Reply #23: Growing Up in Detroit [View All]

[BeatleBoot]

Growing up in Detroit and still living here, I am at a loss.

This is a whole in the heart of musicians everywhere.

I teethed myself on the Stooges and saw Iggy so many times in concert it's hard to remember.

I even saw Ron Asheton in Dark Carnival a couple of times.

His guitar is embedded in the soul of Ann Arbor and Hamtramck and Detroit and its environs.

Ron played with Marshall amps stacked 2 x 2.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28523517/?GT1=43001

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Asheton’s powerful, distorted guitar on songs like “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “T.V. Eye” was a hallmark of the group’s sound. His “technically adept but also beautifully raw” style was heavily influenced by free jazz and created “beauty out of noise,” said Brian Cogan, a punk-music historian at Molloy College on New York’s Long Island.

“He invents the template for punk-rock guitar,” Cogan said. “He’s the one who allows Johnny Ramone and the guys in the Dictators to play the way they do.”

When he was named the 29th greatest guitarist of all time in 2003 by Rolling Stone, the magazine described Asheton as “the Detroit punk who made the Stooges’ music reek like a puddle of week-old biker sweat.”

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