Iggy Pop (17 page)

On his regular phone calls, Fields continued hearing glowing reports from the singer. Although it was ‘uncool’ to address people’s drugs habits back then, Iggy had the knack of leaving Danny encouraged as he put the phone down, convinced a major new breakthrough lay round the corner. In true Warhol style, Danny taped many of his phone calls; replaying the tapes in later years, Danny would remember how there had only ever been one occasion on which Iggy seemed close to breakdown or betrayed any sense of crisis. The phone call came early in the morning.

Jim Osterberg: ‘I really have to talk to you. I came home last night from practice and my bird is dead and I’m like, freaked out!’

Danny Fields: ‘What happened? I remember I had a bird that died once and we never knew why.’

JO: ‘Well yeah, that’s it. We thought it was a little sick but nothing serious. He had his feathers ruffled and his eyes closed, and I don’t know what it was, he came down plop - he must have had a stroke or a heart attack, that’s a common thing with birds . . . Well, anyway, he dropped right off his perch like a stone and landed on his back with his little feet up in the air, you know, just like in the Raid picture where they kill the little ants.’

DF: ‘Ohhhhh . . . Was it a parakeet?’

JO: ‘Yeah, a yellow parakeet. And we tried to give him water, and we had to put the water right up to his beak and he’d go [makes little bird drinking sounds] and finally like after ten minutes I started freakin’, I started crying, I didn’t know what to do and I just called my mom. And finally, uh, we heard these tiny tiny little coughing sounds [makes tiny coughing sound] that he was making. And he was just dead. So we’re keeping him here tonight and then we’re just going to bury him tomorrow.’

DF: ‘Oh that’s crummy. Are you OK now?’

JO: ‘Yeah. We’re keeping him here tonight and then we’re just going to bury him tomorrow. And we’ve been practising, it sounds real nice, and ummm we’ve got this thing together for the fifteenth . . .’

Sitting in his Greenwich Village apartment, in 2006, Danny Fields shakes his head: ‘Over all those years, that was the only time I remember Jim being upset about another being. A parakeet.’

In truth, Iggy was, as his bandmates put it, ‘a tough little son-of-a-bitch survivor’, overcoming disaster after disaster over the course of 1971. He’d built up a lucrative heroin-dealing business with Wayne Kramer; Kramer knew a source in Detroit, while Iggy provided the customers in the form of his own ‘heroin acolytes’. Then one day Kramer returned from an MC5 tour to find the singer in the hospital, presumably recovering from an overdose; the heroin and the money were gone. Determined to wreak his revenge, Kramer enticed Jim to Inkster, a notoriously heavy area of Detroit, and told him to bring some cash. Then Kramer pulled out a gun, took the money and left Iggy penniless and stranded (and wearing, some say, a pink tutu). ‘It was a dark time,’ says Kramer. ‘But that’s what people with the mental disorder of drug addiction do.’ Many times Iggy went into convulsions at other people’s hangouts, including one near-fatal overdose at the apartment of MC5 bassist Michael Davis. Often Betsy was in tow - and Betsy was looking terrible, too. Then there was the gig at the East Town ballroom in May when Scott was driving the equipment out of Ann Arbor and decided to drive the twelve-foot-high rental truck under a ten-foot railway bridge on Washington, just near University Towers, peeling the top off the van like it was a sardine can, and smearing Scotty and two roadies over the road. ‘I missed getting under that bridge by a clear two feet - smack!’ laughs Scott. ‘I hit that sucker so hard it wasn’t until I was laying out on the road and stopped rolling that I realised what happened.’ With Scotty in hospital, the band called Steve Mackay to play drums in his place. Struggling to master a new set with an unfamiliar drum kit, the sax player had to endure the drawn-out humiliation of Iggy Pop stopping in the middle of each song to complain about his drumming. ‘Meanwhile, there’s this hometown crowd,’ he says, ‘and they’re screaming, come on Iggy ya motherfucking junkie, come on, let’s see you puke, asshole.’

James Williamson points out that, ‘It was hard to distinguish my own chaos from that of the band,’ while sanguinely noting that the Stooges’ desperate straits didn’t preclude the presence of a constant stream of women. Eventually Danny Fields had a moment of realisation, at a Chicago show in April 1971. ‘Iggy’s supposed to be on stage, 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 $1500, and there’s one that looked poised for stardom. And one poised for the floor of the bathroom.’

