100 Greatest Song of the 60’s #25 The Stooges – I Wanna Be Your Dog

Released: 1969

As with any success, punk rock has many fathers. Famously notable in it’s lineage are Bowie, the New York Dolls, the brothers Ramone and such like, but what if it had been more or less invented in not Holloway or the Kings Road, but in Michigan and by a group of weirdos who at first everbody thought were some kind of joke?

Even a few months before the release of their iconoclastic, self titled debut, The Stooges couldn’t provoke any sort of audience into a reaction. In May of 1969 their gig at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio pulled a crowd of less than two dozen; a few weeks later they were in the studio with John Cale, broiling their elemental menace into something America would have trouble digesting, if at all.

I Wanna Be Your Dog was simplistic, brutal, uncompromising. With a one note piano riff and guitars that sounded like they’d been thrown down three flights of stairs, all that was needed to top off it’s dead eyed fury was James “Iggy” Osterberg telling you how much he wanted to be owned, kept on a leash and forced to beg. Anyone who ever heard it knew it for what it was; punk rock, new born, angry and pissed off at the world and everything in it. All the others were latecomers to a party started years before.