Scenes From the Life of James Osterberg

PAUL TRYNKA: “The idea of an alter ego that takes on a life of its own reaches back through time, was formalized in nineteenth-century gothic fiction, and reached new popularity in the postwar America that nurtured Jim Osterberg, the boy who dreamt of being the Atomic Brain. For a twenty-one year old performer confronting a hostile audience, being able to call on a super human alter ego might enable survival. But as we know from countless cheesy horror movies, alter egos can get out of control.”

IGGY POP: “I was transformed into a dork in high school, when I first became exposed to the incredible cruelty that children have at their disposal. Nobody can be more cruel than a child. And there’s nobody more equipped or inclined towards cruelty than upper middle class children whose folks gave lots of space money and big cars and glib speech. I was burdened by the fact that whenever I tried to express myself I would be laughed at. I was considered weird – this weird kid. I was also very, very shy, very unhip, very unglib, and never wore the right clothes. But those days were numbered as soon as I learnt how to become excessively aggressive towards others. I learnt a unique and indispensible skill, which is to make rock’n’roll. I stopped my parents dressing me and started becoming a conniving cold-hearted son of a bitch, which I’ve always been since the beginning of the Stooges, right up until the here and now.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “The Stooges could only have existed in Ann Arbor, for no other town was as smart and as dumb. They originated at a place where high art met greaser thuggery, where the intellectual met the dysfunctional. And that collision was exemplified by the moment that Jim Osterberg teamed up with the Asheton brothers; the moment when ‘the boy most likely to’ became, as he boasts, ‘corrupted!’”

IGGY POP: “I was shooting up every day and passing out every night, drinking and drugging and screwing and… defying.”

IGGY POP: “Two grams of biker speed, five tabs of LSD and as much grass as could be inhaled before the gig. I found this concoction effective enough to completely lose my senses. And then, before a gig, we’d gather like a football team and hype ourselves up to a point where we’d be screaming at each other, ‘OK, you guys, whadda we gonna do? Kill! Kill! Kill!’ Then we’d take the stage.’”

LESTER BANGS: “The Stooges are one band that does have the strength to meet any audience on its own terms, no matter what manner of devilish bullshit that audience might think up (although they are usually too cowed by Ig’s psychically pugnacious assertiveness to do anything but gape and cringe slightly, snickering later on the drive home). Iggy is like a matador baiting the vast dark hydra sitting afront him – he enters the audience frequently to see what’s what and even from the stage his eyes reach out searchingly, sweeping the joint and singling out startled strangers who’re seldom able to stare him down. It’s your stage as well as his and if you can take it away from him, why, welcome to it. But the King of the Mountain must maintain the pace, and the authority, and few can. In this sense Ig is a true star of the rarest kind – he has won that stage, and nothing but the force of his own presence entitles him to it.”

IGGY POP: “The music drives me into a peak freak. I can’t feel any pain or realize what goes on around me, and when I dive into the sea of people, it is the feeling of the music, the mood.”

ALAN VEGA: “This guy with blond bangs – who looked like Brian Jones – came out onstage and at first I thought he was a chick. He had on torn dungarees and these ridiculous-looking loafers. He was just wild-looking – staring at the crowd and going – ‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ Then the Stooges launched into one of their songs and the next thing you knew, Iggy was diving off the stage onto the concrete, and cutting himself up with a broken guitar. It wasn’t theatrical, it was theater. Alice Cooper was theatrical, he had all the accoutrements, but with Iggy, this was not acting. It was the real thing. Iggy’s set ended in twenty minutes, and somebody had the fucking genius to play Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto through the speaker system. The audience was throwing bottles and roses at him. I swear it was beautiful. Do you know what I’m saying, man? It changed my life because it made me realize everything I was doing was bullshit.”

IGGY POP: “For just five minutes! For just five minutes can’t you treat me like an animal?!”

PATRICIA KENEELY: “Iggy, despite his unorthodox stage demeanor, is the kind of kid that makes everybody feel like a Jewish mother: you want to take him home and feed him chicken soup. Onstage, he becomes a latter-day berserker: at the Pavilion concert, dressed in blue jeans cut to short shorts, loafers and nothing else, he leaned back against the bank of amplifiers, took a broken drum stick, and almost absently began to carve up his chest with it. Other action included flamenco dancing around the mike stand, humping the mike stand, humping the mike stand, crouching at the edge of the stage and then launching himself headfirst, arms over head like a diver, into the crowd. (‘But Iggy, what did you do when you were down there?’ ‘Oh, I just kind of said ‘Hi.’’)”

RON ASHETON: “The whole room turned really primitive – like a pack of starving animals that hadn’t eaten in a week and somebody throws out a piece of meat. I was afraid. For me it wasn’t fun, but it was mesmerizing. It was like, ‘The plane’s burning, the ship’s sinking, so let’s crush each other.’ Never had I seen people driven so nuts – that music could drive people to such dangerous extremes. That’s when I realized, This is definitely what I wanna do.”

LOU BARLOW: “I was always drawn to the Stooges because they were playing in Ann Arbor, near where I grew up. My dad actually worked with Iggy’s mom. And I remember when I was, like, nine I used to think all hippies were violent and wanted to kill everybody. I thought the rock bands coming out of Detroit were the state of rock. Later on I realized they were the exception.”

IGGY POP: “I did it to the point of parody. Other people drove their cars into swimming pools. We couldn’t afford a car, so we drove other people’s cars in. Then, when others started doing that, we went beyond it again. We’d throw ourselves into the pool and drown. We were a very nasty little band. The only people who responded to what we did were the avant-garde and the deviants, the arty sickos. And kids and high school dropouts, the real dregs, the young sickos.”

JAN HODENFIELD: “In the gymnasium of Monroe Community College on the fringes of Rochester, the group Catfish is carrying on to little effect and less response until lead singer Bob Hodge calls this kids from the audience onto the stage. The kid, identifying himself as Jim Osterberg, is small and shrugs shyly into his nylon fleece jacket when Hodge, all show-business hip, asks if he wants to boogie with the group. The kids starts coughing into the microphone. And humming. And jiggling around. Right into what looks like an epileptic fit. It’s getting very strange. Suddenly, he rasps maniacally, ‘Are you nice and loose now?’ and goes jerking across the stage like some faggy brain surgeon turned truck driver, belching out a song.”

