Iggy Pop Page 46

  Iggy Pop would delight in stealing groupies from under their noses. Glen Matlock: ‘There was these three good-looking birds [in Toronto]. And the guys in the band were sitting round having a drink and we’re kinda trying to chat ’em up. Didn’t really get anywhere. And then it kinda dawned on us that at certain times there was always a different one missing. And they’d all been up to Iggy’s room and come back. But we had the last laugh, ’cause the next morning he was in a foul mood. What happened was one of them had the coil fitted wrong, and it cut his dick up really bad. And when we got to do the gig that night, not only did he get his dick out, which he normally does, but he’d got it wrapped up in Kleenex. And he’s pulling bits of Kleenex off his dick and throwing it into the audience. You know they say the band behind the stripper gets the best view? Well, it was ’orrible.’

  ‘Cutting off his nose to spite his face’. It is of course possible that the Soldier mixes were a mess for other reasons.

  Boyce was the man to salvage Iggy’s album. Charles Levison has been blamed for recruiting Tommy Boyce, but his memory was that ‘that was probably Tarquin’s suggestion, although I [would] have been involved in the decision’. Tarquin, meanwhile, although he doesn’t remember specifically, says, ‘I’m happy to take the blame if nobody else will, but I thought it was Charles’s suggestion, because it’s that sort of American older connection.’

  CHAPTER 15: NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES

  This chapter is mainly based around Esther’s account of her and Jim’s disastrous holiday in Haiti. It is the first time this story has come out in print, and I’m extremely grateful to Esther for sharing it. She tells me she has also performed a full, two-hour version containing other bizarre episodes not mentioned here, which is guaranteed to leave an audience frazzled and emotionally exhausted. I can’t wait to hear it. While it is of course amusing, like so many stories pertaining to Jim Osterberg it is also tragic, and ends in our hero succumbing to madness, and one bystander dead. At the close, I have written that Jim descended into madness, which is not the word that Esther used; she said ‘illness’. I don’t mean to be fanciful. It is the word, however, used by psychiatric experts such as Kate Jamison to describe the kind of behaviour Jim exhibited in Haiti. Other sources include Mike Page, Rob Duprey, Anne Wehrer, Murray Zucker, Ric Ocasek, and the JO interview with David Fricke also cited in Chapter 16.

  Collapsing PA stacks. Frank Infante remembers this show as being in Portland, Mike Page remembers it as being at the Santa Monica Pacific Auditorium. Unless the tour information I have is incorrect, Infante’s line-up didn’t play Santa Monica.

  CHAPTER 16: HIDEAWAY

  Main sources: JO, Nigel Harrison, Robert Matheu, Clem Burke, Dr Murray Zucker, EF, Kevin Armstrong, Erdal Kizilcay, Seamus Beaghen, Nancy Jeffries, Jeff Gold, Olivier Ferrand, Dan Bourgoise and Bill Laswell. For Jim’s years out of the limelight, one priceless source was an interview conducted in October 1984 for People magazine by David Fricke of Rolling Stone. David demonstrated an unrivalled combination of generosity and organisation - keeping an interview tape and then locating it twenty years on. Huge thanks also to Kris Needs for supplying a copy of his Creem interview from 1986, which filled in more gaps over this period.

  Iggy’s tour was cancelled because of legal threats. According to road manager Henry McGroggan, this tale is incorrect, and the tour of the Far East was cut short simply due to Iggy’s exhaustion.

  Olivier Ferrand. According to Ferrand, Iggy and Jones recorded eight songs: a mellow version of ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Get To The Point’, ‘Fire Girl’, ‘Warm Female’, a rather bland take on ‘Family Affair’, ‘Cry For Love’, ‘Beside You’ and ‘Winners And Losers’. It’s possible the songs also included ‘When Dreaming Fails’ and a messy cover of the Animals’ ‘It’s My Life’.

  Iggy-flavoured Bowie album. This was mentioned in a generally supportive review by Richard Riegel in Creem, February 1987.

  New manager Art Collins. Art was part of a management duo with Barry Taylor, but Art was the one that most A&M staff remember; he went on to manage Iggy solo, and was much loved. Art died in July 2005; Iggy’s long-term road manager, Henry McGroggan - also known for his work with the Corrs - took over his management.

