Iggy Pop Page 35

  One night Esther woke up and saw Jim was gone. So was the local they’d hired to watch the room. She grabbed her clothes and ran out, found their guide and drove off into the night; they finally located Jim in a hole-in-the-wall bar, dancing with the local hookers. Esther ran in, shouting at him, ‘Where’s our money?’ As she’d dreaded, he’d given it away, and despite Esther’s pleas to the women - ‘I know you think we’re rich, stupid Americans, but that was our last two hundred dollars. Please keep half, but please give me half back’ - they were left penniless.

  Finally Esther and her helper bundled Jim into their rented VW Beetle and they started off home, their guide at the wheel. The couple fell asleep; then Esther awoke and realised they were on a tiny dirt road, glanced out of the window and saw faces staring in. ‘I screamed! I yelled, They’re going to kill us!’ Their driver was so alarmed by the bloodcurdling scream that he wrenched at the wheel, crunching the Beetle into a stone wall. As it skidded along, Jim jumped out, hitting the wall and, it later transpired, breaking three ribs. While the driver cradled his head, which he’d hurt in the crash, Esther screamed at him to get out; she took the wheel with Jim beside her, leaving the driver, turned the badly damaged but still driveable Beetle round and drove back along the dirt track until finally she reached the hotel.

  The next day Esther decided she needed to obtain a police report to explain the damage to the rental company. Accosting her guide, who’d turned up at the hotel, she marched him down to the police station, leaving Jim back in their room. The commissioner at the desk was a portly, intimidating figure who reminded Esther of Idi Amin, and at one end of the police station was, Esther remembers, ‘a cage, with a guy hanging in it. I swear to God; it was like a bad movie.’ Esther realised her guide was transfixed with fear; she looked down and saw he’d wet himself and quickly mentioned it was she who’d been driving the car when they crashed. Finally they managed to get the requisite report and left; the guide was so grateful not to have been left in the clutches of the police, and their feared secret service counterparts the Tontons Macoute, that he found an uncle or cousin who repaired the Beetle.

  Over subsequent weeks Esther found a job to raise some cash, assisting a Belgian dentist named Pierre, who specialised in bargain-basement extractions. ‘It cost one dollar with nothing, two dollars with procaine, and three dollars for a tooth out with a shot of anaesthetic.’ While Esther was away, Jim would stay with a local woman, her numerous offspring and her one-legged dad, all of them crammed into a tiny hut. The woman was just a friend - ‘I don’t think anything unseemly was going on’ - but he’d sit there all day while she braided his hair. The skewed domesticity lasted until Esther’s dentist friend was murdered - ‘the Tontons Macoute slaughtered him - it turned out because he was competition for the local dentist’ - and again they moved on, fleeing Jacmel in the middle of the night after being warned that someone would be lying in wait for them on the single road out.

  It was at this point that Esther became convinced that the voodoo priest had put a curse on them. She began attempting to get the two away, but whenever they tried to get to the airport, something would stop them, and all the while Jim was becoming more and more mentally disturbed, says Esther: ‘He was ill. I mean really ill.’ They made it to the airport and even had their luggage on the plane for Los Angeles one time when Jim disappeared. Frantic, Esther searched the airport. ‘Then finally this dude comes up to me and says, if you’re looking for your boyfriend, he’s gone off in a car to do something. So it was bam, luggage off the plane. And this happened at least three more times.’ From Jacmel they moved to a bungalow on the beach, rented from an American expat who gave them credit; she seemed to rent out most of her rooms to CIA agents or other people with something to hide. They remained there for a month or so before renting another house. Jim would bring kids back so they could get to try sleeping on a bed; Esther would wander around and chat with the landlord as the man took his cow for a walk. By now, Esther was calling her friends all over the world, her father, ex-boyfriend Norbert, and Jim’s agents, FBI, to raise enough money to pay off their debts and get another flight home. Meanwhile, Jim was either flying away on some doomed manic escapade or slumped like a morose drunk, incapable of the most basic functions. She started hiding his clothes, just like Ron used to in the Stooges days, to ensure he wouldn’t wander off at night, but that didn’t necessarily stop him. One night he disappeared, naked but for one of her skirts, took the rental car, even though he couldn’t drive, crashed it and then hitched a lift to the Hotel Oloffson, from which someone called Esther, begging her to take him home.

