previous or newfound Stooge experiences (that’s Maria Damon showing off James Williamson’s autograph on her dress garnered in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the band’s Tribute to Ron Asheton gig. She gets around.)
A major highlight of any Stooge show remains an invasion of 100+ stomping, moshing audience persons invited onstage to wild it up with the band from its perspective, an interactive vestige of the days when Iggy would spend half the show out in a club’s audience himself, barking in people’s faces, scuttling under dresses, rather impossible with the group’s huge draw nowadays. The stage erected in the park proved inadequate for such a gambit, so a single dancer from the audience and later some lithe, body-painted nubiles solved selfsame problem to the satisfaction of all.
After the feedback fury and raw nerve pain/redemption of selfsame “Open Up And Bleed,” (a song so wrenching it titled Paul Trynka’s definitive Iggy biography despite its unreleased status) the band returned with its singer wearing a recent facsimile of his Street Walking Cheetah jacket seen on the back cover of Raw Power. For encore “Burn” from recently released batch of brand spankin’ new Stooge songs Ready To Die, Iggy then unexpectedly met up with a gaggle of nubile young ladies onstage, nude but for body paint and “purported bodystockings.” Promoter Dan Pulcrano had hired Trina Merry/Art Alive Gallery’s body-painted naked dancers in a surprise performance art coda with the band as tribute to his legend-enmeshed headliners.
Global rock festival goers attend for the communality, their mutual collective experience of shared ambience and solidarities of musical tastes in seeing whatever A-list, world-class acts are touring that summer. American festival attendees go for specific favorite acts. All festival audiences go for the ears and eyes. I go for the heart.
Thus ‘off to photograph its premiere exponents who invented speedmetal, punk, hardcore from the late 1960s on via their original sui generis inventiveness, Iggy and The Stooges, blasting the Ink ‘n’ Iron Festival right smack dab in front of the ocean liner The Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, beginning of summer, 2013. Our first photograph at top depicts the unique setting, the Stooges’ most surreal stage backdrop ever with a 25 foot Princess Diana and fronting an entire famous ship, gangplanks and all.
It’s not just Raw but Real Power, perpetual motion, five grown men defying gravity, the sound barrier and their own demographic by presenting almost 2 hours of 1,000mph hardest rock that they helped invent as young autodidacts. Power can be fathomed as political, bullying, providing momentum, igniting electricity, a force of nature. That last signification gets us a little closer to the phenom.
A major British music writer precisely detailed the live Stooge experience – its Promethean touchstone of hardest rock genesis performed by its original practitioners – in a mindset closer to my own creed but shimmering with more polish: “…All that had gone before had put me in that wonderful but rare state that we all crave from our music – a combination of euphoria, empowerment and something like abandonment. I was feeling the music more than I was seeing and hearing it.” – Andy Barding, Louder than War, June 22, 2013 on the Royal Festival Hall gig in London a week before the 6.8.13 Long Beach show.
“…Multiple regions of the brain fire upon hearing music: muscular, auditory, visual, linguistic… Visual and auditory clues trigger empathetic neurons… We think of ourselves as individuals but to some extent we are not; our very cells are joined to the group by these evolved empathetic reactions to others…” From “How Music Works” by David Byrne of Talking Heads, writing for Smithsonian Magazine, Oct. 2012
Explaining why I loved “I Can See For Miles” by The Who to another of the world’s foremost guitarists whose dogs share playdates with ours, I proffered that the track conjured tsunamis, Dust Bowl cloud blackening skies, blizzards and hurricanes all bearing down on you at once to the extent that you were almost relieved when the song was over. What if these same forces of nature beguiled you, teased you, shook you to the core to want even more? Now we’re getting closer.
Reunion bands with predominantly original members… There’s this “world’s greatest rock and roll band” who still sound unquestionably magnificent and produce peerless live shows, but have you really preferred any of their newest songs to their canon of 40 years ago?
Attack, sustain, release, decay are the components of a musical sound: it’s out of order for Iggy and The Stooges, who rebooted all hard rock musics and, since pioneers get all the arrows, decayed in lifestyles and momentum but never in music, went their separate ways, then reunited in the 2000s to sustain with two versions of one of the greatest groups ever, first with the late guitarist Ron Asheton then with his successor James Williamson.
“Saw him (Mike Watt) for the first time in ‘97… I was 17, did whole under-aged drinking thing, but half way through the show I stopped. I’m just floored, like, ‘This is for real.’ No smooth pop punk there.” – Anonymous, because witness is now respectable tattoo shop owner/businessman
Everything he does from “L.A. Blues” squonks to pre-encore closer, the mighty “Open Up And Bleed”’s poignant harmonica spells sonic Stoogebliss completeness. God bless ‘im! Steve Mackay Rules OK! as the punks put in their original 1970s era, three years after their inspirations, Iggy and The Stooges Mach 1, had broken up.
The latter appears on 
Amongst the festival circuit current acts, Iggy and The Stooges is indeed acknowledged by critics’ consensus as the best of reunions of originals. They even play better than before despite having started from the top of the heap (lack of drug oblivion today aids in same. Luckily times changed.) 
