Iggy Pop Read online

  Thunders’ dalliance with heroin was infinitely more serious than that of Iggy, who always liked to boast of his physical indestructibility. Thunders’ life would soon follow an inexorable downward spiral; the guitarist was rarely off heroin or methadone thereafter, and would die in New Orleans at the age of thirty-eight.

  By this point, scoring smack was a constant obsession of Iggy’s. Late one evening Annie Apple, who’d seen Jim around Rodney’s, answered the phone to hear: ‘Hi, I think you know me, this is Iggy Pop.’ Credentials established, he asked if she had any money, trading on his celebrity with relaxed ease. At around three that morning he knocked on her door at the Coronet, a once-magnificent Mediterranean Revival apartment building that had housed the House of Francis, an upmarket brothel, back in the 1930s. Now it was ramshackle, full of drug-dealers, hookers and artists, and was handily close to the Hyatt. Iggy was accompanied by Stan Lee, later the guitarist with LA punk band the Dickies, and Max, a well-groomed, suave European who was the main celebrity drug-dealer in Hollywood. It soon transpired that Iggy was planning to sell Annie his celebrated ‘cheetah’ jacket, in which he’d posed on the Raw Power sleeve, for $25, and Annie handed over the cash before Max realised what was happening. ‘You’re not hawking your jacket!’ Max informed Iggy, before taking the jacket and returning Annie’s $25. ‘Thanks for helping me out,’ Iggy told Annie politely before the three of them disappeared into the Hollywood night. (Lee would wear the cheetah jacket around LA for many years. It was slightly too small for him, and eventually fell apart.)

  By now Iggy’s freeloading was notorious - there was even an urban legend that he used to stand beneath a huge Columbia billboard for Raw Power on the Strip, pointing to his photo as he panhandled for dope - but there was also a keen intelligence to his behaviour. During his brief visit to Apple’s apartment, Jim had recognised the potential of the Coronet, also known as the Piazza Del Sol, which was managed by Jerry Flanagan, an eccentric character who used to write hectoring letters to his tenants in exquisite longhand and sign them ‘the Corporation’. Apple had been planning to move out of her apartment, number 404, but after returning from a short trip to San Francisco she opened her front door, painted in sky blue with cheery white clouds, to discover that Flanagan had given the keys to Ron Asheton. Apple managed to retrieve a few of her meagre possessions, but left the Stooges with her pots and pans, and even her little brother’s sleeping bag - which Jim commandeered, sleeping on the plywood floor. It gave her an excuse to drop by every now and then and survey the activities at the Coronet. After James Williamson and Evita moved into their own apartment at 306, the run-down building became the Stooges’ base of operations.

  After their two-week lay-off, the Stooges returned to the Whisky on 3 September, for a run of shows that by now were being poorly attended, according to Don Waller and fellow fan Phast Phreddie Patterson, who put together Back Door Man magazine. ‘When he came back in the fall there weren’t nearly as many people,’ says Patterson. ‘Some days we’d go and there was just us and a couple of others.’ Where on the previous runs the crowd had been so packed they could pass him over their heads, this time Iggy could dance out on the floor, just a few people around him. ‘Just doing his Iggy thing,’ says Patterson; at one point Iggy poured melted candle wax down his chest, just like the old days. Still, say Waller, Patterson and others, the band were on fire, playing more new songs, including ‘Heavy Liquid’, as well as baiting the audience most evenings. One evening Iggy announced, ‘We can’t be bought, not even in this town. Not by all the faggots in the world. Not by all the money in Israel.’ It’s tempting to speculate that Danny Sugerman and Jeff Wald made up the Jewish contingent in the audience that night; in any case, Wald decided to drop the Stooges over the course of their Whisky run, disturbed, he says, by Iggy’s erratic antics, and worried that he would be tainted by their fast-growing reputation as losers. ‘You are judged by your success and they weren’t a success. I didn’t want [them] to be my calling card, the artists by which they judge my management abilities. You could say it was a ruthless decision . . . I would prefer the word cold.’

  Although Wald always insisted on firing bands in person - he wasn’t the kind of manager who left his underlings to perform brutal tasks - he remembers Jim as being composed and not particularly surprised. However, there were still a fair number of bookings dotted across the US, and a few days later the band returned to their Detroit home turf for two shows at the Michigan Palace, starting on 5 October.