  Within a few days, Esther had phoned around to raise more money, and this time managed to get Jim home to Brooklyn. Still he seemed deranged. Unable to endure any more, Esther took the advice of a friend back in Haiti, who told her the couple were undoubtedly the victims of a voodoo curse. Following their instructions, she took a pair of scissors, bent over Jim when he was asleep and snipped through the yellow T-shirt that he’d been wearing since the start of their holiday and gently pulled it off his back. Taking the remaining clothes he’d been wearing throughout their time in Haiti, she set fire to all of them, banishing the spell.

  She also had to find medical care for Jim. Danny Sugerman managed to track down Dr Zucker, who was now working at Northridge Hospital in Los Angeles; Eric’s mother, Paulette Benson, agreed to meet Jim off the plane and take him to the hospital. Esther’s main worry was that Jim wouldn’t be allowed on the plane, because he was literally raving; but she knew that his chances were infinitely better in first class. Finally she managed to buy the ticket using a borrowed credit card, put Jim on the plane to LA, and told him to sleep and not say a word. She watched the plane take off, and waited for him back in Brooklyn.

  Jim spent a few weeks in Northridge. It was like going back in time to 1974, and again he had to spend a week or so cleansing his body of its cocktail of drugs before he could sit down and talk with Murray Zucker, who admired Jim but also worked hard on the underlying issues that caused the singer’s predilection to crash and burn. Just as last time around, once Jim was settled and out of his rock ’n’ roll habits, Murray found him a vulnerable, sensitive and empathetic character. There was a disturbed teenager in the same unit who suffered from Duchenne’s disease, which meant he was somewhat malformed, could only walk with difficulty and whose life expectancy was severely shortened. The boy was deeply depressed; Jim gave him his jacket and transformed his condition. It was a wonderful thing to behold, Zucker thought; far more effective than any treatment he could have prescribed; Jim’s spontaneous act of sympathy turned round what remained of the youngster’s life. At another point during his hospitalisation, a psychotic inmate attacked a nurse; Jim spontaneously leapt up and wrestled the patient to the ground, saving the nurse from possible serious injury.

  It was probably during his stay at Northridge that Jim made the decision to quit his destructive lifestyle. But still there was the omnipresent problem of money, or lack of it. For the only way to generate cash was live work: ‘What else could I do? I didn’t even think about it.’

  In October, he hit the road again, promoting Zombie Birdhouse and his autobiography, I Need More. The book was a hilarious read, but showed only occasional glimpses of Jim’s intelligence and insight, handicapped by the circumstances in which it was written. Esther contributed dozens of photos, Anne Wehrer and designer Wyn Loving spent weeks finding rare shots, but the costs of putting it together were perilously close to the advance from the small New York publisher, Karz-Cohl, while the text itself was riddled with mistakes, occasional grandiose fantasies and gratuitous insults aimed at most of those with whom Iggy had worked. Back in Ann Arbor the word was that Scott Asheton, Jim’s closest friend in the Stooges, arranged a barbecue and invited his friends around to watch his copy burn on a bonfire in the garden.

  Unsurprisingly, Zombie Birdhouse sold poorly, and by the end of the tour to promote it which opened on 13 October, J
im was, say the rest of the band, more crazed than ever. New drummer Larry Mysliewicz was apparently freaked out; Frank Infante, yet another recruit from Blondie, lapped up the experience, which reminded him of the Last Days Of Pompeii. One night Iggy was smashed full-on in the head with a Heineken bottle. He kept singing. The band was hassled by Hells Angels in London, and then, on a quick flight to Newcastle to film the TV show The Tube, Iggy turned up at the end of the soundcheck and fell backwards into the drums, destroying the carefully-placed array of microphones. Iggy returned to the hotel before the show; the house security guard heard suspicious noises in his room and decided to investigate. As he opened the door with his pass key, he was treated to the entertaining spectacle of a stark naked Iggy with his foot braced against the wall, attempting to pull out a live power outlet socket, which he’d apparently decided would make an attractive belt. The long-suffering Henry McGroggan managed to persuade the hotel management to let the rest of the band remain at the hotel, as long as Iggy flew back to London straight after the show. After a short break for January 1983 the live shows resumed again, this time presciently titled The Breaking Point.