JAN HODENFIELD: “Offstage, Jim Osterberg is quite calm, quite sane, very normal indeed, and completely unreal. Shy smiles, engaging twinkles, boyish affability. One quiet word follows another. Except that he’s stringing together thought of such denseness and complexity that you suddenly feel you missed one too many classes in Logic I and you remember manager, Danny Fields, telling you that he often feels Iggy is tuning himself down to most people.”

IGGY POP: “John Sinclair was always saying, ‘You’ve got to get with the People!’ I was like, ‘AWWWWHHH, THE PEOPLE? Oh man, what is this? Gimme a break! The People don’t give a fuck!’”

IGGY POP: “We didn’t know a chord, we didn’t know nothin’… and we just began totally far-out music together. It was a lot of Indian music and a lot of some of the opera I used to listen to, but mainly it was these poems of motion.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “The Psychedelic Stooges lived in what would become the fabled Fun House, a large wood-frame farmhouse at 2666 Packard that had been spotted by Ann Asheton some way out of Ann Arbor toward Ypsilanti. The farmhouse was up for rent at a bargain price because it was due to be demolished to make way for a highway; in forthcoming years its owner, Farmer Baylis, aka the Bear, would drive over and mournfully survey its increasingly decrepit condition. It would become the seat of the Stooges empire, and was christened Stooge Hall, or the Fun House. The latter name was appropriate, for it was a location that local girls and boys couldn’t wait to visit – although the girls in particular faced the prospect of being chased around the farmhouse in complete darkness to the music of Harry Partch, a fiendish sensory-deprivation technique that would doubtless today qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.”

JOHN CALE: “The story that affected my view of Iggy the most was the nights he told me he spent alone in the farmhouse, up until all hours of the morning, tuning each string on his lap-steel guitar to the same note, turning it up and immersing himself in the noise. That was vision to me.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Visiting Ann Arbor to discuss the Stooges’ first album, Cale took a look around the Fun House and opened the refrigerator to see ‘dozens of bottles of Bud and no food. I said. ‘What do you fuck’in eat?’ Iggy said, ‘Whatever, you know.’’ Cale was taken with the band’s proto-slacker attitude; the Ann Arbor outfit were similarly impressed by his intellectual demeanor and the fact that he wore black bikini briefs and drank wine, both of which seemed to represent sophistication.”

JOHN CALE: “Iggy had this impish quality – he’d be threatening you one minute and hugging you the next… It was incredible seeing him in the studio: he’d be climbing all over the amps and the desks like a mad animal, while the band just played as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. It was like an ad for Kenzo Jungle.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “With the first small advance check banked, life was comparatively cushy at the Fun House; the living quarters were now established: Iggy was ensconced in the attic, Jimmy Silver, Susan, and their new baby Rachel were in a self-contained apartment on the second floor, Scott had a room on the same floor, and Ron and Dave lived on the ground floor, handily close to the communal TV room, which was decorated with posters of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Brian Jones, Elvis Presley, and Adolf Hitler, plus an ad for Ron’s old band, the Chosen Few.”

IGGY POP: “So they were a decent bunch of guys – a nice bunch of guys to have around to blow up your local CIA recruiting office.”

NICK KENT: “A key phrase in the Stooges’ lexicon was ‘O-mind.’ It referred to those times when the individuals in the group spread out around the communal bong and got even more righteously stoned than was normally the case. At this stage, all conversation would cease, eyes would fall shut, heads would tilt back and minds would feel like they were opening up, like there was a big ‘O’ shape where their brains had formerly been, this hole looking down through to the subconscious and then back through to the dawn of time itself, back to when dinosaurs still roamed the land, when strange birds of prey hung in their skies and where large prehistoric amplifiers vibrated with the horrendous howling of strange tribal madness.”

IGGY POP: “O-Mind came up when Ron Asheton and Dave Alexander had smoked a whole bunch of dope: ‘Wow, I’m O-Mind, maaan!’ It meant to lose perspective of the normal signposts and signals of accepted human existence. The advantage of it creatively is that you are then in that ‘explorer’ position in which you can find new visions and signs and symbols.”

 

 

ROY SEEGER: “We’d often get together and smoke some weed while Jim would tell us about anthropology, and how ancient people were. He was fascinated in how the human race was when we were real primitive, closer to the animal kingdom and nature. And he did definitely use that in his music.”

IGGY POP: “I was looking at a book on Egyptian antiquity. And I realized the pharaohs never wore a shirt. And I thought, ‘Gee, there’s something about that!’”

PAUL TRYNKA: “As they drove through LA, John Mendelssohn told David Bowie about the Stooges’ lead singer, Iggy, who’d arrived on the West Coast that summer, his only clothing some ripped jeans, one change of underwear, and a pair of silver lame gloves, and had shocked crowds, pulling a girl out of the audience by her face and dripping melted wax on his chest. David hung on his every word.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “In the seven months since David had discovered the colorful story of Iggy Stooge, the Detroit singer’s life had taken successively more picaresque turns.  Abandoned by his record company, he had suffered heroin overdoses and van crashes, been stranded in the Detroit projects clad in a tutu, and had recently been booted out of guitarist Rick Derringer’s house after the apparent theft of Liz Derringer’s jewelry by Iggy’s underage girlfriend.  Eventually, Iggy was persuaded to pull himself away from the TV in his friend Danny Fields’ apartment and walk up to Max’s.  In future years, David would be seen as cold and manipulative, eyeing Iggy as a Victorian collector would a choice hummingbird destined for a glass cabinet in his study.  The reality was almost the opposite, for it was Iggy who manipulated the event…  Iggy could turn on the fluttery-eyelashed flirtatiousness and build rapport just like Bowie, but there was an idee fixe about his manner that fascinated and slightly unnerved David… By the end of the meeting, Iggy had agreed to go over to London and sign with Gem after he completed his methadone program.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “London in the spring of 1972 was thrilling, sleazy, glamorous, and stoned on Mandrax and hashish. David Bowie and Marc Bolan were together sprinkling the final touches of fairy-dust on what would become glam… And the new boy on the scene, Iggy Pop, walked the streets, convinced he was better than any of them.”

