Police stated to have found 60-year-old Ron Asheton, a guitarist and founding member of the influential rock band The Stooges, dead at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, early on Tuesday morning.
According to The Ann Arbor News, Asheton's personal assistant contacted police late Monday after unsuccessfully trying to get a hold of him for days. When officers arrived at the scene, they found his body on a living-room couch. He appeared to have been dead for at least several days. Detectives told the newspaper that the cause of death is yet to be determined, but that it seems to have occurred by natural causes. Autopsy and toxicology results are scheduled.
Asheton grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and had a fascination with rock & roll and Nazi Germany ever since he was very young. In the punk oral history Please Kill Me, he complains about not having had too many friends as a child. "I'd wear SS pins to school and draw swastikas all over my books." One of his few friends was future Stooges bassist Dave Alexander, who took Asheton to England in the mid 60s where they saw the Who play at the Cavern Club. The experience struck Asheton like lightning and it was then when it became clear to him that this was the path he wants to follow in life.
In 1967 The Stooges took life, with the lineup rounded out by Asheton's brother Scott on drums and the late Dave Alexander on bass. The band was soon to be easy to recognize due to a violent and primitive style that featured stage-diving and outrageous antics by Iggy Pop.
In the middle of the flower-power and psychedelic period of the late 1960s, Asheton introduced the world to an aggressive, rudimentary and stunningly loud style of playing that was the antithesis of everything popular at the time. Songs like "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "T.V. Eye" reflected his "technically adept but also beautifully raw" style that was heavily influenced by free jazz and created "beauty out of noise," said Brian Cogan, a punk-music historian at Molloy College on New York's Long Island.
Critical reaction to the band’s debut was, at best, mixed. They sucked and they knew it, but their attitude expressed the fact that they did not care and that they are playing just for the fun of it. Their second album, 1970's Fun House, shared the same commercial and critical fate, as well as Raw Power, which thanks to David Bowie, became their third consecutive masterpiece, though the album bombed and the band dissolved after a disastrous tour. Iggy Pop was the first to purchase a solo career which turned out to be successful after all, not knowing that he was not to see “my best friend,” as he called Asheton for more than 25 years. The latter went on to play guitar in little-known groups such as the New Order, New Race, Destroy All Monsters and Dark Carnival. He also played in a series of low-budget horror films in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Stooges reunited after Iggy Pop requested the Asheton brothers to play on his album Skull Ring in 2003. This led to an offer for the whole band to perform at Coachella that year, which resulted in a whole tour, where they (finally) played to huge, rapturous audiences.
In 2007 the Stooges cut their fourth album, The Weirdness, and continued to tour as recently as this past summer. In spite of all that, The Stooges never achieved commercial success.
In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Ron Asheton at number 29 on their 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time list and in September, the Stooges were nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Run-DMC and Metallica.
Ronald Asheton was born on the 17th of July, 1948, in Washington, D.C. He left behind a sister, Kathy, and his brother Scott, who was The Stooges' drummer.
