Iggy Pop Read online

  During a gruelling string of dates across Europe, the band developed a heads-down post-Stooges set that trampled roughshod over Iggy’s RCA material, transforming ‘Lust For Life’ and even ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ into dull generic rockers, but performing fiery, aggressive versions of ‘Kill City’ and a new song called ‘Five Foot One’. There was continuous, niggling friction between Iggy and Fred Smith, and when Jim asked the SRB to work with him in the US, the band turned him down - to Scott Asheton’s chagrin: ‘We had a holiday coming up, I hadn’t been home in a while. But if I’ve had known it meant so much I swear to God I would have stayed.’ It would be twenty years before Iggy would again play with the man he’d frequently namechecked as his favourite drummer, while his rivalry with Smith turned particularly nasty once he’d heard that Fred had gone over to Esther ’s flat to listen to some records with her. Shortly afterwards Iggy managed to get into the apartment when Esther was out and, says Esther, trashed it: ‘He took razor blades and put them in everything, in the lampshades, behind the mirrors, everywhere.’

  Over the next few years, Esther learned to accept such paranoia and insecurity, as well as Iggy’s rampant behaviour with groupies on tour: ‘After a while you realise that it’s all part of the Iggy persona, ’ she points out, while stressing that Jim Osterberg - the character she spent most of her time with - was sweet and considerate. If he had money, he’d share it; he was intelligent, romantic, always buying impulsive presents or flowers. He was also lovably humble when necessary. For instance, after one particularly bad quarrel, Esther heard the front door open and looked up to see a ludicrously kitsch clockwork doll waddling its way down the hall, chanting, ‘Baby come back, baby come back.’ ‘How could you say no to that?’ Esther laughs. ‘So we had a reconciliation. I couldn’t believe he actually went to the trouble to find this silly doll.’

  By the autumn of 1978, there was a comfortable domesticity at the Hinterhof apartment, which Esther decorated with tasteful pillows and artworks. This was Jim’s first regular experience of living with a woman, shopping, cooking, spending time together, or going round to friends’, like Martin Kippenberger, for Sunday brunch. David’s portrait of Iggy took pride of place in the living room alongside a hi-fi, tape recorder, TV and a shiny new Fender Telecaster with the price-tag still attached. Iggy would spend hours working up riffs, using a copy of the Stones’ Some Girls for inspiration, and ‘Stern’ pills - a mild, legal upper favoured by German schoolkids cramming for exams - for stimulation. With the advance from TV Eye Live banked, there were no financial pressures, and Jim had a new manager negotiating a new record deal. Peter Davies, who left his position as a senior executive in RCA London’s international department to take on Iggy’s business affairs, was a well liked, rather public-school character who was devoted to Iggy’s music; and Davies soon found a welcoming audience in the guise of Ben Edmonds - the Creem writer and editor who had recently joined Arista UK as head of A&R - and Charles Levison, the company’s managing director. They were both eager to sign Iggy. Edmonds was as convinced that Iggy could make a great commercial but aggressive album as he had been back in Kill City days, while Levison thought Iggy was ‘terrifically credible, wonderfully charismatic, an intriguing, complex character, and one of the brightest, most intelligent artists I’d ever met’.

  There was only one problem: the founder of Arista, Clive Davis, the man who’d been persuaded to sign Iggy Pop to Columbia back in 1971, who wasn’t about to repeat the mistake. According to Levison, Davis’s objections were not to do with Iggy’s personal habits: ‘Clive was used to rock ’n’ roll behaviour. His objections were purely commercial.’ Davis had hired Levison in January 1978 to oversee all of Arista’s business outside the US, and after fierce discussions, he allowed Levison to have his own way. But Davis’s repeatedly and forcefully stated objections increased the pressure on both Levison and Iggy.

  Clive Davis’s lack of enthusiasm presented a potential problem for Iggy’s records in the US, but with Arista’s advance cheque in the bank and a small selection of songs written, Jim was happy, and worked hard, overjoyed to have secured a deal under his own auspices. In the autumn, Scott Thurston flew over to Berlin to work on more material; the partners were productive, composing three songs that would make the final record, reviving two others that they’d worked on back in Iggy’s down-and-out Kill City era - ‘Angel’ and ‘Curiosity’ - and at least four or five more. Some of the new material fell through the cracks; one of the best lost songs, according to Thurston, was called ‘Hey Coco’, presumably dedicated to Coco Schwab. Only years later, says Scott, who went on to work with Jackson Browne and Tom Petty, would he realise what a creative musician Iggy was. ‘I would say he was pretty fabulous. Pretty fantastic. But I don’t think I appreciated it back then like I would now.’ Today, Thurston reflects that he simply ‘didn’t quite have the writing chops’ to do justice to Iggy’s work, describing the results as ‘not totally unsuccessful. And not totally successful.’ His opinion would be shared by most of those involved on what became the New Values album.

