Iggy Pop Page 11

  Only when Fields was in Detroit did Sinclair and Wayne Kramer mention their ‘little brother band’, the Psychedelic Stooges. ‘The Stooges weren’t something you could send a promo kit out on,’ says Sinclair. ‘Sending out a demo tape would be like sending them a vacuum cleaner, there was no way you could understand what the Stooges were like without seeing them in performance.’ The Stooges played on an all Trans Love bill, featuring the Up and the ’5, the next afternoon, at the university’s union ballroom. ‘It was twenty minutes of brilliant shit,’ says Sinclair. ‘And once Danny saw the Ig, he understood. He was gone.’

  ‘I didn’t know their songs, I couldn’t recognise any intro or chord thing or anything,’ says Fields. ‘It was all pretty free form. I loved the sound. It was like Beethoven finally got here, or Wagner. It was so solid and so modern and so non-blues. How long did it take me to recognise this was something special? Five seconds.’

  Immediately after the performance, Fields walked into the tiny dressing room, which was crammed with stacked-up chairs, and proclaimed, ‘You’re a star!’ to Jim Osterberg. The singer ’s reaction was that Fields ‘just wanted to pick me up’. (Fields is obviously and very openly gay.) Ron Asheton’s reaction was, ‘Who is this asshole?’

  It was only after Fields spoke to Jimmy Silver that the band realised that this interloper was the Elektra Head of Promotions, and represented their shot at the big time. But the misunderstanding was fateful, for it helped plant the idea that Fields’ excitement was inspired by the Stooges’ singer, and not their music. That idea, Fields insists, is a fallacy: ‘It was the music I liked more than his charisma or him.’ Nonetheless, relations between Elektra and the Stooges would subsequently hinge on the relationship between Danny Fields and Jim Osterberg and Iggy Pop. And as Iggy Pop was drawn into Danny’s extravagant milieu, the Ashetons would be left to glower, resentfully, from the sidelines.

  Fields had gone to Ann Arbor with the specific intent of signing the MC5, and had discussed the size of advance with Sinclair on the Saturday night. On Monday, Fields called Holzman, and told him that not only were the MC5 all he’d hoped, but that he had another band he wanted to sign too. According to Fields, Holzman replied, ‘See if you can sign the big group for twenty thousand dollars and the little group for five.’

  Silver and his charges were not in the least fazed by being offered a deal so early in their career. ‘My expectations were so unrealistic that it didn’t seem that out-there. The boys did feel like second-class citizens about the size of the advance - but they had a We’ll Show Everybody attitude anyway.’

  Although Sinclair announced in 5th Estate magazine that both bands signed to Elektra on the next Thursday, there was no signing of any paperwork until Elektra founder Jac Holzman and Vice President Bill Harvey saw both bands for themselves the following weekend at the Fifth Dimension, a hip club built in what had been a bowling alley. According to Jim, in the intervening week he’d become so nervous about the audition that he was bedridden with asthma, hence the Stooges wrote two songs ‘specially for that show’: ‘I’m Sick’ and ‘Asthma Attack’. ‘We played these two songs, I [just] flopped around on stage, and we got the deal,’ says Jim. ‘They just thought, well they’re crazy, people want crazy things, and maybe this guy has some sort of charisma or something, so let’s sign him.’

  According to Fields, Holzman and Harvey were ‘completely stupefied by the Stooges. The MC5 they could [understand] because it was a more conventional, traditional approach to rock ’n’ roll.’

  Holzman himself readily admits that he signed the Stooges to humour his Head of Promotions. ‘Danny was very high on the Stooges, and I just said yes. I have always liked things that were odd but interesting, and they certainly fit that bill. But yes, the Stooges were an afterthought for Elektra.’ Holzman was an intelligent but relatively unassuming man, who for a record-company boss was remarkably young and hip; he dressed in slacks and polo-neck sweaters but never patronised his artists by pretending to be ‘down with the kids’ - he left that to company freaks like Danny. Elektra’s deal with the band was concluded on 4 October 1968. On the contract, they were simply titled ‘the Stooges’, although the ‘Psychedelic’ tag remained on the band’s stationery and posters for another month or so. ‘I think Jac Holzman told us the kids wouldn’t think the word was hip any more!’ laughs Jimmy Silver.

