Iggy Pop Page 19

  For five years now, Iggy had forged on; often distracted, often confused by a haze of hashish, acid or heroin, he’d still maintained the drive that sustained him from the very first days of the Stooges, when he’d taken the early bus from the trailer park to rouse Ron and Scott from their slumbers. Now, with an album ready for release and a new set ready to be unleashed on an audience, he was forced to sit and do nothing. Many evenings Jim would talk late into the night with Childers, analysing his predicament. It was impossible to know for sure whether he was being pampered or punished. In the early days Defries had appealed to Iggy and James’s natural arrogance: ‘Make yourself unavailable. Make yourself mysterious,’ but that cover story was now becoming less and less plausible.

  In the meantime, the Stooges threw themselves into rehearsing at Studio Instrument Rentals, a huge complex on Santa Monica Boulevard, where Leee had negotiated a cut-rate deal from the star struck management. Day after day they would step in the MainMan Cadillac for the fifteen-minute drive down Mulholland, spending hours rehearsing on the six-foot-high stage in front of a huge mirror, as Iggy and James directed their efforts. Poignantly, for a band who would eventually be celebrated as born losers, their work was unstinting. Even while their existing album languished in limbo, they worked towards a new one, before emerging in the evening and wandering down to Rodney’s English Disco, a couple of minutes away on Sunset, for a little R&R.

  Perhaps more than any location before or since, Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco perfectly epitomised Hollywood’s enchanting intermingling of innocence and depravity. Rodney’s artless, naive demeanour and frank adoration of celebrity ensured that when he first came to Hollywood he was nurtured by a succession of teenage girls on the Strip, then adopted as a sidekick by Sonny and Cher. As a PR man at Mercury Records, he’d become one of David Bowie’s first champions in LA, and was so obsessed with the magic of English glam rock that he opened Rodney’s English Disco at 7561 Sunset Boulevard. It boasted a mirrored dance floor, Watney’s beer on tap, and was the only location in California to serve that English delicacy, sausage rolls (‘absolutely dreadful’, according to Annie Apple, who worked at the club), all calculated to make visiting English rockers feel as if they were back in Blighty. Soon it became a hangout for every girl from the Valley who owned a pair of platforms, and Rodney became the gatekeeper, as Rodney’s regular Michael Des Barres puts it, of ‘a posse of pussy’.

  The girls who hung out at Rodney’s were either wild rich kids or desperate street kids, and ‘there was very little distinction between the two’, according to Kathy Heller, one of the former. Some of them sipped Coca-Cola; a few shot up heroin in the tiny toilets. Some liked just to hang out with visiting English rock stars; some liked to get in their pants. When Iggy and the Stooges arrived at the end of 1972, the queen of the LA scene was Sable Shields, aka Sable Starr, a self-styled 15-year-old groupie and wild child offspring of a wealthy family from Palos Verdes in south-eastern LA. Sable was often accompanied by her older, sensible sister Coral, who was more reserved, but equally beautiful; with Sable’s curly blonde mop, and Coral’s waist-length dark hair, they reminded many onlookers of Snow White and Rose Red. Coral and Sable had probably first met Jim and James via their friend Evita Ardura, whom James had noticed one day as he drove in the MainMan limo past Hollywood High where the 15-year-old was attending school - he won her over by taking her, Coral and Sable to Disneyland, and seemed a powerful, mysterious presence, despite his obvious distaste for funfairs. Along with their friend Lori Maddox, these diehards of the postage-stamp-sized VIP area at Rodney’s gravitated towards the West Coast offices of England’s hippest management company, MainMan. And Leee Childers found his babysitting responsibilities just got a whole lot more challenging. One of the key roles of the MainMan vice president was to watch closely for any signs of drug use; demeaning as it was, he was ordered to search the band’s room while they were down at SIR. And week by week, he found more dirty spoons and other paraphernalia.

