Iggy Pop Page 18

  The night before Iggy’s first ever show outside of the USA, Lou Reed made his London debut at the same venue, King’s Cross Cinema. James and Iggy went to see their rival, whose show was attended by Roxy Music and other members of the Glamorati. Lou was clearly out of it on tranquillisers, or alcohol, or some combination thereof; Iggy and James could be seen snickering at each other, especially the moment when Lou’s sequinned trousers started to fall down. ‘James was nudging Iggy, and Iggy looking at James and they pointed to it,’ says Nick Kent. ‘It was, ha ha, Lou, you aren’t so cool. We’re going to kick your arse.’

  Iggy Pop made his public debut the following night, 15 July 1972. In keeping with MainMan’s concentration on stars, rather than bands, the billing read ‘Iggy Pop, ex Iggy and the Stooges’. Creem’s Dave Marsh was one of several writers who’d been flown over to see Bowie’s Aylesbury show, in a pioneering MainMan propaganda operation, and managed to watch Iggy, too. He’d seen the old Stooges, but found this performance, in the black-painted theatre that had been recently converted from a sleazy porn venue, far more dark and forbidding. ‘All the things that I’d never took seriously in my Id were coming to life. And there was no Buffy in sight to slay the vampires.’

  The show left many onlookers shaken, disturbed or inspired. Mick Rock, who was then just starting out as a photographer, had to track the singer, in his silver leather pants and silver hair, like he was chasing a big cat over its home territory; he was stunned by the attitude and physicality of the singer, and the sheer rawness of the sound. The crowd was smaller than that for Lou, but possibly more influential. A 16-year-old boy called John Lydon attended with his friend, John Grey; Mick Jones, later a founder of the Clash, thought, ‘The full-on quality of the Stooges was great, like flame-throwers.’ Music industry press officer Richard Ogden was contentedly observing the show from his seat in the balcony when suddenly Iggy climbed up and deposited himself in his lap, pulling Ogden’s hair, bellowing into the microphone and splattering sweat and melted make-up over his mortified victim, as London’s journalists giggled at Ogden’s discomfort. Williamson’s guitar playing was rough in places, but Nick Kent for one felt that this was the most cataclysmic show he’d ever seen. ‘A lot of new genres were created that night, musically. One song was the first time I ever heard what became known as Thrash Metal. This was where I understood what rock ’n’ roll was all about, because it simply dripped from their fingers.’

  Two days after the King’s Cross performance, the Stooges went into London’s Olympic Studios with engineer Keith Harwood to record more rehearsals. Together with other early demos from Trident Studios, and tapes from R&G Jones rehearsal studio, where they’d start at midnight and play until dawn, they document a period of insistent creativity and a sound that was profoundly different from the previous Stooges. Any vestiges of art rock or the avant garde were gone, replaced by a more conventional but infinitely more aggressive bug-eyed guitar assault. At times the recordings simply dissolve into white noise, as Williamson’s Wagnerian rumble drowns out Iggy on songs like ‘I Got A Right’: psychotically intense, taken at a dizzying pace, the song vindicated Nick Kent’s assertion that he’d witnessed the birth of Thrash Metal. On other songs the music is simple and sweet, notably ‘Sick Of You’, a crooned dissection of Iggy’s relationship with Betsy - ‘sick of hanging round your pad; sick of your mom and sick of your dad’ set over limpid arpeggios that lull the listener into a false sense of security before the sucker punch of Williamson’s rattling powerchords launch a nasty rant that makes the Rolling Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb’ sound sensitive and retiring.

  The recordings, magnificent as they are, capture the work of someone almost literally manic, obsessed with being faster, louder and treblier than any magnetic tape could capture; an impression Jim Osterberg would bear out recently, pointing out how: ‘My insanity bar was raised so high at that point that nothing sounded bent enough - ever.’

