Iggy Pop
By Michael Erlewine
I keep getting requests to tell about how Iggy Pop came to be a drummer in our band. The Prime Movers started in the summer of 1965. I became the de facto leader of the band because someone had to manage it. I did all the bookings, handled what little cash we had, arranged the practices, often got the band up for practice, usually drove us in the Prime Movers van we had, and on and on. No one else was interested in doing all that. I was. I also designed, cut and silkscreened almost all of the bands posters. The band members sometimes would help to post them around town.
I was back then the same “Me” that later founded the All-Movie Guide (allmusic.com), the All-Movie Guide (AllMovie.com), the All-Game Guide (AllGame.com), and so on. I just didn’t know it then. I had just returned from a year in Berkley, California which seemed years ahead of Ann Arbor, Michigan to me. I understood that everything IMO had to be presented just right to make the proper impression and to communicate what the Prime Movers Blues Band was all about.
When Iggy joined our band, he knew little about music or any of the liberal arts, and our influence was crucial to his education. Even Iggy says that.
Here is a quote from the book “Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed” by Paul Trynka:
START QUOTE:
“… throughout 1966, Michael Erlewine’s influence was crucial. “Iggy was a sponge, I think he soaked up ideas,” says Scott Richardson, then singer with the Chosen Few, who for a while shared a squalid basement apartment with the drummer. “Michael was a very bossy figure, but a very influential one.”
“Robert Sheff (Prime Mover’s keyboard player) observed Iggy close-up, both in the Prime Movers and the Stooges, and he felt that Michael Erlewine was “not a mentor exactly, but Iggy made him that. The Prime Mover experience was important to Iggy in an emotional way. Michael liked very emotional situations, and he put that into the music a lot. Iggy’s the same way.”
“An intellectual, inspiring, often infuriating character to this day — it’s sometimes hard to extract his opinions of other people, for he’s far more interested in himself — Michael Erlewine was ruthlessly committed to his music. But this wasn’t a selfish commitment, for he was devoted to bringing the audience with him — sometimes literally so.”
“There was one late-night Prime Movers show at Clint’s Club [a Black bar in Ann Arbor] when he worked up the audience into such an exalted state that, after the final song [2 AM], the band and twenty kids from the audience followed him through the streets of Ann Arbor, listening to Michael speak, exhorting them to contemplate the beauty of everyday objects around them. They stayed up until six o’clock in the morning, sharing spirituality of the night turning into the dawn, before bundling into a twenty-four hour Greek restaurant for more earthly sustenance.
“It was an incredible experience,” remembers Sheff, “a charismatic experience.” Few other performers would have taken such risks, but Michael’s commitment in stimulating and challenging his audience was a crucial lesson. And one in which the pupil would eventually outdo the master.”
Here is another quote that just came my way. This just goes to show you that if you wait long enough, even what seems like the straightest line becomes a curve and everything comes back around. I never thought I would see the day when my old bandmate (and drummer) Iggy Pop would deliver a lecture, and in Britain no less. But sure enough, he just did and he even mentioned me, by golly. The lecture was titled “Free Music in a Capitalistic Society,” and it was the BBC Music John Peel Lecture for the year 2014.
Here is what Iggy said about Michael Erlewine:
“I found other people who were smarter than me, to teach me. My first pro band was a blues band called the Prime Movers, and the leader Michael Erlewine was a very bright hippy-beatnik with a beautifully-organized record collection in library form of “The Blues.” I had never really heard ‘The Blues’. That part of our American heritage was kept off the major media. It was system-up, people-down. No Big Bill Broonzy on BBC for us.
“Boy, I wish. No money in it. But everything I learned’ from Michael’s beautiful library became the building blocks for anything good I’ve done since. Guys like this are priceless. If you find one, follow him or her. Get the knowledge.”
As for my comments on Iggy’s comments on ‘Michael Erlewine’, I would add. Yes, the record collection was a good one, “beautiful,” but Iggy forgot to remember that it was someone like myself, my brother Daniel, and my friend (and keyboard player) Robert Sheff (famous as “Blue Gene Tyranny in avant-garde classical music) who very patiently sat down and introduced that music to Iggy, track by track, note by note, carefully pointing out where the good stuff was and how to perform it.
We gave Iggy an education, not only in music, but also in the liberal arts in general. My point is that it was not only the record collection that was “beautiful,” but the way it was presented (and by whom) to Iggy. I know Iggy knows this, and all of us very much loved him. Later Iggy Pop perhaps got “in your face” to the world, but to me he will always be a very receptive and lovable character. I was taking it in.
Iggy Pop was the Prime Movers Blues Band first ‘real’ drummer. I was the lead singer and amplified harmonica player in the Prime Movers Blues Band back in the mid-1960s and that’s right, Iggy Pop was our drummer. My brother Dan Erlewine was our lead guitarist, Rober Sheff on keyboards, and Jack Dawson our bass player.