  Even as their consumption of drugs increased to help ease the sheer boredom of being stranded up in the hills, Jim, James, Ron and Scotty worked more consistently than ever before. Finally, it was announced that there would be a showcase performance, promoted by MainMan, at the end of March in Detroit. Over the spring of 1973, they continued piecing together songs like ‘Head On The Curb’, based round an intricate riff lifted from the Doors’ ‘LA Woman’, and ‘Cock In My Pocket’, a fast Eddie Cochran-style number that, with its salacious lyrics and traditional blues structure, may well be the only Stooges composition obviously indebted to Bowie and the Spiders. Later came ‘Johanna’, a song about Iggy’s main girlfriend, with whom he was involved in a bizarre heroin ménage à trois, and ‘Open Up And Bleed’, a dark and sombre epic. The song’s conversational delivery paralleled the Stones’ ‘Sympathy For The Devil’, but where Mick modelled himself on Satan, Jim was playing Jesus. In earlier interviews, Jim had already compared his audience to the first Christians, the world’s downtrodden. Now, his message seemed even more overtly messianic - that he was offering himself up as a sacrificial victim, in the belief that his music would somehow endure. But if Jim Osterberg really felt doomed, he felt little self-pity at his predicament. ‘If he did get maudlin, it was when he was drinking,’ says Childers, ‘but it was never, Why me? It was about the world being fucked up.’

  As the weeks went by, the Stooges household took on a warped little routine of its own. From his apartment over the garage, Leee watched as the scene came to resemble a Hollywood movie set, with teenage girls running around, visitors being thrown in the pool, a motley assortment of drug dealers and teenage runaways coming and going in flash cars. Sable was the loudest and most outrageous of the girls, and was rapidly becoming notorious around Hollywood. She also had fantasies of becoming a conventional housewife, so every now and then you could see Hollywood’s most celebrated groupie washing the mountain of dirty dishes accumulating in the kitchen.

  ‘Everyone was in love with Jim at the time,’ says Lori Maddox, who’d often hang out with her friends Sable and Coral at Torreyson, ‘and everything was pretty crazed, so there was a lot of passing girlfriends back and forth.’ Sable had a fling with Jim, who eventually moved on to Coral, who was the more responsible child and often looked out for her younger sister. Sable was ‘funny, always on it, very quick-witted, that was why men liked being with her,’ says Lori, ‘but she would decide to do things absolutely out of nowhere; like maybe in the middle of night decide to put on Hollywood underwear and a garter belt and drive around town. She would do things no one else would even consider, things that Coral would never do. It was very crazed, and it was right at that period that Sable was becoming notorious.’ During the same period, Jim’s relationship with Johanna was warped and druggy. ‘It was a junk thing,’ remembers Ron Asheton. ‘She had a boyfriend who was selling junk, Iggy was giving the guy a bunch of dough. I stayed out of that crap. He loves to be hurt. Thrives on the chaos.’

  Ron and Scott’s demotion to mere sidemen by now seemed to absolve them of any responsibility for their singer, and many times they would look on indifferently as Iggy floated motionless in the pool. Leee Childers realised it was down to him to rescue MainMan West Coast’s premier star, drag him out of the pool and ensure he was breathing. It happened so often over those twelve weeks that Leee learned to swim in the process.

  By March, rumours of the band’s increasingly debauched behaviour were getting back to MainMan’s New York office; Cherry Vanilla started to get suspicious about incessant requests for money to buy new equipment and other vague expenses. When Wayne County dropped by, with even his extensive knowledge of excess, gained in the backroom at Max’s, he found the situation surreal. Before Wayne arrived, Leee briefed him. ‘Whatever you do, don’t bring any drugs. Don’t give Iggy money. Don’t give him alcohol. Don’t give him anything.’

  Arriving in the house, which seemed forebodingly dark inside, Wayne saw Jim and the Stooges in a
line, sitting on the couch, immobile and unresponsive. Only Sable seemed interested, giggling and flirtatious; eventually it dawned on Wayne that ‘she wants to fuck, fuck, fuck, and she even wants to fuck me!’ In his melodious Blanche Dubois drawl, Wayne informed her, ‘Honey, are you barking up the wrong tree,’ and watched calmly as LA’s most celebrated groupie slashed her wrists and took a melodramatic leap into the pool. Feeling contented and warm, thanks to a couple of Quaaludes, Wayne watched Sable splash around, until Leee Childers assumed his lifeguard duties once more and fished Sable out of the pool. The cuts were, it transpired, only surface scratches, and Leee salved Sable’s wounded pride by telling her, ‘Wayne is not like Bowie or Iggy, that is a freak but who’s still gonna fuck you - Wayne is a real queen!’ Subsequently Wayne and Sable became best friends, sharing tips on make-up.

  Even after a short-term exposure to life at Torreyson, Wayne County was worried whether his friend Leee would emerge unscathed. As for Iggy, his one-time hero, a man he’d always considered intelligent and cultured, he was now simply ‘a lunatic. A charming, lovable lunatic, but definitely a lunatic.’

