Jim Jarmusch on The Stooges: 'They were ahead of their time'

Jim Jarmusch doesn't remember the exact moment he heard Detroit rock band Iggy and the Stooges for the first time but he remembers the feeling. 

"It was primal," Jarmusch asserts numerous times throughout his interview with host Tom Power. "In Ohio, as a young teenager, we didn't have much to look forward to except we had rock 'n' roll, and soul music, and car culture, and that's very much the same as Detroit [...] That stuff came from, let's say, genetic material closer to our own." 

Jarmusch put his love for the band to good use in his latest project, a documentary about the band called Gimme Danger. The film chronicles the band's rise to fame in the late '60s and their subsequent breakups and reunions. While Jarmusch was a fan at the time he heard them, many pushed back against the band's raw punk sound.

"I think people were intimidated by something that wild and uncontrolled," he explains. "They were not mainstream and not predictable and I think people didn't know how to take them.

"The appreciators were the young stoners and the kind of intelligentsia, but everything in between just wanted to throw bottles at them."  

WEB EXTRA | Watch the trailer for Gimme Danger below.

For more, check out "Iggy Pop on the end of the Stooges: 'I'm embarrassed to be here'" over at CBC Music.