Iggy Pop Page 24

  Iggying out took many forms, but invariably it required someone having to come along and rescue him. Typical examples were his trips north to San Francisco, where he’d hang with the Pop Patrol, his own fan club made up of stalwarts from the Bimbo’s and Cockettes scene. On his return, Iggy would usually be, as Danny Sugerman put it, ‘feminised’: hair dyed black, wearing mascara and foundation and a skimpy dress. The dress wasn’t as much a problem as the fact that his San Francisco admirers would ply him with heroin and Quaaludes. On one occasion, Manzarek was called up by Sugerman, who begged him to come to the Hollywood jail to bail out his new bandmate. The two arrived and found, among the usual gang members, junkies and hookers, Jim Osterberg, in a long dress, with smeared eyeliner, bare-footed, drooling and mumbling. Manzarek, the only one with the necessary cash on hand, bailed him out.

  Iggying out could also refer to his behaviour with Bebe Buell, who flew over to see him in April and took him to Hamburger Hamlet in her rented convertible. During a quick trip to the bathroom while the motor was being refuelled, Iggy doled her out a neat line of powder on the toilet cistern, which she inhaled in one go on the assumption it was cocaine, only for Jim to tell her that it was heroin. The pair took refuge in Ben Edmonds’ apartment, where Bebe was sent off to puke in the bathroom. Jim gently showered her clean, while Ben yelled, ‘Don’t you clog up my drain with your puke, godammit!’ from the living room. As Jim apologised, Bebe shouted at him, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ then got in her car and split.

  Another typical Iggy trick might be to arrive at a practice two hours late, then walk into the rehearsal room stark naked. This sometimes happened when Ray was auditioning a new musician, for instance Alice Cooper’s one-time guitarist Dick Wagner. A similar example was the time when Danny Sugerman had persuaded Clive Davis to come and check out Ray’s amazing new band. Davis turned up at 2pm as arranged and started chatting with Ray. No Iggy. The conversation continued for another hour or so. Still no Iggy. ‘Finally it gets to five o’clock, and Ray’s run out of every Doors story he can tell Clive,’ says Nigel Harrison. ‘Then suddenly a yellow cab, which is rare in LA, shows up, and it’s Iggy in his underwear, totally fucking buzzing on something.’

  Clive Davis looked at Manzarek and smiled. ‘Well, Ray, I guess some things never change.’

  Ray Manzarek believes the psychological motivation behind Jim and Iggy’s behaviour was simple. ‘It was about: who are you? The problem was: am I Iggy Pop, the crazy wild man, doyenne of the Cockettes, or am I Jim Osterberg, the good poet, the good singer? He would have had to put that on the line in front of Clive Davis and choose one of those personas. And I think rather than confront that choice it was easier not to appear.’

  When he wasn’t crashing at Wonderland Avenue, Jim would find refuge anywhere across the Valley. Despite his wild mood swings and eccentric behaviour, he usually seemed conscious of what he could get away with. Some people speculated that, despite his apparent confusion, he was simply using Manzarek and Sugerman until something better came along. ‘He was often out of it,’ says writer and producer Harvey Kubernick, who crashed at the same house as Jim for a few weeks, ‘but you also had the sense you were watching Rommel working out exactly where to place his tanks.’ Kubernick was staying in the Laurel Canyon home of his friend Bob Sherman, and Jim intuitively understood Kubernick and Sherman’s ambition to break into the music business. He charmed them, rather than exploited them, and when he cheerily welcomed Sherman with the words, ‘Hey, Bob, let’s go get a slab and a beer,’ Sherman hardly resented the fact that when they ordered their spread, at Harry’s Open Pit BBQ on Sunset, he was invariably expected to pick up the tab.