  Iggy’s fellow Stooges apparently believed that his increasingly erratic behaviour derived from his craving for attention - reassuringly, he could still keep his act together in the rehearsal studio. But Nick Kent, Jim’s confidant from London, wangled his way over to Los Angeles to interview his hero in the middle of March and was shocked at what he saw. Physically, Iggy seemed in the best of health, tanned, with centre-parted bleached hair, looking like a Californian Brian Jones. But Kent observed Iggy going into ‘crazy states. And it wasn’t even the quantity of drugs he was taking. Sometimes it would take just one Quaalude to completely bend his mind and other times he’d take twenty and they’d do nothing to him. He had a nervous system that had been shot and he’d never taken the time to mend it.’

  Several people who hung out with Iggy on Sunset share the same memory of watching him lost in his own reflection in the mirror at Rodney’s English Disco, coiling and uncoiling like a snake, wrapped up in a narcissistic dream, or adrift on planet heroin. The drug didn’t make him a nicer person. In public he was frequently paranoid, nasty or superior. ‘“Hey, I’m Iggy Pop. Remember that. I’m the boss,”’ says Kent. Evita remembers that he was like ‘a bad child. It’s not like it was calculated or intentional . . . he loved Coral but he would fuck her sister ’cause she was there. He would go with anyone if they offered him drugs.’ Many of the Rodney’s girls share recollections of Jim as being charming, ‘humble’ or ‘a gentleman’. But dig a little deeper and there are darker stories, such as that from Lonnie, a friend of Coral’s, who remembers Iggy as a lost, Little Lord Fauntleroy figure who maintained an innocent demeanour even as he attempted to turn her on to heroin: ‘Jim used to do it a lot with my friend. Then, at some club, we went in the bathroom, they tied that rubber thing around my arm and he shot me up with heroin. I spent the rest of the night in Denny’s parking lot and bathroom throwing up.’

  Jim’s mental state was plainly careening out of control, and no one close to him was immune to the effects of his alarming mood swings. But there was one segment of his life that Jim still seemed to hold inviolable: the music. Some time in February he had called Bob Sheff, pianist from the Prime Movers, who was now teaching at a music college in Berkeley, to ask him to augment the Stooges’ line-up, adding a rootsy edge with his blues piano stylings. He was to be ready for the band’s Detroit homecoming on 31 March, the first of a projected three or four shows. They spent a long time chatting, overlooking Errol Flynn’s house, and Jim was plainly ambitious about his music, even as he talked dreamily of the temptations of heroin.

  Throughout March the band worked intensively in SIR. On some songs they were obviously attempting to move the music in precisely the opposite direction of Jim’s original musical manifesto, towards heavy blues rock - evidence of a readiness to experiment, or perhaps desperation. Jim was excited about the forthcoming release of Raw Power, taking tapes of his earlier mix to WABX for the Detroit radio station to give the album its first public airing. By 18 March Jim and the band were back in Ann Arbor, rehearsing at the recording studio on Morgan Road that the SRC had sensibly bought with their first advance from Capitol records, ready for their flagship show at Detroit’s Ford Auditorium.

  For all the frustrations of waiting for the MainMan machine to lurch into operation on behalf of the Stooges, everything seemed set for a triumphant return. Cherry Vanilla was calling her contacts to send round acetates of the new album, and a couple of days before the Detroit performance Iggy appeared on Mark Parenteau’s afternoon radio show on WABX to preview the album.

  Iggy seemed positively joyous, Parenteau thought, and after a couple of songs started to sing along with the album that he’d waited so long for the world to hear. In between they chatted, fooling around in the tiny studio converted from an old dentist’s office, up on the thirty-third floor of the David Stott skyscraper. After two or three songs, Iggy undid the one button of his bright red trousers, revealing he was wearing no underwear, stepped out of the pants and started to dance as he sang along. Parenteau started giggling uncontrollably as he realised Iggy’s penis, flapping against his stomach, was clearly audible over the radio. Every now and then he caught sight of WABX admin and other staff peering through the narrow strip of glass in the studio door, as Parenteau hinted to his radio audience what was going on. After the show finished, Parenteau had to sit and listen meekly as WABX general manager John Detz declared the singer would never be allowed on the radio station again.

