Iggy Pop Page 29

  It was during his visit to CBGB back in April 1976 that Jim had first become aware of what would be termed the punk movement (he himself ascribes the first use of the term to Lenny Kaye, via his description of the Stooges’ debut as ‘the music of punks cruising for burgers’). That first encounter with the CBGB regulars gave him a sense that ‘something was about to break’, which was heightened as he heard tapes of the Sex Pistols and the Damned later in 1976.

  But even as the first punk singles trickled onto the market, Iggy would release an album that showed his acolytes how it was done. Metallic KO was a live recording of the band’s final, painful show at the Michigan Palace, and was midwifed by Nick Kent and Marc Zermati. Nick had obtained the tape of the show, which was recorded by Michael Tipton, in late 1974 from James Williamson. Zermati - who had launched his own Skydog label with an EP by the Flaming Groovies in May 1973 - later got hold of the tape of the Stooges’ earlier Michigan Palace show, and edited the two tapes to make up a 39-minute album that was released in September 1976. It remains for many the ultimate punk album: flawed, like so many contemporaries, pathetic in its proud inarticulacy (‘One, two, fuck you pricks’), yet unutterably majestic when the band was in full flight, on ‘Raw Power’ or ‘Louie Louie’. For Peter Hook, bassist in a Manchester band who’d later rename themselves Joy Division, Metallic KO would be both a huge influence, and a signpost to where he himself was heading. ‘It just sounds like the sort of gig that we used to have in the early days - on a knife edge. That was why it was so fucking exciting, the best live album ever made, far more so than most bloody live CDs where everyone’s clapping.’ Without a doubt, Metallic KO’s negativity and violence influenced the emerging UK punk movement, encouraging bottle-throwing and spitting, and for Jim himself, says Nick Kent, ‘It [was] a dark record. I know that Iggy was spooked by it.’

  Dark as it was, Metallic KO would be the first Stooges album released into a world that was finally ready for it. In the UK, both leading music weeklies, NME and Sounds, had reinvented themselves on the back of the emerging punk movement, and both the NME’s Nick Kent and Sounds’ Giovanni Dadomo championed the album and its singer consistently and devotedly. Despite legal threats from Tony Defries, who sent cease-and-desist letters to Zermati, stating the Stooges were still under contract to MainMan, the three-year-old recording became one of the key releases of the UK punk scene in particular, and would sell over 100,000 copies. It would soon be followed by a Stooges single, ‘I Got a Right’, mastered from a MainMan-era demo supplied by James Williamson. Released by Philippe Mogane’s Siamese Dog label in March, this lost, once-rejected piledriving track was greeted with extravagant praise right across Europe.

  As England embraced his past, Jim flew over to showcase his present, opening a tour to promote The Idiot on 1 March 1977 at Aylesbury Friars - a small club an hour out of London that David Bowie favoured for low-key launches before the higher-profile London shows. The tour was organised by Bowie’s MAM agency, run by John Giddings and Ian Wright, who told Friars promoter David Stopps that Bowie would be guesting on keyboards, but swore him to secrecy. That afternoon, the band were tense, with Iggy quite obviously nervous; instead it was David Bowie, in brown cords, chequered shirt and flat cap, who was the epitome of low-key affability, greeting Stopps like an old chum - ‘What’s a smart young guy like you still doing in a place like this?’ - remaining calm when the band’s equipment was delayed in customs, and instructing the promoter to open the doors and let the fans in, even though they’d had time for only the most cursory soundcheck. ‘David was definitely playing second fiddle to Iggy - and enjoying it,’ remembers Stopps, ‘revelling in the lack of pressure.’

  The show was packed with London’s punk aristocracy: the Damned’s Brian James, the Heartbreakers’ Johnny Thunders and Billy Rath, the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock and Iggy’s long-time supporter Nick Kent were all present, as were members of Generation X and the Adverts, who watched a slick show, drawn from all three Stooges albums plus The Idiot; as the audience realised who was playing keyboards, the crowd grew deeper at Bowie’s side of the stage. Faced with the legendary singer who, for many of them, was a icon of aggression and excess, the crowd were mostly ecstatic at seeing him alive and well - albeit disappointed to see him dispensing with the practices that had nearly rendered him dead or damaged. ‘[Iggy] was mesmerising,’ says Brian James, who was slightly disturbed by the presence of David Bowie on keyboards, while Kris Needs, who reviewed the show for Roxette magazine, pronounced Iggy ‘captivating - but not the Detroit Demon we’d hoped for’. After the show, Brian James got into an argument with Johnny Thunders, who complained that the Bowie-backed Iggy had ‘gone cabaret’.