Some Stooges diehards enjoyed their final shows. Leee ‘Black’ Childers savoured the infamous performance at New York’s Electric Circus in May 1971, where Iggy looked particularly psychotic, covered in baby oil and glitter. Gerry Miller, the one-time topless dancer and star of several Warhol movies, shouted, ‘Let’s see you puke!’ at Iggy, in her squeaky Mickey Mouse voice. ‘So he did!’ laughs Leee. ‘Right on her!’ Some of Danny’s live recordings, too, show that when the band got their act together they were still potent, the music based around incessant, headbanging high-energy guitar, and by now they had developed a set of all-new material, including songs titled ‘You Don’t Want My Name’, ‘Fresh Rag’ and ‘Big Time Bum’. Although Elektra records were aware of Iggy’s drugs problems - Jac Holzman wrote to Danny Fields recommending a rehab clinic that had presumably been patronised by some of his other artists - Danny believed there was still a good chance that the company would pick up their option for another Stooges album. It was not to happen. But the decision had little to do with the band’s collective smack habit. Instead, much of the responsibility for the Stooges’ sacking would lie, not with heroin, but with the Third Reich.

As far as the Stooges were concerned, the man responsible for dumping the band from the Elektra label was Bill Harvey, arch-enemy of Danny Fields. But in reality, the decision fell to another Elektra executive, who by supreme irony was also the producer who had nursemaided the band’s greatest recording. For according to Don Gallucci, who went with Bill Harvey to listen to the Stooges’ new material at the Fun House, it was he who made the decision to reject the band.

Today, Gallucci runs a successful real-estate finance business, although he looks back on his production of
Fun House
as one of the finest moments in his musical career. But in 1971, the album was anything but a feather in his cap. Gallucci was, he explains, emotionally naive but politically adept. He was acutely aware that the album he produced with the Stooges had not troubled the Billboard Top 100 albums, yet he also knew no opprobrium attached to him for this failure - for the decision to press the button had been Jac Holzman’s. But if Gallucci elected to produce the band a second time, the responsibility for failure would be his alone.

When Don Gallucci and Bill Harvey arrived in Ann Arbor to audition the band’s material, they were aware of the band’s drug abuse, and the two of them took Steve Mackay for a drive to pump him for information about his ex-bandmates. Mackay was noncommittal, and as Gallucci tells it, he had no conception that the Stooges were involved in anything worse than the hashish he had seen them smoke incessantly at the Elektra studios.

Gallucci didn’t want to be out in Michigan, which he considered a god-forsaken location, nor in a falling-down farmhouse with a bunch of people with whom he felt little rapport. But he had to go through the niceties, and in any case enjoyed the company of Ron Asheton, whom he considered the most ‘reach-out’ and PR-savvy of the Stooges. Consequently, he was happy to join Ron on a tour of the Fun House, until they reached Ron’s room. For Gallucci, the slick savvy exec in an expensive sports jacket, was horrified by the Nazi uniforms, by the books on concentration camps, the swastikas, the lightning-bolt logos and the photos of atrocities that he says he saw in Ron’s living quarters. Shocked, he asked Ron why he was fascinated with the Nazis. Ron explained that when he was a child, Ann Asheton used to wash and then blow-dry his hair, says Gallucci, ‘And then Ron said, “In the noise of the dryer going
wheeeshhh, wheeeshhhh
, I could hear voices going
Sieg Heil . . . Sieg Heil . . .
”’

What was perhaps typical Asheton black humour completely weirded Gallucci out. And then he sat down to listen to a couple of Stooges numbers, played live in the Fun House. James Williamson remembers Harvey and Gallucci being ‘appalled’ by the music, but the producer maintains that while the music perhaps seemed derivative of their earlier material, that was the last thing on his mind. ‘I thought I was in nut land, I hated the whole Michigan middle of nowhere thing and I wanted to get out. And now we’re gonna do another album where the first one didn’t make it? And I think I said some fairly unkind things in front of them, to Bill Harvey, something like, Cream is the London Philharmonic compared to these guys, something really asshole.’

Gallucci’s abandoning of the Stooges’ cause gave Bill Harvey ample justification for telling Danny Fields that, as far as the new material went, ‘I hear nothing.’ The label would forgo its option on the Stooges’ next album. More seriously, on 21 June, Elektra demanded the return of $10,825 that had been advanced to the band. According to Jim Osterberg, Jac Holzman was apologetic that things hadn’t worked out, and gave him a Nikon camera as a farewell present, but over the same period Bill Harvey was writing to Danny Fields, demanding that all the fees for Stooges live performances be paid directly to Elektra, to recoup their debts. Holzman, it transpired later, was interested in retaining the services of Iggy Pop as a solo artist, but the loss of all their income from live shows was the death sentence for the Stooges. The band failed to show at dates booked over late June and early July; Ron, Scott and Jimmy Recca played one last show at Wamplers Lake, enlisting Steve Richards, from River View, Michigan, to sing in place of Iggy; meanwhile, James, who had contracted a nasty case of hepatitis, went to recuperate at his sister’s in Detroit.

