Iggy Pop Page 34
As the Party tapes sat around, awaiting release, the band resumed their incessant touring, again to approving and often ecstatic audiences. The shows were ramshackle, but still powerful, and Iggy still seemed a potent force while, in his ‘up’ moments, his mental powers seemed undimmed. That February, there was a hilarious appearance on Tom Snyder’s chat show in New York; breathless after playing a raucous version of ‘Dog Food’, Jim mumbles while regaining his energies, and then, in response to the usual predictable questions about being a cartoon punk, delivers a brilliantly lucid explanation of the difference between Dionysian and Apollonian art as Snyder looks on in open-mouthed incomprehension. The interview was illustrative of a wider lack of understanding of Iggy’s own art: how he was celebrated for the broken glass and blood rather than the music. One night around this time, Jim broke down in tears, telling Mike Page how he was fed up of becoming ‘the Don Rickles of rock ’n’ roll’, known only for insulting his audience. Yet mostly, he drowned his feelings in alcohol. ‘I had to get drunk onstage to make it sound good and that was the worst part. I feared playing without being drunk. Because it didn’t sound good enough.’ Sadly, with most of Arista’s advances swallowed up in recording expenses, he had no choice but to continue.
For Ivan Kral, the hit record that he hoped to make for Iggy had become a travesty, and there were stories within the band that he had been accosted by Bowie in the streets of New York, who asked him, ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ A sincere, passionate man, when he had joined Iggy he had somehow thought, ‘I would always look after him,’ but on the first night of the tour to promote Party, he’d finally had enough. Kral was disgusted by the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, of ‘using women as receptacles’, and had himself been riding an emotional rollercoaster which he could endure no longer. He had hired the Uptown Horns, for the opening dates at New York’s Ritz Club on 31 July 1981, and arrived for the soundcheck, he says, to find that Jim had dropped a tab of acid and was crying like a baby. He made his decision then to quit, phoning road manager Henry McGroggan after the third performance.
More replacements were called in to fill the breach. Gary Valentine had been Blondie’s bassist - he’d written their hit ‘(I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence Dear’ - and stepped in on guitar for Iggy’s tour, while Patti Smith keyboardist Richard Sohl joined up too; he lasted until 3 September. Like his predecessors, Valentine found touring with Iggy ‘a blur’, full of relentless dates, many of them ‘tiny, hole-in-the-wall dumps’, fuelled on alcohol and, in the main, inspiring performances by Iggy, who still seemed in full possession of a Nijinsky-like grace and was, even in this reduced setting, ‘unequivocally one of the best performers I’ve ever seen. I can’t think of a time when I came away from a show thinking he wasn’t on it tonight or he didn’t really nail it. There were a couple of times when we didn’t - and he would give us a strong talking to.’
Even Carlos Alomar, who joined the tour along with Blondie drummer Clem Burke in October 1981, thought Iggy was ‘very controlled’ - although it was all a far cry from the refined atmosphere of a Bowie tour. Carlos learned to dress in black leather, which offered more protection against the beer with which the band were constantly splattered, and particularly remembers one performance on a New Orleans riverboat, from which, once it had left the pier, there was no escape. ‘Iggy came out in a little T-shirt, fishnet stockings, and he’s hung like a horse so with not even a third of the song finished he would always rise up and there he was totally exposed and singing his ass off. At one point I think he took a shit on stage right behind the speakers. It was, what the hell is that smell? It was outrageous.’ Carlos loved the experience, and Clem Burke later told the band his three months with Iggy were the most enjoyable tour of his life. ‘It was certainly the most debauched,’ he says today, while Gary Valentine in particular remembers the ‘rough customers’, who would be lined up in the dressing room after the show. ‘They weren’t very attractive. Maybe they could cater to his needs, I don’t know. I do remember this one woman in a dressing room telling [Iggy], “Your cock never tasted as good until it was in my cunt.” Or something like that. It was pretty rough language. I remember this one girl there and she was pretty new to this and she was like “Oh my God!” She’d never heard anything like this before.’
