Steve MacKay, the hard-charging tenor saxophonist who brought horns to punk rock with Iggy and the Stooges and the Violent Femmes, has died. He was 66.
Punk icon Iggy Pop, frontman of The Stooges, announced MacKay’s death on Facebook.
“Steve was a classic ’60s American guy, full of generosity and love for anyone he met,” Pop wrote.
“Every time he put his sax to his lips and honked, he lightened my road and brightened the whole world.”
MacKay, whose date of death was not specified, had been suffering sepsis, an illness caused by the immune system’s response to an infection.
MacKay was best known for The Stooges’ 1970 second album Fun House, in which his blaring and free-form saxophone drew comparisons to jazz greats.
The album helped shape the emerging genre of punk, with MacKay’s contribution offering a link between jazz and punk in their knack for improvisation.
MacKay said that when he was a child in the 1950s, virtually every big hit on US radio had a “rockin’ tenor sax solo.”
“When the ‘British Invasion’ happened all my friends got guitars,” he said in a 2010 interview with the Galway Advertiser as he played Ireland, referring to the 1960s dominance of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and other British rockers.
“Sax wasn’t cool but I was ‘the only one who could play a lead,’” he said.
Despite his saxophone’s influence, MacKay initially spent only six months before being fired from The Stooges, whose early shows were notoriously inconsistent due to heroin use.
But Pop, the ever-topless singer famous for working himself into a sweat, reunited The Stooges in 2003 after his successful solo career and invited MacKay to return.
The Violent Femmes, the punk-inspired band from Milwaukee, in the intervening years tapped MacKay for its Horns of Dilemma, a rotating horn section in the group’s concerts.
Violent Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie said that MacKay had a “rollicking and insane” personal life but few peers musically.
“In the end it would not be a stretch to call Steve the greatest rock and roll sax player of all time,” Ritchie wrote on Facebook.
“He was the first to combine the raucous sound of early rock and roll with the freedom and joy of free improvisation, all the while playing each note with total focus,” he wrote.
But MacKay often lacked consistent employment. He moved for a time to Amsterdam to play with bands around Europe; back in Michigan he had a small band called Carnal Kitchen and worked at a record store.