  By the summer of 1974, Manzarek was openly floating the idea of producing an Iggy album, mentioning the idea to Rolling Stone, and Sugerman was keen to project his new charge as a responsible, reformed individual - despite the mass of evidence to the contrary. Over June and July, Iggy guested a couple of times at Manzarek’s sets at the Whisky, singing on old Doors numbers like ‘LA Woman’ or ‘Back Door Man’; he cut a respectable figure on stage, and a damaged, sad one off it. One night rock fan Jim Parrett and wife Dee Dee saw a ball of arms, legs and pink fur bouncing down the stairs of the Whisky. As the strange apparation hit the bottom it uncoiled and jumped up to greet them with a cheeky grin. ‘Hi, I’m Iggy!’ A couple of nights later he accosted Dee Dee backstage, asking her, ‘Hey, wanna see me do a somersault,’ and obliging, then boasting, child-like, ‘That’s nothing, here’s a double whammy.’ Another time, Kim Fowley invited Iggy onto the Whisky stage to introduce his latest creations, the Hollywood Stars. Clad in his pink feather concoction, Iggy commanded a beat from the drummer before improvising a monologue. ‘I didn’t useta like the Hollywood Stars, I useta like the New York Dolls, then I heard ’em play “Satisfaction”, now I wanna sleep with ’em.’ The crowd was impressed, until they realised he had no intention of leaving the stage; the Hollywood Stars’ roadies vainly attempted to peel him off the microphone stand, before the band gave up and allowed him to guest on a couple of songs. After the show he accosted Jim and Dee Dee once more, his face puffy and lined, asking them, ‘Wanna see my cock? Take as many photos as you want and send ’em to London. They love me there, you’ll make a lot of money.’

  The Parretts interviewed Jim for their fanzine, Denim Delinquent; in conversation he was coherent, but his mood was dark and defeatist, and his main hope seemed to be that he would be asked to sing in a reformed Doors line-up. ‘He was so vulnerable, you wanted to wrap your arms around him and protect him, despite the bravado he occasionally projected,’ says Jim Parrett, who sensed that the singer felt angry about how he was being portrayed, yet was incapable of doing anything about it.

  There could be no better indication of the depths to which Jim had sunk than his first full post-Stooges performance. Jim and Ray had been working on a loosely themed piece, which pasted together a number of musical movements in the vein of the Doors’ Soft Parade. ‘Maybe there’d be acting, talking, girls on stage,’ says Manzarek. ‘The idea was to keep on expanding it.’ The first anyone heard of actually staging this extravaganza was when Iggy turned up at Nigel Harrison’s apartment just by the Whisky early in the morning (‘which of course means he’d been up all night buzzing on something,’ says Harrison) on 11 August. He sat down on the edge of the mattress where Nigel and his blonde Bowie-lookalike girlfriend Suzette were attempting to snooze, insisted Nigel pick up his bass, and started singing a simple riff, telling Nigel to keep playing a drone in F sharp. It transpired that Jim had worked up the song - which was based on the Velvets’ ‘Some Kinda Love’ and revolved around the lyric ‘put jelly on your shoulder’ - with Ray, but that Ray had declined to participate in this ‘premature artistic ejaculation’. Ordering Nigel to turn up at Rodney’s English Disco at nine, and mentioning he was off to find a guitarist, a drummer and, cryptically, a virgin, Iggy disappeared onto the Strip.

  He found his guitarist at the Coronet, knocking on the sky-blue front door of 404 to rouse Ron Asheton, telling him: ‘You still got your Nazi uniform? Good, bring that, and you’ll need to brutalise me, so bring a whip too.’

  No one is sure where Iggy found his drummer, but, unsurprisingly, he found it impossible to locate a virgin, and instead had to settle for a gay youth who was dining at Denny’s, just down from Rodney’s. In the meantime, he ordered Danny Sugerman to phone up every journalist he knew and tell them to expect ‘a landmark performance’ at Rodney’s that evening, which would be entitled Murder of a Virgin. Sugerman spent hours on the phone, telling his contacts, ‘Your name’s on the guest list, and you better come because he’s only going to be doing this once,’ floating once again the delicious prospect that Iggy would commit suicide on stage.

  Rodney Bingenheimer was delighted at the prospect of Iggy performing at his club - the singer told him ‘he wanted to show the glitter crowd what real rock ’n’ roll was all about’ - and volunteered to resume his old job as radio plugger. Rodne
y duly picked Jim up in his black Cadillac convertible and drove him to KNAC, where they buzzed on the intercom - only to be told that Iggy Pop was not allowed in the building.

  There was a line outside Rodney’s for the show, although once inside the packed club it was impossible to see what was going on unless you were right at the edge of the mirrored dance floor, where Iggy, wearing a pair of Jim Morrison’s leather pants borrowed from Danny Sugerman, declaimed in front of a huge drum kit. Nigel Harrison kept up a rhythmic pulse, and Ron Asheton, wearing his Afrika Korps uniform, complete with swastika armband, brandished a ‘sconce’ he’d carefully crafted from a length of electrical flex. The ‘virgin’, who was wearing some kind of sacrificial white robe, looked nervous, but it soon transpired that the victim would be Iggy himself. Iggy had brought along a hang-man’s noose and started waving a steak knife he’d borrowed from Sugerman’s kitchen.