  It was David Bowie who found Jim a drummer; he called up Klaus Kruger, a friend of Martin Kippenberger who’d hung out in the Berlin clubs with David and Jim, and had just played drums on Tangerine Dream’s Force Majeure album at Hansa. Peter Davies and Jim had called up James Williamson out of the blue, and Ben Edmonds was enthusiastic about hiring him as the producer - even though he blamed James for running off with the Kill City masters that Ben had funded back in 1974. ‘I didn’t ever bring up the subject, ’ says Ben. ‘What a chump!’ (He does point out that at the time James took them, the tapes had no commercial value.) Scottie Thurston brought bassist Jackie Clark, who’d played with him on his last gig, Ike and Tina Turner.

  The band and producer assembled in Los Angeles, and they bonded well during their rehearsals at SIR and in Scottie Thurston’s basement rehearsal studio. They were a hilariously disparate crew: Klaus was all earnest, his playing tight and crisp, and spent much of rehearsals with headphones on listening to a click track; Jackie Clark had been strictly an R&B musician, but ‘got it’ straight away, and started dressing for the part in a country-and-western Nudie suit and Stetson. Scottie, as ever, was cute, amenable and enthusiastic. Williamson, too, was hard-working; he was wearing slick suits, and showed a new focus on being organised and professional. Williamson’s new image was something of a front for his own insecurity; his musical self-confidence had been irreparably damaged by his disastrous career with the Stooges, and he had more or less given up the guitar. ‘I used to have fun playing the guitar, but it was always an emotional outlet for me,’ he says today, adding with understatement that ‘there was some baggage associated with that’. Williamson, understandably given their history, was cynical about Jim’s motives. At the end of 1978 his only contact with Jim was via Peter Davies, who called regularly to complain about his involvement in releasing Kill City. Then when the album, which was credited to ‘Iggy Pop and James Williamson’, became a critical success, it seemed Williamson’s name had a commercial cachet once more and Davies’ phonecalls suddenly got friendly. ‘Jim was hoping I would come back and get the rock dream again,’ says Williamson. ‘But by that time I had changed my views.’ Williamson was determined to avoid personal involvement with his one-time friend. ‘This was strictly a professional effort.’

  With three-fifths of the old Stooges finally assembled in one place, there were many mementoes of their old lifestyle, too. The band got kicked out of the Tropicana for attracting too many groupies and making too much noise - Iggy would sit in his room naked but for his Telecaster, which he played at staggering volume at three in the morning. Peter Davies arrived with his girlfriend Clare, who became Esther ’s friend and companion when Iggy disappeared to find groupies. Davies had organised the trip impeccably, but his professional manner didn’t last, according to Esther: ‘Peter was very, very together in the beginning, but unfortunately the guy developed a taste for cocaine and just b
ecame hopeless - but that was definitely a result of hanging out with us. He hadn’t gone near the stuff before.’

  As the small party of musicians were thrown out of one hotel after another, their surroundings became progressively seedier, concluding with the Wigwam Hotel, a kitsch 1930s hotel complex with individual chalets fashioned as brightly coloured concrete tepees, which was dilapidated and crumbling; its clientele was now mainly hookers and their johns, who’d rent a chalet by the hour.

  Although the amounts of cocaine consumed during the recording of New Values at Paramount Studios - which was where James had trained as a recording engineer - were prodigious, the sessions were efficient, with Thurston directing the band, and James working closely with Iggy on the lyrics and vocals. On the best songs, ‘Five Foot One’ and ‘I’m Bored’, the sound was taut and stripped down, obviously influenced by the Stones’ Some Girls, but tougher and more malevolent: there was a new restraint in Iggy’s singing that only emphasised the power he had in reserve, and there were new, intriguingly minimal experiments like ‘The Endless Sea’. Other promising songs, though, were lost under a bland mix and swamped by corny overdubbed horns and backing vocals, leading Ben Edmonds to conclude that: ‘James was a good producer, but he was so concerned with pushing his professional credentials, he mixed the songs like he was mixing cardboard.’ For all that, New Values, released in April 1979, was a modestly impressive album and became a modest success, reaching number 60 in the UK album charts, while ‘I’m Bored’ became a staple of rock radio across Europe, and also in the US, especially on East Coast stations like Boston’s WBCN. But Clive Davis, preferring to concentrate on his own artists, like Whitney Houston and Barry Manilow, refused to release New Values until the autumn, by which time it had become old news, and the album peaked at number 180 in the US.

