Iggy Pop (11 page)

As neither band nor manager had enough cash to bail out the unfortunate singer, Jimmy Silver was forced to summon James Osterberg Senior for assistance. Mr Osterberg arrived the next morning to stand bail for his son. With commendable promptness, the case was heard the following morning by Justice Shocke, who fined the offender $41, with $9 costs. Osterberg Senior paid the fine, and seemed remarkably good-humoured about the escapade, once Jim Junior offered to take him out for a round of golf at Pat’s Par Three.

The notorious gig was the subject of one of the band’s first press reports, making the front page of the Romeo
Observer
. Sadly, its PR value was limited, as the newspaper described James Osterberg as a ‘dancer and entertainer’, making it appear the cops had managed to close down some lewd homosexual strip club. The infamy Luke Engel attracted for hosting this display inspired the club owner to pull his lease the next day, and the aspiring promoter left town soon afterwards.

Because of - rather than despite - such displays, the Psychedelic Stooges started to attract a hard core of fans, most of them, according to Jim, ‘high school and junior high kids who either were bad - or wanted to be. Plus a few of the more musically informed people.’ Those groups epitomised the polarity of the Psychedelic Stooges’ appeal, for the music was brutal and anti-intellectual, while the spectacle itself was theatrical and confrontational. Dave Marsh, later a celebrated writer for
Creem
, and one of the Stooges’ main supporters, saw a performance at the University of Michigan in Dearborn where a ‘straight-looking, fraternity couple got up to leave and were confronted by the singer: he begins to do this routine haranguing them, getting right in their faces - which resolved into a song called “Goodbye Bozos”.’ The confrontation was thrilling, ‘deeply theatrical’ and anticipated a controversial play,
Dionysus 1969
, later filmed by Brian De Palma, which experimented with similar psycho-dramatics, confrontation and nudity. However, the Stooges didn’t look as if they were acting, and the brutal monotonous riffing added to the sense of danger. When it didn’t fall apart, that is, because for the few local musicians who actually enjoyed the music, the Psychedelic Stooges’ semi-competence was an intrinsic part of their appeal. Embryonic songs, like ‘Asthma Attack’, had memorable riffs but no worked-out endings, and would often simply fall apart. Crowds might be treated to the sight of Iggy and Scott Asheton having an argument mid-song about a drum pattern that would culminate in Iggy taking up the sticks and showing a scowling Scott what to play. Or they might watch Iggy incense the crowd by simply lying on his back as yet another song ground to a halt, and crooning an a cappella rendition of ‘Shadow Of Your Smile’.

Brownsville Station’s Cub Koda shared many concert bills with the Stooges, and remembers, delightedly, how: ‘A lot of the bands like Ted Nugent or the Frost, who thought they were superior, didn’t like sharing a bill with the Stooges. With us it was: Great, it’s the Stooges, what’s gonna happen? ’Cause they could do twenty minutes and be brilliant, then all of a sudden the set would go to hell in a handcart. All the stuff that happens on the
Metallic KO
record, even though it’s a different band, was what those performances were like - ’cause they could really fall apart in mid-song. And because you had a leader who was no leader, who was a leader of chaos, the band would just stand there looking at their shoes waiting for their next piece of direction.’

For all the chaos, for all the ridicule, the Stooges, four Midwest nobodies with huge egos, entertained no self-doubt. They had cast their fates to the wind, they said, and they would see where it would take them, outcasts against a world they considered shallow and banal. Jim Osterberg, the schoolboy politician, was perhaps the only Stooge who could have lived in this outside world. But according to his confidant, Jimmy Silver, rejoining that would require him ‘putting on a face he no longer wanted to bother with. He had made this decision to play this music. That’s what he was. That’s what drove him. That’s what called him.’ And there was no going back.

Nowadays, when the late 1960s Detroit scene is revered as a hotbed of tough garage rock, it’s easy to forget the hippie evangelism that nurtured the Stooges. Perhaps the most effective reminder is John Sinclair, at the time a high priest of the Detroit arts scene, and today a tubby, avuncular DJ in New Orleans.

Sinclair’s greatest fame came when he was adopted as a cause célèbre by John Lennon when the authorities gave him ‘ten for two’: ten years’ jail for two joints of marijuana. Sinclair was victimised for his establishment of the White Panther Party, whose claimed exploits included blowing up a CIA building in Detroit. Grey-haired, with a hip hoarse-voiced jazz jive in the style of Dr John, today Sinclair looks like a cross between a dress-down Santa Claus and one of the lazy hippies from Gilbert Shelton’s Fat Freddy’s Cat cartoon. In the daytime, he makes a living via his oldies show on New Orleans public radio. At home, he sits late into the evening playing rare old vinyl records by Albert Ayler or Charley Patton.