  There was something about the venue’s atmosphere that the band disliked, but the old theatre was packed, and by now the band were in their element. The Detroit audiences, more than anyone, appreciated the Stooges desperate, take-no-prisoners attitude and in-your-face aggression, and that night they received a raucous, enthusiastic reception, with the audience invading the stage at the end of the show. At some point, Iggy invited the crowd back to the band’s hotel, the Detroit Hilton, for what might well have been the band’s most gloriously depraved night in the city.

  Michael Tipton and Natalie Schlossman, two of the band’s closest friends, were staying at the Hilton but, like most of the hotel guests, got little sleep that night. At one point Michael Tipton was chatting with Scottie Thurston in his room when James Williamson knocked on his door, walked in with two friends, one male, one female, explained that his own room was packed with people, asked if he could use Tipton’s bathroom, and the three of them disappeared inside. Twenty minutes later Natalie Schlossman arrived in search of James, and knocked on the bathroom door; after a pause, James and friends emerged, apologising to Tipton for the mess. Tipton looked in the bathroom and saw the walls were splattered with blood.

  A couple of hours later Natalie got a call from Ron Asheton asking for a chat. She was about to take a shower and forgot to go down for some time. When she knocked on Ron’s door it swung open and Asheton told her, ‘Come on in, it’s cool.’ Inside were Ron and Scottie Thurston, both naked from the waist down, with one woman wearing an exotic wig and nothing else; the guitarist and mild-mannered keyboard player were ‘both kind of having a go at her’.

  Later in the morning, Natalie heard her phone ring twice, called the operator and heard two messages from Jim telling her, ‘Come on down, pick me up and let’s go eat.’ She was already going for breakfast with Michael Tipton, and the two of them stopped at Jim’s room on their way downstairs. When the door opened Natalie and Michael saw approximately twenty people in the room in various sexual combinations; another couple - or other combination - was copulating against the bathroom’s glass door, banging against it so loudly Natalie thought it would splinter any moment. Jim stood there with shirt but no pants, a girl holding on to his legs. Politely, he told the pair, ‘Sorry, I’ve changed my mind, I think I’m going to crash.’

  Ten minutes later Tipton and Schlossman were tucking into their morning coffees when Jim bounded into the restaurant. ‘I got rid of ’em,’ he whispered, before sitting down for breakfast.

  The following night’s show was triumphant, too; the new, harder-rocking set went down better with the Detroit audience than the comparatively restrained Ford Auditorium show six months earlier; one Detroit fan, photographer Robert Matheu, remembers: ‘We all loved “Cock In My Pocket”, it became quite a local anthem for a while.’ A few days later, the band settled into a residency from 8 to 13 October at a small club called Richards, in Atlanta, Georgia, for what James Williamson regarded as a string of their best performances. Several of the band’s fans, including Ben Edmonds of Creem, conspired to raise their morale with an endorsement by Elton John. Elton was sweeping across the US on a hugely successful stadium tour that significantly outgrossed the performances by his friend and rival David Bowie, with whom Elton was engaged in semi-friendly sniping. Elton decided to signal his support for the Stooges, plus his own general zaniness, by renting a gorilla suit and planning a one-ape stage invasion during the Stooges stint.

  Creem had prepared a photographer
for the stunt. Unfortunately, no one had prepared Iggy. Indeed, the previous night he had disappeared with the usual local ‘Rich Bitch’, to use the Stooges’ term of endearment. Early in the morning she brought him back to the band’s hotel unconscious; he had gobbled down her entire supply of Quaaludes. Scott Asheton and a friend of the band, Doug Currie, were called to lift his dead weight out of her Corvette; carrying him into the hotel, they dropped him and were overcome with a giggling fit, seeing him peacefully sleeping, sprawled over a spiky Mediterranean bush.

  He was still hardly conscious that evening when Doug and Scotty carried him into the club (‘God knows what the poor club owner thought!’ laughs Currie), and after a quick discussion of what to do, Doug announced he had some speed. James Williamson managed to find a syringe, and they duly shot their singer full of methamphetamine sulphate in order to get him on his feet.

