It's a wonderful irony to think that The Stooges' ticket to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ultimately was stamped via a certain Swedish disco band.

The proto-punk band from Ann Arbor, Mich., led by the ferocious Iggy Pop, had been nominated and voted down six times, leading even Madonna to campaign for them by having Pop tear it up at her own induction.

Today, The Stooges finally get in the door, and guitarist James Williamson has a theory as to why it was a lucky seven.

"It's been a roller coaster," he says. "This year, I don't think anyone in the band thought we were going to get in. We were about to take pride in setting a record for not getting in. But lo and behold we did, and I secretly feel like ABBA might have something to do with it because I can just see the guys on the committee going, 'Well, you know, if we put ABBA in, we're going to take a lot of crap for this. We better put the Stooges in there to counterbalance it.' "

The Stooges' induction coincides with the guitarist's return to the recently reunited band -- and to the stage in general -- after more than 35 years. His own status was built from one Stooges' album, 1974's "Raw Power."

Mr. Williamson, who was born in Texas and grew up in Detroit, played in a high school band called The Chosen Few with bassist Ron Asheton, who would go to become The Stooges' guitarist for the first two albums.

"When you saw them play live they were different than everyone else," he says. "Back then they were called the Psychedelic Stooges. It was kind of like an experiential thing. Iggy played a vacuum cleaner and blender with a mike in it, and the drummer played two 50-gallon oil drums and then bass and guitar. It was more Sun Ra than anything. Some of that was just because they couldn't play their instruments very well at that time, but they were something to behold. Eventually, they could play their instruments better and started coming up with songs, and eventually they dropped Psychedelic and were just the Stooges."

A representative for Elektra Records, sent to scout the MC5, signed the Stooges in 1968 and the band's debut was quickly assembled with John Cale of the Velvet Underground producing. Although it would contain such classics as "I Wanna Be Your Dog," "1969" and "No Fun," the band's feral debut was out of step with the time and failed commercially. A year later, "Fun House" hit even harder and didn't fare much better, with record-buyers or critics.

Like so many bands at the time, the Stooges couldn't resist the drugs, in their case heroin, and had all but fallen apart by 1971 and were dropped by Elektra. But Iggy got a second life in the form of a Columbia deal through his friend, David Bowie.

"He asked me to come over and make a new band with him in England and record an album," Mr. Williamson says. "We went over to England and had a bunch of auditions to hire a rhythm section, but we couldn't find anybody we liked. It was frilly shirts and big hair. We just weren't interested in that, and I remember distinctly watching television with Jim [Iggy] one night and saying, 'You know what, we ought to call the Ashetons.' Ron was a good bass player, I had known him as a bass player when I first met him, and we said, 'Hey, let's call him and bring him as a rhythm section.' So we did, and they were happy to do it. It was a job."

The result was Iggy & the Stooges' "Raw Power," leading off with what would become the band's signature song, "Search and Destroy." It was another commercial bust, but the record is legendary for its influence. Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols said he learned to play guitar listening to it. Henry Rollins of Black Flag sports a "Search and Destroy" tattoo. And Kurt Cobain deemed it his favorite album.

"Raw Power," which has been reissued by Columbia in a three-disc set with a outtakes and a 1973 live recording, was troublesome even before it was released.

"When we first made the album, our management, which was the same as Bowie's, had no understanding of our music at all," the guitarist says. "Leading up to the recording of 'Raw Power, they had rejected everything we'd been doing as demos. Finally, they got tied up with Bowie breaking in the U.S. and weren't paying attention to us anymore. We kind of snuck into the studio and recorded 'Raw Power' without any adult supervision. That's really how that album came to be. Nothing ever sounded like it before or since. But once we were finished with the album, we did our own mix, and we liked it a lot. As usual, when we took it to Main Man Management they didn't like it and thought their golden boy would save the day, so they handed the mix to him and he took a few days off his tour and mixed it in L.A."

The Stooges disliked Bowie's mix at the time (and Iggy would remix it in 1997), but the guitarist says he's grown to appreciate Bowie's ear-shattering guitar approach.

After "Raw Power," Mr, Williamson cut an album with Iggy, and then opted for a drastic career change. "I think I had reached the culmination of my efforts in music at that point and felt like music, at least for me, had reached a plateau."

Excited by the dawn of personal computers, he decided to become a computer engineer and recently retired as vice president of technology standards with Sony Electronics. With Ron Asheton dying last year, he was invited back into the Stooges (which now also consists of Iggy, drummer Scott Asheton, bassist Mike Watt and saxophonist Steve MacKay), starting with a gig in Brazil back in November.

"I hadn't played at all in almost 35 years," he says. "I had to do a lot of woodshedding to get back to the point where we could actually play in front of people, but it came together and the good thing is, I wrote most of this music, or a lot of it anyway, and it's in my style and kind of natural for me to play. Lucky for me I've got a band that let's me do that."

Tonight, he'll be on stage at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, as the Stooges are inducted for their enormous influence on punk, something they never saw coming at the time.

"I don't think they had any thoughts about things like that. Punk wasn't coined at that time, and neither was metal. We felt like we were playing rock 'n' roll. On the first couple albums, I would say the attitude was kind of punkish, and with the super simplistic chord changes, that's the case as well. I think the stuff I introduced in the third album, the power chords, was probably more imitated by that movement later on. I remember noting the guitar players started sounding an awful lot like me. That's flattering -- people are imitating your style."

Rather than a Sex Pistol, someone from Black Flag or the old New York punk scene, the Hall of Fame committee saw fit to have the Stooges inducted by pop-punk poster boy Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day.

"I think it's totally cool," Mr. Williamson says. "Green Day is a major act, and they have certainly acknowledged that some of their inspiration came from us."

As for the band's attitude going in after being rejected six times, he says, "I think every guy in the band is thrilled to death about it. It's always satisfying or gratifying to be accepted, especially after all these years. It's nice that it happened."

Critics Andrew Druckenbrod and Scott Mervis talk about music on "The Beat," available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.