  Much the same positive but restrained reaction attended subsequent live dates, as well as The Idiot itself which was released later that month and was promoted in tandem with Bowie’s own Low, released in January. Some fans expected Iggy’s new album to sound like the last one and regretted the loss of James Williamson’s high-octane guitar assault, although there were enough adherents to ensure that, at last, Iggy made the upper reaches of the album charts: The Idiot appeared at a respectable number 30 in the UK (it would later chart at number 72 in the US). Only in retrospect would most people realise the dark power of songs like ‘Nightclubbing’ and ‘Dum Dum Boys’, which prefigured the sound of 1980s pop. Those juicy synthesisers, doom-laden vocals and dark, gothic guitar work would establish the tonal palette for bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine, the Birthday Party and Bauhaus. More poignantly, The Idiot would be the favourite album of Joy Division’s inspirational, emotionally disturbed singer Ian Curtis; the album was still spinning on Curtis’s turntable when the singer hanged himself in May 1980. ‘Although,’ says Curtis’s friend and bassist Peter Hook, with a mixture of sadness, sympathy and trademark black humour, ‘I don’t think Iggy can take the rap for it.’

  As the tour progressed, Iggy’s antics became wilder, and the band’s performance at London’s Rainbow, propelled by the Sales brothers’ unstoppable momentum, was viciously efficient (Johnny Rotten turned up after the show to pay tribute). Ironically, they would still fall foul of a newly emerging punk conservatism in the pages of Melody Maker, where Mark P, of punk fanzine Sniffin Glue, complained that Iggy didn’t ‘get in the audience and break some seats’. Ricky Gardiner in particular was regularly criticised in print for his lack of aggression, but in fact that was part of the plan: Gardiner’s clangy Stratocaster sound and Bowie’s electric piano had both been chosen to add a new clarity to the mix and give Iggy’s voice more prominence. But if the band ignored punk convention for those early dates, as they tore through twenty-six shows in six weeks there was plenty of backstage carnage to complement the onstage professionalism. Tony Sales would regularly find himself ‘walking through the hallways of hotels naked and stoned. It wasn’t a party. It was strange. It was over-the-top exhaustion and to cover the exhaustion you’d do more cocaine and after a while it doesn’t do anything.’ Hunt and Tony Sales calculate they each lost around twenty-five pounds in weight over the six weeks; as the tour went on, Tony remembers Iggy climbing a monitor stack before falling backwards and smashing onto the stage. ‘He didn’t feel anything when it happened, because he was so out of it.’ Bowie reckoned, ‘The drug use was unbelievable and I knew it was killing me, so that was a difficult side of it.’ By the time the band reached America, says Hunt Sales, they were ‘pretty burnt’, while their singer was becoming ‘very erratic, very obsessive, and you don’t know from one moment who you’re dealing with’. But for all his infuriating, confusing manias and obsessions, Hunt points out, Iggy was ‘a trooper. He did a great job every gig.’

  Jim Osterberg, too, would turn in some fabulous performances, most notably on Dinah Shore’s afternoon talk show, where he incongruously guested alongside Bowie on 15 April. The show was filmed at the CBS studios off Beverly Boulevard, and Iggy is introduced as the ‘originator of punk rock’, performing elegantly on the two son
gs, ‘Sister Midnight’ and ‘Funtime’ - a taut bundle of callisthenic energy, kept firmly under control until the thrilling climax of each song. But it is Jim Osterberg, doe-eyed, boyish and coy, who wins over Dinah Shore, who sighs in horror at the prospect of what Iggy was doing to himself physically, before Jim cheekily interrupts, ‘and to other people too’, fluttering his mascara’d eyelashes, charming with his Jimmy Stewart voice and his naughty Donald Sutherland smile. The same cheeky charm was evident in the many press interviews Jim participated in on what was his first proper, professionally organised world tour. Throughout all of these encounters there were two common threads: first, the open acknowledgement of his many faults, and his readiness to denigrate or mock himself. Second, the almost scarily consistent belief in his music, the sense that he has a manifest destiny to make it, and the conviction that his music will change the world.