He’s an engaging, smart, inspiring raconteur, but as our conversations continue over several drawn-out, generous New Orleans lunches of catfish and okra, it becomes increasingly obvious why Amerika was never consumed by revolution. For all his charm, he’s a self-absorbed, unworldly figure, overflowing with ideas but always complaining he’s out of cash.

Sinclair was a crucial influence on the young Jim Osterberg, putting him in contact with Elektra records, tutoring him in free jazz and helping the Stooges score their Marshall stacks. But he was the making of the Stooges in a more crucial way, too. By encouraging their art-rock experiments, he unwittingly engineered their rejection by Michigan’s unheeding, untutored audiences. What started out as an optimistic, avant-garde hippie experiment would become something altogether darker and ultimately confrontational. This confrontation would have a profound, painful effect on Iggy and his Stooges. But it would also make for some great music.

CHAPTER 4

Oh My, Boo Hoo

‘It was Sunday, the twenty-second September, when I heard the Stooges. I know that was the weekend because it’s my parents’ anniversary. I stopped in the doorway and did a mesmerisation moment. What is this? You don’t get too many moments like that in your life. Some movies, some passages of books, like
Catcher in the Rye
. You live for moments like that. Well I do. And this was one of them.’

An engaging, flirtatiously energetic character with a mordant sense of humour, Danny Fields has occasionally been described as Jim Osterberg’s brother, and more consistently been credited as Iggy Pop’s discoverer. The man who finally exposed the Stooges to New York, and ultimately to a worldwide audience, the maverick who championed revolutionary music that no one else could comprehend, he would be rewarded for his crucial contributions with ingratitude, endless early morning phone calls and huge credit-card bills. Despite the fact that, in the main, his greatest protégés caused him nothing but trouble, the visionary who helped them record their most radical albums recounts their story with grace and wit. And a lot of sex, drugs and revolutionary mantras.

In the mid-1960s it was compulsory for any record label to recruit a ‘company freak’ - a hippie who knew what was down with the kids and could help the label make money out of them. Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman was hugely interested in recorded sound, had established his label recording folkies like Phil Ochs and repackaging European music, but hit gold-dirt when he happened on Danny Fields, who established his credentials in grandstanding style in 1967 when he insisted that the Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’ should be the band’s breakthrough single. Unfortunately for Fields’ career with the label, those credentials would be comprehensively shredded by his involvement with the Stooges, and confrontations with Elektra’s management.

It was John Sinclair ’s messianic zeal that inspired the MC5 and Stooges’ hook-up with Elektra. After a couple of years of intimida tion by the police and other rednecks, Sinclair and the MC5 moved from Detroit to the far less repressive bohemian enclave of Ann Arbor, where they set up their organisation at 1510 and 1520 Hill Street around May 1968. Together with John’s brother David, who managed the Up, and Jimmy Silver, they established Trans Love Energies, a loose management cooperative. Sinclair issued endless press releases and manifestos from his sprawling Victorian headquarters, and eventually piqued the interest of DJs and music writers Dennis Frawley and Bob Rudnick, who hosted the Kocaine Karma radio show on the pioneering independent radio station WFMU in New Jersey. When Sinclair dropped off a copy of the MC5 single ‘Looking At You/Borderline’ in the summer of 1968, the two put it on heavy rotation. One of the first people to notice it was another head and fellow WFMU presenter: Elektra’s Danny Fields. Enthused both by the single and by Sinclair’s radical polemics, Fields flew to Detroit to see the MC5 at the Grande on Saturday 21 September, 1968. He thought they were ‘terrific . . . very show business’ and agreed to sign the band to Elektra, convinced the act would be a huge money-spinner.

Only when Fields was in Detroit did Sinclair and Wayne Kramer mention their ‘little brother band’, the Psychedelic Stooges. ‘The Stooges weren’t something you could send a promo kit out on,’ says Sinclair. ‘Sending out a demo tape would be like sending them a vacuum cleaner, there was no way you could understand what the Stooges were like without seeing them in performance.’ The Stooges played on an all Trans Love bill, featuring the Up and the ’5, the next afternoon, at the university’s union ballroom. ‘It was twenty minutes of brilliant shit,’ says Sinclair. ‘And once Danny saw the Ig, he understood. He was gone.’

‘I didn’t know their songs, I couldn’t recognise any intro or chord thing or anything,’ says Fields. ‘It was all pretty free form. I loved the sound. It was like Beethoven finally got here, or Wagner. It was so solid and so modern and so non-blues. How long did it take me to recognise this was something special? Five seconds.’

