Iggy Pop Read online

  For both Brian James and Glen Matlock, who’d spearheaded Britain’s punk revolution, this two-month series of high-energy performances, night after night, was far more intense than anything they’d experienced. Their leader’s energy levels seemed almost superhuman, although Brian in particular was occasionally shocked by the levels of aggression, as Iggy bounced up to adoring kids crushed into the front row of the audience and slapped them on their faces, enjoying the shock and chaos he generated. Backstage, the atmosphere could be just as crazed. In the mornings, Glen or Brian would have conversations about books or history with Jim, who seemed like a studious young uncle. Then in the evenings, Iggy Pop would delight in stealing groupies from under their noses.

  By the time the New Values tour came to an end with a show at Hurrah’s in New York City on 9 December 1979, both English musicians had had enough. Brian James wanted to return to his own band, a decision that meant he was cold-shouldered on his last evening at the Mudd Club after the show. Matlock phoned Peter Davies over the New Year’s break to tell him he was quitting soon after he’d heard the finished mix of Soldier, which he considered an act of sonic sabotage that amounted to Iggy ‘cutting off his nose to spite his face’. To be fair, Soldier’s mix was as likely to be an attempt at damage-limitation as revenge on Steve New, but the outcome illustrated Jim’s inability to keep his musicians - in particular the talented songwriters with whom he needed to collaborate. Over the same period, manager Peter Davies disappeared from the picture. A sweet, considerate man who bought tasteful presents for his friends - Charles Levison treasured a first edition of an Arthur Rackham-illustrated Sleeping Beauty that he’d given him - Davies had been engulfed by the chaos that seemed to surround Iggy, had already been cut out of the loop with Arista, and finally had a falling-out with Jim over money.

  There was barely time to rehearse Matlock and James’s replacements - guitarist Rob Duprey and ex-Heartbreakers bassist Billy Rath - before yet another tour started in February 1980 to promote Soldier. The run of dates apparently started well, with an ambitious set packed with new songs, including ‘Hassles’, ‘Sacred Cow’, ‘Joe And Billy’ and ‘The Winter Of My Discontent’, but after two weeks of European shows, the band ground to a halt in New Orleans during the first two nights of a string of American dates. Iggy, according to Kral, decided to sack his rhythm section, explaining, ‘Klaus never smiles, he’s boring - and Billy is a junkie.’ Kral flew to New York to audition more cannon fodder, and found Mike Page - blues fan, ex-Chubby Checker bassist, and, by coincidence, an acquaintance of Jim’s from San Diego - and drummer Doug Bowne. Together, this small crew would play month in, month out over the coming year, crisscrossing America and Europe. And it was two-thirds of the way through those 100-odd dates, most of them agree, that things got ‘dark’.

  Mike Page and Rob Duprey were both young musicians who were ecstatic to get the gig with Iggy, and lapped up the high-energy experience of live shows night after night, groupies lined up in the dressing room after the show, and drinking until the early hours. ‘It wasn’t until later that I realised what a skanky existence he was living,’ says Duprey, ‘that he was just surviving. And how towards the end it got pretty grim.’ That year there was a show every day or two throughout February, March, April and May 1980, with another string of dates, the Nightclubbing tour, arranged at smaller venues from September, which according to Mike Page were arranged so that Jim could pay off a huge IRS tax bill. ‘That was the point when it really got gruelling, when he had to muster up all that energy into playing the same places, night after night. Then it became a grind.’

  In retrospect, there was a single upside to the relentless touring that Jim embarked on over the late 1970s and early 1980s. ‘I did invest a lot of time in the people, touring Europe over and over to no avail,’ he remembers. ‘They threw fish in Scandinavia, beers in Belgium, stones in Germany. And they set fire to my drum kit once.’ Little by little he was building up a new, grassroots following, who appreciated that very rarely, as Mike Page points out, did Iggy give a show that was anything but totally committed: ‘For live shows you’d see him get himself into the head space where the past, the present or the future didn’t exist. He’d work himself into being pure unadulterated rock ’n’ roll.’