  Perhaps this sense of destiny was what drove Iggy’s next creative act. Possibly it was augmented by the unique, intense artistic environment of Berlin, by the supreme musicianship of his band, or by a newly emerging creative rivalry with David Bowie. In truth, all of those involved in the recording of Lust For Life share the same feeling, that it was impossible to analyse what lay behind the sensation of being carried along in something that was bigger than all of them: ‘It was like a dream,’ says Tony Sales. ‘We were sleepwalking.’

  A necessary rite of passage before Iggy’s recording of Lust For Life was Jim’s renting of a flat of his own. It came shortly after a last fling in LA at the end of The Idiot tour, when he sunbathed on the beach, enjoyed a brief romantic idyll with writer Pleasant Gehman, and hung out at the Whisky, just as he turned thirty. On his return to Berlin, Jim signed the contract for his new flat with landlady Rosa Morath, who also owned Bowie’s apartment; incredibly, it was the first time Jim had had a long-term lease in his own name, paid for with his own money, thanks to a new contract and a $25,000 advance from RCA, negotiated back in January. The flat was at the rear of the 155 Hauptstrasse building, in the Hinterhof - the more modest, lower-ceilinged mews apartments that would once have served as servants’ quarters or work premises. The rent was just 184 DM per month - cheap, because the flat had no hot water, which suited his new no-frills, hard-working ethic. It was a new start and Jim Osterberg ‘felt real good’.

  For The Idiot, David Bowie had contracted the studio time and owned the master tapes, according to Jim, and had been in the stronger position. By now, Jim believed, Bowie was pretty sick of Iggy’s rock histrionics, and Jim was ‘pretty sick of where Bowie was coming from - so there was a lot of friction’. But both were fired up by the project, and the irritation each felt with the other was laced with respect: ‘It was an ideas friction, not a personal one,’ says Jim.

  From the moment the project was mooted, there was intense competition between the two, both of them vying to contribute more songs. Bowie called Carlos Alomar to ask him to take charge of the band - which in the case of the Sales brothers, and quite possibly Bowie and Iggy too, was like being asked to tame a particularly nervy purebred stallion. Alomar loved the challenge of harnessing what he called their ‘wanton abandonment’, realising he could channel the Saleses’ rambunctiousness, even if he couldn’t hope to turn it on and off like a light switch.

  For both Bowie and Iggy, the Lust For Life sessions were the first project conceived and completed in Berlin, and the city’s ambience would be firmly imprinted in the grooves of the record. The two main protagonists, as well as the Sales brothers, had immersed themselves in the decadence of Los Angeles, but Berlin offered them the chance to turn their excess into art, rather than the rootless confusion they’d all suffered in California; the city offered a better class of decadence, one that focused their energies rather than sapping them. And throughout there was the vision of the Berlin Wall, which was still visible from Tonstudio 3, says Carlos Alomar, with the gunners and their elevated hut now at eye level, ‘and beyond that the desolate nothingness of possible minefields and then in the background the silhouetted skyline of some buildings. Pretty dark, dismal and depressing.’ That image would impose its foreboding presence on David’s next project, “Heroes”, giving it a taut, wired edge, but on Lust For Life the spectre of the wall would inspire a glorious carnality and celebration, like the explosion of sexuality that had engulfed both London and Berlin in wartime. And in this isolated outpost of the West, Jim in particular found his own, curiously warped peace: ‘I was living on coke, hash, red wine, beer and German sausages, had my own little place and I was sleeping on a cot with cold-water showers.’ Iggy was also, as Tony Sales puts it, ‘on fire’.