  Once again, it seemed that the best way to promote the album was with live dates, and Iggy hit the road once more. Sometimes it felt, over the next four years, that he never left it.

  Ex-Sex Pistol Glen Matlock - whose own band, the Rich Kids, had just split - was sitting in his Maida Vale flat one day wondering what to do next when the phone rang, and Peter Davies asked if he would like to speak to Iggy Pop. A few days later, he was lunching with Jim Osterberg at Mayfair’s Athenaeum Hotel, and he agreed to join Iggy’s band on bass, with Jackie Clark switching to guitar. He spent the next two months on the road, bringing his friend Henry McGroggan - who’d been road manager for the Rich Kids and, before that, Scottish glam band Slik - along too; McGroggan would become the longest-serving accomplice of Iggy’s career. As an ex-Sex Pistol, who’d written most of the music to hits like ‘Anarchy In The UK’, ‘No Future’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’, Matlock looked to be a useful signing, given that Iggy had not so far set the world alight with his solo songwriting. Perhaps for that reason, Scott Thurston, who’d been Iggy’s main musical partner over the last year, decided to bail out, taking his friend Jackie Clark with him. (Jackie Clark would die a few years later.) The last straw for Scottie was hearing the band was due to record another album straight after the tour, in Wales. ‘Finally I blew up. I was like, why the fuck have we got to work with Glen Matlock? Why do you want to record in Wales? Why have Peter Davies as manager? Why the bullshit? Why don’t we just do something good?!’

  By the summer of 1979, Iggy Pop was an artist who commanded almost universal respect. He was widely acknowledged as the architect of much of the musical landscape of the late 1970s; and, more than many, he seemed, in the form of Lust For Life and New Values, to have progressed from the simple punk blueprint that so many of his acolytes were still following. It was this reasonable assessment of his career that seemed to inform the strategy of ‘one last push’, which inspired the recording of Iggy’s next album, Soldier. ‘One last push’, everyone agreed, might finally help Iggy achieve mainstream success - to ‘cross over’, in the industry parlance. But as any military historian would confirm, the strategy of ‘one last push’ invariably precedes a disaster.

  Early in 1979, Ben Edmonds had left Arista for EMI, leaving Arista’s new head of A&R, Tarquin Gotch, to manage the career of Edmonds’ major signings, Iggy Pop and Simple Minds. There was little rapport or understanding between Gotch and Iggy. ‘We simply never had a proper conversation, or a proper relationship,’ says Gotch, who did, perhaps, make the suggestion of teaming Iggy with a British ‘New Wave’ band and having him record out in Wales at Rockfield, a residential studio based in an old farm near Monmouth. Once again, Williamson was engaged as producer. Williamson had been fairly happy with New Values - ‘Jim came in with a bunch of crap to record and we had turned it into something half decent’ - but felt he’d expended a huge amount of his personal capital and energy on the work. The second time around, he found it impossible to muster the same commitment, and he was particularly unhappy about having to record in Wales, without Scott Thurston. ‘With New Values I’d been able to exert a lot of control,’ he remembers. ‘This time around, Iggy and Peter Davies were trying to get that control back.’ Despite his reservations, Williamson agreed to take the job, for one last time.

  As far as Glen Matlock and Klaus Kruger were concerned, the preparations for Soldier started promisingly. Klaus had driven over from Berlin to London, met up with Jim and James Williamson, who were both renting apartments in Mayfair, and was impressed to see Williamson playing guitar at rehearsals: ‘He had his Les Paul cranked up through a fifty-watt Marshall amplifier, and it sounded fantastic.’ Yet, for all the bravado and aggression of his Stooges days, Williamson was still unhappy about playing guitar, and once Matlock brought in his ex-Rich Kids bandmate, Steve New, Williamson withdrew, leaving New to play all the guitar parts. Matlock, however, noticed the pressure on Jim, who’d been called on to write a new album immediately after coming off the road, whether inspiration struck or not, and without a band with whom he knew he could gel.

