So I'll tell you the story of my first band. Let's see, I'll start with Dave, Dave Alexander. He ended up playing bass guitar. He was a friend down the block, a friend of Scott Asheton's, our drummer. David was kinda pink, because he had a really bad complexion. He used a whole lot of Clearasil because it ws advertised on Dick Clark for zits. I should mention that Dave's dead now. Anyway, he had this orange hair, real long hair, and he used to carry a knife in his pocket. He was about 5' 7" and he would wear these stretch Levi's. They were always, well, he didn't have much of an ass, Dave, and they were always - they would cling real tight, but they were too big around the waist, the elasticity was lost on him - and they would always be coming down over the hips, you know, which did look funny sometimes because they really came down, plus his pockets were loaded and all of these things pulling - combs and knives, bottles of gin or whatever he was drinking, and wallets and things. They were what you call in Michigan high water. And then he'd wear Beatles boots because he and Ron Asheton (our guitarist) had skipped school at one time and gone to England, gone to Liverpool to be near the Beatles for an entire semester when they were in high school. These guys are a couple years younger than I am. Dave was from this little hamlet of about 150 people - it was called Whitmore Lake, Michigan, and it used to produce these really degenerate kids. By the time he was 12 he was on glue and Romilar and, I don't know, Seconals too, I think - god knows what he was on. He was always on something bad, and had to be at all times. He always liked to live at home. He was spoiled rotten, like filthy rotten spoiled to the core, right? If he had to work more than 10 minutes he would whine. But he wanted to be in the band, and he had a car and money, which was a big attraction. He could get an amplifier and buy a bass, so he was in. Dave used to do some funny things. i remember once, he saw Jimmy Hendrix set his guitar on fire in some movie. So Dave decided one night at the Silver Bell Hideout in Birmingham, Michigan, he was going to set his bass on fire. He'd seen it done, and it didn't hurt the finish, right. As it happened, that night I let him borrow a shirt, one of my favorite shirts. So he's wearing my shirt up there playing n stage, and we're singing a couple of songs and Dave ceremoniously lays out his bass - ha,ha, ha - he's going to set it on fire. So he lays it down on stage doing some appropriate gesture, and he pours some lighter fluid on it. But when he lit it, it went up like a torch. It went up about 3 feet and he looked at it in utter - I'll never forget it - he looked at it in utter shock and horror: "Oh what'll I do now?". So he decided - to maintain the stagemanship of his ply - he would put it out with his body. He just fell on it and put the fire out with his chest.....with MY shirt! He wasn't badly hurt, you know. There's this big fucking ring on MY shirt! He wasn't really burned, but it didn't look too good. So he didn't get that right. He missed. But I guess it was the thought that counted. I'll never forget Dave. One time, before our first-ever Stooges concert, he said that he was on acid and wanted to paint my ancient Hawaiian guitar (which was central to our sound then) in a day-glo floral design. So I said, yeah, go ahead and paint... day-glo butterflies on it, you know. But he painted over the pickups, so my guitar was broken the day before the gig. As it turned out,t he course of history was changed because I had to play standing up, instead of sit-down Hawaiian, and my pants fell down slowly during my debut. Everybody thought it was part of my act, which included an aluminum Afro wig and whiteface and a maternity smock that I was sporting with my golf shoes. So that was Dave. He started out with us doing little odd musical jobs like pushing the heads off amplifiers and throwing things. He had a special talent for that, you know. So that was Dave. Scott Asheton - he was the juvenile delinquent. He was this Elvis Presley looking character; a really quite handsome young lad, you know, somewhere between Elvis and Fabian, real tough dude, real badass, good fighter and shit like that. He used to always wear his sleeves rolled up. He also had the stretch Levis and pointed boots, and he had a big Elvis hairdo which he called his pomp or my do. He was a pretty interesting kid. He dropped out of school. His dad died, his and Ron's - they were brothers - so they didn't have much discipline at home. He used to hang out on the street near where I worked in this record store at the time I was drumming with the band. He started laughing out at our Prime Movers rehearsals. He'd hang out on the stairs with a couple of his buddies. He was like a hick kid. So he used to hang around and he asked me if I'd teach him to play drums. I liked him. He was a pretty neat guy, you know. So I said, "Year, I'll teach you how to play." And I started teaching him some things, and he sat down at my drum set one night and started drumming. Through Scott I met the rest of them: Dave and Ron. They all used to hang outin front of the drug store, Marshall's drug store, where later I used to go to get my fix. I used to say I was a diabetic. You know how those small town drug stores are.