IGGY POP: “I used to walk around London, through the park and stuff, with this leopard jacket I had, a cheetah-skin jacket actually – it had a big cheetah on the back – and all the old men in London would drive by in their cars and they’d stop and try to cruise me. All I liked to do was walk around the streets with a heart full of napalm. I always thought ‘Heart Full of Soul’ was a good song so I thought, What’s my heart full of? I decided it was basically full of napalm.”

NICK KENT: “I remember asking the Stooges how they envisaged this third musical statement might end up sounding. Iggy pondered the question for a moment while dangling a wine glass he was sipping from rather daintily from his left hand. Then he drove the glass down hard on to the table directly in front of him, noisily shattering its base. ‘Something like that,’ he then replied evenly.”

IGGY POP: “We [James Williamson and himself] moved to the Royal Gardens, on Kensington Park. This was better. It was a bridal suite, because they thought Iggy was a girl’s name. We had to sleep together on the first night, ‘til I found the murphy bed. I bought a cheetah jacket at Ken Market, and walked around the park a lot, trying to think, ‘Search And Destroy’ came from the park; ‘I’m Sick Of You’ came from the murphy bed. I had a huge bathtub with temperature control, and sometimes I’d go downstairs and have my hair done. I had lunch there once with David Bowie. He ate sugar cubes, and I ate honey.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Ziggy was David Bowie’s homage to the outsider; the main inspiration was undoubtedly Iggy, the singer with whom David was obsessed and whose doomed, Dionysian career path had already built its own mythology. David was well aware that Iggy, too, was a mere creation – for in their first meeting, David had learned the scary, gold-and-glitter-spattered façade hid another persona – the urbane Jim Osterberg, who was disconcertingly reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart.”

DAVID BOWIE: “Up comes this funny ragged, ragged little guy with a broken tooth… You couldn’t help loving him, he was so vulnerable.”

IGGY POP: “James Williamson and I were a pretty scary duo, particularly when we lived in London. We were intense people and everyone was frightened of us except Bowie, who’d come around the house and show us his newest hairdo. James would always be like, ‘Get that fucking platform-shoe faggot out of here, we’re trying to make man’s music here!’”

NICK KENT: “Iggy and Bowie may have been linked by management and general word of mouth but their individual agendas were poles apart. Bowie was a culture-vulture tourist, a magpie chameleon furiously ransacking all manner of cutting-edge influences in order to create a sophisticated multi-layered pop consciousness for himself and his audience to share in. Iggy meanwhile was a fervent purist intent on rechanneling the bedrock blues aesthetic – two or three chords and a hypnotic groove – through the whole white bohemian stream-of-consciousness mindset mixed in with some performance art. Put simply, Ziggy Stardust was ‘show business’ whilst the Stooges were ‘soul business.’ The first was deeply glamorous and alluring to behold, the latter less attractive but potentially more life-changing to be exposed to.”

IGGY POP: “I’ve had my ins and outs with Lou. I’m guessing we hit a low point somewhere around the time I went round to his apartment, bummed three or four Valium off him and ended up running into a door at Madison Square Garden later that night.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “Sometimes it felt as though every time somebody came over to the MainMan table at Max’s, they brought with them their own tale of the trail of carnage Pop wrought – the peanut butter and the broken glass, the molten wax and the bleeding flesh, and Tony Defries filed them all away. He was already aware that a picture is worth a thousand words – now he realized that a legend can sometimes be worth a thousand pictures. Although it was difficult sometimes to look over at Pop, ragged and shambolic, all crooked, elfish features and Alfred E. Neuman ears, and see him through the eyes of the never-ending parade of horrific witnesses, that only added to the boy’s appeal.”

NICK KENT: “I’d always imagined Iggy Pop to be a bull-in-a-china-shop kind of guy – a walking sea of turbulence – but the fellow facing me was the epitome of charm and well-mannered cordiality. In point of fact, I didn’t really meet Iggy Pop that day. I was treated to an encounter with his alter ego, Jim Osterberg, instead. I couldn’t get over how polite and intelligent he was. He had exquisite manners and spoke penetratingly about Gore Vidal’s novels and avant-garde European cinema… I saw him a lot during the next few months. He could often be espied walking around the city alone, mapping out the London terrain street by street until he’d covered every postal district on foot. Like Napoleon, he was busy working up his own plan of attack on the metropolis... Iggy’s sense of self-belief was staggering. There he was, walking around London, working out his plan to take over the world. He’s one of those people. He believed he had this manifest destiny to throw his shadow across the world on a major level.”

CHERRY VANILLA: “Upon hitting New York, the Mainman team went to a signing with RCA and dinner afterwards at the Gingerman, a dinner which Richard and Lisa Robinson, some industry types, and Lou Reed also attended.  Bowie still had his Veronica Lake romantic look at the time and reportedly took particular notice of Lou’s short hair and urban, black-leather style.  After the Gingerman, the party moved to Max’s, where they ran into Danny Fields, who called Iggy to meet up with them there.  The next day Iggy went to the Warwick and signed a management deal with Mainman, a deal contingent on the promise the Ig would go back home to Detroit for a while and clean up his act with methadone.  But first, Defries summoned Tony Zanetta to take Iggy shopping for a new wardrobe.  Zee was totally broke, as we all were, and needed the little bits of cash Defries would always lay on him.  He gave Zee five hundred dollars that day, the whole of which Zee spent on a pair of silver leather pants for Iggy at North Beach Leather – pants that eventually proved well worth the price, since they became Iggy’s signature look for a while.”

