ABSTRACT
The trajectory of the Stooges through the music business and their involvement with Elektra Records reveals the culture industry in action. As this study has argued, the band’s dogged dedication to their artistic vision within the situation of the commercial marketplace rendered their position there tenuous during their original existence. At the same time, the tendency to detach the Stooges from their late-1960s and early-70s context has engendered distorted perceptions of them as “lost in the future.” The tradeoff to the kind of cultural capital that accrues from being avant-garde, of course, is often a lack of short-term economic capital, commercial failure, and possibly personal disaster—which is where the members of the Stooges found themselves after they had played their final gig as a full band in Toledo, Ohio, on May 29, 1971, and were dropped by Elektra that June.
