Iggy Pop (7 page)

Three months out of high school, the 18-year-old Osterberg seemed keen to lay waste to his former straight, fratboy image. And where he’d made a real effort to fit in at high school, impressing fellow students with his intellect, his attendance at the university was desultory, and seemingly confined to hanging out at the library and the coffee shops. Lynn Goldsmith had bumped into Iggy standing in line on their enrolment day at the University of Michigan; there was an instant erotic attraction between them and they arranged a rendezvous for later that day - to which neither turned up. When they met again, each of them admitted they were still virgins and had chickened out. ‘Iggy was cute. Girls like cute guys, it’s that simple,’ says Goldsmith. But she remembers that where Panther was naturally unique, ‘Iggy worked at being unique. He used to go in this coffee shop on the campus, and he’d sit there, pick his nose and eat his boogers. But only when people were watching him. That was my take.’

When eyewitnesses remember Jim over that period, the adjective ‘coy’ occurs again and again. Janet Withers had had a crush on ‘Ostie’ ever since she’d been introduced to him by her sister Dale at high school, and would hang around the university campus and Discount Records in order to catch a glimpse of this elusive creature. She kept a diary of her sightings, describing how Ostie would look her up and down as they talked, then look away, a true coquette. ‘He’s about my height [5’ 9”], has a thin but very good build, black hair in a long Beatle [cut], large, large, beautiful blue eyes and a long straight nose,’ she confided to her diary. ‘His mouth is naturally appealing and just the right proportions. He has muscles, of course, and man! just the ideal guy for me.’ Janet’s crush was never consummated - but then none of them was. ‘Jim was very coy and flirty, very come-on, but nothing to back it up,’ says Dan Erlewine, who shared a one-room apartment on State Street with his drummer in 1966. ‘But that’s not bad, that’s just being shy.’ The shared bedroom gave Dan more of an insight into Iggy’s character than he would have liked, particularly as Barbara Oliver, who was a couple of years older than Iggy and supposedly going out with Dan’s brother Mike, was a regular visitor. As Dan vainly attempted to get to sleep, he would hear Jim tease her with the phrase, ‘You can look, but you can’t touch.’ Jim getting girls over and teasing them with ‘his thing’ became quite a regular ritual. ‘I wouldn’t have done that with him in the room,’ says Erlewine, ‘but he would with me.’ Both Erlewine brothers agreed that Osterberg’s generously sized ‘thing’ was a crucial part of his self-image. It was no surprise when he announced that his featured vocal with the band would be ‘I’m A Man’.

Seducing (or tantalising) Michael Erlewine’s girlfriend underlined Jim’s Oedipal relationship with this father figure. Later, Jim would denigrate the Prime Movers as effete bohemians, but throughout 1966 Erlewine’s influence was crucial. ‘[Iggy] was a sponge, I think he soaked up ideas,’ says Scott Richardson, then the singer with the Chosen Few. ‘Michael was a very bossy figure, but a very influential one.’

Bob Sheff observed Iggy from close up, both in the Prime Movers and the Stooges, and he felt that Michael Erlewine was ‘not a mentor exactly, but he made him. The [Prime Movers] experience was important to Iggy in an emotional way. Michael liked very emotional situations and he put that into the music a lot. Iggy’s the same way.’

An intellectual, inspiring, often infuriating character to this day - it’s sometimes hard to extract his opinions of other people, for he’s far more interested in himself - Michael Erlewine was ruthlessly committed to his music. But this wasn’t a selfish commitment, for he was devoted to bringing the audience with him - sometimes literally so. There was one late-night Prime Movers’ show at Clint’s Club where he worked up the audience into such an exalted state that after their final song he led the band and twenty kids from the audience through the streets of Ann Arbor, preaching and encouraging them to contemplate the beauty of the everyday objects around them. They stayed up until six o’clock in the morning, sharing the spirituality of the night turning into the dawn, before bundling into a 24-hour Greek restaurant for more earthly sustenance. ‘It was an incredible experience,’ remembers Sheff. ‘A charismatic experience.’ Few other performers would have taken such risks, but Michael’s commitment in stimulating and challenging his audience was a crucial lesson. And one in which the pupil would eventually outdo the master.

