Iggy Pop (10 page)

Although the band usually recall their first professional show as opening for Blood Sweat and Tears at the Grande Ballroom on 3 March 1968, their debut in fact was on 20 January, replacing the Amboy Dukes on a bill headlined by Scott Richardson’s new band, Scott Richard Case. The hippie kids and heads attending that evening could have had no clue what was about to hit them.

For the first Grande dates, Jim Osterberg finally left the Hawaiian guitar at home and made his debut as a frontman. Jim himself describes those early performances as being naive, heavily derivative of his heroes Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison: ‘Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger, that’s who I wanted to be. In fact, it was so obvious that they should have called me Mick Morrison!’ But Jim Morrison never appeared on stage in a white Victorian nightdress, wearing a home-made metallic silver wig and white make-up, towing a vacuum cleaner in his wake. Indeed, the Psychedelic Stooges looked so ludicrous that on the 45-minute drive to the gig, according to Ron Asheton, several rednecks attempted to run them off the highway, while the security guard at the Grande took one look at Iggy, bedecked in his aluminium finery, and asked, ‘What
is
that? Some kind of mechanical man?’

Once at the venue, owner Russ Gibb was nonplussed by the singer’s costume (‘He looked like the tin man in
The Wizard of Oz
’), and listened patiently as Jim Osterberg explained the practical difficulties of amplifying ‘the Osterizer’, which Russ thought was some kind of toilet bowl. Open-minded and enthusiastic, always ready to indulge anything that ‘the kids’ might go for, Russ came out of his office to watch the band open their set. He found it thrilling. Based around high-energy rock ’n’ roll in the vein of the Who, Hendrix - or, indeed, the MC5 - this was way more freeform. Iggy would sing into the vacuum cleaner, vocalising lines that were then picked up by Ron and Dave in long, repetitive loping riffs, while Scott Asheton kept up a Bo Diddley-influenced tribal beat, bashed out on 55-gallon oil cans, augmented with a set of timbales and battered cymbals.

The ‘heads’, like John Sinclair - and even the ‘greedheads’, as Sinclair half affectionately described Russ Gibb - were entranced. ‘Shamanistic is the word to use about Iggy’s performance,’ says Sinclair. ‘People talk about Jim Morrison being shamanistic but this was much farther out.’ The MC5, most of whom were in attendance, thought the performance was ‘simply amazing’, says Becky Tyner, girlfriend and later wife of MC5 singer Rob Tyner. The ‘kids’, however, were less convinced. Over the next few months, Iggy would become familiar with the sensation of watching the audience frozen in horror, their only discernible reaction being to laugh, or leave. Russ met one of the first of them, a young girl who went into his office later that evening to ask what the hell he was doing booking someone so ‘weird! He was a little too alternative for those suburban kids,’ he explains. ‘I guess the closest she’d ever got to something exciting was a Doris Day movie.’ Fatefully, while the crowd was unmoved, a local reporter, Steve Silverman, named the Stooges as the most exciting thing to be seen at the Grande, while he damned the slick, covers-based Scott Richard Case with faint praise. The Stooges, as Silverman termed them in their first published review, ‘played electronic music which utilized controlled feedback, wah wah, slide guitar and droned bass as well as scat-like singing and neo-primitive howling’.

Over the next few weeks, the Stooges returned to the Grande again and again, supporting Blood Sweat and Tears, Sly Stone and Junior Wells. Most often, though, they shared the bill with the MC5, who were already capable of drawing 800-strong crowds to the old Victorian ballroom, and became champions of what they called ‘our little brother band’. The messianistic fervour that John Sinclair had built up around the MC5 organisation, with which Jimmy Silver and his charges were informally allied, was infectious, particularly for musicians who, says Silver, ‘saw themselves as stars from day one’ - and who were also, for much of the time, high on dope or acid.

But acid could be a cruel mistress as well as a beneficent one, and there is no better illustration of its highs and lows than 21 April 1968, a day that marked the completion of Jim Osterberg’s twenty-first year on the planet; a day that harboured a beatifically good trip for the Stooges’ guitarist, and a devastatingly bad one for its singer.

