The Stooges album Jack White says “changed my life”
Alongside his then-wife Meg, Jack White co-founded The White Stripes in 1997. Through a string of highly successful turn-of-the-century albums, the pair revolutionised rock music, ushering in the so-called garage rock revival. Garage rock emerged in the 1960s as an unrefined answer to contemporary pop rock and was defined by enduring hits like the Mysterians’ ’96 Tears’ and The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie, Louie’.
Thanks to its unrefined and energetic approach, the style was precursory to punk rock. The punk generation, led by Ramones and Sex Pistols, simplified garage foundations, opting for simple, punchy chord progressions apt to frame their increasingly caustic and anarchistic subject matter.
One of the most celebrated proponents of the garage rock wave was The Stooges. The group’s frontman, Iggy Pop, is often referred to as ‘The Godfather of Punk’, thanks to his provocative performances and wailing vocals. Visceral, macabre subject matter invariably completed the puzzle, with classic lines like, “I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm / I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb” – possibly the greatest opening line in punk rock history.
In a 2018 interview with Questlove for Rolling Stone, Jack White discussed his peculiar fascination with the number three. “I was about 15, 16,” he remembered. “We were working on a couch, and it was three staples I’d put down, and it was the minimum amount to hold a piece of fabric on a side of wood: left, right, centre. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s great.'”
The triangle is the strongest shape in geometry, too, but White preferred to apply the number to the complexities of life. He argued that the number three doesn’t “leave everything black and white” or “Republican [and] Democrat”. White explained that there is a “third option, which sort of means everything.’ And I thought, ‘That’s a great balance for anything I do artistically.’ So I’ve been holding onto that for dear life ever since, to sort of ground me whenever I’m working on anything.”
This idea of three options recalls Albert Camus’s fundamental absurdist philosophy, wherein the French writer posed three possible responses to the absurdity of life: suicide, religion, or revolution. White seemed to choose the third of these options when he discovered punk in his youth.
Fittingly, White first stumbled upon The Stooges while rummaging around in Detroit dumpsters for discarded gems. “I found the Stooges’ first album on vinyl in one of those dumpsters – and that really changed my life,” White said. “I recorded ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ on 4-track because of that, and it led me into punk rock in a bigger way.”
‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ is The Stooges’ debut single, released in July 1969. The song is the band’s most famous and a true classic of the garage rock wave. Thanks to its salacious grittiness, ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ is a prominent landmark on the road to punk rock. Listen to the song below.