  In May 1983 there was a brief respite. Jim and Esther had moved to a new apartment in Columbus Avenue, New York, and he continued tapping away on his typewriter. ‘Decided not to bother with hospital this year,’ he wrote. ‘Too much monkey business, rather take my chances.’ He continued a few lines later: ‘I believe I am a farmer of sound. I treat my crops with infinite devotion and tenderness.’

  Despite his unquenchable enthusiasm for music, there seemed little chance of a new record deal, even with the assistance a few weeks earlier of Cars founder Ric Ocasek, who’d produced some studio sessions for him in Boston, with Ministry guitarist Al Jourgensen. There was some good news from the UK, where David Bowie’s Let’s Dance album, which featured David’s version of ‘China Girl’, hit number one, dangling the prospect of songwriting royalties to come. But in the meantime Jim’s energies were directed at a tour of Hawaii, Japan and Australia.

  On the plane over to Hawaii, Jim had a word with Mike Page, telling him he was worried about Mike’s drinking. Mike assured him he had it under control. Jim gave him a steady stare. ‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter,’ he warned him. A couple of weeks later, on 20 June at the Sun Plaza in Tokyo, Iggy spotted an attractive 22-year-old in the audience and employed his usual gambit of singing to the girl next to her, tantalising her. At the end of the show he sent Henry McGroggan out to find the girl, but she was not in the auditorium. But it happened to be raining outside, and the girl, whose name was Suchi, walked back in to collect her umbrella from the coat-check stand. That night she joined him on the tour. One week later, David Bowie’s version of ‘China Girl’ hit the Top Ten in both the UK and the US. Three weeks later, Jim had abandoned the tour and was on a plane to Los Angeles with his future wife.

  The sun is beating down relentlessly in San Diego, the neatly maintained city that has always seemed a refuge for those with nowhere else to go, voyagers who’ve run out of friends in San Francisco and then LA, and eventually find themselves stranded in this last stop before Mexico. I’d been calling Mike Page, an enthusiastic, energetic man, for a few weeks before I made the trip from San Francisco in the summer of 1995, and he promised me a great time: he’d get us the best room at the city’s finest hotel, as he was friends with the manager. We’d get complimentary food and drink at the Hard Rock Café, which had one of his basses hanging on the wall. Then he would introduce me to some of the city’s young musicians.

  I liked Mike; a big, solid-looking, funny guy who reminded me of New Order’s celebrated bassist, Peter Hook, and I could see why he’d been Iggy’s closest companion on those gruelling tours, night after night, when the singer was getting smashed in the head by Heineken bottles, dodging collapsing PA stacks, or rushing out of hotels. It was seeing Iggy shrug off all those assaults, Mike told me, that convinced him his ex-employer was indestructible. ‘Iggy is not a normal human being,’ he told me. ‘I’ve got proof of it. I’ve got pictures of him where he’d jumped in the crowd, when he’s been scratched from his shoulder to the bottom of his waist and you can see the marks. I took a photograph of it in the tour bus, when he was asleep. If it was you or I, a fingernail cut, which can be real dirty, those scratches would be there for a week. They’d broken right through the skin. But with him, within two days it was gone.’

  As we chatted over successive rounds of Becks at the Hard Rock Café, the conversation was riveting, but like the stories Mike related, the evening was punctuated by misfortune. Mike called his hotel-manager friend who said he was sorry, but the place was fully booked. There was a new manager at the Hard Rock who’d never heard of him; I stumped up for their overpriced factory food despite his objections. Later in the evening Mike’s plans of being the perfect host took another turn for the worse as we sat, morosely, in a local ‘alterna-rock’ club, whose pale, listless patrons were not impressed by the English writer Mike had brought along. Then suddenly Mike disappeared. His friend Steve, a lawyer currently going through a divorce, asked me to help look for him in the toilets - Mike had blacked out there the previous week, Steve told me, and he was really worried about Mike’s drinking. Mike turned up eventually, without mentioning where he’d been, and rather than checking into the city’s best hotel, we went off to sleep on the floor of Steve’s one-bedroom flat.

