Alan Sacks is the original Sweathog. A buttoned-down N.Y. producer who relocated to Los Angeles to be closer to the happenings of the late ‘60s, Sacks helped create Welcome Back Kotter by drawing upon his tough childhood in Brooklyn. We talked to Sacks about the inspiration behind the Jewish Holy Trinity: Kotter, Epstein and Horshack.

How did you create the show, where did it come from?

I was inspired by a couple of things, both of which happened around 1956. That was a pivotal year for me. That was the year "rock n roll" was invented by Alan Freed …

Another fine Jew.

Yeah, exactly, too bad he's not around to be interviewed. But yeah, Alan Freed came up with that phrase "rock n roll," and all summer long I was listening to him over the airwaves, his top forty countdown on Saturday morning. I'd be in the schoolyard with a lot of my Italian friends, Vinnie Barbarino and Joey Caluchi …

Wait, did you just say Vinnie Barbarino?

Right.

So the John Travolta character was based on a real person with the same name?

Right … No wait, his real name was Joey Barbarino.

Oh.

I mean Joey Caluchi. Yeah, Travolta's character was really based more on the other friend I mentioned, Joey Caluchi. You know, Joey Caluchi's other claim to fame is he was the first person ever whacked by Sammy the Bull.

That's great. I mean, that's horrible, but that's great.

(Laughing). And Sammy the Bull went to my elementary school.

So you were saying?

So we would listen to Alan Freed's top forty countdown show, and it would come over these little Motorola portable radios that we had. Well, during that same year, three movies came out in very close proximity to one another: The Wild One with Marlon Brando; Rebel without a Cause with James Dean, and The Blackboard Jungle. These were movies about juvenile delinquents. When we went to see The Blackboard Jungle, it began by showing what today they would call an inner city high school, though it was just a Lower East Side or Brooklyn type of high school; and they had guys dancing over the main titles with each other and suddenly Bill Haley's music came on – "Rock Around the Clock" – and it was the first time we ever heard music beyond those small little radios, we heard this huge music coming over the speakers, this rock n roll, and it became like tribal, we started banging our chairs, you know, throwing things, destroying the theater and they had to shut down the movie. That stayed with me my whole life. So I always thought when I came out here to California, I was going to write and create a television show about that moment, the tough things that I grew up with in Brooklyn.

The other thing that inspired me was a series of films called the Bowery Boys about these east side kids, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, these tough kids from New York.

These were mostly Irish kids, right?

Yeah, mostly Irish kids, but I think Huntz Hall, he might have been Hebrew, I think so, he might have been.

You kind of identified with him when watching it?

No, I didn't, I identified with Leo Gorcey, who was the tough, short leader of the pack, even though he was Irish. Huntz Hall was Jewish, and was played with a big nose, and he was, you know, the goof.

Ok, so you had this idea, and you pitched it to the networks?

It wasn't just my idea. It was also Gabe Kaplan's, who played Mr. Kotter on the show. He had an act all about kids he knew in high school, and I had my experiences with my friends and we combined the two. Like "Epstein the Animal." He was a character in Gabe's stand-up routine. He was the toughest kid in the neighborhood. We liked the idea of having a tough Jew, cause there are some, you know. Gabe's joke was, "This kid was so tough that all the other parents would take their kids off the street one hour a day so Epstein could run out and walk through the streets." So that was kind of what Epstein was based on. But [Michael] Eisner, who was then head of programming at ABC, said I think we should make Epstein half Puerto Rican and half Jewish. My personal feeling about that was I didn't know any half Puerto Ricans and half Jews, I didn't quite buy that idea, but I also knew that he wanted to contribute creatively, so I said, ok, let's go with this. As it turned out it was a great idea, it gave us a wealth of material, a wealth of jokes. And the irony of it is I have a cousin who moved down to Florida and she came to visit about seven or eight years ago, and I hadn't seen her in years, and she'd married a Puerto Rican guy and her last name is Gonzales now, and her children are half Jewish, half Puerto Rican, so in fact I have cousins who are in reality like the fiction that I created.

Kotter lives!

More than even that. I had no idea I was going to become a college professor. I'm teaching now seven or eight years, I forget, and that's accidental, I didn't plan it, I didn't start out to be a teacher, I'm not in retirement, I didn't say ok I'm a teacher now, it just happened, you know. So the irony is I became a teacher and my students love the idea that I created Welcome Back.