  Iggy seized a large teddy bear and started copulating with it. In polls of greatest TV moments, this appearance has been listed as being on Motormouth, but it was actually the ITV kids’ No. 73. Hopefully the video will eventually surface on youtube.com.

  A three-month run of shows supporting the Pretenders. For the Pretenders shows, Andy Anderson replaced Gavin Harrison on drums.

  Iggy had made bad albums before, but Instinct was the first time he’d been boring. Nick Kent, whose critical opinions I naturally respect, chooses Blah Blah Blah for his personal disdain: ‘I actually fell asleep the first time I heard it I was so underwhelmed.’ However, I would choose Instinct as the most soporific of Iggy’s albums, with its endless mid-paced chugging guitars, mind-numbingly predictable riffs, sterile solos and forgettable lyrics. However hard I try to concentrate on this album, I find myself diverted to some more stimulating activity, like filing press cuttings or tidying the cutlery drawer.

  CHAPTER 17: UNDEFEATED

  Main sources: JO, Nancy Jeffries, Don Was, Whitey Kirst, Charles Francis aka Black Francis, Eric Schermerhorn, Hal Cragin, Larry Mullins, Bob Gruen, Glen Matlock, Pete Marshall.

  ‘Livin’ On The Edge Of The Night’ . . . didn’t make its intended slot on Black Rain. Although the song appears on the OST compilation, both Don Was and Iggy mentioned that their original song wasn’t used.

  ‘Did You Evah’. Helped by a snazzy Alex Cox video, the single reached number 42 in the UK.

  ‘Everything they did blows me away.’ Taken from ‘Heroes’, Guitar magazine 1992, interview by Cliff Jones, as is the Thurston Moore ‘I’d really like to see Nirvana as Iggy’s backing band’ quote.

  The American ‘alternative’ and grunge scene of the 1990s. Thanks to MOJO’s Jenny Bulley - who was at the 1989 Nirvana Astoria show - Keith Cameron and Andrew Perry for discussing Iggy and the Stooges’ influence on grunge.

  ‘You little scumbag!’ Johnny Depp: ‘We actually met in 1989, on the set of John Waters’ Cry-Baby. But I had already met him long before. We were in a bar in 1980. At this time, I was part of a band who played first part of his show. I was seventeen. It was in Gainesville in Florida. After the concert, we all gathered in a bar and I absolutely wanted to draw his attention to me. When they closed the bar, I was totally drunk and I started yelling obscenities at him. He didn’t react at first, after a while Iggy came close to me, looked me straight in the eyes and said, “You little scumbag!” Then he left. I felt at the top of the world - at least he finally knew I was existing. That was great.’ (Interview by Christophe d’Yvoire.)

  ‘I think there was a moment where Jim decided that he couldn’t do a fucking article without my name being mentioned - and I don’t think that’s a very comfortable feeling.’ Bowie went on to say, ‘I completely understand - I really, really do. Unfortunately, I think Jim took it personally, and that’s a shame because I would have liked to remain closer to him.’ To Robert Phoenix, gettingit.com, October 1999.

  Henry Rollins. Rollins has a hilarious monologue of his admiration for and rivalry with Iggy, based around his attempt to blow him off stage at successive performances; it’s included as an extra on the Live At Luna Park DVD.

  ‘Beside You’. Of course, the original ‘Beside You’ recorded at Olivier Ferrand’s would have predated U2’s ‘With Or Without You’. The original demo made by the Godfather of Punk and his English lieutenant was apparently strongly reminiscent of a Police song - possibly ‘Every Breath You Take’.

  ‘[I did] all the wrong things [with Eric]’. Most of Jim’s quotes here, and other vital information on Jim’s relationship with Eric, come from Garth Cartwright’s excellent interview for the Times Saturday magazine in September 1999. Although, to be fair, Eric’s was not a conception planned
by his father, Iggy is disturbingly brutal about his son when one considers the devoted support he received from his own parents. Meeting Iggy in 1999, says Garth, ‘What struck me most about him was a certain reptilian quality - he was absolutely cold-blooded when talking about his son, ex-wife or old Stooges.’

