Wow.
According to CNN, Ron Asheton was found dead in his Ann Arbor, MI home after not being heard from for several days.
I don't know what this means to you, but I'll tell you what it means to me.
As a disaffected 13 year old, I first began to familiarize myself with the guitar via my stumbling attempts to play along with the three wondrous principal chords of "I Wanna Be Your Dog." That song...all snarl, all attitude, all guts, all rock and roll; the perfect aural tonic for a kid stuck in the suburbs, surrounded by Alan Parsons Project fans. I'd listen to it and to "1969" over and over at deafening volumes through my crappy Radio Shack stereo and clunky Koss headphones, lost in my own little world of sonic bliss - a world of solid anger, solid noise that no parent could penetrate. I'd listen, learn, and draw inspiration. Years later, those three chords and that wall of fuzz would be echoed endlessly in my own playing, on my own records, and they continue to reverberate to this day.
Every few weeks when I lug my 100 watt carvin tube amp and matching 4x12 speaker out to some cruddy local bar, crank up the volume, and make ears bleed for several blocks of the surrounding area, there's more than a little bit of Ron Asheton in there. Just as there is for every guitarist in every punk band that has stalked the earth in the forty years since Asheton, Iggy and company made their indelible mark on music history.
Damn, man. Rock on. Wherever you are.