  Unsurprisingly, during the performance for which Elton had planned his jolly jape, Iggy was, he says, ‘unusually stoned to the point of being barely ambulatory, so it scared the hell out of me.’ For a couple of seconds, as Elton emerged from the wings in his gorilla suit, Iggy thought he was hallucinating, or else a real gorilla was raiding the stage. The Creem photograph documenting the event is hilarious, showing James Williamson transfixing the uppity ape with a malevolent glare that signals, he says, his intent to ‘take him out. He lucked out, because he was smart enough to take his head off to let people know who he was, just in time.’

  Once Elton discarded the ape mask and revealed his cheery face, Iggy realised what was happening and danced around with the fur-clad Elton for a song or so, and the event was duly plugged in Creem, with Iggy telling the magazine, ‘Elton’s a swell guy.’ (Off the record, he would tell people that Elton had only pulled the stunt because he wanted to get into tough-guy guitarist James Williamson’s pants.) Yet, although there would be ongoing discussions with Elton’s manager, John Reid, and his record imprint, Rocket, the encounter failed to lift the Stooges’ spirits, and soon the band was becoming more obviously frazzled. Around this time it seems many of the Stooges clung to pathetically poignant lucky mementoes. Iggy had a pet cuddly rabbit. Drummer Scott had a lucky towel, which he would wrap round his head at times of acute stress. Guitarist Ron had a treasured pillow which his mom had embroidered - if any of his fellow band members hid it, he went mad.

  By the end of the year bookings had started to fizzle out, so the band switched agencies to ATI in New York. Rumours spread that the Stooges were about to split, or had split already, as the various members dispersed around Hollywood. In LA, regulars at Rodney’s English Disco started claiming that Iggy was asking a New York promoter for a one-million-dollar fee to commit suicide live on stage at Madison Square Garden; Andy Warhol got in on the action, calling his friend Anne Wehrer to say he’d heard the event would happen at the Stooges’ end-of-year show at New York’s Academy of Music. The story reached the band themselves, but their reaction, according to Bob Czaykowski, was, ‘We don’t think he’s strong enough to commit suicide.’ Instead, the evening was remarkable mostly for Iggy’s announcing every song as ‘Heavy Liquid’. It was telling that by now no one, whether band or road crew, knew if he was putting on an act, or was under the influence of a new drug, or had literally lost his mind.

  With increasing regularity, outsiders who caught sight of the out-of-it singer before the shows would ask the road crew, ‘Do you really think he can make it?’ The answer would be, ‘Well, he always does.’ But the New Year’s Eve show marked a turning point, says Nite Bob. ‘Before that, everybody seemed to be happy. And now everybody seemed to be unhappy. You could see the signpost up ahead, “The End Is Near”.’ News of the death of one-time Stooges bassist, Zeke Zettner from a heroin overdose on 10 November further darkened their mood. Up to now, James Williamson had been the one force attempting to push the band forwards, but even he was losing heart. ‘The fact is that I already knew this, but I had to be taught many times about how unreliable Iggy really is. That band could have been a real [success] and . . . instead it was becoming a flop.’

  By the time the Stooges returned to the West Coast in January 1974 for four shows at a club called Bimbo’s in San Francisco, their audience had dwindled, with just a few dozen fans in the 700-capacity club, all of them clustered round the stage. Joel Selvin was there to review the show for the Chronicle; he remembers that despite the tiny audience, the band was ragged but on the rampage, and that Iggy was as committed as ever. At one point he jumped out into the crowd, whereupon a fan pulled his bikini briefs down and the singer shouted a running commentary over the microphone, ‘Somebody’s sucking my dick, somebody’s sucking my dick!’ Finally, bored of the attention, he screamed, ‘Give me my cock back, you bitch!’ and continued the performance. Selvin wrote up the incident in his review, with heavy use of asterisks. ‘But I genderised the story,’ he says, ‘and wrote how the girl unhanded him, or something like that. The next day after the story runs I get a phone call from a guy who says, “That was no girl that did Iggy - that was me and my cousin Frankie!”’ Annie Apple was at the show, and she wonders if Iggy was aware of what was happening and relished the experience: a sort of ‘when-in-Rome-do-as-the-Romans-do thing.’

