Stooges doc feels like a fan film
JIM Jarmusch built Gimme Danger, his new documentary on legendary proto-punk band the Stooges, around what he calls “an interrogation”. The director spent about 14 hours – including 10 in a single sitting – interviewing Stooges frontman Iggy Pop at his home in Florida.
“It was pretty gruelling for him,” Jarmusch recalls. “We felt like we left there with a little chest of gold entrusted to us, so we packed up and got out while he was too tired to chase us for it.”
Jarmusch is half-joking. He and Pop are longtime friends and colleagues (Pop played roles in two previous Jarmusch films, Dead Man and Coffee and Cigarettes), and Pop asked Jarmusch to make Gimme Danger. But Pop agrees that the interview was intense.
“Jim is not a pushover, and his questions were very tough – by the end of it, I was in pain,” he says. “But there was a personal urge on my part to get all this off my chest to someone who I thought could understand it and process it in some way that was worthwhile, instead of just telling people my sob stories.”
Pop’s interview guides the narrative arc of Gimme Danger. With bright enthusiasm and wry humour, he lays out a chronological history of the Michigan-based band, which made three groundbreaking, influential albums between 1969 and 1974, then reunited three decades later. Jarmusch had initially planned a less linear story with chapter titles such as “Why No Shirt?” – a reference to Pop’s habit of performing naked from the waist up. But he found that Pop telling the Stooges’ tale as it unfolded did the band’s legacy more justice.
“This film is kind of a fan film,” insists Jarmusch, a leading figure in independent film for the past three decades. “It’s a celebration of the Stooges, not an academic analysis, so I didn’t want to put a big signature across it.”
In keeping with that goal, Jarmusch spoke only to members of “the Stooges family”: the band, members’ relatives, and former manager and mentor Danny Fields. Unlike many music documentaries, Gimme Danger eschews commentary from rock critics or musicians the Stooges influenced.
“Famous people commenting on the subject usually comes about from a marketing department or a filmmaker desperate for the movie to get seen,” Pop GimmeDanger, says. “I wanted to avoid that, and I knew if we could get Jim to make this movie, the bar would be higher.”
Although Gimme Danger is mostly a linear story, it begins at an end. Jarmusch opens on the Stooges breaking up after a calamitous 1974 tour that finished with a Detroit audience pelting them with eggs and beer bottles. Pop moved back in with his parents in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Brothers Ron Asheton (guitar) and Scott Asheton (drums) did the same with their parents; the Ashetons’ sister Kathy admits feeling relieved that they made it home alive. It’s a brutal reminder that, despite the Stooges’ status as Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees, their creative prime was not exactly glorious.
For Pop, watching Gimme Danger made that pain palpable again. “I felt a little bit of fear and shame – there we were, back living with our mums,” he recalls. “But then I realised this was the only way to portray the central psychic journey of the group. It was a key truth, and Jim took the bull by the horns and stuck it right out there. Besides, we don’t live with our mothers anymore, and they all ended up being proud of us and seeing us succeed.”
Pop isn’t naive about the Stooges’ tribulations, but his memories in Gimme Danger come with a sense of wonder. At one point in the film, he recalls moving from Ann Arbor to Chicago as a teenage drummer so he could play with people “who in adulthood had not lost their childhood”. At age 69, Pop still values that ideal.
“That’s a big part of my respect for him,” Jarmusch says. “The beautiful thing about children is their openness to the world, because they don’t know everything about it, and they don’t act like they do.”
There was a childish side to the Stooges, too, that came out in their goofy sense of humour. After all, they shared a moniker with the Three Stooges, whom the band members contacted for approval. To match their silliness, Jarmusch illustrates some wilder Stooges anecdotes with playful animation and campy stock footage from old TV shows – including, naturally, The Three Stooges.
“We wanted to keep the film in a style appropriate for the music of the Stooges, so that meant there had to be some funny things and some stupid things in it,” he says. “I don’t mean that derogatorily – I think great rock ’n’ roll has to have stupid things in it. Otherwise, it becomes too earnest.”
The intentions behind Gimme Danger were certainly serious, though. For Pop, the ongoing documentation of his life – including a new autobiography, Total Chaos, out this fall on Jack White’s Third Man Books imprint – made telling the Stooges’ story imperative.
“I wouldn’t really feel right about any of this until the actual group, which I was just a part of, got its due,” he says.
Pop’s familial sentiments have gotten heavier as his Stooges comrades have passed away, including guitarist Dave Alexander, saxophonist Steve MacKay, and both Asheton brothers (fortunately, Jarmusch interviewed Scott before he died in 2014). He admits that watching Gimme Danger reminds him of his own mortality.
But it also has helped him see that, as he puts it, “there’s a little immortality in everybody’s mortality”.