Even in his reduced state, forced to tour to pay the bills, aware by now his record contract was in jeopardy, and reliant on alcohol - ‘Is Mr Daniels here yet?’ was his customary query before a show - both Jim Osterberg and Iggy seemed reliably intact. Backstage, Jim’s thick glasses and unkempt hair were a vital camouflage. But when Iggy was on, there was still a sharpness about his thinking - just like the behaviour of Kill City days, which prompted one observer to liken him to Rommel positioning his forces ready for an assault. Valentine noticed how adept Iggy was at playing a backstage crowd, the promoters and hipsters who turned up with their little offerings of drugs or gifts. ‘He would just eat them up. He’d just take and keep on taking whatever they had and they’d get maybe three minutes of conversation. Then they were standing there empty-handed and looking like, what was that all about?’
They’d been Iggy’d.
In most cases, there was no harm done, but over this period Iggy displayed an increasingly childlike selfishness and ignorance of the consequences of his actions. Which was why, suggests Dayna Louise, he seemed intuitively to search out people who’d tolerate his behaviour. ‘As an adult, I can see that a grown woman would probably see through his manic depression and say, dude, you’re pretty fucked up. Whereas children, young girls, would just be so starry-eyed and enamoured of him that they wouldn’t care.’
Iggy had taken Dayna, who was now sixteen, to Houston in the autumn of 1981, but after an argument had abandoned her in the hotel, leaving a couple of hundred dollars on the mantelpiece for her to get home. Dayna returned to her parents in New Orleans and enrolled at high school. Iggy later tracked her down, sent flowers and begged forgiveness before, bizarrely, moving in with Dayna and parents; her mom put him to work on jobs around the house before he disappeared to a hotel. For a short time they shared romantic walks around the French Quarter, as Dayna returned to Iggy’s hotel on the way back from school each day, but Iggy was fascinated with the quarter’s gris-gris ladies, and also recruited a pair of dilaudid and heroin dealers as friends. Soon the atmosphere turned nasty; Dayna’s mother ascribed it to the gris-gris ladies, Dayna blamed it on the dealers. ‘They were a pretty rough crowd that did a lot of skank,’ says Dayna. ‘I kinda toyed with it, and I think he was getting into it honestly, ’cause he started getting very mean and very abusive again. And at that point I came home to the hotel from school and there was this woman in bed with him. I’m like, What the fuck’s this? And he goes, Well, baby, you’ve been replaced. He was fucking her as I packed my stuff up and left. And that’s the last I saw him.’ Some time later, Iggy apparently regretted his impulsive rejection of Dayna and started phoning her house. But Dayna’s mom, who had kept a watchful eye on how the singer treated her daughter in New Orleans, told him to stay away: ‘You hurt her, cheri. And you’re done.’
Contemplating her time with Iggy, Dayna describes him as ‘tal ented . . . but tormented’, and then ‘primal’, before, on reflection, she summarises his actions as ‘vampiric. Like a succubus.’ Now in his mid-thirties, he seemed irrevocably committed to repeat the destructive behaviour of his youth, seemingly without any clue how to extract himself. And while the live shows were consistently exciting, there was the odd echo of former humiliations, most notably when Iggy was booked at the behest of Keith Richards to support the Rolling Stones for two nights at Detroit’s 80,000-capacity Pontiac Silverdome, from 31 November 1981. On the second night Iggy appeared on stage in a ballerina dress, with what looked like a semi-erection clearly visible through his brown and cream stockings. Seemingly within moments, a hail of bottles, Bic lighters and shoes started spinning to the stage. This time around, Iggy told his band that such a reception
was a sign of affection in Detroit, and at the end of their set the promoter, Bill Graham, read out an itemised list of the objects, in lieu of an encore. Graham would note in his memoirs that Iggy had attracted the most projectiles of any act he’d ever worked with. This was tragedy rewritten as farce.
