Historic Stooges photos published for the first time

Here's a piece of history for Stooges fans. We're publishing - for the first time anywhere - three sets of photos of the "Funhouse" and pre-"Raw Power" Stooges, from the six shows they played in the St Louis area in 1970 and '71.

CRAIG PETTY was lucky enough to be at all those shows, several of them with camera in hand. His photos were destined for publication in a Stooges book which, alas, appears to have stalled. So we're presenting them for the first time, in copy-protected form. (You may be able to reproduce these photos if you have a worthy project in mind - but please make sure you seek permission here first. OK?)

Craig takes up the story...

"The color photos of Iggy with longer hair, no dog collar and unripped jeans were from Kiel Stadium, St Louis, Missouri on March 7th, 1970.

"The next set of color shots with Iggy in ripped jeans , dog collar and shorter hair come from The Rainy Daze Club St.Louis MO in about July 1970 - a week or so before the famous Cincinnati Festival with the 'walking on the hands' film."

Close observers will note that Iggy is almost identically dressed in that TV footage:


"The black-and-white shots are from May 27th 1971 at the Factory, in St.Charles (a suburb of St Louis.) This show is the one that many bootlegs are from, and many of those are mistakenly labeled Kiel Stadium 1970,"
Craig says.

(There's a bootleg on the mysterious Starfighter label which purports to be this show - a better quality copy of that tape is circulating through traders.)

"The Factory show had Ron AND James Williamson on dual lead guitars for a very rare and short lived period. This was a makeup show for one canceled the night before at The Music Palace when the band's equipment truck didn't show.

"About 35 minutes into the show, Ig whacks Ron in the head with his mic by accident and the gig stops. They come back and try one more but it goes down. The show is over.

"People are pissed. Iggy comes out into the crowd afterward and hangs out and talks to everybody and is very apologetic. This is very cool.

"The promoter stiffs them. That's very uncool.

"A couple of weeks later they're dropped by Elektra and the band goes dormant.

"They came back to St Louis in '73 for two shows at the American Theatre."

Dates Craig recalls the dates the band played in St Louis over 1970-73 were:

3/7/70 Kiel Stadium
3/25/70 Rainy Daze
?/7/70 Rainy Daze
5/27/71 The Factory
8/18/73 American Theatre (two shows)

You can access the photos here. Wouldn't hurt to tell Craig how you feel (to quote Ig) by leaving a comment.