Iggy Pop

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To Lucy and Curtis,
my Chinese rugs.

PROLOGUE

I Never Thought It Would Come To This

This wasn’t magnificent, but it was definitely war. Scott Asheton hunched low behind his ride cymbal, which offered a little protection from the incoming hail. From his position at the back of the stage he could see the projectiles clearly once they flashed out of the lights - whisky bottles, Stroh’s bottles, heavy black champagne bottles, glasses, coins and lit cigarettes - and Scott’s vantage point and keen eyesight meant he could also spot the occasional bags of weed as they hit the stage, and point them out to his guardian John Cole, who’d throw the drugs inside Scott’s bass drum for safe-keeping. He looked over at Iggy, his singer and one-time drug buddy, increasingly irritated as he realised that each time the singer whipped the crowd into a new surge of fury, he would come and stand over by the drum kit, attracting more missiles in Scott’s direction. But he didn’t blame Iggy. The singer was only a little more messed up than he was.

Each member of the Stooges was in his own private world as they battled through their doomed set on the freezing-cold night of 9 February 1974 at the Michigan Palace, the decayed, depressing 1920s movie hall in downtown Detroit. Pianist Scott Thurston was a recent arrival, but he’d grown to respect his bandmates for their dumb heroism and what he thought of as their forlorn hillbilly hope, a hope he’d come to share: that maybe they could spruce up their act and grab victory from ‘whatever was happening’. But this was . . . degraded, he decided. As he watched Iggy surge into the crowd to provoke them once again, he felt admiration tinged with pity. The guy was driven. Driven to everything except success.

James Williamson, the hotshot tough guy guitarist who’d seen the Stooges as his meal ticket to fame, the sensitive thug derided by most of the Stooges and their tiny camp of followers as ‘the Skull’, concentrated on keeping his guitar in tune and cranking out his magnificent, dangerous guitar riffs, and looked over at Iggy with something closer to contempt. Wearing a bizarre sci fi outfit crafted by Hollywood designer Bill Whitten, James looked striking from the back of the hall, but up close you could see his costume was dirty and frayed. Even a month or so ago, James had been driving the band forward, compelled to write and rehearse new material even when there was no prospect of a record company ever releasing it. But now he too was starting to despair. His singer was a failure, and he was a failure too. The Stooges had fucked their way through some damn good orgies, but his own burning drive for success was fizzling out. Once, he’d enjoyed the psychodrama, but now it was unbearable. Iggy had sold James out, and now he couldn’t even keep his own act together. Nonetheless, James felt a twinge of sympathy, knowing what his one-time friend had been through.

Ron Asheton felt drained. He’d survived the most painful humiliations, sacked as the Stooges’ guitarist, demoted to playing bass, estranged from his brother and his singer, clinging to the hope that the band he’d co-created could fulfil their destiny and become the American Stones. But, free of the drugs that had numbed most of his bandmates, he knew, with inescapable clarity, that this tour was beating a dead horse - a dead horse that was turning to dust. Until now, he’d survived on gallows humour, entertaining all those around him with his deadpan observations on the desperate state of his singer and his band. He’d porked some girls, had some good times, but now the good times had gone.

Then there was Iggy. Indestructible Iggy, who hoovered up whatever drugs were placed in front of his nose, who’d been thrown unconscious onto the stage by his tour manager several times over the preceding months, who’d been knocked flat by bikers a couple of days ago but invited them back to the Michigan Palace for more. Who now seemed so physically and mentally damaged, by himself and those around him, that at times both his life force and his luminous beauty looked to be draining away. By now, at least one of his closest confidantes had concluded that he’d suffered some kind of breakdown that had left his nervous system permanently damaged. His face was puffy, and there were lines etched round the hypnotic blue eyes that had charmed so many of America’s desirable chicks. Tonight he’d chosen to enrage the biker audience, who were convinced he was a fag, by wearing some kind of black leotard, augmented with a shawl fashioned into a see-through skirt. Despite the ludicrous outfit, he was telling them, or maybe because of it, their girlfriends still wanted to fuck him. And just in case the message wasn’t explicit enough, he enunciated lasciviously the title of the next song, ‘Cock In My Pocket’. Even now, as he danced around the stage, lithe, balletic, there was a shamanic power that electrified the crowd, half of them besotted, half of them contemptuous, or perhaps simply numbed by the Quaaludes that had become the drug
du jour
at the Palace. Relentlessly, James Williamson’s thuggish, psychotic guitar kept propelling Iggy forward as he threw himself into songs like ‘Gimme Danger’ or ‘I Got Nothing’, songs he’d written about feeling doomed, songs he was compelled to keep writing even when no record company was interested in releasing them. Now everyone in the audience, friend or foe, seemed to know he was doomed too. As he quipped, ‘I don’t care if you throw all the ice in the world, I’m making ten thousand, baby, so screw you,’ everyone present knew this was empty bravado. And if Iggy Pop didn’t know it, Jim Osterberg, the man who’d created this out-of-control alter ego, did.

