Abstract:
IN the BBC-TV history of rock'n'roll, Dancing in the Street (1996), Iggy Pop tells
a story about how he hit upon the Stooges' sound. It was the late 1960s.A loner
kid from trailer parks outside Detroit, he'd started out wanting to play the blues.
But as soon as he k-tchang-ed the first notes, he understood how the noises made
by the likes of Robert Johnson and Son House had been invented in a landscape
completely different from his own. Iggy could tell there was no point mimicking
the field-gang calls, the river-flat reverbs, tracker-dog howls and train whistles
that defined the Negro South. Instead, he needed to build his sound from the
landscape that had made him, the landscape he knew and could rightfully invoke.
