“Violent and powerful”: the hard rock song Iggy Pop said “gave me hope”
For the first half of the 1960s, it wasn’t clear that rock and roll would be any more than just a passing fad. There had been some great success stories throughout the ’50s, but before the British invasion got started, the deaths of Buddy Holly and seeing Little Richard turn to religion left many to wonder whether the entire genre seemed to be just kid’s stuff. The Beatles may have given people a reason to smile again, but for Iggy Pop, something was altered in his DNA when he heard ‘You Really Got Me’ for the first time.
By the time Pop started taking music seriously, though, he had begun to outgrow the traditional means of writing tracks. The Beatles were still among the greatest to ever grace the stage, but there were only so many ways one could take the love song, and Pop was never one to talk about his romantic side in song.
He was deadset on destruction, and suddenly hearing The Kinks for the first time ignited a fire in him. The band was still wearing suits and playing the same type of rock and roll everyone else was, but there was something nastier blaring out of Dave Davies’ guitar amp whenever he played.
Since he could only play power chords, hearing Davies playing on a cut-up amplifier is arguably the first heavy metal guitar heard on a record. Some thought it was too aggressive and most parents called it noise, but Pop seemed to see the future the minute he heard it.
When talking to VH1, Pop credited ‘You Really Got Me’ for sparking his interest in rock again, saying, “I was just a sophomore or something, and I just went crazy. It was so violent and powerful and simple and it made me think rebellious things. [It] gave me hope that if that can sound good, then maybe I don’t have to rewrite Bach here.”
From the first few notes of the first Stooges record, Pop seemed to be birthed out of that initial riff. The band were never going to be the kind of group that would get sappy when they played, and hearing songs like ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and ‘1969′ blaring out of the speakers was an extension of what The Kinks had built on.
There was also a little bit more anger with The Stooges. For all of the great music that The Kinks might have started, Pop’s primary focus was to make something that sounded like the future with his music, almost like he was trying to make a musical epiphany go off in your head as you watched him. It’s not like he didn’t call his shot, either, being one of the forefathers of what turned into punk rock in the late 1970s.
Even though ‘You Really Got Me’ was eventually shot up with steroids the minute Van Halen covered it, the original is still one of the most feral recordings to ever come out of the British Invasion. The Rolling Stones may have introduced listeners to what heavier rock could sound like, but by the time The Kinks came along, the dam had burst. It was the age of heavy rock now, and everyone would try to get that same distortion on every song.