  The Elektra signing inspired a whirlwind of activity for the MC5’s organisation; the MC5 recorded their debut album live at the Grande on 30 and 31 while early in November Sinclair announced the formation of the White Panther Party - a white counterpart to Huey Newton’s Black Panthers. Meanwhile, according to Jimmy Silver, his own charges proceeded in a rather more sedate fashion. ‘They were pretty lax. They spent a lot of time thinking about stuff and talking to each other. In terms of what they could have been doing to perfect their ability to present what they wanted to present, I felt like they were, I won’t use the word lazy . . . I felt they were shortchanging themselves.’

  Silver kept the band’s live regime light, worried they would tire themselves out, while rehearsals were always limited to just twenty minutes per night, invariably conducted at mind-boggling volume. Instead, the focus was on building a band mentality, establishing a shared vocabulary of ‘in’ words and developing the ‘O-Mind’ - best described as the collective band vibe (or drug stupor) and soon Stooges slang for anything that was tolerable. Jimmy and Susan Silver, tolerant and well balanced as they were, found the O-Mind occasionally disturbing. ‘People who work in hospitals will tell you about the full moon, which is the time when all the crazy stuff happens. And I could relate to that. Soon I could see every full moon, they would want what they called “the hat trick - narc, ’tutes and ’cohol” - drugs, girls and alcohol. And as it came round, like the tides, they’d want money so they could score dope and everything else. It did kinda freak me out. Ultimately it totally freaked me out . . . They were four corky guys.’

  Quite often Jim Osterberg was totally lucid, and would explain that the slow pace of activity was optimum, or at least as much as his comrades could sustain - that pushing them harder would ensure everything fell apart. But Jim could be every bit as slothful and irrational as his peers, and his intake of weed in particular exacerbated his asthma to the point it sometimes became Jimmy and Susan’s primary concern; they nursed him on a macrobiotic diet, medicating his asthma with lotus-root tea, and wrote updates to Danny Fields, delaying the album sessions until he returned to health.

  With the first small advance cheque banked, life was comparatively cushy at the Fun House; the living quarters were now well established, with Jim ensconced in the attic, Jimmy, Susan and new baby Rachel (aka Bunchie) in a self-contained apartment on the top floor, while Scott had a room nearby; Ron and Dave lived on the ground floor, handily close to the communal TV room, which was decorated with posters of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Brian Jones, Elvis Presley and Adolf Hitler, plus an ad for Ron’s old band, the Chosen Few.

  In the autumn, a new resident took over the basement of the Fun House: John Adams, a friend of Jimmy Silver’s from the University of Illinois. Adams came from a wealthy Chicago family who’d made their money in the railroads; he was a fan of Damon Runyon, fancied himself as an ace pool hustler and had a fascination with the underworld. ‘It’s like Conrad said in Heart of Darkness - the fascination of the abomination - and John was really into that,’ says Jimmy Silver. Silver discovered Adams had acquired a heroin habit since they were fellow students, but had subsequently kicked it. His friend was ‘tremendously intelligent, tremendously loyal and willing to work hard’, and so the band offered him a refuge and a job as a roadie. Once established with the band, he grew out his wiry red hair, which bounced up and down over his ears and gained him the nickname Flaps. ‘But he had the most nicknames of anyone I ever knew,’ points out Bill Cheatham, who joined as roadie shortly afterwards. ‘We also called him the Hippie Gangster, Nickels, Peanut, the Sphinx, Goldie and the Fellow.’
By now, Jim too had gained an additional nickname - Scott, Ron and Dave had christened him ‘Pop’ (none of his fellow Stooges ever called him Iggy, except when referring to his live performances). The name came after Jim shaved his eyebrows, and was therefore reckoned to look like an Ann Arbor character called Jim Popp, whose hair had fallen out. But for professional purposes Jim was usually titled Iggy Stooge.

  In comparison to his charges, Fields was frenetically busy, overseeing the mechanics of recording the MC5, and also investigating a producer for the Stooges’ first album. Soon Fields thought of John Cale, who had just contributed a stunning sequence of arrangements to The Marble Index by his fellow Velvet Underground refugee, Nico. With his intimate knowledge of the avant garde and high-volume amplified rock ’n’ roll, he seemed like the perfect choice, so Fields called and invited him to the MC5’s recording date at the Grande. A few days later, Cale was in Detroit, watching both bands.

  ‘I hated the MC5!’ he emphasises today, in his rich Welsh tones. ‘Heartily! Not because they were conventional rock ’n’ roll but because of the violence. It was like a Nuremberg rally! I was like, holy shit, the fuckin’ Nazis are alive and well.’ The support act was a different matter: ‘Here was this spindly little guy in the middle, a tremendous sense of humour, and it was really delicate, but aggressive - and self-parodying, in a happy kind of way!’