IGGY POP: “I was backstage looking for a vein and screaming, ‘Get out! Get out!’ to everybody, even my friends – and they were all thinking, God, he’s going to die, blah, blah, blah. Finally, I’m up there on the stage, and as soon as I walked on the stage, I could feel it, I knew I just had to puke. I wasn’t going to leave the stage, though, because I felt that would have been considered deserting one’s audience.”

DEE DEE RAMONE: “The band finally came out and Iggy seemed very upset. He was all painted in silver paint and all he had on was a pair of underwear. The silver paint was smeared all over him, even in his hair. But his hair and fingernails were gold. And someone had also sparkled him up with glitter. They went on and played the same song over and over. It only had three chords. And the only words to it were ‘I want your name, I want your number.’ Then Iggy just looked at everybody and said, ‘You people make me sick!’ Then he threw up.”

MICK ROCK: “Iggy was already in my mind more than mythological, than human. His appeal was omnisexual; he was physically very beautiful, and the silver hair and silver trousers only added to the sense of the mythological. He seemed to have emerged from some bizarre primal hinterland, so much bigger than life, emoting and projecting a tingling menace. He was a cultural revolutionary, operating well ahead of his time.”

DANNY FIELDS: “Jim Morrison never went out, like Iggy did, and raised a four-hundred pound bench over the heads of the first rows of kids in the audience like he was going to slam it down, and you thought the momentum of the swing was such that he couldn’t stop it. You thought that the kids were going to get squashed to death. And then Iggy would seem to stop it in midair, like he was Nadia Comaneci. As I later got to know him, and knew that no one was going to get killed at the show, I was never quite sure that that night wasn’t going to be the exception.”

DAVE MARSH: “All the things that I’d never took seriously in my id were coming to life. And there was no Buffy in sight to slay the vampires.”

THURSTON MOORE: “I was 14 when I first saw a picture of Iggy onstage: shirtless, with his body spray-painted silver. He was sweating — it looked like glitter sweat — and he had a chipped tooth. He looked young and on fire. Iggy’s parents were intellectuals — his father was an English teacher — and that gave him an edge. He had focus. Iggy believed what he was doing was important — this self-reliant, anti-establishment art form.”

NICK KENT: “Iggy gave one of the most superhuman physical displays ever seen in public. Every nuance of his performance is still engraved in my memory – his absolute fearlessness, his Nijinsky-like body language and the mind-boggling way he seemed able to defy even the laws of gravity. At one point he placed his mike stand right at the lip of the stage, bent backward until his head touched the ground and then threw his whole body forward onto it. As he and the stand descended into the audience pit, he managed to execute a full somersault on it whilst still in mid-air. Landing on the floor in a deft pirouette, he then proceeded to crawl around the crowd’s feet on his chest like a reptile.”

LESTER BANGS: “I’d just like to ask some of these spike-domed little assholes if they think when Iggy formed the Stooges he sat down and said, ‘Okay boys, let’s be punks: we’ll get fucked up all the time and act like assholes and make a point of not knowing howta play our instruments! It’ll make us famous!...' Iggy was just a fucked up kid who took too many drugs and wanted to have the most fucked up band in history so as to externalize his own inner turmoil.”

LESTER BANGS: “Yeah, Iggy’s got a fantastic body; it’s so fantastic he’s crying in every nerve to explode out of it into some unimaginable freedom. It’s as if someone writhing in torment has made that writhing into a kind of poetry, and we watch in awe of such beautiful writhing, so impressed that we perhaps forget what inspired it in the first place.”

SCOTT KEMPER: “From then on, rock’n’roll could never be anything less to me. Whatever I did – whether I was writing, or playing – there was blood on the pages, there was blood on the strings, because anything less than that was just bullshit, and a waste of fucking time.”

MICK FARREN: “Never in the field of human conflict has a performer and audience gone at it so hard. ‘Metallic KO’ could never qualify as one of the all-time greatest live albums by virtuoso playing. It made it on the potential for mayhem that lurks in the core of most rock shows, pushing it to the extreme, and being energized by the raw hostility. The Stooges maintain a relentless drone while Iggy free-associates from some deep psycho-core of abuse and challenge that owes as much to nasty pro-wrestling as it does to Chuck Berry. You can’t see the missiles, the firecrackers and the broken glass but you can hear them, and easily visualize Iggy, stripped and bleeding, facing down the Scorpions Motorcycle Club who want to rip his arms off.”

LESTER BANGS: “The audience, which consisted largely of bikers, was unusually hostile, and Iggy, as usual, fed on that hostility, soaked it up and gave it back and absorbed it all over again in an eerie, frightening symbiosis. “All right,” he finally said, stopping a song in the middle, “you assholes wanta hear ‘Louie, Louie,’ we’ll give you ‘Louie, Louie.’” So the Stooges played a forty-five-minute version of “Louie Louie,” including new lyrics improvised by the Pop on the spot consisting of “You can suck my ass / You biker faggot sissies,” etc. By now the hatred in the room is one huge livid wave, and Iggy singles out one heckler who has been particularly abusive: “Listen, asshole, you heckle me one more time and I’m gonna come down there and kick your ass.” “Fuck you, you little punk,” responds the biker. So Iggy jumps off the stage, runs through the middle of the crowd, and the guy beats the shit out of him, ending the evening’s musical festivities by sending the lead singer back to his motel room and a doctor. I walk into the dressing room, where I encounter the manager of the club offering to punch out anybody in the band who will take him on. The next day the bike gang, who call themselves the Scorpions, will phone WABX-FM and promise to kill Iggy and the Stooges if they play the Michigan Palace on Thursday night. They do (play, that is), and nobody gets killed, but Metallic K.O. is the only rock album I know where you can actually hear hurled beer bottles breaking against guitar strings.”

IGGY POP: “I went to the radio station and challenged the Scorpions to come down and do their worst at my big show in Detroit. Which they proceeded to do. You can hear all sorts of things on the tape flying through the air: shovels, four-gallon jugs, M-80s… but our lady fans in the front rows threw a lot of beautiful underwear, which I thought was sweet.”

