Even a jaded old music hack hopes to move people occasionally. The record-setting outpouring of, er, emotion occasioned by our Ween Over/Under, when some members of the Ween forum came to hang out for a while, was a striking thing to behold. After a few dozen postings, the comment thread began predictably to devolve like a game of Telephone, until some of the poor befuddled dears were lambasting me—or a previous commenter or, at any rate, somebody somewhere—for dismissing Ween as a “joke band.” I’d argued exactly the opposite, but never mind; watching the train wreck was sort of fun. And now that we’ve aired out the joint and flipped the mattresses, the office is pretty much back to normal, except one of the interns got a tummyache from all the bad swears, and we’re still finding misplaced modifiers between the couch cushions. But since it’s just us again, and since we’re already talking about bands with active senses of humor (as opposed to some among their fans), let’s consider Michigan’s mighty Stooges. And let’s put it clearly: The Stooges represent one of rock history’s benchmarks. To call most any Stooges cut “overrated” requires the sheerest splitting of hairs, since the brilliant canonical albums number only three, with 2007’s The Weirdness serving mostly as a grace note. And the Stooges were utterly sui generis; though they drew openly from garage rock, electric blues and free jazz (and guerilla theater, come to think of it), the band wasn’t easy to pin, then or now. The sequential development heard on The Stooges, Funhouse and Raw Power has been quite accurately called the bridge between ’60s garage and ’70s punk. But the band’s real greatness, I think, lay in its open baiting and challenging of the audience. Cool cats like the Velvets, Bob Dylan and Miles Davis could play entire sets without even acknowledging the crowd, but no band before the Stooges had ever taken such obvious delight in overtly challenging, even openly antagonizing, the people who’d come to hear them play. (“I won’t fuck you when I’m workin’,” Iggy Pop famously snarled to one persistent heckler.) That seems to me the sea change—the moment when flower power died and your-pretty-face-is-going-to-hell sneering took over. I’ll go further and say that the Stooges were the first post-Manson rock band. Part of me can’t believe I just wrote that, but I’m standing by it. So this list is going to feel more subjective than most, and the criteria might be a little inconsistent from entry to entry, but I don’t think Pop and Co. would mind. No messier glory ever crawled across a rock ‘n’ roll stage beneath a shower of eggs and bottles.
Like most bands, 
Ever wonder what will happen during the last five minutes of late-night TV talk shows? Here are tonight’s notable performers:
Dorio: