I've got a Korean guy who comes in, a Tai Chi master, and I do these funny Chinese exercises. "My wife's a good cook and I go to sleep at night and all that shit like you're supposed to. "Common sense," he replies when I ask the secret of his super fitness. I sucked in my stomach and cheeks but I still felt like a twenty-five stone behemoth beside this little panther. While we posed for a snapshot, I put my arms around his shoulders and could literally feel his muscles rippling. A slight but noticeable quiver of the head and hand and considerable deafness in one ear appear to be the only ravages bequeathed by his years of debauchery. When I met him backstage at a Hamburg rock festival a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by how energetic, healthy and even athletic he looks. These days, Iggy Pop is all cleaned up and, as you can gather from the closing lines of his autobiography, a man of much simpler pleasures. Other times, he opted for the more direct approach of slicing his bare chest with a blade.Īll that is in the past though. Iggy would often punctuate his concerts by repeatedly pummelling himself in the mouth with his microphone until he started to bleed. Onstage, his mania for self-destruction was clearly evident. His cocaine binges with collaborator, David Bowie, in Berlin during the seventies are the stuff of legend and very nearly killed them both. There has been violence, both towards himself and towards others, suicide attempts and years of vein-popping drug abuse. He is, by his own definition, "a certifiable maniac" with an addiction to activities that "have a better than evens chance of killing me within a week". That glancing reference to ups and downs, however, is one of those noises-off-stage directions that covers a multitude of sins, and I do mean sins.įrom his early teens onwards, Iggy decided to burn maximum rubber on the fast lane of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. The foregoing is, of course, merely the gist of the Iggy Pop story but it's a damn fine gist. "Ambition is to make better music, live life in peace and then die." Hate publicity whores, hokey music, people who wanna use me and conceited dicks. Love my garden, my wife, my dog and cat a lot, but also love noise, aggravation, girls, regular guys, music, as much. Got a place in Mexico to go when I can't stand it anymore. Lots more albums (total 15), half great, half so-so. Resurfaced '76 with first solo album, recorded by Bowie. "Went L.A., went underground, more arrests, hard times. Went nuts from the life, got screwed in the business. Totally did our own thing, like nobody else. WOW! Found two High School dropouts on Michigan Street corner, '67, to start Stooges. Loved Butterfield Band/Junior Wells/Buddy Guy/Little Walter/Otis Rush. Blues band called Prime Movers, playing bars, Detroit and Chicago sometimes. "Started getting WILD, grew my hair to my shoulders and dyed it platinum. I plugged a phonograph into that socket and listened to OUT OF OUR HEADS and BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME all summer. "Five 45-minute sets a night, 15-minute breaks, six nights a week, a bare cabin with cold running water, five mattresses and one electric socket. WOW! Professional employment, far away from home. We cut a single in our senior year, and the summer of 1965 we got a gig in Northern Michigan at a joint called The Ponytail Club. 10th Grade, 1962, formed Iguanas, High School rock band. "Age 5, played drums with my Lincoln Logs and Jinkertoys," he recalls. Pretty early on, however, he started to find release from his grim environment by both listening to and making music. Like the old joke goes, trailer parks are the reason God invented tornadoes, and the young Iggy (real name James Jewel Osterberg) hated life in Coachville Yonder.
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