So do you divide them into different characters from the show – and do they act like those guys?

No, but they like to think they do, they have a big joke like that. (laughs) But you know, it's funny when you say that because when I went to my high school reunion in Brooklyn, I'd lived in Hollywood so long that when I got there I half-expected it to be this huge event with klieg lights and like a red carpet, that was my frame of reference. As it turned out, there was just the old gym, and the whole school packed in there and I felt out of place. But then, everybody started coming up to me and asking me who they were. "Was I Barbarino?" "Was I Horshack?" They all wanted to know which one was based on them.

Were any of them?

No, because it was mostly from my junior high school. I turned it into a high school for the show.

Did any people actually want to be Horshack?

Errr, I think some people did (laughs). Yeah, I think so.

Who picks Horshack as the person to be?

I think people who are happy being the nerd, you know, the person satisfied about being a goofball. I wouldn't want to be Horshack.

You wouldn't?

No, no, (laughs), he was a goof.

It's funny, because in terms of Jewish identity, he's probably the most interesting character. He seems very Jewish.

But I never wanted him to be Jewish, I didn't want the nerd, the complete nerd to be Jewish, the stereotype, you know. That's the one thing about being Jewish that you get typecast as, and that's not necessarily, you know, who Jews who are. Jews are cool!

But in some ways it seems unavoidable, like maybe you were making fun of that idea. I mean, he's got the name, which sounds kind of Polish-Jewish…

"Arnold, hi, I'm Arnold Horshack."

And the accent, and the nose…

He's Italian, and the accent was Robert Hegyes trying to do Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. But, I understand what you're saying and people interpreting that. Still, I always found that a little offensive that people felt that.

I don't mean to be offensive.

No, you're not being offensive at all…

But I got to ask you a couple of things about that, because, one, in Dustin Hoffman you've got …

Yeah, yeah, right.

…a Jew playing an Italian, I always think Jews and Italians are so alike anyway, it's like…

Right!

…it's like Jews are decaf Italians.

Exactly, that's funny.

So I wonder if on some level Horshack was an unconscious projection of negative feelings of how Jews are seen.

My own negative feelings?

Maybe, or Gabe's. Was he your character more, or Gabe's character?

Gabe's. Though I always thought Gabe himself was a nerd. So maybe it is Gabe. We're analyzing Gabe now! (laughs)

Well, it's easy, you know, what's he gonna say? He's not here. We should call him up and get him on a three-way conversation.

I spoke to Gabe this morning.

Maybe we should check in with him and give him like a little P.S. at the bottom. You know, like "I'm anyone but Horshack." We'll talk about that later. But one other thing about Horshack – I was remembering what I think is one of the final episodes where he gets married…

Yeah.

Isn't there a moment where they need something for him to step on at the wedding, a glass…

Did he step on a glass … oh, yeah yeah yeah, I remember that now, right.

I think it's something other than a glass because they can't find one. I can't remember now.

I can't remember.

So he must be Jewish.

(Sounding defeated) Right.

Like he came out of the closet at the end of the show…

Well, he wasn't Jewish for the first two years. (Sighs then laughs). You know, Gabe and I have been talking about developing a movie and in the movie we've talked about Horshack coming out.

Of the closet? Not as a Jew, but as gay?

Yeah.

I like it. Because that was the other thing about him you always wondered. He seemed a little too attracted to Mr. Kotter all the time. You know, "Ewww ewwww ewwww, Mr. Kotter!"

(Laughs) Yeah, right.

Interesting. So what about the rest of the Sweathogs? What are they doing?

In my mind? Creatively?

Yeah.

Oh. Well, like I said, Horshack is coming out. He's a beautician. A hairdresser. This past week he was getting married in San Francisco. Not that that matters to me at all. I think that's great. And let's see … Barbarino … he's just gotten out of jail. He's written a memoir about the Sweathogs and he's sold the movie rights and he's a millionaire in L.A. And Freddy "Boom Boom" Washington is like, you know, still like one of the cool, ultimate brothers. He's still going to basketball games, still shooting hoops, he's very stylin'. He's a music producer, he's into music, and he's playing keyboards.

And Epstein?

Oh, Epstein, he's like on his fourth wife. And he's a butcher.

Is he still in the neighborhood?

Yeah, he's still in the neighborhood, he's a butcher in Brooklyn.