  Fields’ confidence that Cale would ‘get it’ was vindicated. But while the tall, authoritative adopted New Yorker ‘got’ the music, the Stooges’ lifestyle was a shock. Visiting Ann Arbor to discuss the project, he took a look around the Fun House and opened the refrigerator to see ‘dozens of bottles of Bud. And no food. I said, what do you fuckin’ eat? Iggy said, Whatever, you know.’ Cale was taken with the band’s proto-slacker attitude; the Ann Arbor outfit were similarly impressed by his intellectual demeanour and the fact he wore black bikini briefs and drank wine, both of which seemed to embody his urban sophistication. ‘He was this commanding, intellectually strong person - but also a whack job,’ says Silver. ‘He was married to [the designer] Betsey Johnson but would chase girls around, he was into drugs and drink but could take it or leave it, it didn’t seem to make any difference.’ As a ‘whack job’, Cale recognised a kindred spirit in the young singer, notably when he picked up the lap steel that had featured in the Stooges’ Halloween Night party debut, and realised that all six strings were tuned to one note - a technique the Velvets had experimented with on an early song, ‘The Ostrich’. Informed by its owner that he would play the instrument while high, plugging it into a huge bank of Marshall amplifiers, the dark lord of the New York avant garde thought, ‘It must have sounded horrendous!’ Simultaneously, he concluded, ‘Man, this is in the raw. Let’s go!’

  John Cale and Danny Fields’ enthusiasm for the Stooges would help make them the darlings of New York’s hip society, and a couple of weeks after Cale’s visit to Ann Arbor, the band flew to New York, where Danny Fields introduced them to the city’s cornucopia of delights. They took in all of Fields’ hangouts: Andy Warhol’s Factory, Steve Paul’s The Scene nightclub and Max’s Kansas City, the haunt of various Warhol acolytes and, it seemed, just about anyone of sophisticated artistic sensibilities and exotic sexual predilections. According to Danny, however, Iggy needed little introduction. ‘He was born sophisticated and confident. He was a star before he was a star. He was Iggy. By that time he was already famous in the backroom of Max’s.’ Iggy moved with ease through Max’s various factions, the most crucial of which were the Drellas - the nickname for the Warhol crowd. The Miseries were ‘all these thin pregnant women in black, who always looked unhappy,’ says Fields; the Bananas were gay Cuban exiles. ‘The Phoebes were the busboys,’ says Danny; ‘I called myself Phoebe’; and then there were inevitably intriguing characters of indeterminate gender and orientation from John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam’s Play House of the Ridiculous set. Not that Ron and Scott were impressed, says Ron: ‘Being Midwest naive people, we never fell for that bullshit, man, it’s supposed to be great that you are some scumball, or some derelict, so Iggy and Scottie and myself are always like, fuck that.’

  The Scene, the club run by Steve Paul - a canny, frighteningly smart friend of Danny Fields, invariably dressed in blue - was the other main hip location, and it was there that Jim met Nico, the Germanic icemaiden, whose recent album had attracted critical plaudits, but only marginal sales. Before long, says John Cale, ‘Nico was in love with Iggy. For Jim Morrison reasons. As usual.’ The pair, with their disparate backgrounds, were fascinated with each other, although Jim’s fellow Stooges sniggered at the sight of the couple: ‘Jim looked like the black dwarf next to her!’ laughs Jimmy Silver. The two, over a few brief nights, became the star couple at Max’s, where Iggy was the focus of everyone’s attention - boys and girls. Leee ‘Black’ Childers, one of the Warhol crew, was chatting to Jaime Andrews - an actor who went on to work for MainMan - when the two of them spotted Nico standing next to Iggy, with her hand down his pants. ‘I wonder if I could do that?’ Andrews said to Childers, before walking over to the couple. Nico pulled her hand out; Andrews put his in. Iggy stood there, enjoying the attention.

