The Stooges

Every punk band past and present owes a great deal to the genre's forefathers, the Stooges, who made their anarchistic debut on Halloween 1967. For the next six years, singer Iggy Pop destroyed all boundaries between audience and performer--leaping into the crowd, creating confrontations, cutting himself with broken glass--while the other members kept it primitive, simple, and vicious. The seminal Detroit band's primal--yet somehow artful--attack was the primary influence on everyone from the Sex Pistols to the White Stripes. In the end, the Stooges were too volatile to last, and after a brawl with a Detroit biker gang in 1974, the Stooges disbanded, while Iggy went on to a long, fruitful solo career. In 2000, the band reunited for several tours, and in 2007 they released THE WEIRDNESS, their first studio album in over 30 years.