Real cool time

Can i come over tonight?
Can i come over tonight?
What do you think i wanna do?
That's right
Can i come over tonight?
I say we will have a real cool time tonight
-- Real Cool Time

Iggy & the Stooges came over on Sunday night -- to the Congress Theatre in Chicago, that is. And we all had a real cool time.

Mitigating factor? I had a 9 a.m. appointment the next day in Winona, MN, that I couldn't weasel out of. Did it deter me? Uhm, no.

The only deterrence to anyone's Fun Time was that Steve Albini's band Shellac opened. Not that they were horrible, but their minimalist brand of skronk didn't quite fit with what the crowd had in mind for all-out rock 'n' roll. Plus, they said "Three more!" when the crowd was getting antsy and then played like nine more. They got more than a few boos, and the snotty drummer (Minneapolis boy, Todd Trainer, who has a really bad precious black circa-1982 MCAD hair do) lipped off to everyone with "And what's YOUR band called? We're WORLD FAMOUS." I just knew that most of the older guys in black leather jackets around me wanted to take him outside and chain whip him. Plus, the Congress has this really tall cool domed ceiling with a glowy red lozenge at the top, which made it sound like all we could hear was the drummer wailing on his tom, and not Albini's angular Gang of Four-like guitar flangs. It was like being on the Screaming Kid flight ALL the way from ORD to Narita, or having the AA buffoons all wired on coffee and blowing up one firecracker every three seconds right below your bedroom window at 3 am on July 5th when you have to be up at 5 that morning. And then the cops show up, so they quit and get on their Harleys and rap those off for like 20 minutes before peeling out. Anyway. It was really annoying, and not in a rock 'n' roll piss-off-your-parents way.

But before we knew it, the Stooges rocketed onto the stage and began blowing us away. From where I stood, it looked like Iggy had the body of a 25-year old, and he made Mick Jagger look like a cripple. Iggy turns 60 this Saturday (Happy b-day Ig!), and if I have those moves at 60, I'll be pretty darn happy.

They played quite a bit from the first two Stooges albums, and a bunch from their new disc, The Weirdness, which I confess I haven't heard. My faves were "I Wanna Be Your Dog", "1969" (Ron Asheton proved that he is THEE Rock Guitar God of the Universe with that one -- my ears are still going 'WEEEEEEEEEEEE'), "Little Electric Chair" and "TV Eye".

Mike Watt (yeah, from the Minutemen!) has been playing bass with the Stooges. Mike's got a tour diary going here on his hootpage. Miguel? You can be assured that Sunday night you were in the hottest band on the planet. Steve Mackay (who also played on Funhouse) wailed on sax.

Lord See that cat
Yeah I do mean you
See that cat
Yeah I do mean you
She got a TV eye on me
She got a TV eye
She got a TV eye on me, oh

See that cat
Yeah I love her so
see that cat
Yeah I love her so
She got a TV eye on me
She got a TV eye
She got a TV eye on me, oh
Right on, right on, right on
-- TV Eye

*I* want a TV Eye on me!

I'm the type to never recognize a TV Eye when one is on me, though. Maybe I walk too quickly. Maybe I have poor peripheral vision. I never know when I am being checked out. Somehow I miss the obvious (to others) clues.

I wonder about my own TV Eye. I hope it is subtle as I cast it about. I hope it is not scorching that woman's bottom as she strolls by.

So what is a TV Eye?

You can read about it in Please Kill Me, Legs McNeill's history of punk music (a great read, by the way, if you fondly recall the Stooges, Ramones, Blondie, New York Dolls, et al):

Kathy Asheton, younger sister of Stooges members Ron and Scott Asheton, recalls at one point how she came up with the term as shorthand for a term involving a vulgar term for her anatomy: "Twat Vibe Eye."

“TV Eye” was my term. It was girl stuff. My girlfriends and I developed a code. It was a way for us to communicate with each other if we thought some guy was staring at us...

Like, ‘He’s got a TV Eye on you. And if we had it then we’d use “I have...”

Iggy overheard us and thought it was really funny. That’s when he wrote that song “TV Eye.”

Yeah...I want a TV Eye on me.



Photos: (Top) Iggy Pop at Soldier Field, July 18, 1970. (Bottom) Iggy Pop at Congress Theatre, April 15, 2007, during "Real Cool Time."

Oh! And I went over to celebmatch and it says that I am a 98% intellectual match with Mr. Pop. Not sure what that says about either of us...