Ron Asheton remembers that day for its windy, sunny afternoon, when he flew a kite with a beautiful girl, both of them gently high on acid and seeing faces in the clouds. That afternoon he lost his virginity, and as he and his lover basked in their psychedelic high back at the Fun House, they listened to the Byrds’ new album,
The Notorious Byrd Brothers
. The gentle whimsy of songs like ‘Goin’ Back’ or ‘Dolphin Smile’ was perfectly fitted for the faultless afternoon, and a day so unspoilt that Ron would never take acid again, for he knew no future trip could ever live up to that one.

But not every song on that Byrds album was so distinguished; one of its least successful tracks was ‘Tribal Gathering’, a forgettable piece of hippie indulgence in 5/4 time, heavily influenced by Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’. The song meanders along, aimlessly, until one minute in the musicians seemingly get bored and switch beat and mood to play a tough, simplistic two-note riff for eight bars. This fragment of an otherwise forgettable tune would lodge in Ron’s psychedelicised mind.

The evening looked as promising as the afternoon, for the band were playing again at the Grande, supporting the James Gang, on a bill that had originally featured Cream. As with all their performances so far, the band had planned a completely new set for the occasion, while Jim Osterberg had cadged a lift to the venue earlier that week to bring in a five-foot-tall oil-storage tank which Jimmy Silver was delegated to ‘play’, and place it in front of the stage. To celebrate the event, Iggy decided to drop two hits of Owsley Orange Sunshine. But as the band launched into their set, they discovered that instead of the expected all-conquering roar of sound emanating from their Marshall amplifiers, a problem with the power hook-up reduced the output to a pathetic weedy murmur: ‘It was like the aural equivalent of erectile dysfunction,’ says the singer with a shudder. As the opening number faltered to a premature halt, the band decided to stop the set until they could get the amplifiers back to full power. Growing increasingly restless, the crowd started to chant, ‘We want the Cream! We want the Cream!’

Deciding to confront the audience, Iggy climbed to the top of the huge oil-storage tank and posed, like a renaissance statue on a massive plinth, ‘just to be a lightning rod for this hatred’, as the crowd’s chanting grew louder and more aggressive. Finally the Marshall amplifiers spluttered back to life, and the band resumed the show. ‘But it was not a good set,’ says Iggy, who, despite his initial bravado, found the crowd’s hostility profoundly disturbing, particularly in his ‘sensitive’ hallucinatory state.

Grief-stricken, he returned to Ann Arbor to stay overnight with Dave Alexander and his parents, but even the birthday treat of a cheeseburger with a candle plonked on top couldn’t erase his sense of failure. ‘And if ever I was going to give up, that would be the time. I was not encouraged.’

This was the point where a sensitive hippie would have given up. But Jim Osterberg was not a sensitive hippie. He was the boy most likely to, and he would face down this hatred.

But how do you confront hatred?

Jim Osterberg says he reacted by becoming ‘more brazen. So they could bill me as The Guy You Love To Hate.’

Jimmy Silver says that Jim Osterberg built up a kind of psychic armour. ‘He had to. Because there were all those people that hated him. Plus there was the potential [of them] physically attacking him.’

Cub Koda, fellow musician and fan, observed that ‘the audience’s rejection of that pop art performance brought out the meanness in him - made him go out and physically provoke the audience into responding, one way or another’.

Kathy Asheton, friend and later lover, points out that ‘He knew the viciousness of people. And it’s hard not to build an attitude after a while. He did not set out for shock value, it just naturally happened.’

This new man, brazen, indestructible, mean, confrontational, was Iggy Stooge.

The idea of an alter ego that takes on a life of its own reaches back through time, was formalised 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-year-old performer confronting a hostile audience, being able to call on a superhuman alter ego might enable survival. But as we know from countless cheesy horror movies, alter egos can get out of control.

Over the coming years, those people who were close to Jim Osterberg mostly came to respect Iggy Pop, as he would later rename himself. They’d enjoy sharing a stage with Iggy, or going for a meal with Jim (heaven help anyone who got the combination the wrong way round). They’d learn to forgive behaviour from Iggy that would simply be unforgivable from his charming creator. Ultimately, Jim Osterberg created what many people regard as the greatest rock ’n’ roll frontman ever to command a stage. But this Iggy creation would subsequently become the focus of all the attention on the Stooges and, ultimately, the morality of the cheesy horror movie could not be ignored. As Ron Asheton puts it, ‘It was an act for a long time: sincere, wholesome emotions that made him be Iggy. Then it spilled over. To where he could not separate the performance from his real life.’