As his band finally splintered, Iggy was making plans with a junkie’s deviousness. Although the band’s Elektra bank account had been closed, Iggy would regularly walk over from University Tower to Discount Records, brandishing the band’s cheque book. Steve Mackay, who was behind the counter, was suspicious, but Dale Watermolder was sufficiently star-struck by Discount’s famous ex-employee to allow him to cash the cheque. For ten days, Iggy kept returning, each time with a cheque for around $200, until finally the bank informed Watermolder that all the cheques, over $2,000 in total, had bounced. A shamefaced Jim Osterberg finally came in with his father, who paid all of his debts, saving his son from facing any criminal charges.

Around July 1971, Jim Osterberg took refuge in the Adare Road home of the Mickelsens. According to Hiawatha Bailey, a friend of the family, Iggy made himself at home in their comfortable house, sprawling imperiously in the lounge with Betsy in his lap, and regally gesturing his approval should Dr Mickelsen walk into the room to pour himself a drink. Hiawatha, a Trans Love employee, was obeying a summons from Iggy to bring over the Up’s old Chevy van, and on his arrival was invited to sit down and offered a glass of wine from the Mickelsens’ cabinet. Then Iggy told Hi, ‘What I want you to do is go over to Stooge Manor [aka the Fun House], and these are the things I want you to pick up. I want you to get the Marshall stack, I want you to get the Echorette, I want you to get the drums . . .’

Hiawatha pauses for a moment. ‘When Iggy sent me over there . . . he was sending me to break up the Stooges.’

They bulldozed the Fun House a couple of months later.

It is a sunny day, and Billy Cheatham and I are sprawling on a small grassy bank in the centre of Ann Arbor, watching aeroplanes track slowly overhead as Billy explains the mechanics of heroin addiction. As apprentice to the Fellow, Billy charted the progress of the drug as it wreaked its havoc among the Dum Dum Boys. Later he himself took the red wine cure, one of a bewilderingly wide range of folk remedies to wean users off Sister Morphine. Billy is a thoughtful, placid, thick-set man, and he speaks fondly, dreamily, of Dave Alexander - ‘a crazy kid, and a great guy’ - and of Tommy ‘Zeke’ Zettner and his brother Miles, both of them ‘lost to . . . that damned heroin’. Together we mourn the Dum Dum Boys, a mourning more poignant for the fact that, a few years later, I would hear that Billy, too, died prematurely.

Perhaps no friendships really survive fame. Perhaps few of them survive heroin. Perhaps it’s simply that no man is a hero to his roadie. But when Billy’s conversation turns to his one-time singer, his tone becomes precise, and cold. When Billy and Iggy were bandmates, they would hit the Detroit ghettos together to score. But drug buddies they were not. Even as the Dum Dum Boys went missing in action, says Billy, their leader found them expendable. ‘There was a movie on the other day by Elia Kazan, called
A Face in the Crowd
, where Andy Griffith starts out as a radio personality and starts climbing and climbing and gets more and more power, and he gets uglier and uglier.

‘I can almost see that happening to Jim, in that the more popular he became, the less likeable and friendly, and less admirable he became to his friends. Like he thought, I’m the one that does this, you’re along for the ride. I don’t know if that was the smell of power, or the drugs, but I did see that happening. I didn’t care for it too much.’

As the Dum Dum Boys retired, hurt, to family houses across Ann Arbor and Detroit, their singer kept on moving. As he describes it, there was ‘no operatic sense of doom’; instead he was busy trading on his new contacts, of whom by far the most promising was Steve Paul, the ambitious, canny proprietor of New York nightclub The Scene. Paul was a member of Danny Fields’ intimidatingly smart gay circle; he had made his first fortune, according to Iggy, selling pimple remover, he dressed only in the colour blue, and was forcefully steering the career of Johnny Winter, extracting a then unprecedented $600,000 advance from Columbia Records for the albino Texan guitarist. Paul paid Iggy and Betsy’s fare to New York so the blue-clad svengali could discuss overseeing his career. The conversation advanced to the point where Paul decided he had to inform his close friend - and Iggy’s existing manager - Danny Fields, who by now had spent his entire life savings attempting to bankroll Iggy and his band.