When our first drummer “Spider” left the band, we had no drummer. Looking around town, we spotted a young Jim Osterberg playing in a frat band called the ‘Iguanas’. It did not take Osterberg long to see that the Prime Movers were a whole other kind of band and take on music.
He wanted in and we let him in. We even liked him. But we didn’t really know him yet and he was a wee bit suspect just because he had settled (up to that point) with just being in a frat band.
So, from day one we called him “Iguana.” It was not 100% disrespectful, but it did serve to remind him where he came from. In a matter of days as we saw he really was one of us, his name was shortened to “Iggy,” he liked it, and that is how he was known from then on until he added the last name “Pop” much later after he left our band.
If he had already been called “Iggy” when we met him, we would never have called him “Iguana” for a time, so we named the Igg-ster.
For myself, I always liked Iggy. He was fun to be around, never a problem. I don’t recall having had a single real argument with him, and I can argue. In fact, if I remember right, Iggy didn’t want to tell me himself when he finally decided to leave our band, and so I first heard it from someone else.
Obviously, he eventually had other fish to fry. When Iggy joined our band, he was not a great drummer. He was an adequate drummer, but he had never played something as difficult as the blues.
I know, most musicians think of the blues as easy, the same progression over and over. This just shows how little they know or care to know. Blues are not easy and Iggy found that out. We taught him the blues.
He had to work on his drumming, and he was very diligent in this. He became a very good drummer. The hardest rhythm he had to learn is something called the “double shuffle.” It is a very difficult beat and Iggy learned it from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band drummer Sam Lay. It took him weeks to learn it, but he eventually nailed it. Iggy became a fine blues drummer.
Many people have called for a reunion of the Prime Movers Blues Band with Iggy on drums. I heard from Iggy’s manager recently that the reason Iggy is not pushing for such a reunion is that he has not played drums in a long time.
This I so understand; I feel the same way about my harmonica playing. Just for fun, I have played harmonica several times behind poet/activist John Sinclair in recent years as part of his backup band the “Blues Scholars,” and I sure am out of shape. Back then we played whatever gigs we could find.
For a while the legendary promoter Jeep Holland managed us or tried to manage us. We were kind of unmanageable. He dressed us in suits and put us out on the teen circuit, playing at teen nightclubs around the state.
Blues music, a touch of gospel, and the kind of stuff we played really wasn’t for teens. And back then we would smoke the weed.
I remember there was a pound of really less-than-great marijuana that we kept under the floorboards at 114 N. Division Street, what was called the “Prime Movers House,” and we smoked every last fiber of that lousy stuff.
I can remember one gig out on the teen circuit, perhaps at Daniel’s Den in Saginaw. We had some really good weed that night and my brother Dan and I were stoned and on stage. He was the lead guitarist and at that time I was playing rhythm guitar. We were looking across the stage at one another, eye-ball to eye-ball.
Neither of us had the slightest idea what the next chord change could be, at least I didn’t. It seemed impossible that we would ever remember it in time. I was freaked. And of course, the song seemed like it was in slow motion.
But, sure enough, when each chord change finally rolled around, by some chance accident of fate the right chord would appear, and we would smoothly play it. Try doing that for most of a night.
And Iggy was also with us when we played the Schwaben Inn down on Ashley Street in Ann Arbor, where the wonderful blues player from Detroit, “Washboard Willie and His Super Suds of Rhythm,” would play on Wednesday nights.
We would play on weekends. The Schwaben Inn is where the tide of U-M students who came to hear us met the tide of townies who claimed we were one of them. After all, most of our band were townies, not “pin heads” as we called the U-M students.
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The fights that broke out between the two groups would find us cringing behind our amplifiers. As I have mentioned in another blog, there was one fight that took nine police cars to break up. And this beer hall never dried out. With its low ceilings, it always smelt of wet beer and cigarettes. It would catch your breath when you first walked into the place, until you got used to the smell.
Music was not the only thing that Iggy learned from the Prime Movers. A number of us also knew a lot about literature, poetry, theater, and the arts. This was news to Iggy and he soaked that up pretty well.
Personally, I believe we opened his eyes to more than just the blues. And he was willing. And Iggy had one other thing going for him that the rest of us did not. My brother Dan, who roomed with Iggy, tells me he a had great big you-know-what, and was pretty pleased about that. Later after he left our group, he liked to show it off from time to time on stage.
Folks are always asking me how outrageous Iggy must have been. Not really, folks. Iggy was a great guy, even a bit shy. And with his long eyelashes, the ladies loved him, but he would always let them approach him, and not vice versa. In my heart of hearts, the “Iggy Pop” that the world knows was a brilliant idea Iggy came up with just for show, not how he was inside.
