Stooges drummer Scott Asheton dead at 64

Iggy & The Stooges drummer Scott Asheton, who played with the pioneering proto-punk band from their earliest days in 1967 through their 2013 LP Ready to Die, died Saturday due to an unspecified illness. He was 64.

“Scott was a great artist,” Iggy Pop said in a statement.

“I have never heard anyone play the drums with more meaning than Scott Asheton. He was like my brother. He and Ron have left a huge legacy to the world. The Ashetons have always been and continue to be a second family to me. My thoughts are with his sister Kathy, his wife Liz and his daughter Leanna, who was the light of his life.”

Asheton was born in Washington, D.C., but moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan when he was 14. He began playing music with his older brother Ron and their friend Dave Alexander soon after. “We didn’t get very far,” Scott told writer Brett Callwood in his book The Stooges: Head On. “We liked the idea of being in a band, we looked like we were in a band and we’d all hang out together. It wasn’t until... Iggy, got involved that it actually became a real band.”

Under the leadership of Iggy Pop, The Stooges, along with the MC5, became one of the most popular acts around Ann Arbor and Detroit, eventually signing a deal with Elektra and releasing their groundbreaking self-titled LP in 1969. “We didn’t have songs,” Scott Asheton told Callwood. “A lot of that first album was written at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City over two days immediately before we went in the studio.”

The record - produced by John Cale of the Velvet Underground – laid the groundwork for punk rock, inspiring everybody from David Bowie to the Ramones. It’s almost impossible to imagine how the 1970s would have unfolded had they not formed. ”He was magnetic,” Pop said of his first impression with Asheton in Paul Trynka’s 2008 book Open Up and Bleed. “Like a cross between a young Sonny Liston and Elvis Presley.” The album, however, was not a commercial success and the group practically dissolved after 1970’s equally brilliant Fun House also failed to find an audience.