  The woefully predictable Naughty Little Doggie. According to Hal Cragin, Iggy had worked on more adventurous material before retreating into ‘bonehead rock’ in the studio. The songs on the album, while competent enough punk-by-numbers, mostly repeat earlier themes: ‘I Wanna Live’ fuses the chord sequence of ‘Real Cool Time’ with the Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’; ‘Innocent World’ evokes ‘Gimme Danger’; the opening of ‘Knucklehead’ sounds like ‘Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell’ spliced with the Monkees’ ‘Stepping Stone’; ‘Pussy Walk’ returns to the subject of Brick By Brick’s ‘Pussy Power’. ‘It’s about going to high schools, seeing young girls and thinking about what kind of pussies they have under their skirts,’ says Cragin. ‘He thought it would make a good single.’ The final song, ‘Look Away’, recalling the story of Johnny Thunders and Sable Starr, is one of the album’s more intriguing moments, but as so often on this album, sounds half finished, breaking into a drearily predictable Ramones three-chord sequence. Given the album’s overall sparkling digital clarity, one also wonders why producer Thom Wilson didn’t edit out Iggy’s nervous, out-of-tune vocal takes.

  [Iggy’s] music was included in dozens of movies. There’s a good summary of Iggy and the Stooges’ presence on movie soundtracks at www.imdb.com/name/nm0006563/.

  Iggy claimed [the ROAR] tour offered the opportunity of playing to bigger crowds. Iggy justified the ROAR tour by telling Colin McDonald: ‘It has always been to my regret that I’ve never had the opportunity to play places like Pittsburgh, Davenport, Milwaukee, Huntsville on a good stage with good sound. I’ve never had that chance and I wanted to show people what I do before I can’t do it any more.’ Considering the conviction with which Iggy Pop can propound the most outrageous arguments, one suspects our hero already realised the game was up.

  ROAR tour. Skoal originally announced that the ROAR tour would reach forty cities across the USA. The actual number of dates played, recorded at drummer Larry Mullins’ www.tobydammit.com, is twenty. ROAR information here comes from Pete Marshall, Hal Cragin, Whitey and Larry Mullins; the information about Jim’s suspected nerve damage comes from Ron Asheton. For another band’s recollections of the doomed ROAR tour go to http://www.baboonland.com/sstories_iggy1.htm

  Jos Grain. Grain now has his own following on the web, thanks to the hilarious eighteen-page rider he wrote for the Stooges, which you can find at www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1004061iggypop1.html.

  ‘Furthermore, I don’t have to.’ From the interview with Colin McDonald, 1997.

  Iggy . . . seemed simply to lose his nerve. I’ve dealt with Avenue B briefly here, as it’s an album that seemed to sink without trace, although to me the work seems one of the biggest missed opportunities of Iggy’s later career. Coincidentally, during a few recent interviews with Jim we had discussed Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Kurt Weill and Sinatra’s Only The Lonely, debating how an intense, stripped-down, piano-led album could pack as much emotional muscle as an electric recording. In this instance, I do believe Don Was’s attempts to make the album more tasteful diluted the appeal it might have had.

  For the Avenue B tour that autumn. From this tour, Whitey’s brother, Alex Kirst, took over on drums from Larry Mullins, who was now playing for a variety of people, including the Residents.

  David Bowie used the word ‘obsessive’ about Iggy’s compulsion to tour. ‘I think he does far, far more touring than I do. I like touring, but I don’t like it quite so obsessively as [he does].’ Bowie to Robert Phoenix, gettingit.com, December 1999.

  ‘Listen, dude,’ he retorted. The quote is from the San Francisco Chronicle, April 2001.

  The same old fights . . . were even worse when confined to a tiny private jet. Whitey: ‘We were playing in the Pyrenees mountains so Jim rented a helicopter. We looked down over these mountains and saw wild horses and chased the wild horses. That was super cool. Then for a while he wanted to fly in private jets, which seems like a cool idea, but when you take four sweaty guys half out of their minds, Jim’s got his head cut from God knows, and stick them in a box together and keep feeding them all wine it gets pretty nutty.’

  CHAPTER 18: THE REPTILE HOUSE

  Main sources. The interview described at Jim’s house took place on 26 April 2005, just as I started work on this book, and was commissioned by MOJO magazine. Sad to say, the Tiki Hut was demolished by Hurricane Katrina.

  Murray Zucker diagnosed Jim Osterberg with a bipolar disorder, but now wonders . . . ‘I always got the feeling he enjoyed his brain so much he would play with it to the point of himself not knowing what was up and what was down. At times he seemed to have complete control of turning this on and that on, playing with different personas, out Bowie-ing David Bowie, as a display of the range of his brain. But then at other times you get the feeling he wasn’t in control - he was just bouncing around with it. It wasn’t just lack of discipline, it wasn’t necessarily bipolar, it was God knows what.’ Jim Osterberg since confirmed that his apparent bipolarity was a product of his lifestyle, and that the condition seems to have disappeared.