  When the Stooges hit the Midwest again, despite the fact that supporters like Natalie Schlossman were there to look after him, Jim seemed to be in an even worse state. Physically he was in decent condition, still slim, surviving on a diet of burgers with Tabasco or even raw meat - which he loved to order in restaurants, freaking out the waitresses. Now, though, his face was puffy and careworn; glammed up with make-up and blond hair he looked scary rather than androgynous. Mentally, he was tired and listless. Columbia had recorded the end-of-year Academy of Music show with a view to releasing it as a live album, but in January they’d decided it wasn’t worthy of release and that Iggy’s contract would not be renewed. In Toledo, Ohio, the band was supporting Slade, who played good old-fashioned brickies’ glam rock and detested the Stooges; before the show there was nearly a fight when the Brummie roadies insulted Natalie and her friend Pat; Rock Action threatened to take them all on, and the Brummies backed down. When it came to the show, Iggy, wearing pale make-up and a little bow tie, launched himself into the audience twice; each time the audience parted like the Red Sea and looked on smugly as he smashed into the floor.

  The entire band were depressed by the audience’s indifference; Jim was particularly disturbed, and that night Ron asked Natalie to look after him and put him to bed. Ron had hidden Jim’s clothes in the hope that this would curtail his usual habit of cruising the hotel corridors for drugs in the middle of the night. Natalie spoke to Jim gently and reassuringly, as if to a child, until he fell asleep. After waiting another twenty minutes to make certain he was OK, she left. An hour and a half later there was a disturbance in the hallway; Michael Tipton and Scott Asheton ran out and saw Jim cowering naked as Slade’s roadies pulled the fluorescent light tubes out of the elevator and threw them at him.

  It is Ron who describes those last months as ‘never-ending torture’. Jim Osterberg today displays very little emotion about his physical and mental travails. But by January 1974, this ambitious, driven man was regarded by everyone, even his closest bandmates, as a failure and a liability. And whatever drugs he was taking, says Michael Tipton, Jim knew exactly what was going on, and was suffering greater mental torture than any of his bandmates could comprehend. ‘Everybody thinks he’s not 100 per cent - but even when he’s high, the little man thinks a lot. He knew.’

  Over the next two weeks, the Stooges continued zigzagging across North America, from Wisconsin to Toronto to Long Island. A few days later, on Monday 4 February, the band was booked into a tiny club on the far West Side of Detroit, on the way to Ypsilanti. The Rock and Roll Farm, in Wayne, Michigan, was a tiny bar, with a capacity of 120 or so, that normally hosted blues or rock ’n’ roll revival acts. The road crew started complaining the moment they realised how difficult it would be to
cram the Stooges’ amplifiers onto the tiny stage; several fans who turned up early started feeling worried when they saw how many bikes were lined up outside the venue. Robert Matheu was standing in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette in the freezing cold as he worked out how to blag his way in for free. Matheu brought a camera to most Detroit gigs, but knowing the venue, he’d left it at home. He knew that ‘this wasn’t a place where people were going to see the band. This was more like the Stooges were playing their bar.’

  Bob Baker, another Stooges fan, had arrived early and found himself a good vantage point at stage right, on the edge of the dance floor. He too started feeling uneasy when he saw how many bikers were filling the bar. There were several dozen scattered around the audience, with a huddle of six or seven at the edge of the dance floor; heavy-set bearded guys, aged around thirty, most of them in dark denim jackets, several of which were decorated with the colours of the Scorpions, a West Side Detroit biker gang.

  Baker loved the Stooges; this was the first time he’d seen them since the Ford Auditorium. This time round the music was more cutthroat and malevolent, and their look was far more extreme too; Iggy was prancing in a leotard, while James Williamson was a dark, powerful stage presence, who also seemed bizarrely androgynous - ‘If you were too drunk you might not be sure he was a man.’ It was not a combination calculated to appeal to the typical Michigan biker, and even as the Stooges launched into their set - which still opened with ‘Raw Power’ but was now augmented with more new songs, including another poignant doomed anthem, ‘I Got Nothing’ - there were scuffles at the back of the venue. Robert Matheu and his friend Mark heard shouted threats, and the word ‘motherfucker’ being uttered from the stage: ‘And that is not a word you should say to a biker. Because they tend to take it personally. ’ As the violence continued, randomly across the crowd, it was impossible to see what was happening; Matheu and his friend Mark decided they’d had enough and left. Then at some point during the set, the group of six or seven bikers produced a carton of eggs and started throwing them at the stage.