And the ladies like to drop in?

Oh yeah!

The post Up Your Nose With a Rubber Hose: Jewcy Talks to Alan Sacks, Co-Creator of “Welcome Back Kotter” appeared first on Jewcy.

America’s most storied urinals were lost to history last week. Hilly Kristal, the founder of CBGB’s, died on August 28 of lung cancer, just a few months after his legendary punk club closed its doors with the intention of reopening as a retrofitted knock-off venue in Vegas. As much as it pained me to envision CB’s as some kitsch attraction at New York, New York, the hotel, in a way the proposed transport and reassembly of the joint made sense. Kristal was the Moses of a Lower East Side rebellion. I can’t envision a better tribute to his legacy than to have his piss-stained ark wind up in a desert as dry as the Sinai.

CB’s fans acknowledge Kristal’s managerial genius without quite realizing that his father’s Zionism was the crucial factor. Hilly believed all musicians had to stake their own claims, envision their own identities; they couldn’t depend on headlining acts, especially in the gruesome era of disco. Genres were made to be broken. Kristal inaugurated the Do It Yourself style to independent music, a style embodied by the pluck of a young American kibbutznik.

Kristal was raised on a Jewish-Socialist collective in upstate New Jersey. Kristal’s father, a Russian immigrant, and his great-uncle were the founders of the Jersey Homestead, a farming collective for Jews trapped in city slums, and their philosophy could be summed up in one word – self-determination. Like the 19^th century Romantics, they were firm believers in the restorative powers of nature. Indeed, their back-to-the-land visions included the utopia of an inviolable motherland, a Zion. Both became followers of Herzl. As Kristal told me just before his club closed, they wanted to “get Jews out of urban areas like Philadelphia and New York and out into the country” – the same impulse that led those original Zionists to hightail it to British Mandate Palestine and set up Kibbutzim. These weren’t religious zealots – they were nationalists who believed that Jews of the Diaspora could only achieve full personhood when they had a country of their own, one in which they could till the soil and subsist.

This “my way” philosophy was later adopted by Kristal even after he chose to leave the Jersey Homestead and head back to New York City. Once there, he pursued a music career in a variety of forms, all of them subject to diminishing returns. Giving up his cherished violin, which he’d never been able to perfect due to his chores on the farm, Kristal opted for a more “possible” future as an opera singer. For years he took classes, attended auditions and leant his tenor voice where he could. But when it ultimately became clear that this wasn’t working, he took to singing on a more modest level: he was a bass in the Radio City Christmas pageant headlined by the Rockettes. A Hebrew on high-kicking Broadway.

After a brief stint in the Marines, Kristal moved to the other side of the aisle, first as a salesman of Tin Pan Alley sheet music (a “rack jobber” in the lingo of the era), later as a manager of prestigious music venues such as the Village Vanguard. There he met Miles Davis, John Coltrane and that ultimate Jewish punk Lenny Bruce. By the late 1960s, Kristal was not only running his own Greenwich Village nightclub – Hilly’s On 9^th Street – he was making plans to expand into the low-rent East Village, then an artistic slum of beatniks, bohos and drunks.

That East Side club, Hilly’s On the Bowery, didn’t open till 1969, and when it did, it was so sparsely attended that Hilly rapidly changed its name and focus, making it an Americana-only venue in the hopes of attracting a hip, post-Dylan audience. And yet the ingredient-limited melting pot of Country, Blue Grass and Blues (CBGB’s for short) didn’t prove any more accommodating than jazz in the ghetto of winos and Hells Angels. So when a couple of kids with bad skin and worse attitudes came in asking if they could perform, Hilly said yes, on one condition; that, like his father, like the Kibbutzim, like the new Jews of the post-shtetl Diaspora, they did it for themselves.

“You’ve got to perform your own music,” he told them. Unlike almost every other New York club owner at the time, he refused to settle for covers. He wanted originality, individualism—anarchy! Unable to take the stage himself, Kristal took to setting it for a new genre of live music. It was the birth of Do It Yourself rock, whence a whole tradition of garage bands and alternative scenesters soon followed.