  For the other Stooges, those early days in London were comparatively idyllic. Ron, for all his change in role, felt blissful that the band was reunited, and spent much of his time wandering around Lambeth’s Imperial War Museum. Scott recalls an eclectic drugs regime, which included the odd grain of pure brown heroin (‘the strongest, best I ever had’), beer, hash, Mandrax, Quaaludes and Valium. According to Ron, Williamson also appreciated the fact that in the UK, codeine was available over the counter. Many times they would call a limo to take them down to Defries’ Gunther Grove apartment to hang out. The studio flat, with its impressive mezzanine and inevitably ‘colourful’ inhabitants, was the centre of the MainMan empire, which by now included Mott the Hoople, Dana Gillespie and Wayne County. But the MainMan circus, for all its flash, was a slow-moving operation. In January, David had unveiled his Ziggy Stardust persona; the fact that this grandiose rock superhero was openly based on Iggy was flattering, as was the fact that Ziggy had attempted to emulate his hero by walking on his audience’s hands at Imperial College in February, only to tumble to the floor. But as the Ziggy Stardust album started to take off following its 6 June release, it was obvious that this fictional creation was occupying all Defries’ attention - much to the resentment of the real people left standing in the wings. Wayne County saw his own career become hopelessly stalled, and in the endless weeks of hanging around MainMan, observed why that didn’t happen to Iggy. ‘The joke going round was that Tony gave Iggy to Bowie to play with. But he refused to be exploited. He could be the sweetest thing in the world but if he thought somebody was fucking with him, fucking with his life, fucking with his career, he’d be, “I’m gonna take you, motherfucker”.’

  Today, Angie Bowie attributes cynical motives to her then-husband’s championing of Iggy. ‘If he had all the people that were cool, then did that not make him more cool than the most cool?’ Many others credit Bowie with a more sincere respect for Iggy’s music, but by now the Ziggy bandwagon had a momentum of its own and the Stooges, for better or worse, were left to their own devices. MainMan director Hugh Attwooll block-booked London’s rehearsal studios for them, but there was a limit on how much time they could spend rehearsing and, for a group of characters devoted to watching midnight TV screenings of Night Of The Living Dead, the British way of life - notably the fact that television shut down at 10.30 - seemed cruel and inhuman. Those who first met the Stooges in June found them ‘chipper’ and optimistic. But Nick Kent, one of Jim and James’s few regular visitors in the early days, noticed that even though the two had kicked serious drugs, ‘Jim would talk about his heroin days, James would too . . . and there was a longing in the way that they addressed the subject’. Kent sensed an inevitability that Iggy would follow that route again; and he would be proved right.

  In July, Angie Bowie was allotted the task of finding the Stooges a new home, and selected a mews house at 19 Seymour Walk in Kensington, five minutes from MainMan’s office, which belonged to novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael; Angie also demonstrated her efficiency by managing to recruit a maid who was also an expert macrobiotic cook. On the summer afternoons, Iggy would walk around Hyde Park in shades, wearing his leather jacket with a cheetah on the back, reading magazines. During one such ramble early in September, after he noticed a Time magazine feature headlined ‘Search and Destroy’, Iggy snorted several rocks of Chinese brown heroin and decided the phrase would make a great song title. The song’s inspiration was the search-and-destroy missions of the Vietnam War, which was constantly in that summer’s headlines. Ironically, the subject of the article was the global depradations of heroin.

  The lyrics featured as its narrator and hero ‘a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm’. The phrases perfectly fitted a scything James Williamson riff worked up at R&G Jones, which the guitarist used to punctuate with the exclamation, ‘Kill it, gooks’. (‘The Stooges are really horrible people, politically incorrect,’ laughs Jim.) It was the perfect manifesto, the war cry of the ‘world’s forgotten boy’. But the subtext was obvious to the Stoog
es’ singer, if no one else. Search-and-destroy missions were a notorious failure. For all his bravado, Jim Osterberg felt his new venture was doomed: ‘I knew we were going down and I knew no one was going for this,’ he murmurs today, matter-of-factly. ‘Because there were all sorts of weaknesses. The lyrics to “Death Trip” are my way of saying, I know what is happening to us, I know what we’re doing, here’s why . . . and I’m gonna sing about it.’

  When Iggy first arrived in London, David Bowie had offered to produce what would have been his solo debut, but Iggy had declined the collaboration - which might well, as with Mott the Hoople’s Bowie-penned ‘All The Young Dudes’, have yielded a hit. Instead, Iggy had insisted on producing the album himself, along with Williamson. Today, Williamson concludes the insistence was probably a mistake. The two of them - for all Iggy’s claims that he, rather than John Cale or Don Gallucci, had produced the band’s first two albums - were inexperienced in the studio, and overlooked many basic errors and sonic glitches. But from the moment the sessions started on 10 September at CBS’s studio on Whitfield Street, just under London’s sparkling, futuristic Post Office Tower, the entire band were focused on their task and worked doggedly to ensure that, even if this was their last chance, they would go down fighting.