Iggy’s recording contract had obviously been in serious jeopardy by the summer of 1981; Charles Levison, his champion at Arista, had been the victim of political manoeuvrings at the company throughout the year, and eventually jumped ship to WEA, at which point Jim was officially informed his Arista contract would not be renewed. Eventually, it transpired Blondie founder Chris Stein was starting his own record label, Animal, and was willing to fund a new album; early in 1982 Iggy and his guitarist Rob Duprey started working on material, mostly at Rob’s home studio set-up in his apartment on 6th Avenue. By now, Jim had moved to a new apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, an area he’d acquired a taste for since seeing John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and there were occasional scenes of near-domesticity. Eric’s mother, Paulette Benson, had decided that he needed to spend more time with his father, and the 12-year-old started visiting Jim and Esther more regularly. The couple did their best to look after his son, and they responsibly concealed their spliffs and cocaine - although Eric, who’d been brought up in California, almost certainly knew what was going on. James Senior and Louella, too, kept a close eye on Eric, delighted in their role as grandparents.
In the run-up to the recording of their album, Jim spent six weeks in Duprey’s apartment as they experimented with new material. As was his wont, Jim was a generous boss - he had received a $50,000 advance from Animal, but split the $10,000 he’d received for his own living expenses equally with Duprey - but he still lived ‘like a cat,’ says Rob. Each week he’d receive a stipend from his agency, FBI, and would disappear for a couple of days, although every now and then Duprey might see him taking ‘some big blonde’ into his room, blasting out his own single, ‘Bang Bang’, at staggering volume while he was doing ‘who knows what’. After three or four days his money would be exhausted, so Jim would instead skulk around the apartment, raiding the refrigerator for food, ‘being really friendly. Like a cat. Then as soon as the money came in the next Wednesday, he’d be gone again.’ When he was based in Brooklyn, life was more organised; Esther put Jim on a budget of $20 a day, handing over his spending money each morning, just like David used to back in Berlin. He’d keep a record of his expenditure, carefully noting his consumption of Big Macs (one for him, one for Rob Duprey), Cokes and other junk food, 85 cents for smokes, $4 for a cab and $4 for a nickel bag of grass.
For all that Duprey knew he didn’t have a close friendship with Jim - ‘he really associates with who he needs to associate with, I wouldn’t call him a particularly friendly-type person’ - he felt privileged to work with him. ‘I was just a bratty kid, and got treated really well . . . even if Zombie Birdhouse turned out to be his most pretentious record.’
In fact, pieced together for less than $50,000 at Blank Tapes, a budget 16-track studio in New York, with Chris Stein on bass and Clem Burke on drums, Zombie Birdhouse was a flawed but grown-up album, studded with odd moments of quiet, slightly weary beauty. Although the album was dominated by declamatory self-conscious exercises, such as ‘Bulldozer’, the Weill-esque ‘Life Of Work’ and the painfully arty ‘Watching The News’, there were intriguing experiments, such as ‘The Ballad Of Cookie McBride’, a skewed, catchy tale delivered in a yee-haw Southern yodel, and the stark, vulnerable ‘Ordinary Bummer’ - one of the finest songs Jim had written since Lust For Life days. Ultimately, the album would be regarded as a failure - not unreasonably, as its opening quartet of songs are strident and unlistenable - but it showed at least a desire to experiment and defy expectations, perhaps as David Bowie had done with ventures such as Baal earlier in the year. It was certainly a desire to ‘diversify like David’ that inspired work on an autobiography, tentatively entitled Run Like A Villain, at the suggestion of Jim’s old Ann Arbor friend Anne Wehrer - the woman who, with then-husband Joe, had first sheltered Andy Warhol and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable in Ann Arbor back in March 1966. According to Wehrer, the book was instigated with Bowie’s encouragement; Esther Friedmann, however, remembers Bowie counselling Jim that ‘you can only write your autobiography once’, perhaps sensing, as had happened so often recently, that this was yet another project that would go off half-cocked.
Wehrer had started her work as ghostwriter during the autumn 1981 tour, although unsurprisingly she’d found it difficult to make substantial progress thanks to the various distractions on offer. Occasionally she’d manage quiet conversations in Jim’s hotel - she remembers how he would personalise his soulless room by placing tapestries over the lamp and bed - and eventually she built up a close rapport with this one-time schoolfriend of her son, Tom. Anne, a rather patrician woman, had lost a leg to cancer and over the course of the tour grew to believe that Jim, like her, was damaged and vulnerable; that belief, she says, drew them together and they became lovers. Back in New York, though, progress was slow. Jim would take the subway to Anne and designer Wyn Loving’s loft, and sit in the huge clawfoot bath and dictate to them, but his anecdotes, hilarious as they were, were disjointed and hard to turn into a coherent story. Often, on quiet afternoons, Jim would take his newly purchased typewriter down to the street corner or local park and fashion stream-of-consciousness stories or reportage. They were hugely imaginative, intense and slightly scary, suggestive of mania. On one typewritten manuscript he mentions how he’s feeling good and is managing without the Valium, which was presumably prescribed to calm him down - the note is a poignant sign of a damaged psyche, and perhaps a portent of a coming crisis.