RON ASHETON: “Los Angeles was the glam capital of America, not New York, so of course the Stooges relocated to L.A. right after we recorded the ‘Raw Power’ record in London. MainMan, Bowie’s management company, opened their West Coast offices in this big house on Mulholland Drive. Iggy and our guitar player, James Williamson, lived there. I stayed at the Riot House on Sunset Strip, where I was able to enjoy the perks of living there for a while… signing for everything and getting to know all the house detectives and the vice cops and the prostitutes who’d hang in the bar every night. There were all these high rollers that seemed to live there all year round, like this guy Mr. Thompson, who was some big wheeler-dealer in God knows what. I’d slide into the bar at the Hyatt and sit right next to a hooker on one side and a vice cop on the other and Mr. Thompson’d be across the way yelling, ‘Have drinks on me!’ and he’d buy the whole bar a drink. It was a great time… until MainMan dropped us, and then it all went to hell, everything turned into a bad nightmare.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “Taking up residence in a house commanding views of Burbank in one direction and LA in the other, and a heart-shaped swimming pool installed by a previous owner, Carole Lombard, to become the center of activity, the Stooges were living high, but life itself remained a relentless grind. With both Bowie and Mott the Hoople on the road, MainMan simply didn’t have the time to devote to anybody else. And so the Stooges sat there, lazing by the swimming pool with just Leee Black Childers, his secretary Suzi HaHa and a wall caked with fans’ graffiti for company.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “From his apartment atop the garage, Leee Black Childers watched as the scene came to resemble a Hollywood movie set, with teenage girls running around, visitors being thrown into the pool, a motley assortment of drug dealers and teenage runaways coming and going in flashy cars.”

JOE AMBROSE: “The various junk habits within the band blossomed again under the California sun while a never-ending parade of naked nymphets, experienced concubines, hopeful faggy boys, rich drug dealers, blow job queens, and life’s most motley crew basked by the house’s archetypal Hollywood swimming pool.”

LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “They had a lot of unauthorized parties. A lot of broken glass in the pool. A lot of fights with me. They brought in a bunch of junkie groupies and they were shooting up around the pool. All I ever said to Iggy was, ‘be discreet, just be discreet.’ Therefore, the one thing he couldn’t do was be discreet.”

NICK KENT: “Hollywood really brought out the beast in Iggy: the restrained, thoughtful young man I’d encountered in London throughout 1972 had been replaced by a snake-eyed, cold-hearted, abrasively arrogant trouble magnet. He’d transformed his look too, dyeing his hair surfer blond and using his considerable leisure time to cultivate a luxuriously bronzed suntan under the relentless California sun. At first glimpse he seemed positively aglow with rude health but the tan and hair dye were really there to mask a darker secret: he was back on the smack. And thought it had yet to diminish his physical allure, his re-embrace of heroin had already tainted his personality, making him generally mean-spirited, self-centered and plain loopy.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Several people who hung out with Iggy on Sunset share the same memory of watching him lost in his own reflection in the mirror at Rodney’s English Disco, coiling and uncoiling like a snake, wrapped up in a narcissistic dream, or adrift on Planet Heroin.”

NICK KENT: “Iggy was going out with Sable Starr’s sister Coral Shields.  He tried to stop using heroin and then got into an even worse state with ‘ludes and other tranquillizers.  He was very quickly regarded as a loser, mainly because he wasn’t English.  My most abiding memory is of him standing at the English Disco in his ‘Raw Power’ clothes, stoned, looking at himself in the mirrored walls for hours on end.  It was pretty sad.”

NICK KENT: “In a town where fame and money are worshipped above all things, there is little pity and zero tolerance for those with the potential to achieve both who nonetheless end up broke, unemployable and out on the streets. On at least one occasion when Iggy and I were together in local clubs some ‘industry insider’ would take me aside and lecture me about the supposedly dire consequences of ‘being seen with that loser.’ ‘Listen,’ I’d fire back, ‘Iggy Pop is not a loser. He’s already made three records that one sweet day will come to redefine the very sound and vision of rock’n’roll. The women are still in love with him and most men still want to be him. This man you call a loser – really, he’s the king of the world.’”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Iggy threw himself into playing a loser with the same conviction he’d displayed as the glamorous MainMan star. Michael Des Barres, who had hit the skids at the same time as the singer he so admires, witnessed some of Iggy’s decline, and even back then he thought there was magnificence amid the sleaze: ‘The idea of being a kept rock star was a very seventies one – these people would pay your way to give themselves credibility. And he was still this lithe, beautiful thing.’ Occasionally, Iggy could be sighted in up-market locations like the Sunset Marquee, reading the ‘Wall Street Journal,’ or swimming back and forth in the hotel pool as a beautiful blonde sat waiting for him holding a bag of cocaine, a scene of almost mythological perfection.”

NICK KENT: “If you walked around Laurel Canyon, you felt this evil snaking around. When I was living with Iggy and James Williamson just along from the Riot House on the Strip, every night there’d just be these weird people around – people falling apart and having nervous breakdowns. Everybody just walked by because they couldn’t feel anymore.”

DANNY FIELDS: “Iggy’s supposed to be onstage, you’re pulling a needle out of his arm and there’s blood squirting in your face. Meanwhile Alice Cooper and his band are adjusting their false eyelashes and powdering their noses in the same room. And I’m thinking, ‘Those Alice Cooper guys are not as good as this band, but they’re pros.’ That was sorta the metaphor – both bands are playing for fifteen hundred dollars, and there’s one that looked poised for stardom. And one poised for the floor of the bathroom.”

NICK KENT: “What on earth was going on in this guy’s mind to make him behave in such a fashion? It was the drugs pure and simple: Iggy liked them but those same drugs rarely seemed to like him. Heroin curdled his personality and cocaine stimulated instant mental disturbance. Downers left him comatose and uppers sent his mind reeling towards insanity. But still he persevered, believing in his heart of hearts that personal substance abuse and the cerebral disorientation they promoted within him were the key to attaining full Iggyness. Lester Bangs shared much the same philosophy too: he was an ardent apostle of the school of thought that believed the more you pollute yourself, the closer you get to true artistic illumination. Plus Iggy had bought into the whole Antonin Artaud shtick of the performer only being able to achieve greatness by staging his own madness in the public arena. That’s what he meant by the lines ‘I am dying in a story / I’m only living to sing this song’ that he sang on ‘I Need Somebody,’ ‘Raw Power’s penultimate selection. It was a prophecy just waiting to be fulfilled.”

