You were beautiful. You were the Godfather of punk. Fans adored you and Bowie wanted to be you.
“I wanna be your dog,” you sang in a critique of a foul world. Or was it raging masochism?
“I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, they're bright in a hollow sky”
was something else you sang.
You worked out and had the most fabulous body in the Rock biz. Then your skin got saggy and in your see-thru pants you looked like the freshly exhumed corpse of a teenage bodybuilder who’d been dead for a week, or so said Charles Shaar Murray when he’d picked his jaw up off the floor.
Suddenly you are beautiful again. The skin is tight. A modern miracle, possibly by surgical means — who can tell?
And now you are pimping Swiftcover insurance in a $25 million advertising campaign. “Get a life. Get life assurance”, they make you say. Give me back my dreams is what I think.
“I wanna be your dog.” And now you are.
Hail and farewell, Ron Asheton, Iggy's guitarist from the earliest days, who probably saw the advert and promptly died of shock.
"...it became more horrible and twisted than you could ever imagine, the air thick with treachery and vileness. By midnight the whole place was a vicious ball of fangs."
- Raoul Duke.
Hat tip: Danny Baker for the Hunter S Thompson quote via CSM
FURTHER READING:
Article on the history of The Stooges
Hat tip: Stanley Milgram
UPDATE: Ha! It emerges that Swiftcover doesn't insure musicians and is now being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority.
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