Immediately after the performance, Fields walked into the tiny dressing room, which was crammed with stacked-up chairs, and proclaimed, ‘You’re a star!’ to Jim Osterberg. The singer ’s reaction was that Fields ‘just wanted to pick me up’. (Fields is obviously and very openly gay.) Ron Asheton’s reaction was, ‘Who is this asshole?’

It was only after Fields spoke to Jimmy Silver that the band realised that this interloper was the Elektra Head of Promotions, and represented their shot at the big time. But the misunderstanding was fateful, for it helped plant the idea that Fields’ excitement was inspired by the Stooges’ singer, and not their music. That idea, Fields insists, is a fallacy: ‘It was the music I liked more than his charisma or him.’ Nonetheless, relations between Elektra and the Stooges would subsequently hinge on the relationship between Danny Fields and Jim Osterberg and Iggy Pop. And as Iggy Pop was drawn into Danny’s extravagant milieu, the Ashetons would be left to glower, resentfully, from the sidelines.

Fields had gone to Ann Arbor with the specific intent of signing the MC5, and had discussed the size of advance with Sinclair on the Saturday night. On Monday, Fields called Holzman, and told him that not only were the MC5 all he’d hoped, but that he had another band he wanted to sign too. According to Fields, Holzman replied, ‘See if you can sign the big group for twenty thousand dollars and the little group for five.’

Silver and his charges were not in the least fazed by being offered a deal so early in their career. ‘My expectations were so unrealistic that it didn’t seem that out-there. The boys did feel like second-class citizens about the size of the advance - but they had a We’ll Show Everybody attitude anyway.’

Although Sinclair announced in
5th Estate
magazine that both bands signed to Elektra on the next Thursday, there was no signing of any paperwork until Elektra founder Jac Holzman and Vice President Bill Harvey saw both bands for themselves the following weekend at the Fifth Dimension, a hip club built in what had been a bowling alley. According to Jim, in the intervening week he’d become so nervous about the audition that he was bedridden with asthma, hence the Stooges wrote two songs ‘specially for that show’: ‘I’m Sick’ and ‘Asthma Attack’. ‘We played these two songs, I [just] flopped around on stage, and we got the deal,’ says Jim. ‘They just thought, well they’re crazy, people want crazy things, and maybe this guy has some sort of charisma or something, so let’s sign him.’

According to Fields, Holzman and Harvey were ‘completely stupefied by the Stooges. The MC5 they could [understand] because it was a more conventional, traditional approach to rock ’n’ roll.’

Holzman himself readily admits that he signed the Stooges to humour his Head of Promotions. ‘Danny was very high on the Stooges, and I just said yes. I have always liked things that were odd but interesting, and they certainly fit that bill. But yes, the Stooges were an afterthought for Elektra.’ Holzman was an intelligent but relatively unassuming man, who for a record-company boss was remarkably young and hip; he dressed in slacks and polo-neck sweaters but never patronised his artists by pretending to be ‘down with the kids’ - he left that to company freaks like Danny. Elektra’s deal with the band was concluded on 4 October 1968. On the contract, they were simply titled ‘the Stooges’, although the ‘Psychedelic’ tag remained on the band’s stationery and posters for another month or so. ‘I think Jac Holzman told us the kids wouldn’t think the word was hip any more!’ laughs Jimmy Silver.

The Elektra signing inspired a whirlwind of activity for the MC5’s organisation; the MC5 recorded their debut album live at the Grande on 30 and 31 while early in November Sinclair announced the formation of the White Panther Party - a white counterpart to Huey Newton’s Black Panthers. Meanwhile, according to Jimmy Silver, his own charges proceeded in a rather more sedate fashion. ‘They were pretty lax. They spent a lot of time thinking about stuff and talking to each other. In terms of what they could have been doing to perfect their ability to present what they wanted to present, I felt like they were, I won’t use the word lazy . . . I felt they were shortchanging themselves.’

Silver kept the band’s live regime light, worried they would tire themselves out, while rehearsals were always limited to just twenty minutes per night, invariably conducted at mind-boggling volume. Instead, the focus was on building a band mentality, establishing a shared vocabulary of ‘in’ words and developing the ‘O-Mind’ - best described as the collective band vibe (or drug stupor) and soon Stooges slang for anything that was tolerable. Jimmy and Susan Silver, tolerant and well balanced as they were, found the O-Mind occasionally disturbing. ‘People who work in hospitals will tell you about the full moon, which is the time when all the crazy stuff happens. And I could relate to that. Soon I could see every full moon, they would want what they called “the hat trick - narc, ’tutes and ’cohol” - drugs, girls and alcohol. And as it came round, like the tides, they’d want money so they could score dope and everything else. It did kinda freak me out. Ultimately it
totally
freaked me out . . . They were four corky guys.’