Yet who among them realizes that the source of their most cherished punk principle is also one shared by the original settlers of Israel? And who among them wouldn’t be surprised to find that in Israel today that impulse has been turned on its head? Israeli punks no longer protest the occupation of the West Bank – they’ve become occupiers themselves, taking over abandoned buildings in Tel Aviv as part of a growing Squatters Movement. The exodus from the Bowery to the holy land has reduced the avenging flame of punk to mere embers, and two of Kristal’s great passions – homeland and music – have thus collided. CBGB’s was always a locus, whether it was supposed to be or not, for cultural and political revolution. It’s impossible to imagine Patti Smith’s vegetarianism, or David Byrne’s technocratic humanism without the wooden platform Kristal cobbled together from scratch. But if the maddening crowds of punk must now thrive elsewhere, in distant lands, they too will have to do it themselves. Hilly wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The post The Moses of Punk appeared first on Jewcy.

Fifty years ago today, Jack Kerouac published On the Road, a drug and jazz-fueled novel chronicling what came to be known as the Rucksack Revolution. In artistic terms, of course, it inspired the Beat movement, whose resonances (coffeehouses, Greenwich Village, Ethan Hawke) are still very much with us. Fortunately, some of the old Beats are, too.

Throughout his career, Herbert Gold has taken a slightly different road by defending tradition while promoting rebellion. He believes in family, literacy, and moral decency, but also free love, midnight tokes, and madman writing binges. Like Whitman, Gold contradicts himself and contains multitudes: he's the missing link between your grandparents’ dry-goods store and your painter uncle's third floor walk-up on Delancey Street.

As one of the first Jews to bypass Columbia University's notorious quota system, Gold befriended that other Beat icon Allen Ginsberg, who introduced him to Kerouac, then a young football recruit. Ginsberg wanted his new friends to hit it off, but as Gold recalls, Keruoac dismissed him almost immediately as a "smart kike." Gold earned a reputation for calling Kerouac out on his anti-Semitic and increasingly right-wing attitudes, and he was one of the first critics to lament Ginsberg's later work, which he felt was unbecoming of the poet's early, more focused promise.

As a critic, Gold would also spot the unmistakably Jewish resonance of the wild new style of 50's storytelling, practically writing the stage entrance for Norman Mailer: "The hipster-writer is a perennially perverse bar mitzvah boy, proudly announcing, 'Today I am a madman. Now give me the fountain pen.'"

Gold's own moment of fortune and fame came with the publication of his fourth novel, Fathers, which explores the relationship between his early bohemianism and his immigrant father's life in America. Part hipster diatribe, part coming-of-age autobiography, it became a bestseller and for a while made Gold a household name.

Now, at 83, Gold is as candid as ever. From Cleveland and New York to San Francisco and Haiti, he's kept his rucksack at the ready, remembering his Pentateuch and youthful madness while frantically waving his pen in the air.

ON BEING NORMAN MAILER'S WHITE NEGRO (SORT OF):

Well, I describe myself as an old beatnik. I live less elegantly than my kids do. That's kind of my style—the sort of postwar graduate-student style. But I always liked a lot of stuff about the Beat period and the Beat people. I enjoyed the sexual freedom. I wasn't interested in being gay or bisexual, but I enjoyed the sense that you knew you could go ahead and do it. I didn't take a lot of drugs, but I was happy to smoke a joint now and then. I liked the music. You know, this sounds like a white guy talking about how he likes Miles Davis.

ON BREAKING THE COLOR LINE AT HARPER'S:

My first published story was plucked out of the slush pile at Harper's Bazaar. At that period, they didn't publish people like me. The editor, Mary Louise Aswell, asked me to change my name. I was a student at Columbia at the time, and you know what a thrill to get a story in a national magazine! She suggested that I add a u—that I call myself Herbert Gould, which didn't sound so explicitly Jewish. You know, there are Goulds who are not actually Jewish. Anyway, I agreed to do that because I was young and ambitious. But I came back to my dorm at Columbia feeling incredibly guilty and horrible. I called her the next morning and said I wanted my real name used. And she said, "We don't publish Jewish names in Harper's Bazaar." It wasn't her prejudice; it was company policy. But she was sympathetic with me and said OK. And the story was published in Harper's Bazaar under my real name, in the Christmas issue, which had 400 pages. But it was left out of the table of contents.