There were some respects in which Iggy was already way ahead of his mentor, though, for as with the Iguanas, a substantial chunk of the Prime Movers’ audience was there to follow the drummer. Kathy Asheton, sister of Ron and Scott, was one of them: ‘I gathered up a couple of my girlfriends and we concocted a fan club, played the screaming-fan roles. I had a huge crush on him. There was a time we would walk down the street, holding hands, a real innocent thing, or sitting on his bed . . . for me this was very sophisticated.’

Joan Boyle was another Prime Movers fan who, despite Jim’s habit of doing things to gross people out (‘saying obnoxious things, sticking his tongue out’), saw him as sweet, considerate and ‘sen sitive. Definitely. He helped me get together with my husband [Dan Erlewine], gave me counselling on how to snag him.’ Iggy’s attraction to women inspired his agony-uncle column in the otherwise rather staid Prime Movers newsletter - the effect is rather akin to seeing a Page Three boy in a Stalinist propaganda leaflet. In it he would dispense wisdom to lovelorn teenagers, handing out sage advice.

Dear Iggy,

I just wanted to know if you think a girl should kiss a boy on the first date.

Love Veronica

Veronica,

That depends on where you kiss him.

Love Iggy

Happy to exploit his attraction for the opposite sex, Iggy nonetheless exhibited an unexpected humility, which deepened his charm. Dale Withers attended the University of Michigan with Jim, and she often saw him making his way from booth to booth in the semi-subterranean Michigan Union Grill. ‘Jim would come through and stop at each booth or table, saying humbly with downcast eyes, and I remember him saying these exact words, “Please please please please come to our gig.”’

To Dale, such humility seemed rare among men in general, let alone aspiring rock stars. It was all the more alluring in someone so naturally extravagant. Iggy himself recalls how his attitude to the audience differed from that of his bandmates. ‘I remember once in the Prime Movers, we were on a break, we were playing in a bar, and the [Erlewine] brothers were going on and on about how fat and ugly the two girls in the front were. I just told them, “Are you guys crazy? You have two fans there! I don’t give a damn what they look like. This is a treasure, you have two people paying attention to you!” You know?’

This faithful compact with an audience is something that would, in its unconventional way, endure in Jim Osterberg’s life - even if this notion would seem ridiculous to some of his peers, including Pete Andrews, who regularly booked the Prime Movers into Mothers Teenage Nightclub. He regarded Iggy as a ‘solid, sound’ drummer but was staggered by some of his antics, particularly one evening when he checked the stage at showtime, only to see it empty but for a cheesy-looking cardboard phone booth. Then he saw the drummer, dressed in some kind of superhero outfit, break his way out of the ludicrous contraption, climb up a rope to the balcony where the entire band was set up and get to his kit just as the band fired into the intro. ‘We were just going, Jeez,’ remembers Andrews.

After dropping out of the University of Michigan by the second term of his anthropology course - he claimed he learned more as an autodidact, researching in the university library - Jim moved on from his apartment share with Dan Erlewine behind Herb David’s guitar shop to a room across the road in Blakely Court, and finally to an apartment in the basement of a rundown Victorian building, which he shared with Scott Richardson. Lynn Klavitter, his girlfriend from high school, had moved to California, but went to search him out on her return in the summer of 1966. She was shocked at the transformation from the boy she knew from the previous summer: ‘I’m sure he was heavily into drugs, he was wrapped in a blanket, the place was a total disaster.’ Lauri Ingber, who’d served on Jim’s High School election committee, saw him around the same time, and is convinced to this day that the previously clean-cut school kid was by then on heroin. But his dishevelled state was more to do with poverty than the marijuana that was the drug
du jour
, and which he only smoked ‘when force-fed’, as it exacerbated his asthma. By now he was living on his meagre earnings from the Prime Movers and Discount Records, along with handouts from his parents. ‘We were poor, and we were starving half the fucking time,’ says Scott Richardson. ‘We had our clothes hanging on the water pipes, newspapers on the floor, we were living like Kurt Cobain underneath a freeway. But I remember laying with him all night and talking about stuff. It was such a tremendously exciting time. And it was that painful period when you’re young, don’t know who you are yet, with all these influences around.’