  Keyboard player Barry Andrews, a founder member of quirky Swindon popsters XTC, was another new recruit brought in to add some New Wave credibility. Since leaving XTC, Andrews had dropped out, living in a squat and, he says, practising ‘extreme sex’. For a while he’d worked part-time at London Zoo, so it soon became a standing joke with the musicians that Andrews was there to add a certain English weirdness. ‘Whaddya expect, he came from a zoo!’ At his first lunch with Jim and James, Andrews thought Williamson seemed exceptionally straight - almost excessively concerned with being the efficient, radio-friendly producer. Jim was charming and bizarrely flirty, ‘as he seemed to be with all the young boys,’ says Andrews. But once he joined the rehearsals at a studio near Borough Market, he was bemused to discover how casual it all seemed. Glen Matlock was the closest thing to a bandleader, the one who told everyone the chord changes, but overall there seemed more interest in the large bins stocked with cold beers than in honing the material. It all seemed thin, ill-prepared and worst of all, says Andrews, ‘No one was flying the plane.’

  At this point, although it had been a struggle casting around for inspiration for lyrics, Jim seemed unconcerned. So far, all of his albums had come together at the last moment, and there seemed no reason why this time should be different. But as the tapes rolled at Rockfield Studios, and the band and Peter Davies settled into their quarters, scattered round the farmhouse just outside Monmouth in the rolling hills of the Wye valley, the atmosphere started to become increasingly tense.

  James Williamson was proud of his recording prowess, and chatted proudly to Klaus Kruger about the subtleties of microphone placement that he’d learned at Paramount, but as far as the musicians were concerned, his idea of being professional was to order retake after pointless retake. ‘James would go, Let’s do it again and do it again as though this was some test of his production rigour,’ remembers Barry Andrews. ‘Which it wasn’t, of course; instead everyone was getting tireder and tireder and it was sounding worse and worse.’ As the musicians became increasingly fatigued, Matlock’s bass and Kruger’s drumming became more and more l
eaden. Williamson, who had never wanted to record out in Wales, realised the project was spinning out of control, and, according to Glen and Klaus, who called him ‘Straight James’, he started to brandish a bottle of vodka and a revolver around the studio. ‘The word was it was loaded - but I didn’t ask,’ says Matlock, who unsurprisingly didn’t complain about the repeated requests for one more take. As Williamson started knocking back more and more vodka, he also started to fixate on how to synchronise two tape machines to allow 48-track recording, which caused endless technical delays.

  Julie Hooker was the A&R at Arista who was directly overseeing Soldier, as well as Simple Minds, who were recording at Rockfield’s other studio. She also had to field Clive Davis’s calls, as he monitored the tiniest details. Julie liked and respected Williamson, with whom she agreed deadlines and budgets. Like Charles Levison, Hooker was optimistic about the project; she’d heard the rehearsal tapes and they sounded great, but as the recordings dragged on, frustratingly slowly, she increasingly found herself walking in on confrontations between singer and producer. On some of those occasions, she’d catch Williamson blinking back tears.

  Marooned in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, the participants had little distraction from the tension that was obviously building. Only Barry Andrews, who was essentially a visitor to the mad musical world of Iggy, seemed immune, wandering off into the countryside with the attractive young tape operator whose name was Mariella Frostrup, with Andrews keeping an eye out for magic mushrooms. The others found Andrews enigmatic, but they were amazed, when the tapes rolled, by the way he instantly conjured up a variety of dazzlingly inventive keyboard parts. There were some moments of light relief, notably a drunken party for Julie Hooker’s birthday on 13 September at which each musician performed skits, but Williamson seemed constantly concerned by distractions that threatened to make the recordings overrun. Each evening, the band would play back rough mixes of the day’s work on a ghetto blaster in the dining room; every now and then, Barry or Glen might record something peculiar or ridiculous as an experiment or a laugh. Whenever that happened, or someone was taking too long to work up an idea, Williamson developed the habit of telling them, ‘Save that for the dining room.’ When Iggy attempted to sing anything too out there, he would get the same comment. ‘Dining-room music meant music you play for your own pleasure, which is ultimately wanking,’ says Andrews, who noticed Iggy getting increasingly irritated whenever the phrase was uttered in his direction.