ON DRINKING, FUCKING, AND DYING WITH ALLEN GINSBERG:

Once, at a restaurant in Paris, I saw Allen take out and play this funny little instrument. He sang this Buddhist country-rock song that went, "Eat when you eat, drink when you drink, fuck when you fuck, die when you die." There was something comical about his take on life. In fact, I think parts of his poetry that people take seriously are meant as comedy. Of course, he was also very much in earnest about his love life and about his various passions. When Sonny Barger, who was head of the Hell's Angels, sent a telegram to Nixon offering the services of the Angels as guerillas in Vietnam, Allen said he was gonna organize—and this is the phrase he used; I want to quote it exactly—“a disciplined corps of trained fairies to unzip the flies of the Hell’s Angels and blow them into peacefulness.” Well, it was very funny. And at the same time, there was a certain element of seriousness because he thought that if the Hell’s Angels only got good sex, they would relax—it was that kind of humor, what the carnies called “kidding on the square.”

ON TACKLING THE BEAT GENERATION'S DUMB JOCK:

I knew Kerouac through Ginsberg at Columbia when I was a student. When I first saw him, he was just a jock. He was given a football scholarship to Columbia. I don't remember how I first met him, but I know that Allen kept wanting me to be friends with him. Allen was like a mother hen; he wanted all his friends to be friends and he was trying to make us a Kerouac clique. He and I argued about only three things: We argued about his sexuality (not that I objected to his being gay, it was just that he wanted to convert me at that time); we argued about Saint Theresa, whom he followed; and we argued about Kerouac. Kerouac was a creep from the beginning, but I think his antisemitism didn't come out then because he was self-serving. He accepted all the help from Allen that he could. And he and Allen were briefly lovers. Poor guy died at, what was it, 47 or 48, and he was an old man when he died. And his becoming antisemitic developed along with his obesity and his alcoholism and his general falling apart, along with his becoming a right-winger. Remember, he supported the war in Vietnam. And he supported Nixon. I think his mind was pretty much gone.

ON BECOMING A CHOSEN (AKA NICE JEWISH) WRITER:

The ethical standing of being Jewish appeals to me. I think Jews have something special to give. I do accept the idea, not that we're chosen by God to be wonderful, but that Jews have a mission to do certain things which are of virtue in the world and of help in the world. I think it comes down to the fact that heaven is very weak in the Jewish tradition. What happens when we die is we're buried and then when the Messiah comes we all come back to life. But we have to make it on Earth as it is; that's where our work should be done and where we're to enjoy life and where we're to make our memories and experience. It's one of the reasons so many Jews—all over the world but particularly in America—have become novelists. Because what the word novel means is new; a novel is news of the world. And we've had this traditional need to see the world as it is, and to do good for the world.

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Never a true force in a commercial radio sense, Israeli punk nonetheless has in recent years seemed to express the deepest yearnings of Israel’s cutting edge youth. Whether it was the mass of left-leaning political bands (Nikmat Olalim and Dir Yassin) or the skinhead-like fraction of right-wing groups (Retribution, Lehavoth), political engagement was at the heart of Israeli punk from its beginnings in the late 80s to its heyday a few years ago.

“Israeli punk was DIY in the truest sense,” says Liz Nord, director of Jericho’s Echo: Punk Rock in the Holy Land, a 2005 documentary that chronicled the various factions within the scene and their relationship to the punk Diaspora. “Like the hardcore bands that emerged in the second and third wave of punk here in the 1980s, Israeli punk was politically engaged, mostly on the side of peace and negotiating with the Palestinians. And yet, where the political edge of punk kind of went underground here, it remained an integral part of the Israeli scene almost up until 2000."

But, as Bob Dylan might have put it, they were so much older then, they’re younger than that now. Today, nearly a decade after peace seemed imminent at Oslo and nearly a year since Ariel “The Bulldozer” Sharon uprooted the settlers he’d helped become rooted in the first place, peace seems further away than ever, and Israel’s youthful brigade of punk activists feel fine. Like those Displaced Persons Formerly Known as Settlers, they’ve uprooted their metaphorical concerns and retreated from the political arena as it relates to Palestinians and a two-state solution.

For to say “fuck it” to the whole political process, to reclaim the personal over the political, is an act of political engagement itself. As they said during the Vietnam era, “What if they had a war and nobody came?” Israeli punks have taken this ironic and utopian vision for perpetual peace and turned it into a license for perpetual complacency. Israel has had several wars and the punks haven’t “come.” Rather than protesting the occupation, or marching for binational negotiations—let alone setting these as demands in their songwriting—they’ve decided to carve out their own piece of occupied territory at home. Large swaths of “leftist” punks have joined the growing Squatters Movement in Tel Aviv. This is as hardcore as the desert disciples of The Clash have allowed themselves to get.