Earlier that evening, during his short conversation with Jim, Michael Tipton, who was planning to tape that night’s performance on an open-reel recorder, had realised that this would be the last Stooges show - an occasion for Iggy to play around, to mock the audience and his own desperate state. Many fans and foes alike turned up at Stooges shows eager to see what ludicrous outfit Iggy would wear that evening, to enjoy the banter and occasional hostilities between band and audience, but this evening’s was a more pointless circus than any of them had witnessed before. ‘I
am
the greatest!’ Iggy screamed at the audience in the show’s dying moments as a hail of eggs flew on the stage, one of them hitting him in the face. As eggs soared over in Iggy’s direction, Ron kept a lookout for lit cigarettes, worried they’d set fire to his hair. When a heavy coin shot out of the lights and clipped him painfully on his scalp, Ron put his hand up to where it hurt, and saw blood on his fingers.

For everyone around the Stooges, there was a sense the circus couldn’t continue for much longer. Natalie Schlossman, their one-time fan club organiser, had looked after the band for nearly four years, nursemaiding Iggy when he was out of control, often tucking him up in bed and taking away his clothes in the forlorn hope he wouldn’t trawl the hotel corridors in search of drugs. By now, Natalie had walked in on the band in every possible sexual combination - James in a blood-soaked bathroom with two girls, Iggy in a bedroom with three girls, Scottie Thurston and Ron in a hotel room with one girl, twenty different people in an orgy in Iggy’s room - but she regarded their activities with a benign, maternal concern, cooking for them and washing their increasingly scummy costumes. Whatever pathetic state she’d found Iggy in, Natalie knew that on stage he’d reach inside himself to tap into something pure and honest. But now she found herself disturbed by the malevolent miasma around the band, for which she mostly blamed James Williamson. If it were over soon, it would be a blessing for everyone involved.

Walking over to Tipton, Iggy asked whether they should play ‘Louie Louie’. James Williamson glowered at the prospect of the hackneyed garage classic, but he cranked up the song’s brutally simplistic three-chord riff, and the band lurched after him. As Iggy yelped, and shouted, ‘I never thought it would come to this,’ the Stooges’ moronic inferno rose in intensity, and Iggy gave the audience a ‘fuck you’ smirk before launching into an obscene version of the lyrics that had enlivened his own star turn as Jim Osterberg, the singing drummer, nearly ten years before. Now the song that had marked the beginning of his career seemed appropriate with which to mark its end. Back in 1965, 15-year-old society debutantes had innocently thrown his favourite sweets onto the stage during an idyllic summer sojourn when he’d hung out with Michigan’s wealthiest and most cultured industrial barons. Now it seemed his audience’s cultural ambitions amounted to watching messy car crashes. A dumb Detroit anthem with schoolboy pottymouth lyrics, hopelessly mangled from Richard Berry’s original song, ‘Louie Louie’ was pitched right down at their intellectual level. ‘She got a rag on, I move above,’ he sang, his voice raw but each word enunciated clearly, and the singer leered at the audience to make sure they recognised the reference to menstruation, ‘it won’t be long before I take it off . . . I feel a rose down in her hair, her ass is black and her tits are bare’.

This time around, as James Williamson ripped into a vicious, trebly guitar solo, Iggy restrained himself from leaping into the audience. There were only a few minutes to go. James’s blizzard of notes transformed themselves into a pumped-up, bug-eyed, steroid version of the song’s hoodlum riff before the guitarist eased himself back down to comparatively restrained broken chords and Iggy gently crooned the last verse. Then suddenly it was all over, Scottie ringing out a roll on his snare drum as Iggy proclaimed, ‘Well, you missed again, so better luck next time,’ and disappeared into the wings. But there would be no next time.

