![The artist Alice Cooper called the "godfather" of punk: "I had never seen anybody like [him]"](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/static/uploads/1/2024/02/Alice-Cooper-1970s-Musician-Far-Out-Magazine-F-1140x855.jpg)
The artist Alice Cooper called the “godfather” of punk: “I had never seen anybody like [him]”
The entire punk movement has always been based on some kind of destruction. Rock and roll tends to have a habit of getting too bloated every now and then, so bringing in bands like Ramones to wipe out all of the superficial bands tends to go down a lot better than just hearing the latest audio travesty that a prog band might have in their back catalogue. Although Alice Cooper was responsible for waking up a lot of hippies in the early 1970s, he knew he would be playing second fiddle to Iggy Pop every time he got onstage.
But are Iggy and the Stooges actually a punk band? Both yes and no. They may not have been thinking about making a new genre at the time, but Pop had an ambition to make something heavier than anything that had come before. He had come from an art background, and he knew the power of playing heavy rock and roll at deafening volumes, so why not take it one step further?
When The Stooges’ first album was released, though, you would have sworn the band had crawled out of the crypt since the heaviest thing released to radio around that time was The Rolling Stones or maybe The Guess Who. Pop seemed to rip straight out of a nightmare, with James Williamson playing guitar parts that sounded like chainsaws.
While the rest of the world would take some time to catch up , Cooper thought that he was seeing rock’s feral side the minute he saw them, telling VH1, “If there is a punk movement, they have to say that Iggy is the godfather of that. I had never seen anybody like Iggy. I thought ‘Who is this guy? I thought I was the freakiest guy out there’”.
As much as Cooper was shocking to people in the late 1960s, though, there was only so far he could go when playing a character. Pop was the real deal, and whenever he got onstage, it felt like he was at war with his audience half the time rather than wanting to entertain them that much.
It’s not like he didn’t suffer for his art, either. Outside of the amazing shots of him from the time walking through the crowd on people’s hands, he was also just as likely to put damage on himself, including many gigs where he would leave the stage covered in blood after cutting pieces of his chest open.
When remembering those days, though, Cooper said that Iggy never encroached on his territory, telling Metal Evolution, “It was always MC5, Iggy and Alice. Iggy was the king of the punks, and I was this other thing. I was like this strange Phantom of the Opera type character”.
That didn’t stop both bands from becoming absolutely massive after the fact. It turns out the rock world had plenty of room for a few freaks, and everyone from Sonic Youth to David Bowie cited The Stooges as one of the reasons why they love rock and roll so much. If Pop was creating war onstage, though, Cooper was bringing Hell back to Earth for a few hours whenever he made his entrance. After years of watching bands play with wild abandon at every show, the theatrical side of rock and roll was about to take over.