  In retrospect, it’s apparent that with the album that became Raw Power, Iggy and the Stooges were attempting to stick to certain conventions. Unfortunately - for their commercial prospects at least - they were simply incapable of doing so. The album follows a completely formulaic structure, suggested by Tony Defries: uptempo opener for each side, followed by a more romantic ballad, a classic rocker and then a moody, significant closing number. Many elements were far more conventional than anything from the band’s first two albums: twelve-bar blues forms, rockabilly references and chugging riffs that bore the influence of Marc Bolan. But for all that, the Stooges remained deliciously warped. Their romantic song, ‘Gimme Danger’, was based on a luscious, intricate Stonesy guitar riff, but the lyrics detailed how Iggy wanted to ‘feel your disease’. One song’s glammy strut resembles T-Rex. But where Bolan’s chorus went ‘get it on, bang a gong’, Iggy’s lyrics informed his girl that ‘your pretty face is going to hell’, while his vocal performance is simply deranged. Opening side two, ‘Raw Power’ is introduced with a belch, before James Williamson’s exquisite sledgehammer guitar makes its entrance. The album’s closing song, ‘Death Trip’, sketches out Iggy’s past and his future in an almost documentary fashion: ‘I’ll stick you, you’ll stick me, we’re going down in history.’ This was music from people on the edge. Bolan or Bowie were happy with a veneer of decadence, to update a musical structure based on the Yardbirds and vaudeville values shared with Lionel Bart (the composer of Oliver, another Defries client). The Stooges were decadent right through to their sweet, Midwestern hearts.

  By 6 October, Raw Power was finished. Only for nothing to happen. On 10 September, David Bowie had sailed for New York on board the QE2 (he’d famously become terrified of flying after his plane ran into an electric storm on the way back from Cyprus in December 1971). Tony Defries flew over a few days later, to oversee Bowie’s tour from the MainMan New York office, which had been set up (literally, including painting and decorating) by Tony Zanetta. That same month, Cherry Vanilla, another cast member of Pork and, according to Zanetta, the only MainMan employee with any experience of running a business, arrived to handle PR. MainMan’s centre of gravity had moved, it seemed permanently, to the US.

  Deciding to chercher la femme, Jim flew over to Detroit in pursuit of Bowie and was met by Leee Childers, who’d been co-opted into the MainMan operation as a photographer, manager and babysitter, and given the title ‘Vice President, MainMan USA’. A few days later, after visiting Jim’s parents and rendezvousing with Bowie, who was playing Detroit’s Fisher Theater, Leee and Jim flew to Los Angeles to stay with Bowie and his entourage, who were all ensconced at the Beverly Hills Hotel (and, in a typical MainMan sleight of hand, charging their food, limos and groceries to RCA). Jim arrived, the stress of recording well behind him, looking bright-eyed, blond-haired, happy and on a healthy vegetarian diet. He was different from the early days, more self-sufficient, less wide-eyed. He was calm and optimistic. It wouldn’t last.

  CHAPTER 8

  She Creatures of the Hollywood Hills

  In their short, messy career, the Stooges had been assailed by many perils. They’d survived ridicule and hostility, but they couldn’t handle being ignored. So they went crazy, like bored suburban housewives, stranded in a swanky house high up in the Hollywood Hills.

  The first clue to what would happen when employees dropped off the MainMan radar came with the fate of the remaining Stooges. Before Jim had flown off in search of Bowie, the remaining Stooges were told to ‘keep rehearsing’ and then were simply abandoned. For a couple of days they trucked down to a subterranean rehearsal studio in Blackheath, before deciding to stay home and get high. Frederic Raphael’s tasteful mews home was trashed - Hugh Attwooll had to placate the irate author about the fag burns and unidentifiable stains on the carpets - before Angie Bowie took pity on them, and flew them back to Ann Arbor on RCA’s dollar. She and James briefly became lovers: ‘I loved James. Ron was sweet; James was smart. He knew when to shut up. When asked about a particular song on David’s new album, he’d find one positive thing and leave all the negatives. Same when he talked about Iggy. It was the juice of the survivor.’