  But we didn’t sleep at all. Instead, we spent the night singing Rolling Stones songs, taking turns on a plastic Maccaferri guitar Steve had just bought, until dawn, when I left to catch my plane. I fended off the inevitable hangover by drinking throughout the next day, too.

  Over succeeding months I called Mike again and again, but he’d apparently walked out of the guitar shop where he worked. Months turned to years, and I often wondered what had become of him, reflecting on the grim toll Iggy’s lifestyle had taken - particularly on those who, like Dave Alexander, Zeke Zettner and Jackie Clark, played bass guitar. It was nearly ten years later when the phone rang in my LA motel room, and I recognised Mike’s voice. We laughed about our hilariously disastrous night in San Diego, and as our chatter continued Mike described how his life had since followed a familiar, but happy, pattern. He’d quit drinking, turned to soundtrack work, and his career was on the up. And in a typical California parable, he’d found the best place to network for new business contacts was in his local AA meetings.

  CHAPTER 16

  Hideaway

  I found by having a fixed address I can actually roam farther afield. Because I have somewhere to come back and crash at.

  Jim Osterberg

  In the end, it all came down to money. It took five years for the farmer of sound to reap his harvest, but around the middle of 1983 the cash started flowing. There were royalties from the Sex Pistols’ version of ‘No Fun’, which had taken several years to arrive, then came income from Grace Jones, who had a Top Ten dance hit with her 1981 Nightclubbing album, featuring Iggy and David’s song; around this time Dan Bourgoise from Bug Music had been putting Jim’s publishing in order, and the Grace Jones song was the first from which the royalties started to arrive without delay. Soon there was the cash from David’s hit version of ‘China Girl’, which started to trickle in quickly from radio and TV airplay.

  On the plane back to Los Angeles, Jim walked back from the first-class section to talk to Mike Page. Jim was trashed, but not too trashed to tell Mike that he was thinking about taking a break for a while. Then he said, ‘She thinks I drink too much. Do you think I drink too much?’ The rest of the band were still in a state of shock - they had expected the tour to continue to New Zealand - but they had noticed Jim withdraw from them over the last few weeks and were reasonably resigned to their fate. Esther Friedmann, too, gradually realised Jim wasn’t coming back, despite Louella and James Sr’s protestations that the split was surely only temporary. ‘When he looked at her he didn’t think of blow; when he looked at me he probably did,’ says Esther, philosophica
lly. ‘That’s what happens when you do drugs with people. So I knew it was time to get my shit together.’ Jim told her to keep whatever possessions she wanted, including David’s painting of him; but David arrived at Esther’s Kreuzberg apartment a few months later and asked for it back.

  Back in LA, Jim hooked up with two of his confidants from Kill City days, Murray Zucker and Danny Sugerman, and decided he needed to stay in California for a while before he could brave New York again. Zucker counselled him through his stay on a chemical-dependency ward, and Sugerman sent an intriguing commission his way in the form of the title song for Alex Cox’s upcoming movie, Repo Man, for which Sugerman had wangled a role as music consultant. But perhaps the most crucial therapy was Suchi; for the first time in his life, Jim Osterberg had to take responsibility for another human being.

  Suchi Asano was a music fan, stylist and occasional model whose father worked in the police department in Tokyo. She’d learned to speak English at school, and once the couple arrived in LA she enrolled in a Berlitz course. But it was Jim Osterberg who took on the responsibility of coaching her in the language. As the son of an English teacher, he’d been waiting to tell someone else how to speak properly for thirty years or so. ‘I’ve given her a good accent,’ he would proudly proclaim after a year’s tuition. ‘She doesn’t swallow her consonants like a lot of Japanese do.’ For the first six months their communication was pretty basic; Jim found it impossible to explain some of the dilemmas and issues that troubled him, which brought him to a crucial realisation: ‘OK, there’s not so much need to make a big flap over every little thing that happens every day.’ Conquering his need for chaos and drama would represent a crucial breakthrough.