As Iggy, once a term of abuse, became an official stage name, it was obvious that this superhero needed his own costume. Inspiration came, according to Jim, when he was engaged in his own research in the undergraduate library of the University of Michigan, which he’d still occasionally visit: ‘I was looking at a book on Egyptian antiquity. And [I realised] the Pharaohs never wore a shirt. And I thought, gee, there’s something about that!’

Of course, for any casual observer, the notion that the Wild Man of Michigan rock found inspiration for his outfit in a tome on tribal anthropology seems ludicrous. But it’s true, as Psychedelic Stooges roadie Roy Seeger testifies: ‘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.’

Performing stripped to the waist obviously fitted the Psychedelic Stooges’ primal ethos, but Jim also decided to opt for something more spectacular in the trouser department, inspired primarily by the flamboyant stage gear of the MC5. In early 1968, the Stooges were regular overnight visitors to the MC5 and Artist Workshop offices overlooking Detroit’s John C Lodge Freeway, and often ‘babysat’ the MC5’s wives and girlfriends, who lived in fear of some of the heavy local characters who’d previously broken into the building. Becky Tyner and Chris Hovnanina, the partners of Rob Tyner and Wayne Kramer, had become expert costume designers working for the ’5, and Becky volunteered to make a pair of stage pants for Jim in cheap, leather-look PVC. The pants were tailored, via trial and error, to fit Jim’s ‘wonderful body’, says Becky. The eventual hip-hugging design they decided on was ‘very, very low - the top of them just came to his pubic-hair line. And they were very, very tight.’

Purpose-built stage clothes seemed perfectly appropriate for the moment when the Psychedelic Stooges were expanding out of the Grande Ballroom into the small clubs scattered around the tiny rural and industrial towns of Michigan. One such club, Mothers, had been launched in Romeo, Michigan during the summer of 1968 by Luke Engel, and on a visit to Ann Arbor, Luke dropped in to see Jeep Holland, who by now was operating his A2 (aka A-squared) agency out of an office, rather than a payphone. Despite not having high hopes for the Psychedelic Stooges after seeing an early ‘rehearsal’, Jeep was helping them out with bookings, and on this day Jimmy Silver happened to be in the office. After nearly an hour of sweet-talking, Engel was convinced by Silver’s blandishments to book the Psychedelic Stooges as support act to the Jagged Edge, on 11 August 1968.

After the band arrived for the evening’s performance in roadie Roy Seeger’s Pontiac station wagon, Engel had a pleasant chat with an alert, soft-spoken ‘little guy in low-cut pants’, but as the band started up playing their elemental music he was surprised to see the youth, who he’d assumed was a roadie, walk up to the microphone and sing into it - only to grimace, as no sound came out of the PA system. Disgusted, he tossed the offending mike onto the stage, then watched the Jagged Edge’s roadie walk on and retrieve it, switch it to the ‘On’ position, then leave the stage. A slightly chagrined Iggy resumed the performance, dancing in a ‘demented’ fashion before confronting the indifferent crowd. ‘He jumped off the stage, began approaching girls and humping them, much as a large dog might have!’ recounts Engel, who remembers with delight how the local farmboys stood stock-still, their fight-or-flight instinct hopelessly confused. Soon the crowd was transfixed by this ‘seemingly psychotic little person’.

By now Iggy had stripped off his shirt, then he suddenly twisted into a trademark move, arching himself backwards into a seemingly impossible contortion. And at the very last degree of the arc, his PVC pants, stretched beyond their limits, popped down and Iggy’s penis made the first of its many public appearances. ‘The club was buzzing with concern and confusion,’ says Engel, ‘and the two off-duty sheriffs who provided my security were making haste towards me as I ran to find Jimmy Silver and tell him he had to pull the band!’

Within moments the club was swarming with cops, all of them alerted, believes Engel, by a rival club owner, and the now naked Iggy fled out of the back door, accompanied by roadie Roy Seeger. As local and state police rushed around, Jimmy Silver located the superior officer and, using his considerable powers of persuasion, negotiated a deal that guaranteed his charge wouldn’t be beaten up by the irate cops, who were convinced they’d busted some kind of perverted homosexual strip joint. Deal concluded, Iggy was persuaded out of his hiding place in the back of Seeger’s station wagon, and admitted into police custody.