BARNEY HOSKYNS: “By the time Iggy starred in Kim Fowley and Rodney Bingenheimer’s ‘Hollywood Street Revival and Trash Dance’ show at the Palladium later that year along with Silverhead, the New York Dolls, and the resurrected GTOs, the LA glam scene was all but over. Fowley even subtitled the show ‘The Death of Glitter,’ as though in homage to the ‘Death of Hippie’ march organized in Haight-Ashbury at the end of 1967. After the show had climaxed with the Dolls’ ‘Personality Crisis,’ Chuckie Star was carried onstage in a glitter coffin. As the coffin went past them, people tossed lipsticks and roses on to his chest.”

CHUCKIE STAR: “All over Hollywood that night it was glitter. Everyone in LA knew it was going to be their last chance to wear platform shoes and eye-shadow. Surfers from Malibu were there in midriff shirts, silver space boots, and blue eye makeup.”

DEE DEE KEEL: “Iggy had nowhere to live so he ended up living with Erich Haddix and I for years. I spent my honeymoon night at an Iggy and the Stooges concert. I had on this beautiful long black gown with rhinestones and brand-new wedding-night panties with roses on them, and Iggy walks into the room. He was comfortable with me because we’d been hanging out for so long. He points at me and says, ‘You. Take off the panties.’ My husband says, ‘You’d better just do it,’ so I pull ‘em off and give ‘em to Iggy, he puts them on, and says, ‘Now I’m ready to go onstage.’ He went on that night wearing my panties and a pair of boots.”

IGGY POP: “I like music that’s more offensive. I like it to sound like nails on a blackboard, get me wild.”

JOHN CALE: “Iggy had a magical ability to turn violent situations into benevolent ones. I often saw him dive into the audience and he’d stand on a table in the middle of the crowd. The whole thing was mercurial. When he played live all the girls would go absolutely bananas. Sometimes he’d take them under the stage for ten seconds and then pull them out and get back on stage while they’d be trying to drag him back to finish it off.”

IGGY POP: “Onstage, I’ve been hit by a grapefruit, beer cans, eggs, spit, money, cigarette butts, mandies, Quaaludes, joints, panties, and a fist.”

DANNY FIELDS: “The best of all of them is what happened when he played the Whisky in Los Angeles… He was waiting for his dealer, to cop, intent on getting his shot of heroin before he went on. But he had no money. So he went to the VIP booths one at a time and explained the situation… He got more than enough money. He stood off to the side and shot up. The lights went down, the music went up, he stood onstage and collapsed. Without a note being sung. He’d OD’d in front of everyone. And had to be carried off.”

 LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Of course there was the time when Iggy rolled all over the floor and cut himself to pieces in Max’s. Apparently, Jackie Curtis was shouting ‘I want to see blood tonight,’ but I don’t remember that.’”

IGGY POP: "The stitches were happening, let me tell you. They were great big black things, and they had like hits coming out of them. For a long time after that when girls said, 'Are you so-and-so?' And I'd say, 'Yeah,' then they'd say, 'Oh yeah? Well, let me see your scars...' So I seem to have fallen into a good thing there, quite literally, you know?"

IGGY POP: “You never knew with me – we played Atlanta this one night and I’d taken so many downers the night before, they threw me in the bushes, just left me in the shrubbery next to the Days Inn. I woke up and I couldn’t talk. So the preparation for the gig was just shooting me with enough things to get me up to where I could open my mouth and form a word, but I still couldn’t phrase on the beat. It took about a gram of speed and a couple grams of coke, intravenously, at the club so I could get up and stand on my own two feet and phrase slightly behind the beat. I could barely stand up, and that night Elton John came out onstage in this gorilla costume. I was like, ‘Oh my God! What can I do?’ I couldn’t fight him. I could barely stand. I was just too stoned to move, to react. You know, and things like that were happening constantly.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “There was a line outside for the Murder of a Virgin show, although once inside the packed club it was impossible to see what was going on unless you were right at the edge of the mirrored dance floor, where Iggy, wearing a pair of Jim Morrison’s leather pants borrowed from Danny Sugerman, declaimed in front of a huge drum kit. Nigel Harrison kept up a rhythmic pulse, and Ron Ashteon, wearing his Afrika Korps uniform, complete with swastika armband, brandished a ‘sconce’ which he’d carefully crafted from a length of electrical flex. The ‘virgin,’ who was wearing some kind of sacrificial white robe, looked nervous, but it soon  transpired that the victim would be Iggy himself. Iggy had brought along a hangman’s noose and started waving a steak knife that he’d borrowed from Sugerman’s kitchen.”

MISS PAMELA: “We were not at all easily shocked back then. But that was really, really shocking. We were all very worried. Yet it seemed a logical next step for Iggy, letting us in on his anger and frustration.”

KIM FOWLEY: “He sacrificed himself for us at the rock’n’roll altar, as they did in the Roman Colosseum every Sunday when the lions would eat the Christians. And Iggy Pop is both the lion and the Christian.”

IGGY POP: “I was past desperation point. I just wanted to die all the time. Like, that incident at Max’s Kansas City. Everyone thought I’d fallen on some broken glass by accident. But… I just couldn’t stand myself anymore, so I went behind the amps with this piece of broken glass, having decided to cut my jugular vein. I just didn’t have the guts, though… I was aiming for the vein, but I just couldn’t make it. I cut up my chest instead.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “For some, the Stooges’ last stand was a modern-day re-rendering of Western mythology, the unflinching, dusty heroism of five gunslingers going to their doom in certain knowledge of their fate. This music was the long awaited antidote to a bland world of overblown progressive pomp, of complacent country-rock coziness, of manufactured music controlled by faceless producers and session men… Their front man became a symbol: of animalism, boredom, energy, and lethargy – and of a devotion to music that very nearly cost him his life, and perhaps still could.”

