THE UNTOUCHABLE’S INFLUENCE ON: IGGY POP AND THE STOOGES
For many years, James Osterberg (Iggy Pop) has credited seeing Jim Morrison and The Doors and an all-girl band from Princeton in 1967 as motivating him and his band The Stooges to jump start their musical career. In a 1995 interview in Bust magazine, he related:
“There were two things that made us do it; one was seeing that show (the Doors), we saw that show and I just thought, well, this is so brazen, there is no excuse for us not to do it anymore. And the other thing was we went to New York. We had gone to New York a couple of months before that just to check out the scene, and we had never been to a place like New York… we went down around Eighth Street there where all the young tourists hang out, and we met these girls from New Jersey, from Princeton, they had a band called the Untouchable, and we’re like, “Oh, you’ve got a band, sure, ha ha ha,” and they said “Well, come to our house and see us play.” And we didn’t have anywhere to crash, and they played for us, and they completely rocked, and we were really ashamed.”
In the 2016 Jim Jarmusch film Gimme Danger, Iggy again gives mention to The Untouchable. Relating how he and his bandmates told people (before the Stooges had formed) they had a band, but they never really played publicly or were very good, he says:
“They (Ron and Scott Asheton, Dave Alexander) had had the concept of a band called The Dirty Shames, and that was basically something they would tell people when they met people at a party, ‘yeah, we got a band, called The Dirty Shames.’ There was a period when The Stooges resembled The Dirty Shames, in that we decided we had a band, we told people we had a band, but we hadn’t really done any playing. At one point, there was a trip we made to New York, and we met some attractive girls, teenagers, younger than us, who said they had a band. And we drove to Princeton, New Jersey, to see these girls play in a basement, and they were just—lived with their parents. And they were very good, and they were much better than us. At that point, we were shamed!”
After seeing Gimme Danger, freelance writer Mike Appelstein was intrigued about this girl band from Princeton, so he wrote a blog In Search of The Untouchable in an attempt to find out who this mystery band was. After contacting Dodie Pettit, and then Geri Lombardo (Vetick), he interviewed the girls for their side of the story about the legendary basement performance that blew Iggy and his band away. The full interview about this and the history of the band was published in a 2017 issue of Ugly Things, Issue #45.
In the article, Dodie and Geri related their memories of the performance, notably how Iggy and the boys were too embarrassed to play for the girls after they saw the girls play! The full interview can be read in the article, The Untouchable.