  Nico became so enamoured of the young singer that she told him, ‘I vont to get out of the city, I vont to come to Detroit.’ A few weeks later, she flew to the city, and the two lovers spent two weeks sequestered in the attic of the Fun House. ‘It was totally bizarre,’ says Jimmy Silver. ‘This striking regal being, who somehow didn’t look real, living up in the attic.’ Nico charmed the Stooges - who were disturbed by the presence of a foreign woman disrupting their boys’ club - by lovingly cooking vegetable curries and leaving opened $25 bottles of wine for them to taste. Despite their suspicion of such effete European pursuits, the band were eventually won over. Jim, too, cheerfully admits ‘she had no problem corrupting me’ - although, in these as yet innocent times, the corruption consisted of drinking European wines and learning to eat pussy. In the last few days of her stay, Nico was joined by François de Menil - scion of the Texas oil-drilling and art-collection dynasty - who brought a small crew to shoot a promotional film for Nico’s song ‘Frozen Warnings’, shot in the cornfields behind the Fun House. The three-minute short was, according to de Menil, shot on spec rather than as a record company-financed promo, and looked like a cross between a European art-house movie and a low-budget horror flick: Nico plays the brooding icemaiden in a chill Michigan landscape studded with dismembered mannequins; Iggy revisits his white-face mime-influenced look, while moustachioed roadie John Adams wanders around with a flaming cross in suitably post-apocalyptic fashion. A few days later, Nico was gone, having left a beautiful Indian shawl for Jimmy and Susan Silver in thanks for their hospitality - and eventually she fled for Europe. Jim reverted to his former, carefree bachelor state. However, around that time, it transpired that Jim was to become a father, with Paulette Benson, a friend of Sigrid Dobat, who was MC5 guitarist Fred Smith’s girlfriend. Jim’s son, named Eric Benson, was born on 26 February 1969. For perhaps obvious reasons, Paulette decided to bring up her son without Jim’s help; she moved to California, and Jim would have little contact with the child over the next decade.

  Over the spring of 1969, the Stooges worked on developing enough songs for their debut album. John Cale had agreed to produce the band on the basis that they ‘make the record and forget about what’s on stage’. For that reason, apart from tantalising clues, no true record remains of early Stooges performances, and those early freeform ‘songs’, including ‘I’m Sick’, ‘Asthma Attack’, ‘Goodbye Bozos’ and ‘Dance Of Romance’, were abandoned or reworked. In three months of twenty-minute rehearsal sessions, minimal songs were sculpted, piece by piece, from the primordial matter of those early riffs.

  The standout song was crafted from the fragment of Byrds riff that Ron had first heard on his last acid trip back in April. It would become the perfect illustration of the maxim ‘talent borrows, genius steals’, for the Byrds’ simple two-note g
uitar line was lifted wholesale to become the basis of ‘1969’. But where any other band, including the Byrds, would feel the need to embellish something so simple, the Stooges unlocked its primitive beauty simply by leaving it unadorned. The song was remarkable as much for what was left out as what was included; where convention would suggest augmenting the song’s basic two-chord structure, or resolving it by escaping to a third chord, the Stooges simply repeated themselves: ‘Another year for me and you. Another year with nothing to do.’ The musical dead-end, trapped within two chords, perfectly expresses the boredom and claustrophobia of the song’s deadpan disaffection.

  ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ was carved out of another riff that Ron had started playing in his room; Jim had instantly spotted ‘that’s a goodie’. It was another simple motif, similar to a standard blues riff from Yusuf Lateef’s ‘Eastern Market’, a staple of the Stooges’ listening, but set against a musical drone it transforms into something elemental, inexorable and far more malevolent. Jim would later claim that its basic lyrics were romantic, expressing the simple yearning to lie in a girl’s lap, but the song’s sado-masochistic overtones undoubtedly betray the influence of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Venus In Furs’. ‘No Fun’, which the band were playing live by the spring, was based on a simple chord change familiar from Question Mark and the Mysterians’ garage staple ‘96 Tears’ - in this instance, though, it was shorn of its seventh-chords to make it, as Danny Fields put it ‘un-Blues’. Meanwhile, the dirgy ‘Dance Of Romance’ - what would today be called a classic ‘stoner riff’ - gained a lyrical, romantic opening, a vehicle for Jim’s desire to sing the words ‘I Love You’. It was given the title ‘Ann’, partly in tribute to the ever-tolerant and motherly Ann Asheton - although the gossip at Hill Street, according to White Panther Minister of Culture official Hiawatha Bailey, was that it was inspired by Anne Opie Wehrer, the charismatic, blue-blooded doyenne of Ann Arbor’s avant-garde scene: ‘She was an amputee, had lost one leg to cancer, and when Jim would see her stranded in the audience he would drop his wild-man persona and carry her, tenderly, to where she needed to be.’