Quite often Jim Osterberg was totally lucid, and would explain that the slow pace of activity was optimum, or at least as much as his comrades could sustain - that pushing them harder would ensure everything fell apart. But Jim could be every bit as slothful and irrational as his peers, and his intake of weed in particular exacerbated his asthma to the point it sometimes became Jimmy and Susan’s primary concern; they nursed him on a macrobiotic diet, medicating his asthma with lotus-root tea, and wrote updates to Danny Fields, delaying the album sessions until he returned to health.

With the first small advance cheque banked, life was comparatively cushy at the Fun House; the living quarters were now well established, with Jim ensconced in the attic, Jimmy, Susan and new baby Rachel (aka Bunchie) in a self-contained apartment on the top floor, while Scott had a room nearby; 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.

In the autumn, a new resident took over the basement of the Fun House: John Adams, a friend of Jimmy Silver’s from the University of Illinois. Adams came from a wealthy Chicago family who’d made their money in the railroads; he was a fan of Damon Runyon, fancied himself as an ace pool hustler and had a fascination with the underworld. ‘It’s like Conrad said in
Heart of Darkness
- the fascination of the abomination - and John was really into that,’ says Jimmy Silver. Silver discovered Adams had acquired a heroin habit since they were fellow students, but had subsequently kicked it. His friend was ‘tremendously intelligent, tremendously loyal and willing to work hard’, and so the band offered him a refuge and a job as a roadie. Once established with the band, he grew out his wiry red hair, which bounced up and down over his ears and gained him the nickname Flaps. ‘But he had the most nicknames of anyone I ever knew,’ points out Bill Cheatham, who joined as roadie shortly afterwards. ‘We also called him the Hippie Gangster, Nickels, Peanut, the Sphinx, Goldie and the Fellow.’ By now, Jim too had gained an additional nickname - Scott, Ron and Dave had christened him ‘Pop’ (none of his fellow Stooges ever called him Iggy, except when referring to his live performances). The name came after Jim shaved his eyebrows, and was therefore reckoned to look like an Ann Arbor character called Jim Popp, whose hair had fallen out. But for professional purposes Jim was usually titled Iggy Stooge.

In comparison to his charges, Fields was frenetically busy, overseeing the mechanics of recording the MC5, and also investigating a producer for the Stooges’ first album. Soon Fields thought of John Cale, who had just contributed a stunning sequence of arrangements to
The Marble Index
by his fellow Velvet Underground refugee, Nico. With his intimate knowledge of the avant garde and high-volume amplified rock ’n’ roll, he seemed like the perfect choice, so Fields called and invited him to the MC5’s recording date at the Grande. A few days later, Cale was in Detroit, watching both bands.

‘I
hated
the MC5!’ he emphasises today, in his rich Welsh tones. ‘Heartily! Not because they were conventional rock ’n’ roll but because of the violence. It was like a Nuremberg rally! I was like, holy shit, the fuckin’ Nazis are alive and well.’ The support act was a different matter: ‘Here was this spindly little guy in the middle, a tremendous sense of humour, and it was really delicate, but aggressive - and self-parodying, in a happy kind of way!’

Fields’ confidence that Cale would ‘get it’ was vindicated. But while the tall, authoritative adopted New Yorker ‘got’ the music, the Stooges’ lifestyle was a shock. Visiting Ann Arbor to discuss the project, he 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 fuckin’ 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 demeanour and the fact he wore black bikini briefs and drank wine, both of which seemed to embody his urban sophistication. ‘He was this commanding, intellectually strong person - but also a whack job,’ says Silver. ‘He was married to [the designer] Betsey Johnson but would chase girls around, he was into drugs and drink but could take it or leave it, it didn’t seem to make any difference.’ As a ‘whack job’, Cale recognised a kindred spirit in the young singer, notably when he picked up the lap steel that had featured in the Stooges’ Halloween Night party debut, and realised that all six strings were tuned to one note - a technique the Velvets had experimented with on an early song, ‘The Ostrich’. Informed by its owner that he would play the instrument while high, plugging it into a huge bank of Marshall amplifiers, the dark lord of the New York avant garde thought, ‘It must have sounded horrendous!’ Simultaneously, he concluded, ‘Man, this is in the raw. Let’s go!’