Ron Asheton, guitarist for the legendary Stooges, was found dead in his Ann Arbor, Mich., home this morning. Asheton certainly performed with a number of acts between 1973 (when
Raw Power, when he was bumped to bass guitar in the Stooges was released) and 2007 (when the Stooges reunited for
The Weirdness), but in the end, what he was most known for was his songwriting and tough sounding guitar on the Stooges' self-titled album and its followup,
Fun House. Although I feel like I'm way too acquainted with frontman Iggy Pop, all I really ever knew about Asheton came from his contributions to his band's records; even
a recent interview with his hometown paper isn't all that revealing, focusing on how the band reformed and the fact that they haven't made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So, probably fittingly, I'll remember Asheton in death the way I thought of him in life: through the music of the Stooges. A few selections are after the cut.
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Idolator
Forget all that talk about whether Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion is the best album of 2009. The real competition—the Worst Music-Related Article Of 2009 That Somehow Still Managed To Earn A Paycheck In This Completely Devastated Writing Economy—has already been sewn up, thanks to the new "conservatives can be cool and comment on pop culture too, man" blog Big Hollywood. Congratulations, Fox News pundit Greg Gutfeld: Your recently horked-up "Conservatives Rock" is not only headlined by perhaps the worst verb ever to use atop a music-related story, the underlying conceit is about as dumb as, well, a story entitled "Conservatives Rock" might ever hope to be.
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