Positively primal reunion

In Iggy & the Stooges’ 1973 landmark album “Raw Power,” singer Iggy Pop, previously Iggy Stooge, memorably casts himself as “the world’s forgotten boy.”

The Coachella rock festival in Indio this weekend seems designed in part to prove that he’s anything but forgotten. Every aggressive performer on the bill, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis to the three Beastie Boys to the Hives’ Howlin’ Pelle, owe something to the whiplash dynamism Iggy brought to rock in the late ‘60s. And every raw representative of the so-called garage-rock revival, starting with fellow Detroiters the White Stripes, do what they do in large part because the Stooges fought hard to make a place for rock’s primal impulses.

One other act will testify to their importance: the Stooges themselves, with Iggy and his original bandmates Ron and Scott Asheton on stage together for the first time since the mid-’70s. It’s one of the most highly anticipated moments of the act-packed weekend.

“There had been intermittent suggestions to do some sort of reunion and I always stayed away from it,” Pop said this week. “But since I was making a record and I wanted some guests, I thought, ‘Well who would be the coolest guests?’ And it came down to Ron and Scott, particularly because those are the two guys who got behind me when I was Joe Zilch basically.”

The threesome recorded four songs for Iggy’s upcoming album, opening the door to other options.

“It was super cool, I couldn’t believe it,” said Pop, 56. “So at that point it was a living unit, and so the possibility was there to do a gig, and somebody asked. That’s all it really was. It just kind of happened naturally like a real band. This isn’t the Eagles or the Sex Pistols.... It happened first in the studio with new tracks for release. I wouldn’t do this had that not happened.”

They probably won’t play the new songs at Coachella (where they’ll be joined by L.A.’s Mike Watt on bass), but Iggy said that the sound is unmistakable.

“If somebody put it on you’d say ... ‘Is that the ... Stooges?’ Yeah, it sounds like the band. There’s one that’s a definite departure, a step further, and there are three that sound much closer.”

That’s great news to a certain brand of rock fan for whom the Stooges are the Beatles of Basic, the source of everything significant in the music for the past three decades. They made only three formal albums, but in the process they redefined -- or rediscovered -- what rock could mean.

The Stooges crawled out of the Ashetons’ basement in Ann Arbor, Mich., and confronted a complacency that could be softened only by the creepiest of dirges and breached only by the most the ferocious sonic battering ram. With Ron playing guitar and his brother Scott on drums (the late David Alexander was the original bassist), they were a troglodytic reminder of rock’s primal foundations.

“I started out just wanting to front a musically adventurous band which would of necessity work with very, very basic skills,” Pop said this week. “My skills were so basic, so I had to find some guys as basic as I was. And they were coming more from the standard high school dropouts on the corner wanting to be rock stars, and we sort of met somewhere in the middle.”

They also demanded attention by virtue of the scrawny, bare-chested singer’s punishing, unpredictable stage persona.

“We know if you were gonna have some sort of a rock band, there had to be kineticism, there had to be a lift to it, and we weren’t really getting it,” Pop recalled. “We were livin’ in a farmhouse on the edge of town, and it was winter, and one day our manager refused to heat our rehearsal room, and I went crazy.

“And when I went crazy, the anger caused me to insult him as I sang, and ... I began dancin’ around as I insulted him, and the band began to play in a way they’d never really played before, and at that moment we had a style. The one thing fed the other. We had a style.... There was a lot of aggro involved and that grew in all sorts of ways. But there was always something positive under it.”

Anti-virtuosity, brink-of-chaos maneuvers and remorseless riffing are standard fare now, but it just wasn’t done in that more polite era, at least with any expectation of being taken seriously.

The Stooges were mocked and reviled by the mainstream, but an audience of core rock fans grasped them as a lifeline. That following gave rise to glam (David Bowie became a Stooges patron and collaborator) and punk (the Stooges’ “No Fun” was the last song the Sex Pistols played live before breaking up), later to grunge and garage rock -- every movement that treasured statement and individuality over dull professionalism.

After “Raw Power,” which added guitarist James Williamson to the lineup, Iggy (born James Osterberg) embarked on a varied solo career, hanging in the past all expectations, given his legendarily self-destructive way, and assuming the patina of an elder statesman.

If rock doesn’t currently need the radical jolt the Stooges administered three decades ago, Sunday’s set (currently the band’s only planned performance) should still draw undivided attention from the group’s spiritual heirs

“When Nirvana and all that was coming up, it was, ‘Well how do you feel about grunge being based on [your stuff]?’ ” said Pop. “And before that it was ‘How do you feel about alternative?’ It comes up from time to time.

“Sometimes there’s just a chance similarity.... And then sometimes you actually hear people sing certain of your techniques or thought processes, using your stuff to re-create. Yeah, I feel fortunate, because there’s a fine line that divides isolated crazy from visionary artiste. So one feels, ‘Oh, this should help.’ ”

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Iggy & the Stooges

Where: Coachella Festival, Empire Polo Fields, Indio

When: Festival runs today-Sunday, 12:30-11 p.m.; Iggy & the Stooges play Sunday, 9:10 p.m.

Price: $75

Contact: (213) 480-3232 or www.coachella.com