This sorry, funny, pitiful gig wasn’t an especially low point in the Stooges’ doomed recent history. They’d endured bigger humiliations, retreating from the stage shamed and beaten. This time, they’d even got to finish the set. But their singer’s fighting spirit had finally been knocked out of him. All through, he’d stayed true to the music he was convinced would transform the world, and it was all turning to shit. The following morning he telephoned his fellow Stooges to say he could take no more.

If he’d only known what lay ahead, maybe he’d have clung onto his fellow Stooges for company, for the truth was he had not hit bottom yet. There was an infinitely bigger distance to fall, a descent into a Hollywood underworld whose inhabitants would close in on him like vultures eager for their share of carrion, persuading him to repeat the ritual sacrifice and self-harm, or adopting him as a debauched trophy boyfriend before they publicly mocked his pathetic state. And the singer finally seemed to abandon his burning ambition, telling the few people who would listen that there was a hex on him, and on the Stooges. And that there was no way out.

After that would come a confused, half-awake existence, confinement in a mental institution, and shelter in an abandoned garage shared with a Hollywood rent boy. And then jail. This was the oblivion so many people considered his rightful destiny. Where several of his friends ended their confused, desperate lives with heroin overdoses, or simple alcohol abuse, Iggy’s fate seemed to be that of some accursed totem, a laughing stock, an object lesson in abject failure.

Yet, even as the doomed singer dropped below anyone’s radar, word of the Stooges’ dumb, heroic demise was starting to spread. For some, that last stand was a modern-day rerendering of Western mythology, the unflinching, dusty heroism of five gunslingers going to their doom in certain knowledge of their fate. For others, the parallels were almost biblical, for soon an English writer, Iggy’s very own John the Baptist, would be on a plane from Los Angeles to Paris carrying a tape of the Michigan Palace show, a religious relic that would soon pass from believer to believer. As each young music fan examined the sleeve of
Metallic KO
, an album based on Michael Tipton’s recordings, with its silver and black photo of Iggy laid out like Jesus in a homoerotic Deposition, they concluded that this music constituted a vital message. This music was the long-awaited antidote to a bland world of overblown progressive pomp, of complacent country-rock cosiness, of manufactured music controlled by faceless producers and session men. Iggy’s Stooges, in contrast, were the real thing: heroic, doomed, and too dumb to realise it. Their frontman became a symbol: of animalism, boredom, energy and lethargy - and of a devotion to his music that very nearly cost him his life, and perhaps still could.

And then the young fans who listened to this album embarked on quests of their own. Brian James, a guitarist in a band called Bastard, set out to ‘find my own Iggy’, a quest that would lead to the formation of two crucial groups called the London SS - from whose ashes would spring the Clash and Generation X - and the Damned, who would later release the call to action of a new movement that would become known as punk. Ian Curtis, an aspiring singer from Manchester, would buy the record too, playing it to his friends in Warsaw, later renamed Joy Division. Joy Division’s bassist, Peter Hook, was one of many who enthused that
Metallic KO
was ‘a real gig, a real live record’, the only live album that reflected how it felt at his own fast-rising band’s chaotic shows, where everything balanced ‘on a knife edge’. Other English kids like John Lydon and Glen Matlock were listening too, and would adopt the Stooges’ songs for their own band, the Sex Pistols. Another evening, during one of his first visits to New York, Joe Strummer would play the album over and over as he spent the night with a new lover, immersing himself in its volume and intensity. Even decades later, kids like Anthony Kiedis or Jack White listened to the Stooges and resolved to follow their musical blueprint. Not every single person who listened to
Metallic KO
, or its predecessors, formed a band. But enough of them did to ensure that, within a few years, the invincible singer was on the rise again, revered by a new audience. It was another incredible twist in a life and career that would always subvert expectations, both in its highs and in its lows.

By 1976, Iggy Pop had regained his aura of invincibility, and emerged from limbo to greet a new, expectant generation of fans. But as these fans met the self-acclaimed ‘World’s Forgotten Boy’, shocked that Iggy Pop had survived intact, there was another surprise in store for them. Don Was, famed producer for the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and others, who had seen the Stooges in his youth and helped engineer Iggy’s career revival in the 1990s, puts it as well as anybody.

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