Great Lost Band Members # 14 Dave Alexander

Original bassist for The Stooges. Took a trip to England in 1965 with Ron Asheton and they saw The Who play The Cavern which was an inspiration for them selecting the route they chose.

From Please Kill Me

A little while after that Dave tells me 'Hey, I'm going to England, you wanna go?' so I sold my motorcycle. I had a Honda 305 that I got instead of getting a car when I got my driver's license. So we sold the bike and flew to England.

We went to see The Who at the Cavern. It was wall to fucking wall of people. We muscled through to about ten feet from the stage and Townshend started smashing his twelve-string Rickenbacker.

It was my first experience of total pandemonium. It was like a dog pile of people, just trying to grab pieces of Townshend's guitar, and people were scrambling to dive up onstage and he'd swing the guitar at their heads.. The audience weren't cheering; it was more like animal noises, howling. The whole room turned really primitive - like a pack of starving animals that hadn't eaten in a week and somebody throws out a piece of meat. I was afraid. For me it wasn't fun, but it was mesmirizing. It was like 'The plane's burning, the ship's sinking, so let's crush each other.' Never had I seen people driven so nuts - that music could drive people to such dangerous extremes. That's when I realized. This is definitely what I wanna do.'

Alexander was fired for the band for general drunkenness and unreliability after their second record Funhouse. He died, aged just 27 in 1975.

'I'm sitting in my apartment, I have no money, I got no telephone and James Williamson and Iggy come to the door. We were really estranged by this point, so it was a surprise. And then Iggy says, 'Zander's dead and I don't care cause he wasn't my friend anymore.'

I go, 'Huh!' I made him say it three times. This is what always pissed me off about Iggy. He said, 'Dave Alexander is dead and I don't care because he wasn't my friend anyways.'

I went, 'Whooooaaaa!'

I was so stunned, I didn't say anything, I just asked James, 'Can I use your telephone?' And James gave me the keys to his apartment and I walked over by myself, and called home to find out what happened. I talked to Scotty, who told me that Dave went into hospital for a pancreas problem and he wound up dying of pneumonia and it happened real fast.'

Ron Asheton Please Kill Me