  To some of the MainMan staff in Detroit, who were well aware of what the Stooges had been getting up to in Hollywood, the radio show became another example of Iggy’s unreliable behaviour. Cherry Vanilla, who by now was keeping Defries informed of the shenanigans at Torreyson, observed that the MainMan supremo was losing his enthusiasm for ‘the Ig’, as he had once fondly termed him. Jim and James conspired to accelerate that process. According to Jim, James forced him to approach Defries immediately before the Ford Auditorium show and tell him, ‘James is strung out on heroin, and we want to move the band to Florida [where James’s mother lived] because we’re strung out and we need to kick.’ Today, Williamson describes Jim’s account as ludicrous. ‘I wasn’t strung out, and furthermore my mom lived with the Evil Colonel, who would never have done a thing for us.’ Leee Childers, who detested the guitarist, maintains Williamson soured the Stooges’ relationship with MainMan and that the guitarist was difficult and unprofessional. It’s a view few onlookers seem to share, for in the later days Williamson seemed by far the most together Stooge, but Childers would get an opportunity to vent his spleen.

  That evening’s show, according to all who attended, was a triumphant homecoming, to a crowd of diehard fans - including Mr and Mrs Osterberg - who packed the swanky, all-seated venue, which with its wood-lined interior and chandeliers normally housed the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Augmented by Bob Sheff, with James Williamson clad in full Mick Ronson attire - most notably a pair of towering, thigh-length silver platform boots - the band played a set drawn mostly from Raw Power, augmented for the occasion with ‘Cock In My Pocket’ - which, Iggy announced, was ‘co-written by my mother’. Iggy looked lithe and fit, and although perhaps the presence of Tony Defries imposed some restraint, the singer dry-humped a girl in the front row, spat on some of his fans and used a lot of ‘sour’ language, some fans remember. The audience’s response to the show was ecstatic, although there was irritation and a few catcalls when the Stooges, at Defries’ insistence, refused to do an encore.

  It was probably Iggy’s frustration at not being allowed to perform an encore that soured the atmosphere at the lavish after-show party. Defries worked the room as if he was a major politician or local union boss. Nick Kent looked on as Iggy greeted his fans. Then one girl, slightly the worse for a couple of drinks, came up, cooing, ‘Iggy, you look great!’ before attempting to give her hero a hug. Irritated, the singer p
ushed her away, towards a nearby staircase. ‘She almost went backwards down a whole fucking flight of stairs,’ says Kent. ‘This caused a bit of a ruckus in the house because she was a friend of one of the people giving the party. It was a horribly despicable thing to do as well. It really shocked me.’

  Defries was mortified by Iggy’s behaviour, which nearly turned a triumphant show into a disaster. But it was James Williamson who was made a scapegoat. Leee Childers hated the guitarist, and when James had a messy argument with Leee’s friend Cyrinda Foxe after getting her pregnant, Childers set out to claim Williamson’s scalp. On the band’s return to LA, Childers persuaded Defries that Williamson was the cause of the Stooges’ behaviour, and the MainMan boss gave Jim an ultimatum: either James was sacked, or the Stooges would be dropped. The remaining Stooges and Leee Childers all voted: Leee went first, then the Ashetons sheepishly sided against their nemesis. And then finally Iggy agreed to sack his friend and songwriting partner. James was thrown out of the house, not allowed even to take his guitars or his platform boots. Distraught at the betrayal by his friend, who’d ‘pushed me under the bus for the sake of his career’, James disappeared to Hollywood, where an employment centre directed him to a job working as a projectionist at a porno flickjoint.

  Iggy was apparently undisturbed by the loss of his collaborator. Ricky Frystack played in a blues band called Moonfleet, and had gone to Westchester High with Danny Sugerman, a fast-talking 18-year-old who hung around the Doors office and later assisted with their press. Sugerman was ‘very aggressive’ about getting involved with MainMan, says Frystack, and pushed his friend to audition with Iggy. After a brief chat, Iggy suggested Frystack bring his guitar to the house. On the appointed day, Ricky showed up to see Iggy reclining by the pool, cradling a glass of Courvoisier, with Sun Ra’s Atlantis album being played at cacophonous volume over a huge PA system. ‘It was a total eye-opener,’ says Frystack. ‘We jammed for a couple of hours, then hung out for a few more.’ Iggy seemed in his element, ‘really happy’, living out the ultimate rock fantasy life, hanging by the pool.