How Johnny Cash inspired The Stooges classic ‘No Fun’
The Stooges were breaking barriers in the 1960s. While most bands were concerned with bombastic stadium rock or were pulling the last bits of psychedelia from the culture at large, Iggy Pop and his cohorts from Detroit were playing, stripping rock music down to its most basic and aggressive forms.
But that didn’t mean that The Stooges were above some classic influences. A couple were even bizarre alternate-genre legends. One of the best examples was when the band jammed on a two-chord riff one day in rehearsal. Of all the things to come to Pop’s head at that moment, it was a legendary country song from Johnny Cash that provided the foundation for ‘No Fun’.
As Pop tells it in the 1987 TV documentary Lust For Life, “It started as the first two chords. Like most Stooges songs, we were stoned on our smoke and jamming, and Ron came up with the two chords over and over, which was just those two back and forth. Then, I was the one who said… I had written poetry in high school and in my early bands… I was the one who said, ‘Let’s do something more with this. Let’s turn it into a song.'”
“I used Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk The Line’ as a model for this. You can actually hear it if you listen to ‘I Walk The Line’. It goes, ‘I keep a close watch on this heart of mine / I keep my eyes wide open all the time…’ So we used that structure in this song. Then the middle eight is a typical [Rolling] Stones middle eight because I did use a lot from the Stones. And the Velvets.”
In dismissing some of the more unwanted aspects of rock and roll at the time, the singer revealed his motivation for making music for the peripheries of the mainstream. “I wanted to make songs about how we were living in the midwest,” Pop concluded. “What was this life about? Basically, it was no fun and nothing to do. So I wrote about that.”
Check out Pop detailing Cash’s inspiration for ‘No Fun’ down below.