“I think everyone has become so discouraged by the ongoing mess and the lack of movement regarding a solution to the occupation that they’ve decided to focus their energies elsewhere,” says an activist organizer who goes by the alias “Cat.”

Three years ago, while working on my book about the New York Jewish origins of punk, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, I interviewed Cat as he hid from the IDF in the Palestinian town of Nablus (“basically a big refugee camp,” he said). Suddenly, I heard what sounded like firecrackers in the background, some muffled sounds, and then my cell phone went silent. “Cat? Cat?! Are you alright?” There was a pause of about fifteen seconds, and I was just about to hang up, disturbed, when I heard Cat’s voice, much lower now. “Yes, I am ok. It is like this every night. They’re shooting.”

I didn’t have time to ask who was shooting. And looking back now, I realize that wasn’t really the issue in terms of how the music of anarchy has evolved in the holy land. Rather than going off to “fight for an end to the conflict,” Israeli punks have opted to conceive of a kind of mini-Zionism within Israel itself. In fact, the most “punk” thing about them might be how they have passively altered the definition of illegal residence in one region where this has been a perennial source of misery and bloodshed.

The casbah will no longer be rocked; it’ll be dragged into tenancy court.

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Iggy Pop and the Stooges are releasing an album tomorrow – the first by the band since their swansong in 1973 – and I’m frightened. After all, the reunion route is a fraught one. There’s the possibility of disappointment. But more than that, there’s the question of the band’s meaning in the first place. Sure, they helped birth punk. But is that entirely good? Especially for the Jews?

Mr. Pop, as the New York Times might have it, is today remembered as the mad id of rock. Along with core members, the brothers Ron (guitar) and Scott (drums) Asheton, he helped create a kind of Three Stooges of punk, full of raw power and heroin-induced funhouse antics.

People forget how these punk progenitors also helped create a fascination with Nazi imagery, which inspired David Bowie's even more forgotten Nietzsche-quoting, Sieg Hail-ing post-Ziggy Stardust act. The Hitler Youth uniforms of Joy Division – a band named for the squad of sex slaves used to pleasure SS officers in concentration camps – were practically stitched together by the Stooges, who wore swastikas during some of their performances.

Just listen to the Stooges' live bootleg, “Metallic K.O.” in which the Igster kicks-off his rendition of “Rich Bitch” by dedicating it to all the “Hebrew women” in the audience. Or check out the testimony of Asheton in the reissue of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk where he says, “[Iggy] had this whole thing of hooking up with rich Jewish girls … He was using [them] … so I ended up using them and their limousines.” He can't really have been post-PC before there was political correctness, so what to make of this smirking aside besides the obvious?

Of course, if it weren’t for the Stooges, there wouldn’t have been a Jeffry Hyman [sic] or Tamas Erdelyi, better known as Joey and Tommy Ramone. Tamas, the mastermind behind the lanky, caterwauling quartet from Forest Hills, nearly didn’t exist: his parents survived the Holocaust in Budapest through the help of some non-Jewish friends. Did that stop "Blitzkrieg Bop" from happening? Of course not.

From Iggy to Tommy n’ Joey to Chris Stein and his Nazi memorabilia collection, to the five Jews in The Dictators and their Springtime for Hitler-like “Master Race Rock,” the nihilism that leads one into the true belly of punk is littered with Hitler iconography co-opted and warped beyond ideological recognition by punks. So perhaps there was always more going on with the Stooges than mere Sturm und Drang hooliganism.

For one thing, their acting-out was too inchoate and primal to be taken seriously. Cast-offs in the rusting fields of Henry Ford’s Detroit, the Stooges were driven by the belching factory smoke and even sootier excuses for massive industrial lay-offs. The Motor City titan who peddled “Protocols” blood libels in the Dearborn Independent left a legacy of antisemitism that couldn’t help but seep its way into roots of local tradition. It was only a matter of time before daring young ruffians ripped them out and made everyone uncomfortable.

Tear it up and start again. Like the Jewish punks who followed them, the Stooges wanted to exorcize their demons by mocking their parents’ oppressors, even if, on some level, they identified with the kitsch of absolutism. It was never supposed to be pretty.

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