THURSTON MOORE: “The Stooges were more relative to my world. ‘No Fun,’ a song about a girl hanging out smoking a cigarette, spoke volumes about what was going on in my world, as opposed to ‘Lord I was born a rambling man’ by the Allman Brothers, which was what everybody in my school was listening to… When Iggy came to New York in ’76, he met people like the Ramones and the Dead Boys and they were like, ‘Your albums are so important to us, we’ve started bands because of those albums.’ They sold thirteen copies of their records, but those thirteen people went on to form bands that were themselves influential, who influenced Black Flag, who influenced Nirvana, who influenced, I don’t know, Green Day.”

BEBE BUELL: “Iggy was totally fucking gorgeous. Built like an Adonis. Plus he had these big blue eyes which were like saucers. He was a walking sex machine, he truly was. Maybe a fucked-up one, drooling and falling down, but any girl would wonder, ‘Hmmm, what’s he like after a shower and a good night’s sleep?’”

IGGY POP: “I stare at myself in the mirror and I think, ‘Wow, I’m really great-looking.’… I think I’m the greatest, anyway.”

LEGS MCNEIL: “Iggy, the man himself, coming down from the mountain. Iggy was mythic. I mean Iggy was probably the only person that was universally respected by everyone on the scene – and we were people who respected nothing. I mean, okay, there was Lou Reed. Lou was brilliant, but he was an asshole. Iggy was God.”

IGGY POP: “Reconnecting with Bowie had been happening in fits and starts in Los Angeles throughout the mid-seventies. There’ve been other times when I’d gone to his concerts in LA or crashed at his house: ‘Hey, let me stay in your hotel.’ That sort of thing. But there was probably some natural resentment on my part because he was doing really well and I wasn’t. So I hesitated for a while, you know, like the Caesars used to do. When they first make you Caesar, you always had to say, ‘No, no, no, I couldn’t possibly.’ And everybody has to go, ‘No, we need you to be Caesar. We need you to save the republic!’ Then you go, ‘No, no, really, I’m flattered, but I’m sorry, you guys, I’m just not worthy.’”

IGGY POP: “I was in a mental hospital and Bowie happened to be there for another reason. And he came up one day, stoned out of his brain in his little spacesuit, with Dean Stockwell the actor. They were like ‘We want to see Jimmy. Let us in.’ Now the strict rule was never to let outsiders in: it was an insane asylum. But the doctors were star-struck so they let them enter. And the first thing they did was say ‘Hey, want some blow?’ I think I took a little, which is really unpleasant in there. And that’s how we got back in touch.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Iggy was asked to get a bag and report for duty the next morning at nine a.m., like ‘a rock’n’roll boot camp,’ joining Bowie’s tour to open what would be one of the most difficult, educational, and ultimately happy and productive periods of his life. The same could be said of David Bowie. Beset by huge pressures, this nervous, jumpy cocaine fiend was, according to so many of those with whom he’d fallen out, selfish and ruthless in his dealings with others. Yet, in his time with Iggy, Bowie proved to be a selfless person, one who, says Carlos Alomar, treated his friend with ‘understanding, compassion, and gentleness.’ This friendship would extend over a longer period than most people would ever realize, and would underpin the greatest music that both Iggy and Bowie would ever make.”

DAVID BOWIE: “Iggy was a man who was not so hard and all-knowing and cynical. Every artist always knows the answers of the world. It’s nice to see someone who hasn’t a clue – but has insights.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “Iggy adored West Berlin. It was one of the few cities he’d ever visited, after all, that was as crazy as he was, and whose craziness (like his) extended across so many different levels. One night after an evening spent at the Jungle nightclub, Pop stepped into a phone booth to make a call, and was promptly locked in by the same mysterious miscreant who, according to the police, had already caged ten other people the same way.”

IGGY POP: “He sneaks up on people and locks them in and watches the police come and get them out. I didn’t know that, I was just trying to make this phone call… Somebody saw me in there and they were slipping me cigarettes under the door. I was in there for half an hour…”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Before his record deal was secured, Iggy had the added discipline of living on ten deutschmarks a day, which David would hand over each morning. Bowie, Iggy, and Coco’s apartment at 155 Hauptstrasse was part of a large block above a car spares showroom, situated over a tree-lined street. It was fairly elegant, with high ceilings, but was generally nondescript – what Berliners would term a typical Altbau, or period, apartment – and while the furniture was tasteful, it was minimal. In Iggy’s bedroom there was a simple mattress on the floor and not much else. David’s main room was full of books, and also a roll of paper on which he’d write notes and lyrics; another room housed David’s son Zowie, who was enrolled in school in Berlin.”

DAVID BOWIE: “Some days the three of us would jump into the car and drive like crazy through East Germany and head down to the Black Forest, stopping off at any village that caught our eye. Just go for days at a time. Or we’d take all-afternoon lunches at the Wannsee on winter days. The place had a glass roof and was surrounded by trees and still exuded an atmosphere of the long-gone Berlin of the ‘20s.”

IGGY POP: “I was living on coke, hash, red wine, beer, and German sausages, had my own little place, and I was sleeping on a cot with cold water showers.”

IGGY POP: “I loved the rinky-dink villages full of strange old German people. We used to get lost. I like to go out and get lost and be in places made of wood, just to wash every shred of America off. Taking a walk was like a taking a shower.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “In the mornings Jim would take long walks on his own, sometimes wandering for up to eight miles, to the point where he eventually claimed he’d covered every inch of the city on foot. One time he came back from exploring the streets’ Hinterhof workshops – the work premises found at the rear of many apartments – and excitedly told David and Coco that he’d learned how to milk a cow. Compared to David, Iggy was confident about venturing into a bar or shop on his own, going up to people he’d never met before, chatting to them in English or his few words of German, and seeing what would transpire. On a typical afternoon, Iggy and Bowie might stroll around the antique stalls at Winterfeldplatz, or catch the S-Bahn to the Wannsee – a beach resort on the Havel river, a seemingly idyllic spot where Himmler had announced the Final Solution – for a leisurely lunch. One day they went out and bought acrylic paints, and David showed Iggy how to prep a canvas; they both painted all afternoon, and again thereafter David painted a portrait of Iggy, a convincing work in an Expressionist style influenced by the paintings he’d often contemplate at Die Brucke museum.”