  ‘Do you want to see blood?’ he yelled at the Hollywood crowd.

  ‘YEAHH!’ they shouted back.

  ‘Do you really want to see blood?’ he asked again.

  ‘YES WE WANT TO SEE BLOOD!’ they shouted as one.

  ‘Beat me with the whip!’ he ordered Ron, who instead pulled on the noose, to choke him a little bit. ‘No, whip me, hurt me!’ he insisted, and Ron laid into him. ‘Then he goes up to a black guy,’ says Ron, ‘and tried to make him stab him with this rusty kitchen knife. He wouldn’t, so Iggy did it himself.’

  ‘Then he carved an X into his chest,’ says Nigel Harrison. ‘I was really scared, because he’d mentioned he wanted to kill off Iggy Pop. But also I was worried he might get blood on my brand new Kensington Market polka-dot top.’

  ‘We were not at all easily shocked back then,’ says Pamela Des Barres, ‘but that was really, really shocking. We were all very worried. Yet it seemed a logical next step for Iggy, letting us in on his anger and frustration.’

  It was all over in fifteen minutes. ‘Then they put him in a burlap bag, out of the club and into the gutter,’ says Ron. ‘It was horrible. He was fried.’

  ‘I never really planned the blood,’ says Jim today. ‘Then as I got nearer I made the decision to use the knife. It was unnecessary. It didn’t really work . . . it was bad blood, the blood at Max’s Kansas City was nicer blood, much less cynical blood. I was desperate.’

  When Jim Osterberg had created Iggy Pop, his alter ego had been the medium, to help him communicate his music. Now, Iggy was the message, and the music was irrelevant compared to the spectacle of his ritual self-harm, which at this low point seemed to be all he had to offer.

  ‘He sacrificed himself for us at the rock ’n’ roll altar,’ says Kim Fowley. ‘As they did in the Roman Colosseum every Sunday when the lions would eat the Christians. And Iggy Pop is both the lion, and the Christian.’

  Danny Sugerman, the man who had publicised this spectacle, took Jim to the beach. ‘So he could dive in the Pacific Ocean and bathe his wounds. I waited like an hour and he didn’t come back. What was I gonna do? I wasn’t gonna swim out there looking for him. So I went home, took a couple of Quaaludes and went to bed.’

  The next morning, according to Danny Sugerman, he was woken by a phone call from a hysterical girl, screaming that Iggy was attacking her father’s Maserati with a hatchet. Meanwhile, Sugerman, too, was struggling to keep a grip on his own problems. But when Manzarek called to ask Sugerman how everything had gone at Rodney’s, Danny told him, ‘Great!’

  The weeks after the sad spectacle at Rodney’s continued in much the same fashion for Iggy: confused living conditions, sometimes hanging with whatever women would give him shelter, sometimes crashing with fellow musicians, who by now were used to the sight of a Quaaluded Iggy at their door. ‘He would regularly show up in a yellow mini-dress with this huge dick hanging out of it, and would go “I’m cold, I’m hungry,” and empty your refrigerator. Then the next minute he would be trying to crawl in bed with me and my girlfriend. Between us. That’s what it was like,’ laughs Nigel Harrison. Even when Iggy lucked into more luxurious living quarters, such as a wealthy woman called Alex who had a pleasant house in Stone Canyon, he was still a creative scam artist, sticking Band-Aids over his face before he left the house, remembers Harrison, so he could hang out at the Rainbow and moan, ‘I got beat up by two Puerto Ricans, I got no money!’ hoping to beg some cash or drugs.

  Unfortunately, real life soon conspired to imitate such scams, when Jim turned up to see David Bowie at LA’s Universal Amphitheater at the beginning of September. He’d already suffered the humiliation of trying to find Bowie at the Beverly Hills Hotel, cadging a ride there with Ron’s friend Doug Currie and realising his one-time champion was nowhere to be found. Now, walking through the parking lot, he and Sugerman were bounced by two surfers, who enticed Jim to a quiet corner with the offer of drugs, then beat the two of them up. Ron Asheton saw Jim sitting outside Wonderland Avenue the next morning, missing a front tooth and complaining that Sugerman had abandoned him to his fate. These weren’t the only humiliations over this period. In the autumn, Iggy ill-advisedly popped up on Flo and Eddie’s radio show. The KROQ DJs were celebrated for their witty lampooning, and when Iggy guested to chat and sing along to records, it was obvious his days of fast-talking repartee were behind him. Flo and Eddie, a hip duo who’d made their name playing with the Turtles and Frank Zappa, were laughing at him, not with him. The same scenario was being played out at locations like Rodney’s, the Whisky and the Rainbow, where, says Jim Parrett, ‘Every time we saw Jim, even though people were deferential to him in some ways, they were laughing about him.’