For a short time, the Ann Arbor svengali Jeep Holland took control of the Prime Movers. His control freakery was excessive, and the band began to bridle at his insistence that they perform dressed in suits. But Jeep’s megalomania was a godsend in a genuine crisis, notably the spectre of military service in the Vietnam war. Ominous letters started dropping on the doorsteps of many of Ann Arbor ’s musicians from 1966 - by which time Iggy, who’d dropped out of university and therefore lost his student deferment, was vulnerable, as was his friend Ron Asheton. Fortunately Jeep saw the military’s predations on his musical empire as a personal affront, and he masterminded a counter-attack that was inspired in its audacity and frightening in its attention to detail.

The guiding principle, Holland explained to Ann Arbor ’s apprehensive musicians, was psychology. Creative, vulnerable psyches were by their nature incompatible with the rigours of a military campaign or the claustrophobia of life in a platoon. Jeep’s tactics were to accentuate the charming personality foibles of his charges, and even amplify them, often with the use of his favoured drug methamphetamine, until the establishment was compelled to view these innocents as deranged psychopaths.

Jeep would work closely with his subjects for a week before their fateful draft examination at Ann Arbor Armoury (the cheek of the Army, subverting a rock ’n’ roll venue for this charade!) and his evangelistic fervour would help all their fears evaporate. One example he liked to cite was that of Glenn Quackenbush, keyboard player with greaser band the Fugitives, and later the Scott Richard Case, or SRC. ‘Like most organ players, Glenn felt superior, and didn’t really like people very much,’ he explained. Over the years Glenn had nonetheless attained a basic mastery of the niceties of human behaviour. All Jeep had to do was remove this, ‘to take away all the little things you develop so you can get along with other people’. By the time Quackenbush got in line at the Armoury, Jeep proudly boasted, ‘The lines on either side had a gap of four people, because no one would stand near him, they just knew something was very wrong.’

Iggy Osterberg’s performance was a little more baroque, but still satisfying. After they had completed a questionnaire, the draftees were required to strip down to their skivvies in readiness for their physical examination. Osterberg duly lined up, but kept his hands down his pants, ‘holding his dick’, only to be admonished by the military police who were keeping order. ‘No one is touching my dick!’ Osterberg yelped, as the MPs counselled him gently, ‘Don’t worry son, no one will touch you.’ Finally two of the burlier MPs grabbed his elbows and attempted to pull his hands away from his genitals. ‘But Jim was a drummer, and he had arms of steel!’ cackled Holland. ‘They lifted him right off the ground, but couldn’t get him to take his hands off his dick! He was out of there in half an hour!’

Holland calculated that he saved twenty-one musicians from the draft, including most of the future Stooges, the Rationals, and future members of the SRC. Many of their contemporaries were not so lucky. Two of Jim’s close friends, Ricky Hodges and Dennis Dieckmann, were drafted, but survived their tours of duty. Several other Ann Arbor High classmates were maimed or killed in the South-east Asian conflict.

Liberated from military service, the Prime Movers could dedicate themselves to their mission of converting the masses to their own brand of authentic blues. They were sufficiently evangelistic - or masochistic - to take their music to the heart of Ann Arbor’s tiny black quarter around Ann Street, playing a residence at Clint’s Club every week for over a year. They were tolerated by the clientele, who appreciated that they were making an effort, and any mockery tended to be good-humoured. Often a set would finish in silence until some wag shouted out, ‘Let’s give these guys the clap.’ (‘Meaning gonorrhoea, of course,’ says Erlewine.) Sometimes at the teen nightclubs like Mothers they met with similar incomprehension, but for a select few they were the coolest band around - Chosen Few guitarist and future Stooge James Williamson describes the Prime Movers as ‘the best band Iggy was ever in’. ‘What they were doing was relatively esoteric,’ says Dale Withers, who along with her sister, Janet, and future husband, Larry, was one of the band’s more committed fans. ‘But we thought they would really move on up, like the Stones did.’ The band members were formidable musicians. They would often throw unexpected gospel numbers into their set; Sheff’s adept, inventive keyboard-playing anticipated the sound of the Doors by a full year, while Dan Erlewine was one of the first US musicians to use a Gibson Les Paul to achieve an authentic, overdriven, blues grittiness. Iggy himself was becoming an impressive drummer, and he made a decent fist of the songs on which he sang lead - ‘Mystery Train’ and ‘I’m A Man’: ‘I remember him singing that song as “I’m A Tricycle”,’ says Bill Kirchen, later a revered interpreter of roots music. ‘He did it totally straight, like Muddy Waters, singing out the letters “T-R-I-C-Y-C-L-E”. I was impressed!’