 

DAVID BOWIE: “Unfortunately I taught Iggy Pop to ski. We thought, “Ooh, let’s do healthy things.” My son started me off skiing, because ever since he was five or six he’s been an avid skier - most kids who grow up in Switzerland in the mountains are - and I felt a bit left out, so I started learning and I enjoyed it a lot and I knew Jim - Iggy - would too because Jim is incredibly athletic. So we used to go up in the mountains and I taught him to ski. He’s a very good skier…He has an interesting style: lots of bravado and no fear.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “The pair made an engaging, odd couple in the studio: David with his severe Germanic haircut, focusing intently on the music, sitting in a lotus position on a chair by the console; Jimmy, blond, spreading out like a lizard on the floor amid sheaves of lyrics or bouncing around outside like an enthusiastic puppy when David was busy in the control room.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Toward the end of the recording, Iggy’s jokes developed into full-blown comedy monologues based on the endless, hilarious disasters he and his fellow Stooges had suffered. One night he described how Stooges’ drummer Scotty used MainMan’s cash to buy a huge drum set that got smaller and smaller at each show: ‘A simple beat is where it’s at,’ Scotty assured the other Stooges, who soon realized he was selling the set off, piece by piece, to support his smack habit. Another night at the chateau, Iggy stripped off his shirt to show David the scars on his chest and then demonstrated how he’d been forced to roll in broken glass to end a number, the only foolproof way of making his fellow Stooges, nodding out on heroin, recognize the final bars. The tales of disaster, all true and rendered without any self-pity, were somehow soothing.”

TONY VISCONTI: “We would just fall about, aching with laughter; our sides would hurt. I would think, ‘This is unbelievable, I can’t imagine any human being went through this and lived.’”

IGGY POP: “’The Idiot’ was possible because I was totally uprooted from everything rock-related that I had done up to that point. Johnny Thunders was going to carry on that direction for me, and The Ramones and The Damned and what have you, so I was in a position to try anything. After that Bowie and I went out on tour together and by the end I think he was really sick of me. Everybody was edgy.”

ANONYMOUS: “I think in any close friendship you can use the word love – and in many friendships you’ll see that one person loves the other more than the other loves him or her. I believe David loved Jim more than Jim loved David. And in the end, I think Jim found he could manage without him.”

IGGY POP: “Music, when I’m singing or fronting, it’s definitely not coming from me, it’s coming through me, like the way if water has to go through a rusty pipe it comes out a different color. On the way through, I get some of my bits in.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “The last time Iggy toured, just six months before, the fans who came to wish him well were outnumbered two to one at least by the ghouls who hoped that he’d end the evening in bloodied pieces, splattered across David Bowie’s low-key piano. This time, though, there was no safety net superstar to pull the crowds in from the corner; just the reality of the real leper messiah come to retrieve the hand he’d thrown in years before. Bowie reckoned that the kids had killed the man. Pop had returned to prove they hadn’t, the rise and rise of Iggy Stardust.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Meanwhile Jim Osterberg, the empathetic, talkative, charming man who liked to curl up with a good book had far more in common with David Jones/Bowie than anyone who took their image at face value could realize: that coy, slightly flirtatious manner; that skilled reading of power structures and social situations; that childlike enthusiasm; that indefatigable energy.”

THOMAS SEABROOK: “The real James Osterberg, Bowie later recalled, was ‘a rather lonely and quiet guy with a drug problem, horn-rimmed glasses, and a huge appetite for reading,’ – not unlike Bowie himself, except for the glasses.”

DON WAS: “Meeting the guy, I could not believe what he was like, I guess it didn’t contradict anything else I believed about him. I was just shocked that a guy who was willing to cut himself up with broken glass was so articulate. It didn’t mean that he was too smart to have done these things, that all those stories weren’t true. But it was a total shock.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Jim Osterberg’s voice is warm, intelligent, reminiscent of that of Jimmy Stewart, as is his effortless charm: he seems the perfect American icon – warm, alive, acute, and playful. Impressively lithe, he inhabits his body gracefully, like a cat. The conversation ranges from Bertolt Brecht to Greek mythology, the avant garde to t’ai chi, the difference between the Apollonian and the Dionysian ideal. He fixes his clear blue eyes on you, staring into your own eyes in almost disconcertingly rapt attention, but occasionally looks away in a coy, boyish kind of way, or breaks into a broad, seductive smile when he gets to the end of a harrowing anecdote. For someone celebrated as perhaps the most committed, forceful performer ever to take the stage, he is shockingly and consistently self-deprecating. But never, even for one moment, does he suggest that his commitment to his music is anything but unyielding and absolute.”

IGGY POP: “You know, if I had never been into music, I’d have liked to be a professional golfer.”

NICK CAVE: “The way Iggy presented himself was as the ultimate individual, someone who would not be bound down by anything – the audience, the apparatus of the music industry – and he was just god-like to me in that way.”

IGGY POP: “All this terrible self-destructive shit I supposedly did, I only did it because I believed I was in the right and that I was playing the music that real people with real lives wanted to hear. Frankly, throughout my life, I’ve always felt I was completely innocent. I see myself as a genuine innocent. Always have done.”

IGGY POP: “Iggy Pop is the guy who had a band called the Stooges, and he used to stick pencils in himself, throw peanut butter, puke and do crazy things, play wild music… I guess you’d call it punk rock, although it wasn’t at the time. He took all the drugs and did some stuff with Bowie and that sounded different, but it was pretty good. He’s just been around forever and ever, and every time he puts out a new album I think, ‘Oh fuck, is he still going?’”