  In October, Nick Kent flew over to see his hero and was shocked to realise that Iggy seemed to have ‘the word “Loser” tattooed on his forehead. I’d have to tell people, again and again, “This guy is not a loser. This guy is king of the world. This guy has created a music, you don’t even realise it yet, but it’s going to change the face of the world!”’ As the two sat and talked, Jim was quite often lucid, but revealed to Kent how spooked he had been by the disasters the Stooges had undergone, and how he believed there was a hex on the band. Kent was shocked by Jim’s condition, horrified to see him occasionally sleeping rough, or passed out in a parking lot, in a dress, zonked out on who knew how many Quaaludes. Sometimes Jim would cry about the condition in which he found himself. But although existential despair was sometimes the cause, the tears were just as likely to be inspired by his inability to score drugs. Overwhelmed with sadness at the condition in which he found his hero, Kent resolved to help him, and picked up an open-reel tape of the Stooges’ disastrous Michigan Palace show in the hope that he might be able to raise some money with it back in Europe.

  By now Jim seemed to have made up whatever his last disagreement with Williamson had been. It was impossible to make sense of most of his relationships at the time, says Tony Sales, who had become friendly with James and his girlfriend Evita. ‘I know Jim confided in James over that period. And he also told James to fuck off. At times we’d get along, and at other times he’d tell me to piss off. A lot of the time it was the drugs speaking. One’s values and intellect and integrity [are] challenged by that shit - it’s hard to put a marker on something like that and say that’s how someone [really] is.’ Jim moved into James’s apartment at 306, the Coronet, which gave him some stability, even though most of the building’s hookers and Hollywood wannabes who maintained a sideline in selling junk and Quaaludes refused to speak to him, thanks to unpaid drug debts. Earlier in 1974, Jim had been so desperate he’d even contemplated making a living playing with pick-up bands for Hollywood’s jet-set house parties. He’d also at one point arranged to audition as the singer for Kiss, but hadn’t turned up. He was, however, mortally offended when Nick Kent asked him if he’d ever considered putting his impressive penis to work in Hollywood’s thriving porno industry. By the autumn he was becoming more committed to the idea of reviving the spirit of the Stooges and reuniting with James - which meant a break with Manzarek, for the ex-Doo
rs player and James Williamson had little time for each other musically or personally. However, for the one show Danny Sugerman had actually booked for the Manzarek and Iggy supergroup he was attempting to tout, Iggy insisted that Williamson join the band, despite Ray’s misgivings. Iggy sported pristine new front teeth for the occasion, presumably funded by Sugerman or Manzarek.

  The show Sugerman had booked was a prestigious event that set Hollywood’s rock ’n’ roll community abuzz. The Hollywood Street Revival and Trash Dance, staged at the Hollywood Palladium on 9 October, would be popularly known as the Death of Glitter once the MC, Kim Fowley, and others got it into their heads that the event would be a modern-day counterpart to Haight-Ashbury’s symbolic Death of the Hippie ceremony in October 1967. The event was built around the New York Dolls - the Cockettes were also booked but were banned by comedian Lawrence Welk, who considered them depraved - and Iggy was determined to show these upstarts how high-energy rock music should really sound. Unfortunately, a hurried rehearsal at Wonderland Avenue the day before meant the band only had time to throw together a set full of cover versions. The show was competent and aggressive but for many fans it was a disappointment. As Manzarek, Williamson, Scott Morgan - ex-singer of the Rationals, who’d ended up in LA and was called in to guest on harmonica - Nigel Harrison and drummer Gary Mallaber stormed through rock ’n’ roll staples including ‘Route 66’, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Everybody Needs Somebody To Love’, there were flashes of fire and energy - notably when Iggy kicked a stage-invading female fan in the backside, propelling her back into the audience - and Manzarek was delighted, declaring the band ‘rocked like a motherfucker’. But the show represented an end, rather than a beginning. Manzarek declared he couldn’t work with Williamson - ‘there was no sonic space when you had this guitar turned up to 11, like Spinal Tap’ - while Jim responded that without Williamson he would lose his audience. To which Manzarek’s response, of course, was, ‘What audience?’