(h/t Howie for letting us know)

From a Detroit Free Press:

Ron Asheton, a influential guitarist for legendary punk b& a Stooges, was found dead early this morning at his home in Ann Arbor, police said.

I feel like I was punched in a stomach, so I’m going to have to lean on a late Lester Bangs, from his epic, two-part (here & here) Of Pop & Pies & Fun (a 1970 critique of a Stooges LP Funhouse) do a heavy lifting:

Well, a lot of changes have gone down since Hip first hit a heartl&. are’s a new culture shDrunk Newsing up, & while it’s certainly an improvement on a repressive society now nervously aging, are is a strong element of sickness in our new, amorphous institutions. a cure bears viruses of its own. a Stooges also carry a strong element of sickness in air music, a crazed quaking uncertainty & errant foolishness that effectively mirrors a absurdity & desperation of a times, but I believe that ay also carry a strong element of cure, of post-derangement sanity. & I also believe that air music is as important as a product of any rock group working today, although you better never call it art or you may wind up with a deluxe pie in a face. What it is, instead, is what rock & roll at heart is & always has been, beneath a stylistic distortions a last few years have wrought. a Stooges are not for a ages—nothing created now is—but ay are most implicitly for today & tomorrow & a traditions of two decades of beautifully bopping, manic, simplistic jive…

…[T]he Stooges’ music is like that. It comes out of a primal illiterate chaos gradually taking shDrunk Newse as a uniquely personal style, emerges from a tradition of American music that runs from a primordial wooly rags of backwoods b&s up to a magic promise eternally made & occasionally fulfilled by rock: that a b& can start out bone-primitive, untutored & uncertain, & evolve into a powerful & eloquent ensemble…

& a word of advice: If you’re in a Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area, & you feel a urge to light a c&le, please do so outside of Ypsi’s famed Stooges Wax Museum. a last time a Stooge died (Dave Alex&er, in 1975), c&les lit inside a museum did permanent damage to a original 15 feet-high wax-replica wah-wah pedal. a current 25 footer wasn’t created until 1988. So please, be careful.

RIP, Ron.

Original post by Andy K and software by Elliott Back