After hearing psychedelic music, I became a rock music fan and went to many concerts. In the early 1970s, the general trend was for pompous, self-involved rock theatrics. The beatnik notion of “poet-is-priest” became “rock star-is-priest,” and the rock concert audience was transformed into a hedonized mass, generating a group consciousness orchestrated by the rock singer. As at a church service or football game, the audience was enticed to sing along or raise lit matches in unison. Two concerts changed everything for me: one by Sun Ra at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, the other was a concert by Iggy and the Stooges at a small biker bar in Wayne, Michigan.

The two shows were quite different. Sun Ra’s shows at this time were huge, showy and spectacular. The stage was filled with tons of equipment and his “Arkestra,” as well as dancers, and props. The aesthetic was a mixture of African music, exotica, big band, science fiction, Greek chorus, and political rally. It was unlike anything I had ever seen or heard. The audience would be excited into a dancing frenzy by throbbing, African-style drumming, then Sun Ra, or Mr. Mystery, as he would sometimes call himself, would start to fuck with your head, shifting at breakneck speed from schmaltzy big-band arrangements to strange neo-Egyptian poetry and long nonsense chants, to weird skits about “outer space employment agencies.” You were constantly being asked to abruptly shift gears. At one point you might be swept up bodily only to be dropped on your ass by twenty minutes of harsh, electronic white noise. It was the most intellectually and physically demanding show I have ever seen. Afterward I climbed a fence, got backstage, and met Sun Ra. He was very approchable. When asked how his show differed from James Brown’s equally elaborate, but more pleasure-oriented performance, Sun Ra replied, “James Brown gives the people what they want; I give them what they need.”

During an intense winter snowstorm, I braved hitchhiking from Ann Arbor through to a particularly redneck rural area outside Detroit to see the Stooges. When I arrived at the “club,” I found it was a small biker bar. I was the first one there. Passing the time, I asked the bouncer, a huge, fat biker, whether he had ever seen the Stooges. “No,” he said, “But if the prick throws up on stage, I’m going to kick his ass.” When the Stooges arrived, Iggy was dressed in a ridiculous jazz-dancer’s outfit, a kind of leotard with a spangled skirt. His eyes were sloppily ringed with eyeliner, and a cigarette drooped from his lips. His whole demeanor said, “Fuck you.” I could feel the current of hatred spread through the bikers. Iggy was the total front man; the rest of the band barely moved. They stood stiff and erect like store window dummies, their faces blank. They were the perfect foil; all eyes were focused on Iggy, a master of body gesture. Every move was charged, and his moronic, contorted dancing seemed inspired, like an acrobat possessed by the spirit of an epileptic Jerry Lewis. The show started off simply enough, with a few upbeat rock tunes that get the crowd going. Iggy incited the audience to respond to him, got them heated up—they want Iggy. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped, singling out a girl pushed up against the stage, one of the fans to whom a second earlier he had been gesturing and enticing. The room went silent.

“Get this bitch out of here. She tried to touch me! We won’t play unless she is removed.” The tension started to build. She moved out of sight. Then Iggy asked, “What do you want to hear?” The crowd yelled back an incomprehensible roar of song titles.

“Oh… ‘Louie Louie.’”

So the band launched into “Louie Louie.” It’s hard to explain now what “Louie, Louie” meant at that time, when rock music was trying to be important. It was the first song a hillbilly rocker would learn on his guitar to impress the girls at a school dance—a throwback to an embarrassing time when rock music was entertainment for fraternity boys, not an instrument of social change. It was a slap in the face to the audience. But they politely suffered through it, even good-naturedly hoopin’ and hollerin’ a little bit.

Then Iggy asked again, “What do you want to hear?” The same roar came back.

“Oh… ‘Louie Louie.’”

And the band tore into “Louie, Louie” for a second time. “Louie, Louie” was played three times in a row. The audience was starting to get antsy. The band did another rocker and the audience regained its faith, only to have Iggy pull some other disruptive stunt.

He was an amazing performer. I have never seen better. He played the audience like a fish. The crowd was in the palm of his hand. They would suffer insult after insult, have their faces rubbed over and over again in their own complicity, and come running back for more. This doesn’t sound like much after fifteen years of punk music, in which these stage antics are the norm. But Iggy invented this stuff.

After about five or six songs, a big biker shouted, “Hey! Poodle Boy,” and hit Iggy with an egg. The next thing I saw Iggy doing a belly flop into the audience; and then a riot broke out—a real traditional biker bar fistfight. Chairs and tables overturned, the place was cleared within fifteen minutes. The lights were turned up, the band had run out the door, and I was left standing standing there babbling, “What happened?” It was the best piece of theater I have ever seen.

Everything of major importance I know about performing, I learned from these two concerts.

Brechtian Theatre Techniques, by Mike Kelley

DAF

Good evening, we are the Fall and we are from the first world.