Fronted by Iggy Pop, who has had his own successful solo career, the band, which re-formed in 2002, will return to Moscow for the second time to perform at B1 Maximum on Wednesday. "I think this is a good time right now," said The Stooges' drummer and founding member Scott Asheton, 59, in a recent telephone interview from a Finnish hotel.
"I think there are a lot of happy rock and rollers out there, and I know last year in Moscow there were a lot of happy and into-rock and roll people at the show," he said. "There's a place for the band right now, because there's a lot of young rockers who want to play hard and loud, and there's an audience there."
Citing more recent bands The Kooks, The Hives and Muse as worthy listening, Asheton admitted that he gets an idea about what is happening through his 16-year-old daughter.
"She listens to all the new rock and roll bands, and I find out what's going on through her because she's in that age group, and in that age group there's a lot of kids out there that really like rock and roll," he said.
When they started out in the 1960s, The Stooges came up with a radical, avant-garde sound that was unheard of in mainstream rock music. They are seen as one of rock's most influential bands, alongside The Velvet Underground. John Cale, a member of The Velvet Underground, produced the Stooges self-titled debut album in 1969.
"There were a lot of bands playing when we started out, and the main thing is that we didn't want to sound like any other band for a couple of different reasons -- one being that we couldn't," he said. "We were just being creative, having new ideas."
Asheton, whose guitarist brother Ron is also with the re-formed band, also attributes The Stooges' radical approach to music and stage performances to their hometown, where life was a little on the rough side.
"They [people from Detroit] didn't want to hear love songs; they wanted to hear something hard and loud, brash," he said. "They just didn't want to sit there and listen to some nice music. ... They didn't want to listen to stuff that their mom and dad liked to listen to."
The Stooges performs on Wed. at 8 p.m. at B1 Maximum, located at 11 Ulitsa Ordzhonikidze. Metro Leninsky Prospekt. Tel. 648-6777.
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