  It was once he was offstage that Jim Osterberg would become truly disorientated; for one thing, having worked himself up to a frenzy, there was only alcohol or sex to help bring him back down. Many nights he suffered from insomnia. After months on the road, during which Mike Page became his most consistent drinking companion, he would call Page’s room in the middle of the morning if he couldn’t sleep, and ask him, ‘Are you with a girl? Would you send her over?’ According to Page, he always obliged. ‘I didn’t care. I never figured out their names usually until the next day anyway.’

  In time, Page would become numbed by the ‘absolutely staggering’ number of groupies the band went through, and he decided to get married a year later. But for Jim, alcohol and groupies seemed an addiction. And where, in his youth, there was a certain innocence - according to those who were there - in his predilection for young or underage girls, now he was in his mid-thirties that innocence was gone. One girl, who encountered Iggy when she was fifteen, describes how intelligent he was, how he ‘taught me a lot of things’ - and it emerges that the main part of her education at the hands of this rock ’n’ roll Henry Higgins was being tutored in deep-throat techniques.

  By 1980, Esther had learned not to come on tour with Jim. She hadn’t had a rock ’n’ roll background, and hadn’t even heard of Iggy before they met; it was Jim Osterberg she’d fallen in love with, not Iggy Pop. ‘I think I was a good influence on Jim for a long time because I was coming from a different environment. I was a little Jewish princess.’ When she saw Iggy walk into the dressing room after a show, point imperiously at the young girls waiting for him and tell them, ‘You, you and you,’ sending the rest away, she understood that this was Iggy and not Jim talking and learned not to resent it.

  One time Esther organised a swap with an ex-boyfriend, whose new girlfriend she knew Jim fancied. Jim liked the idea of being a decadent European; they did the swap and all had a great time, but when the other couple left, Iggy turned on Esther, telling her, ‘Don’t get me into this fucking European ménage-à-trois shit. You might like it, you’re some European slut, but that’s not happening here and if you ever do it again I’ll kill you!’ It was a demonstration that Iggy was a good old Midwestern traditionalist at heart.

  Esther’s other tactic was to make friends with Iggy’s latest fling; that was guaranteed to make him jealous. In a couple of cases, though, she accepts he occasionally had good taste in girls who in Europe, she says, ‘were more pleasant. You could have a conversation with them.’ Brian James was a bemused witness to Iggy’s cavortings with one woman Esther had allowed backstage, brandishing a bottle of champagne. Brian had popped over for a reunion with his former employer after Iggy’s show at London’s Rainbow Theatre. James was introduced to the new band (he was slightly nonplussed to discover that a Bowie-style full kiss on the lips was the greeting du jour for the new line-up) and Jim asked him to come along to a party in Knightsbridge the following evening. It was a sophisticated affair, attended by Marianne Faithfull and husband Ben Brierly, actress Eva Ferret, Weimar-style singing duo Billy and Eve, ex-Sex Pistol Paul Cook and other aristo-punk celebrities; the party’s host was Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, later known as Francesca, Duchess von Habsburg - the woman who, had the Habsburgs not renounced their claim to the monarchy in 1919, would ultimately have taken the title of Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the party, Brian took Jim and Francesca to a late-night drinking den he knew on the Fulham Road, where they sipped wine from coffee cups and Jim charmed the baroness. ‘He was very charismatic, but relaxed. He didn’t have to put on a show because he knew he’d pulled,’ says Brian James. Esther, in this instance, liked having an aristocrat around: ‘She was good for the entourage. And
she gave great dinner parties.’

  By early 1980, the demands on Jim Osterberg were becoming immense. So far in his career he had recorded eight albums, most of which had required a huge emotional commitment, but the stock of ideas that sustained him was being diminished just at the point when the pressure from his record company was being increased. Charles Levison had been understanding about the Soldier de bacle - he felt it was an ‘interesting’ album and believed that Iggy’s presence gave Arista UK a certain cachet - but the Soldier sessions had gone over budget and Levison was under growing pressure from Clive Davis to justify his investment. Jim and Charles had an unusually close relationship, characterised by long, late-night phone calls, and Levison made it plain that, for the next album, the company needed a commercial breakthrough.