  By the time the sessions began in June, David had already crafted the bulk of the music, some of it recorded on cassette, some of it played out on electric piano to the band, but every song was radically reworked in the studio, with others assembled from scratch. The album’s title track was one that defined the session; the opening chords of ‘Lust For Life’ were inspired by the staccato parping of a German brass-band theme from the Armed Forces TV network, and, says Jim, written on the ukulele in David’s apartment. The song was instantly seized upon by Hunt Sales, who slammed out the distinctive, exuberant rhythm, pulling the rest of the band in his wake. ‘You can’t play a counter rhythm to that,’ says Alomar. ‘You just had to follow.’ The drum beat sounded like the rhythms that newly freed African Americans had been playing back in the Mississippi hill country since the 1880s, advertising to listeners for miles around that a party was about to start.

  For Iggy, the sessions fast became a high-wire act, a test of his ability to improvise lyrics and vocal melodies as quickly as the musicians nailed the backing tracks. And, as Tony Sales observed, he was on fire. The lyrics to ‘Lust For Life’ were, according to most recollections, snatched out of the ether. The narrator is recognisably Iggy, but is namechecked as Johnny Yen, a William Burroughs character from The Ticket That Exploded; then a succession of arresting images follows, most of it off the cuff: ‘Who the hell but Iggy would dare say, “I’ve had it in the ear before”?’ asked Alomar. ‘What the hell does he mean? Is he reluctant to say it? No. Is David reluctant to put it on the album? Hell, no.’

  Plenty of songs were composed on the spot. Earlier in the year, Ricky Gardiner had enjoyed a moment of Wordsworthian inspiration when he was wandering in the countryside, ‘in the field beside an orchard, on one of those glorious spring days with the trees in full blossom’. A distinctive, circular chord sequence had popped into his mind. When David Bowie asked if Ricky had any song ideas, he remembered the riff, and Iggy seized on it, much as he had the first time he heard Ron Asheton play the ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ chord sequence. The lyrics were, like practically every other song on the album, written in the studio, or overnight, celebrating his journeys on the Berlin buses and U-bahn, where he’d ride and ride, contemplating the stars and the ripped-back signs (the song’s mood and title, he later mentioned, were inspired by a Jim Morrison poem). Like ‘Lust For Life’, ‘The Passenger’ was a simple celebration of life, of the long walks he’d taken soaking in his surroundings ever since he’d grown up in Ypsilanti; a reconciliation with the wide-eyed child Jim Osterberg, and the repudiation of Iggy Pop, the creature who’d sung about a ‘Death Trip’.

  The atmosphere between David and Iggy at the sessions was competitive, slightly manic at least on Iggy’s side; it was also ‘very loving’, according to Alomar and the Sales brothers. David drove Iggy hard, but understood implicitly how to channel the creative flow, ready to drop any other part of the recording whenever Iggy had a vocal idea he wanted to get down on tape. At some points, Iggy insisted on getting his own way; dissatisfied with David’s original melody on ‘Success’ - as heard on the finished version’s guitar counter-melody - which he thought sounded like ‘a damn crooning thing’, he arrived early at Hansa with the Sales brothers to egg him on and reworked the song, adding an optimistic six-note tune, and engagingly simple lyrics: ‘Here comes success . . . here comes m
y Chinese rug.’ The sentiment was semi-ironic, but it was semi-sincere, too, for Jim had just bought Chinese rugs for his simple cold-water apartment, and was relishing the prospect of, as Jim describes it, being ‘dragged kicking and screaming to a good outcome’. On ‘Success’, and other songs, there is the near-palpable presence of Esther Friedmann - whom Jim had been calling regularly for the last six months, despite the fact she was still living with surgeon boyfriend Norbert. She was the ideal woman and muse: ‘In the last ditch . . . I think of you.’ The infectious enthusiasm was highlighted by Hunt and Tony’s joyous backing vocals, recorded live in one take later that day, and the first time most of them had heard Iggy’s lyrics properly - you can still hear their giddy amusement at repeating lyrics like ‘Here comes my face . . . it’s plain bizarre’. (Bowie would mention later how he would emulate Iggy’s spontaneous approach to lyric writing, noting down a couple of words and improvising the rest, on “Heroes”.) The electrifying atmosphere was emphasised by Edu Meyer’s idea of plugging Iggy’s vocal mike into a Music Man guitar amplifier that was sitting outside the control room, which added a glassy, overdriven edge to his voice.