The Stooges song inspired by “The Catcher in the Rye”

“Search and Destroy”: The classic Stooges song inspired by “The Catcher in the Rye”

(Credit: Michael Markos)

Saturday May 18, 2024 9:30 p.m., United Kingdom

There is no punk or alternative rock band that doesn’t owe something to the pioneering sounds of the Stooges. The quintessential proto-punk band, The Stooges, created some truly groundbreaking records, inspiring the later punk explosion and countless future rock bands. For their part, the Iggy Pop-led band themselves drew inspiration from a variety of different sources, ranging from early rockabilly to the literary world of JD Salinger.

Originally published in 1945, Salinger’s The Rye Catcher is among the most popular and infamous novels in modern American literature. An ode to adolescent alienation, the novel has been the definitive ancestor of adolescent angst for many generations. So it’s no surprise that the angry young man leading the Stooges found some inspiration in the novel’s revolutionary features.

When you watch old Stooges performances, with Iggy Pop sweating profusely and rushing around the stage like an unattended garden hose, you probably don’t think “there’s a man rooted in literature.” However, even Iggy Pop’s amphetamine maniac has managed to find some free time to enjoy a nice, relaxing read every now and then. So much so that one of the Stooges’ greatest songs found its inspiration both in the work of JD Salinger and in the news of Time magazine.

Talk to Shock in 2010, Pop spoke about the composition of “Search and Destroy”, an emblematic song of the Stooges from 1973. Brute force. “The lyrics, I kind of took them out Time Reviewthe concept of search and destroy,” he explained. “I used to read Time obsessively because they were for me the representatives of the ultimate establishment. The Stooges were anti-authoritarian in every sense of the word, laying the groundwork for the rebellion that would later evolve into punk rock.

Besides the influence of Time, Pop took inspiration from Salinger’s novel for the lyrical content of “Search and Destroy”, revealing: “The thing about the ‘forgotten boy’ was basically a way of expressing my disgust. It’s a bit like the kid in Catcher in the rye – once you find out how people at the top of politics or at the top of the music industry or at the top of whatever, how they start to overestimate things and think they can swallow anything what crap to young people, and they don’t care if it’s something kids would like or not,” concluding: “They just don’t care. »

This defiant anti-authoritarian angst would soon become the definitive sound of the Stooges and the proto-punk scene in general. The band drew on the distorted sounds of Detroit’s garage rock scene – a complete rejection of the ethereal, spaced-out hippie sounds that dominated the West Coast in the late 1960s – to create an entirely new sound, which captured the attention of a disenfranchised generation. the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“Search and Destroy,” thanks to its fierce anti-authoritarian stance and innate feelings of angst, is one of the Stooges’ most recognizable songs. Speaking of the piece’s vast influence and timeless quality, it has gone on to be covered by everyone from Florence and the Machine to Soundgarden and The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

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