  Understandably, Iggy chose to pretend this pressure didn’t exist, and, he says, decided instead to spend his time thinking, ‘Where can I get fucked, where can I get stoned, where can I have a good time?’ Yet, however hard he tried to ignore the problem, Jim would also be troubled by the question of ‘Where can I make music that’s gonna go Pow?’ In retrospect it would be obvious to Jim that ‘Pow’ - the simple power and energy that had always characterised his music - could never be unlocked in his then mental state, with his inexorable live schedule, and with musical collaborators who could not make him focus his energies. And while Jim’s musicians were inclined to overlook their singer’s troubles as they expended most of their energies in pursuit of good times, it was increasingly obvious to a few of those close to him that Jim Osterberg’s mental condition was becoming increasingly desperate.

  Dayna Louise was a 14-year-old music fan who lived in Austin, Texas and became Iggy’s regular companion on his visits to the state. When they had first met in early 1980, he was protective and caring: ‘He made me feel really smart and beautiful at a time I was younger than everybody else and felt a little inadequate.’ Dayna seemed to epitomise Iggy’s growing need for ‘adoration’; something he’d often complained wasn’t forthcoming from Esther, and that he could command more easily from younger girls. But during his subsequent visits to Texas, Dayna observed that Jim’s mental state seemed increasingly parlous. One moment he would be charming, considerate, ‘real loving’, and then all of a sudden he would be on the verge of tears: ‘Everything is shit, this all sucks, I hate my life.’ There was no purposeful nastiness, but it seemed to Dayna that Jim had never learned to be pleasant to other people if his own mood was low. ‘He’s absolutely sincere when he’s kind. But he’s never nice when [he doesn’t feel good] and his lows were pretty low. He was pretty hardcore.’

  Dayna describes Jim’s mental state as ‘poster boy bipolar’; often he’d wake in the morning sober, energised and optimistic, in an ‘everything is beautiful and good’ mood. On such days he would enjoy scribbling lyrics while Dayna did girly things, took a bubble bath or painted her nails, enjoying the Humbert-and-Lolita vibe. Sometimes they maintained that blissful atmosphere for three or four days, ‘and then everything would fall to hell. It was very, very extreme. I really think he was cracking up.’

  For once, Jim’s manic energy - what Vincent Van Gogh used to describe as the ‘electricity’ that underlay the artist’s periods of intense creativity - seemed to turn in on him, rather than powering his music or his showmanship. Whereas in Stooges or Kill City days he had been compelled to create even in the depth of his mental torment, over this period his own music was becoming stunted. Meanwhile, the force of his personality convinced the musicians around him that all was well. ‘I would never have seen [Jim’s predicament] for one microsecond,’ says Rob Duprey. ‘That his situation was for whatever reason declining.’

  It was in this enervated mental state that Iggy was scheduled to make what had to be his breakthrough Arista album. Over the summer of 1980, Esther was staying in Port Washington, New York, with her friend Anita Pallenberg, who was undergoing a painful break-up from Keith Richards. Meanwhile, Jim spent a reasonably calm week in Haiti with Ivan Kral at the chic Hotel Oloffson, a favourite of Jackie Onassis and other jetsetters, before the two of them booked into the Iroquois Hotel in New York to work up material.

  Ivan Kral remembers the genesis of what would become the Party album as being almost idyllic. Ivan would work out songs on his Prophet 5 synthesiser, then take cassettes over to Iggy who would work up lyrics: ‘really good lyrics’. This, thought Kral, was the opportunity and this was the material that would make Iggy ‘bigger than this punk who is left-field, only for a certain kind of people’. Ivan remembers the pair writing a huge number of new songs, and was driven by a belief that this was finally the opportunity for Jim, as Charles Levison used to put it, to ‘cross over ’.