Who knows what he is now, but back then we all liked Iggy. And of course, I have not seen him all these years and assumed he had forgotten us. However, on April 19, 2011 at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor Iggy did a show in honor of our mutual friend (and Iggy’s guitarist) Ron Asheton, who had recently passed away. Asheton used to play bass in our band and was someone I also really liked. At that event Iggy gave me a shout out. Of his old Ann Arbor friends he only brought up my name; I was surprised that he even remembered me:
“There is a guy named Michael Erlewine, who had the Prime Movers Blues Band, of which Ron Ashton and I are both graduates of, and so many great musicians around Ann Arbor. It is just endless… Ann Arbor is a great, weird, little town.”
Thanks Iggy, I am proud of you! And we do finally have one recorded album. A few years ago, someone dug up an old reel-to reel tape out of a basement. It had one set of the Prime Movers Blues Band, one random night of playing out of all those many years.
I have no idea who recorded it, and it certainly is not our best but at least here is a taste of what the band was like. Not sure where it took place, but it obviously is a bar somewhere because the tracks are long and we stretched out to have fun and fill the time. We typically would play from 9 PM or so until 2 AM, and sometimes we would pack up and go to another club for after hours (The 5th Dimension), playing until dawn.
I recently heard an interview with Stooges guitar player Ron Asheton, who used to play bass for our band the Prime Movers. I am sorry to say that Ron passed away not long ago, I am very sorry to say. Ron said this about us
Interviewer: People speak really highly of Michael and Daniel Erlewine?
Asheton: Yep, I learned tons from the Erlewine brothers. That was my first real foot into the reality of actually being in a band, you know, and having the experience of…With Dave and Scotty it was like basement things. We weren’t …none of us were good enough to get that real hit from playing in a band, but the Prime Movers was like…whoah…They would do like all the blues tunes …they had more blues, just more into the solid blues.
Asheton: Other than that, my first real professional type situation was in the Prime Movers Blues Band, where Iggy was going to Pioneer High also and I would see him at school…We used to meet down at the Michigan Union and… at that time, originally, he was in the band “Iguanas,” but he quit and hooked up with the Prime Movers and they were auditioning for bass players.
“The Prime Movers was where I really got in touch with Iggy. He is the one who turned me on to audition for the Prime Movers, so at that time Rick Higgenbotham was playing bass. He couldn’t play very well, but the Movers liked the way he looked and his spirit and what…So I went in one night, played for them, got the job. That’s what kicked off my real learning experience of playing music.
Question: What kind of job was that you got at that point with the Movers? Were they playing around a fair amount?
Asheton: Yeah, the Prime Movers were just really taking off. I felt really, Wow, I was blown back. At that time they were accomplished musicians, so what it did for me… I would either skip school or every day after school I would just go and practice. It’s the house you live in now, the Prime Mover House. Right in that room, for hours every day. They taught me a lot until they were so much better and more accomplished than myself at that time and they eventually copped to Jack Dawson for a bass player, who was more their age group and much finer a player the me.
Question: How long did you play with them?
Asheton: I think I was in the band for like six months and then after … I saw it coming… and then after the boot I still hung around, did equipment, went out on their gigs and they let me sit in for a tune or two. They would even do things like tell their bass player Jack that practice was an hour later so I would get to play for an hour with them. And I still worked out with Iggy on drums, helped him learn the double-shuffle, play some bass while he practiced his ass off every day learning the double shuffle.
Question: So, the Prime Movers Blues Band that was really nice, eh?
Asheton: Oh, that was a great band, the Prime Movers Blues Band.
Question: People speak really highly of Michael and Daniel Erlewine?
Asheton: Yep, I learned tons from the Erlewine brothers. That was my first real foot into the reality of actually being in a band, you know, and having the experience of…With Dave and Scotty it was like basement things. We weren’t …none of us were good enough to get that real hit from playing in a band, but the Prime Movers was like…whoah…They would do like all the blues tunes …they got more blues, just more into the solid blues.
Question: Where did the Prime Movers play?
…Those guys would also do bars like they did two weeks in Grand Rapids at this bar. We lived above it.
Question: That was a college bar then?
Asheton: No, it was just, whoah…all types. It was just like this redneck… there were a lot of close shaves with drunken redneck types and the Erlewine brothers, with their long curly hair. They would be … guys would get drunk and call them “He, Brillo head” or “Hey nigger hair” or something like that. It was a lot of close shaves, but it was fun. You would just get so plowed and transcend the danger. There was always that edge that there could be a fight any second, you know..
There you have at least an introduction to Iggy Pop and the Prime Movers Blues Band, including some photos. If you want to hear what we sounded like here is a sample.
The Prime Movers Blues Band (“The Friends of the Sixties”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZO5bsagUqY&t=183s
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And may it ever grow and flourish.