  Superhuman strength of will. Eric Schermerhorn was one of many who observed, ‘This guy cleaned up on his own, he had this inner strength, and bam, simply stops drinking . . . it was incredible.’ Schermerhorn went on to discuss more about Jim, including his superhuman metabolism, before simply concluding, ‘He’s a freak!’

  His record contract at Virgin was under review. I didn’t want to include the full story of Skull Ring here, as in my view it’s a fairly disposable guest-led album. His songs with the Stooges, I would suggest, are messy and unfocused; for how they really can sound, the listener should check out the two versions of ‘You Better Run’, their superb contribution to Sunday Nights, the Jr Kimbrough tribute album. Jim explains their reunion thus: ‘Virgin also had gone through a restructuring and parted ways with a lot of artists and that time I didn’t want to leave there . . . so I proposed that I do a guest ménage! You should have seen their faces when I said, I want Justin Timberlake, I want Puff Daddy! But I was serious! They never pursued those. So the Stooges looked better and better to me. And I didn’t anticipate the reaction, nobody did, the A&R was sort of allowing it to happen grudgingly and was only gonna give us a tiny budget for one song, then he got a call in his A&R office from Rolling Stone . . . everything changed! Suddenly back-slapping cos he was getting attention and he realised there was interest here . . . and before we were done mixing we had a gig offer. I kept turning them down . . . but they wouldn’t go away so I gave up and we did the [Coachella] gig.’

  Watt had been doubled up in agony in the lead-up to Coachella. There is an enthralling diary, which covers Watts’s shows with the Stooges, at www.hootpage.com. For Watts’s own fascinating recollections of the first Coachella performance, including Iggy’s suggestions on how to play and instructions what to wear, go to www.hootpage.com/hoot_thecordthat-tourdiary4.html.

  Speaking to the Christ-like figure a few weeks later. Jack White was interviewing Iggy for MOJO magazine in May. Thanks to Andrew Male for providing the full transcript of their conversation.

  DISCOGRAPHY

  1. THE STOOGES ★★★★★

  Recorded: Hit Factory & Mastertone studios, NYC, 1-10 April* 1969; Released: Elektra, August 1969 (US), September 1969 (UK); Chart Peak: - (UK), 106 (US); Personnel: Iggy Stooge (v), Ron Asheton (gtr), Dave Alexander (bass), Scott Asheton (drums); Producer: John Cale; Engineer: (Mastertone) Lewis Merenstein.

  Rock music stripped down to its most vital essentials, this album still sounds fresher and more extreme than most of the punk and alternative material it has inspired over the decades. The lyrics reject intellectualism for a documentary depiction of boredom and anomie, del
ivered deadpan over an imposing, monumental backing. It sounds simple, but each element of this monolithic structure has been hoisted into place with painstaking care, most notably Ron Asheton’s precise, memorable riffs on songs like ‘No Fun’, ‘1969’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and ‘Not Right’.

  2. FUN HOUSE. ★★★★★

  Recorded: Elektra Sound Recorders, La Cienega, LA, 10-25 May 1970; Released: Elektra, August 1970 (US), December 1970 (UK); Chart Peak: - (UK), - (US); Personnel: as The Stooges, plus Steve Mackay (tenor sax); Producer: Don Gallucci; Engineer: Brian Ross-Myring.

  For their album debut, the Stooges felt they’d been railroaded by Elektra and restricted by their own inexperience into recording ‘drippy, drippy little songs’, says Scott Asheton. For their second release, Ron Asheton’s guitar playing progressed from charming primitivism to something much more powerful and concise. Thanks to an inspired production from one-time ‘Louie Louie’ organist Don Gallucci, who decreed the band would perform their customary set as if playing live, Iggy working the floor with a hand-held microphone, Fun House captured all the elemental power of the Stooges in full flow. Yet while the album revels in exquisitely dumb riffs - ‘Loose’, ‘1970’ - there’s a confident, sophisticated swagger to the sound, too. When Mackay weighs in on saxophone five songs in, for ‘1970’, the aural onslaught is as thrilling as rock ’n’ roll ever gets.