  Sessions were booked at New York’s Record Plant in the late summer of 1980, with Thom Panunzio engaged as producer. Panunzio had worked with Jimmy Iovine to help Patti Smith score her first mainstream hit with 1978’s ‘Because The Night’ for Arista, and the intention was that Party would do the same for Iggy. Perhaps the idea was his music just needed to be shorn of its rough edges; perhaps it was that typical 1980s record company belief that an expensive studio, a glamorous photo session and an impressive drum sound was all that was needed to score a hit. But the sketchiness of the plan was evident from the moment the sessions started; even Iggy’s band felt like passengers on the venture, reduced to plonking away like automatons on horribly predictable chord sequences.

  During the first sessions for Party there was some pleasant material recorded, notably ‘Pumping For Jill’, based on a chugging guitar sound reminiscent of the Cars’ ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’, the archetypal New Wave crossover hit. ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’, however, had a chorus, a necessity conspicuous for its absence on Party’s supposedly ‘commercial’ material. Most of the other songs were competent and eminently forgettable. ‘Happy Man’, however, wasn’t, however hard you tried: a cringingly simplistic ditty with risible lyrics, in which the singer who once crafted taut poetry of streetwalking cheetahs yelps ‘I’m a happy man and she’s my only romance’, against an oompah Eurovision brass band backing, in an attempted ska genre. A truly pitiful moment, it even made those present on the recording wince; Mike Page reckoned, ‘He was really bending over and taking it in the butt.’ Page speculated that the mostly pitiful lyrics represented Iggy’s attempt to ‘screw up’ this shot at commerciality. Kral, too, believes that Iggy set out to ‘destroy the project’ himself, although in fairness Kral’s own bland and dated music must take at least some of the blame.

  Although Iggy must shoulder the ultimate responsibility for this distressingly dull album, there is something ineffably sad about the story of Party. One is reminded of a toothless old lion, once the proud king of the jungle, now a sad flea-bitten relic shuffling round a circus ring to the crack of a whip. Party stands to this day as a warning against the dire effects on the brain of cocaine and alcohol (if one conveniently forgets that Lust For Life was fuelled by the same chemicals).

  Nonetheless, there were more indignities to come. Having heard the original recordings, Charles Levison decided that ‘we had lost the plot’. Somehow, after casting around for a name producer who could rescue the project, Arista settled on Tommy Boyce, who, with Bobby Hart, was best known for writing ‘Last Train To Clarksville’ and other Monkees hits. Boyce had found a profitable niche in the UK music business working with 1950s revivalist bands like Showaddywaddy and Darts, both of whom notched up bestselling singles in the supposed heyday of punk. Levison knew Boyce via his work with Showaddywaddy and Beatles pasticheurs the Pleasers for Arista, and in desperation, for the label had now spent heavily on Iggy and Clive Davis was ‘breathing down my neck,’ says Levison, he and Tarquin Gotch decided that Boyce was the man to salvage Iggy’s album.

  Boyce’s arrival at the studio, says Mike Page, was ‘a horrible joke’. The producer arrived with ‘an LA haircut, and clichéd LA garb right down to the gold cocaine spoon round his neck’. According to Kral, Boyce’s
main obsession was scoring cocaine with Iggy, and the two locked Kral in a cupboard to prevent him interfering. Boyce picked on Ivan Kral’s song ‘Bang Bang’, another tune with Cars-style throbbing guitars, adding strings and shuffling disco drums. The song was inoffensive, if blatantly derivative of Blondie’s New Wave dance songs, which is more than can be said for two ghastly, syrupy cover versions, of Phil Phillips’ ‘Sea Of Love’ and the Outsiders’ ‘Time Won’t Let Me’. ‘I was forced, I had no choice,’ says Jim today, of recording the songs. ‘And boy, did I butcher them.’

  Mike Page, a positive, generous man who treasures his work with Iggy, describes Party as well as anybody when he says ‘it stood for everything Iggy tore down’. Charles Levison readily admits the album ‘didn’t work. And it broke the confidence that Jim had had in me.’ The album’s reception, when it was finally released in August 1981, confirmed their misgivings. One review speculated that Iggy had spent more time phoning the Uptown Horns to book the studio session than he had writing the lyrics for the entire album. It was the first Iggy Pop album to be universally panned, and reached just number 166 in the US album charts.