Pukkelpop review & Mike Watt interview

[Bucky Ramone]

The Belgian magazine HUMO had a short interview with Mike Watt at the Pukkelpop Festival, here is a rough translation (with my remarks in[ ]):

Mike Watt is one of the big heroes of Flea, and he will be make the Pukkelpop Festival 2002 a legendary one later this night by reviving the Stooges, the best reunion/tribute-concert we have ever heard. ‘The tribute to the Stooges’ was a tribute to the Ramones as well… The young guy from Sparta sang ‘No Fun’ -he had the text written on his arm, but it was too dark to read it-, and the band missed a couple of notes, but well "suck on real genius. Jane’s Addiction!" [JA played a very bad gig at the festival it seemed….- den Buck]
HUMO: What are your favourite Stooges songs?
MW: ‘TV Eye’, ‘Down on the street’ and ‘Little Doll’ with that trippy Bo Diddley-beat. A few years ago I’ve been very seriously ill, I nearly died. I had to lie in bed for six months. When I wanted to start playing again, I couldn’t play anything, I learned to play bass again with Stooges songs, can you believe it? I started practising Stooges songs with J. Mascis. The ‘Tribute’ was his idea, his point of view: ‘First you steal the riffs of your idols, then you are going to play with them’ (MW smiles). We found drummer Scott Asheton in Florida. He didn’t play drums anymore, he didn’t even have a drumkit anymore. I had met Ron Asheton already while touring with fIREHOSE, it all happened very spontaneously, without ‘the business’ having anything to do with it. That’s great, because hey… (pointing at his artist-pass)….all this stuff, I think it is a big joke, over here [at this festival] it is like in America, you are not free to do the things you want…
HUMO : Yes, we noticed, but who sang it all, long before Naomi Klein wrote ‘No Logo’?
MW: (after a moment of thinking) Iggy Pop in ‘I got a right’: Find your own voice, he sang [This is translated literally from the interview, the lyrics go: ‘I got a right to sing no matter what they say’ – den Buck] I do not believe in the ‘majority’, I believe in a infinite number of small minorities, I believe in people.

A review of the ‘Tribute to the Stooges’ from the same issue of HUMO:

‘A Tribute to the Stooges’: the only final concert of the Pukkelpop Festival 2002 worthy of that name took place at the Marquee Stage. [Guns’n’Roses made a joke of themselves on the Main Stage a lot later – den Buck]. Mike Watt is someone who cannot give himself for less than 100%, J. Mascis was glad that he could be standing anonymously at the sideline, drowned by noise, and the two ex-Stooges Ron and Scott Asheton seem to remember their glory days very very well….’I wanna be your dog’, ‘Loose’, ‘Little Doll’, nearly all the songs from the first two Stooges records were played, and because they missed Iggy just like us, Sparta singer Jim Ward was allowed to take his place during ‘No Fun’. ‘A Tribute to the Stooges’ was nostalgia without pathos, chaos without being messy, class with a big exclamation sign. The Stooges are dead, but we have got all their records, and you?

from Switzerland (for the moment), Ton ‘den Buck’ Bukkems

ps. posted this on the Mike Watt mailing list as well

[AGAP]

Rock Action didn’t even have a drum kit <img>

Thanks for the info/translation, great stuff!!!

Allison <img>

[SG]

Thanks for posting that DB <img>

[Author]

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