Almost 40 years since their debut, The Stooges’ influence is still being felt across the world whenever a kid picks up an instrument and just starts thrashing on it with some friends. The three albums they released between 1969 and 1973—The Stooges; Fun House; and Raw Power—remain at the peak of the sheer primal power of what rock ‘n’ roll can achieve. In pure simplicity and repetition they found something almost avant-garde.
Strange then, that for such an influential band it has taken this long for a theatrically-released documentary to appear. Yet, Jim Jarmusch is the ideal man to right this wrong, a director whose work has always mixed pop-culture and rock ‘n’ roll with artier aspirations; Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai took hip-hop culture and fused it with Zen philosophy and a pastiche of sub-Scorsese mafia films, whilst his masterful Dead Man took the tropes of the old-school Western and flipped them on their head, adding acid imagery and William Blake quotations. Not to mention that Jarmusch has worked with Iggy Pop before, casting him in Dead Man and the anthology film Coffee & Cigarettes, where he acted opposite another legend, Tom Waits.
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Jarmusch’s approach here is sensible; he eschews effusive talking heads from celebrity fans or commentators, building the entire narrative of Gimme Danger through interviews, both archival and contemporary, with Iggy, the other Stooges, and anyone else directly involved with the band, mixing in archival concert footage or photographs. Whilst sadly only Iggy and guitarist James Williamson remain of the classic Stooges lineup, it proves to be a great decision, allowing the band and their acquaintances to tell the story themselves, with no interference from other perspectives.
And what a story it proves to be! Anyone slightly familiar with The Stooges will be unsurprised to hear the stories about their copious drug abuse, but what also comes across is a vision of a band that actually thought about the kind of rock ‘n’ roll they were making. As Iggy points out, during the early days of the band, when combining recreational drug use with music listening was habitual, the playlist was not simply The Beatles or the Stones, but experimental composer Harry Partch and jazz pioneer John Coltrane. The Stooges were no troglodytes, but rather experimental, free-wheeling hellraisers (although Iggy does remark that in Ron and Scott Asheton, the late brothers who played guitar and drums respectively, he “found primitive man”).
It’s no surprise that Iggy Pop is great company, as ever a funny and intelligent raconteur, but considering his legendary substance intake it’s great to see that his memory remains so vivid and clear. Just as well, because his presence lifts the film up a gear. Although it lacks the power and emotional strength of the best music documentaries like Anvil!, Gimme Danger is nevertheless an entertaining and engrossing portrait of a dysfunctional, crazy, but ever so brilliant band.
words FEDOR TOT