  In Ann Arbor, Angie Bowie met the SRC’s Scott Richardson, became enamoured of him, and took him back to England (where, according to Angie, Scott and David became cocaine buddies). A few days later the Stooges followed their singer to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where James was just in time to drop in on Jim and David Bowie, who were mixing Raw Power at Western Sound in Hollywood.

  In the years to come, Bowie and Iggy would engage in public sniping about Bowie’s mix of Raw Power. Iggy, down and nearly out a couple of years later, would allege that ‘that fuckin’ carrot-top’ had ‘sabotaged’ his album. Bowie himself would mock Iggy’s production ‘technique’, maintaining that, of a 24-track master, just three tracks were used; one for Iggy’s vocals, one for James’s lead guitar, and the remaining one of the band, all mixed together. Without a doubt, Bowie’s version of events was closer to the truth; both the pre-Bowie mix and Iggy’s own remix of 1997 bear the same murky, confused imprint, with Ron and Scott’s bass and drums submerged under a wall of battling guitars and vocals. By any conventional standards, the eventual results were a mess; as Cub Koda points out, ‘No one could work out how, even if you took that much drugs, a record could sound that bad - and still get released.’

  The Stooges’ debut had been a masterpiece of minimalism and simple eloquence, like a Picasso squiggle on neatly framed white paper. Raw Power was, in comparison, a sprawling, abstract expressionist canvas, with sound splattered over every square inch. Raw Power would be the album that, more than any other, defined the inarticulate assault of punk rock, its raw excitement deriving both from the wealth of ideas and the confusion with which they were expressed. Bowie’s mix - a touch of delay from an exotic device called the Time Tube, the sudden emphasis on shouted backing vocals - added a quirky edge to that confusion. Which, in hindsight, was as much as anyone could have done, says James Williamson: ‘I could never stand the guy [Bowie] personally . . . but I wouldn’t hold it against him. I was one of the people saying I didn’t like the mix, but in retrospect it was actually a good job.’

  By now, the pressure was telling on Bowie too, for he had to squeeze the three-day remix into a punishing live schedule, with dates dotted apparently randomly across the US right through until 10 December, when he sailed back to England on RHMS Ellinis. His trip was fruitful, both for the huge press interest, which established the foundations for future superstardom, and the inspiration he gained for his next album, Aladdin Sane, including ‘Panic In Detroit’, inspired by Jim’s stories of the 1967 Detroit riots, and the tale of the screaming and bawli
ng ‘Jean Genie’, who was based partly on Bowie’s increasingly troublesome protégé.

  With Bowie and Defries gone, RCA eventually bridled at the huge hotel bills being run up by the Stooges and the band was given its marching orders. Rumbled, Defries ordered Leee Black Childers to ‘find a place where Iggy and the band can live - an apartment. Because we’re going to open up MainMan’s West Coast office’.

  Childers started searching for a suitable location, Iggy telling him, ‘If I’m to rehearse, I need a swimming pool. I can’t write without a pool.’ Thinking to himself, well, this is California, Childers went to view several apartment complexes, only for Iggy to point out that this would create problems with noise; finally the singer upped the ante such that Jim himself located a spacious, five-bedroom house on Torreyson Drive, rented for $900 per month. By Christmas, Jim, James, Ron, Scott and Leee were happily established in the sprawling, low-rise building atop the Hollywood Hills, from which they could see the twinkling lights of Los Angeles spread out below. Each Stooge had his own room, while Childers could monitor comings and goings from his bedroom over the garage. The pool, at the rear of the house, was the centre of most of the social activity. It also overlooked Errol Flynn’s old house at 3100 Torreyson, which had been purpose-built for the notorious actor back in the 1940s, complete with one-way mirrors in the bedroom so Flynn could observe his guests’ sexual couplings. Flynn’s description of his own house soon proved apt for its neighbour: ‘Strange people wended their way up the hill to the Mulholland house; among them pimps, bums, down-at-the-heels actors, queers, athletes, sightseers, process servers, phonies, salesmen - everything in the world.’