Here's what the NY Times said....
ROCK REVIEW | IGGY POP
Still Wildly Gyrating After All These Years
By JON PARELES, New York Times
WANTAGH, L.I., Aug. 8 — Iggy Pop, 56, has found his solution for the problem of being an aging rocker: don't age.
Reunited with the surviving members of the Stooges, his band from the 1960's and early 70's, he exploded onto the stage of the Jones Beach Theater here tonight, shirtless in skin-tight bluejeans with every muscle chiseled. As he sang, he was all over the place: wiggling his hips, sticking out his tongue, tucking his microphone suggestively into his waistband or laying atop the bass amplifier with thrusting hips. He soon made his way into the ecstatic crowd.
Except for a few wrinkles, and a shift from self-destructive mania to outright celebration — "Bless you!" he told the crowd — Mr. Pop was the same hyperactive presence who until this year had last led a band called the Stooges in 1974.
He was backed by the brothers Ron Asheton on guitar and Scott Asheton on drums, the surviving members of the band that recorded "The Stooges" (1969) and "Fun House" (1970). (The third Stooges album, "Raw Power" from 1973, had Ron Asheton on bass and James Williamson on lead guitar.) Mike Watt, from the post-punk bands the Minutemen and Firehose, replaced the Stooges' original bassist, Dave Alexander, who died in 1975. And Steve MacKay, who played tenor saxophone on "Fun House," rejoined the band to add honks and hoots.
What they were after, now as then, was the rude catharsis that made the Stooges a model for punk and post-punk. On the first two Stooges albums Mr. Pop was all id and libido, blurting out his boredom and needs while flaunting his lust. Compared with the garage-rock and psychedelia of the 1960's, not to mention the pop, the Stooges were brazenly simplistic, stripping songs down to two or three repeating chords and stoking them until they became molten frenzies. During his long solo career Mr. Pop has made calmer and more considered albums, but there was no hint of them tonight.
The revived Stooges plunged back into rock's primordial flux, growing more vociferous with every song. Mr. Watt and Scott Asheton made the riffs throb and crash as the self-effacing, bespectacled Ron Asheton pumped his wah-wah pedal or played high, screaming blues lines. Mr. Pop — declaiming, barking, shrieking — made his countless latter-day imitators look like poseurs. The Stooges' albums included slower songs, drone incantations that once drew comparisons to the Doors. But the band ignored them and stuck to its protopunk din.
The Stooges have made an album due this fall, and they played one new song: "Skull Rings," a "Peter Gunn" riff with Mr. Pop jeering at "fast cars, hot chicks, money," sounding as passionately jaded as ever. Near the end of the set he proclaimed: "I am you! I am you!" No, he's not: other people show the effects of passing decades.
Sonic Youth, sharing the bill, had moments that sounded like a Stooges tribute, with three guitarists vigorously strumming a big blaring E chord. But aural mayhem is only one facet of Sonic Youth's repertory. Its set reached back to its own oldies, like "Expressway to Yr. Skull" and "Teen Age Riot," along with a new song that considers the career of Mariah Carey. The band made its way from abstract bell tones to crunching garage-rock to folk-rock pastorales to shrieking feedback, in a thoroughly satisfying set that, wisely, didn't try to upstage the Stooges.
― Steve Kiviat (Steve K), Tuesday, 12 August 2003 15:37 (twenty-two years ago)