CHAPTER 15
Night of the Zombies
With recording of Zombie Birdhouse complete, Jim flew to Haiti around April 1982 to finish up his autobiography with Anne Wehrer, and then to holiday and shoot cover photos for Zombie Birdhouse with Esther.
Wehrer thought Jim was a mess - ‘really drugged out, all of the time’ - but she did what she could and disappeared back to New York, happy to have seen Baby Doc Duvalier, who moored his boat by the local bar, the owner of which bought everyone drinks and told them - especially Jim - to not even glance at the notorious dictator. Esther, who stayed on, had a worse time. The couple were in Haiti for three months and, as far as Esther was concerned, what was meant as a holiday turned into a scary downward spiral, a nightmare of voodoo, zombies and murderous Tontons Macoute. ‘We went to hell and back. And it was all because Jim antagonised a voodoo priest. It was a voodoo curse. I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.’
Over their first few weeks, the holiday seemed blissful, Esther recounts, as they cocooned themselves in the luxurious surroundings of the Habitation LeClerc and got blasted on the cornucopia of delights available at the unregulated Port-Au-Prince pharmacies. In particular, you could take in empty 1.5-litre Coke bottles and get them filled with paregoric - camphorated tincture of opium - for two dollars, then use it to top up your piña coladas throughout the day and night. As was their wont, Jim and Esther also managed to line up suppliers of alternative substances within their first few days in Haiti.
As they sprawled around the beautiful but slightly decayed hotel, which had been owned in colonial times by Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline and was purchased in the 1930s by dancer and anthropologist Katherine Denham, who later became a voodoo princess, the surreal nature of their surroundings, in the middle of a huge botanical garden, was highlighted by the constant presence of a Christian group, preaching the gospel and distributing condoms. For their first couple of weeks, wherever Jim and Esther wandered, the Christians seemed to be there too, looking well scrubbed and scarily righteous.
It was a simple urge to dance that seemed to launch the harrowing series of events. After Anne Wehrer’s departure, Jim and Esther moved out of Habitation LeClerc to stay in Jacmel, a small town filled with F
rench colonial-style nineteenth-century mansions; it was an isolated coastal town, and the local police checked their passports on the way in, keeping track of all visitors. After a few days, the couple managed to find an insider who offered to take them to a voodoo session. It was held in secret - practising voodoo had been forbidden by the Baby Doc regime - but Jim and Esther sat down in the darkness under the eyes of the locals, sipping some unknown but potent brew, believing they were about to witness nothing more than a colourful Saturday-night dance. Then the musicians started a drum roll and launched into a hypnotic rhythm. When Jim heard the drums start he leapt up, ignoring Esther’s pleas to keep quiet, ripped off his shirt, jumped into the middle of the ring of revellers and started dancing; soon he’d attracted a gaggle of Haitian girls to dance alongside him, but as Esther glanced around, she saw the priest who was directing the ceremony glaring at Jim. He was muttering, outraged at the disruption of his ceremony. Esther ran to Jim, shouted, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and pulled him away. ‘It was creepy,’ she remembers, ‘and then . . . for the next three months everything started to get out of hand.’
Initially a sceptic, Esther started to get increasingly spooked by her surroundings. At night there were always mysterious figures around, only their eyes visible in the darkness, who she became convinced were zombies. One afternoon she was sipping a drink when a rat ran across the floor in front of her - a local leapt out from nowhere and crushed it under his foot, all the while staring right in her face. And then she noticed Jim had started to give away his possessions. First his guitar disappeared. Then he had given much of his money and most of his clothes away. Soon they were down to their last two hundred dollars.