Iggy Pop (23 page)

He was still hardly conscious that evening when Doug and Scotty carried him into the club (‘God knows what the poor club owner thought!’ laughs Currie), and after a quick discussion of what to do, Doug announced he had some speed. James Williamson managed to find a syringe, and they duly shot their singer full of methamphetamine sulphate in order to get him on his feet.

Unsurprisingly, during the performance for which Elton had planned his jolly jape, Iggy was, he says, ‘unusually stoned to the point of being barely ambulatory, so it scared the hell out of me.’ For a couple of seconds, as Elton emerged from the wings in his gorilla suit, Iggy thought he was hallucinating, or else a real gorilla was raiding the stage. The
Creem
photograph documenting the event is hilarious, showing James Williamson transfixing the uppity ape with a malevolent glare that signals, he says, his intent to ‘take him out. He lucked out, because he was smart enough to take his head off to let people know who he was, just in time.’

Once Elton discarded the ape mask and revealed his cheery face, Iggy realised what was happening and danced around with the fur-clad Elton for a song or so, and the event was duly plugged in
Creem
, with Iggy telling the magazine, ‘Elton’s a swell guy.’ (Off the record, he would tell people that Elton had only pulled the stunt because he wanted to get into tough-guy guitarist James Williamson’s pants.) Yet, although there would be ongoing discussions with Elton’s manager, John Reid, and his record imprint, Rocket, the encounter failed to lift the Stooges’ spirits, and soon the band was becoming more obviously frazzled. Around this time it seems many of the Stooges clung to pathetically poignant lucky mementoes. Iggy had a pet cuddly rabbit. Drummer Scott had a lucky towel, which he would wrap round his head at times of acute stress. Guitarist Ron had a treasured pillow which his mom had embroidered - if any of his fellow band members hid it, he went mad.

By the end of the year bookings had started to fizzle out, so the band switched agencies to ATI in New York. Rumours spread that the Stooges were about to split, or had split already, as the various members dispersed around Hollywood. In LA, regulars at Rodney’s English Disco started claiming that Iggy was asking a New York promoter for a one-million-dollar fee to commit suicide live on stage at Madison Square Garden; Andy Warhol got in on the action, calling his friend Anne Wehrer to say he’d heard the event would happen at the Stooges’ end-of-year show at New York’s Academy of Music. The story reached the band themselves, but their reaction, according to Bob Czaykowski, was, ‘We don’t think he’s strong enough to commit suicide.’ Instead, the evening was remarkable mostly for Iggy’s announcing every song as ‘Heavy Liquid’. It was telling that by now no one, whether band or road crew, knew if he was putting on an act, or was under the influence of a new drug, or had literally lost his mind.

With increasing regularity, outsiders who caught sight of the out-of-it singer before the shows would ask the road crew, ‘Do you really think he can make it?’ The answer would be, ‘Well, he always does.’ But the New Year’s Eve show marked a turning point, says Nite Bob. ‘Before that, everybody seemed to be happy. And now everybody seemed to be unhappy. You could see the signpost up ahead, “The End Is Near”.’ News of the death of one-time Stooges bassist, Zeke Zettner from a heroin overdose on 10 November further darkened their mood. Up to now, James Williamson had been the one force attempting to push the band forwards, but even he was losing heart. ‘The fact is that I already knew this, but I had to be taught many times about how unreliable Iggy really is. That band could have been a real [success] and . . . instead it was becoming a flop.’

By the time the Stooges returned to the West Coast in January 1974 for four shows at a club called Bimbo’s in San Francisco, their audience had dwindled, with just a few dozen fans in the 700-capacity club, all of them clustered round the stage. Joel Selvin was there to review the show for the
Chronicle
; he remembers that despite the tiny audience, the band was ragged but on the rampage, and that Iggy was as committed as ever. At one point he jumped out into the crowd, whereupon a fan pulled his bikini briefs down and the singer shouted a running commentary over the microphone, ‘Somebody’s sucking my dick, somebody’s sucking my dick!’ Finally, bored of the attention, he screamed, ‘Give me my cock back, you bitch!’ and continued the performance. Selvin wrote up the incident in his review, with heavy use of asterisks. ‘But I genderised the story,’ he says, ‘and wrote how the girl unhanded him, or something like that. The next day after the story runs I get a phone call from a guy who says, “That was no girl that did Iggy - that was me and my cousin Frankie!”’ Annie Apple was at the show, and she wonders if Iggy was aware of what was happening and relished the experience: a sort of ‘when-in-Rome-do-as-the-Romans-do thing.’

When the Stooges hit the Midwest again, despite the fact that supporters like Natalie Schlossman were there to look after him, Jim seemed to be in an even worse state. Physically he was in decent condition, still slim, surviving on a diet of burgers with Tabasco or even raw meat - which he loved to order in restaurants, freaking out the waitresses. Now, though, his face was puffy and careworn; glammed up with make-up and blond hair he looked scary rather than androgynous. Mentally, he was tired and listless. Columbia had recorded the end-of-year Academy of Music show with a view to releasing it as a live album, but in January they’d decided it wasn’t worthy of release and that Iggy’s contract would not be renewed. In Toledo, Ohio, the band was supporting Slade, who played good old-fashioned brickies’ glam rock and detested the Stooges; before the show there was nearly a fight when the Brummie roadies insulted Natalie and her friend Pat; Rock Action threatened to take them all on, and the Brummies backed down. When it came to the show, Iggy, wearing pale make-up and a little bow tie, launched himself into the audience twice; each time the audience parted like the Red Sea and looked on smugly as he smashed into the floor.

The entire band were depressed by the audience’s indifference; Jim was particularly disturbed, and that night Ron asked Natalie to look after him and put him to bed. Ron had hidden Jim’s clothes in the hope that this would curtail his usual habit of cruising the hotel corridors for drugs in the middle of the night. Natalie spoke to Jim gently and reassuringly, as if to a child, until he fell asleep. After waiting another twenty minutes to make certain he was OK, she left. An hour and a half later there was a disturbance in the hallway; Michael Tipton and Scott Asheton ran out and saw Jim cowering naked as Slade’s roadies pulled the fluorescent light tubes out of the elevator and threw them at him.

It is Ron who describes those last months as ‘never-ending torture’. Jim Osterberg today displays very little emotion about his physical and mental travails. But by January 1974, this ambitious, driven man was regarded by everyone, even his closest bandmates, as a failure and a liability. And whatever drugs he was taking, says Michael Tipton, Jim knew exactly what was going on, and was suffering greater mental torture than any of his bandmates could comprehend. ‘Everybody thinks he’s not 100 per cent - but even when he’s high, the little man thinks a lot. He knew.’

Over the next two weeks, the Stooges continued zigzagging across North America, from Wisconsin to Toronto to Long Island. A few days later, on Monday 4 February, the band was booked into a tiny club on the far West Side of Detroit, on the way to Ypsilanti. The Rock and Roll Farm, in Wayne, Michigan, was a tiny bar, with a capacity of 120 or so, that normally hosted blues or rock ’n’ roll revival acts. The road crew started complaining the moment they realised how difficult it would be to cram the Stooges’ amplifiers onto the tiny stage; several fans who turned up early started feeling worried when they saw how many bikes were lined up outside the venue. Robert Matheu was standing in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette in the freezing cold as he worked out how to blag his way in for free. Matheu brought a camera to most Detroit gigs, but knowing the venue, he’d left it at home. He knew that ‘this wasn’t a place where people were going to see the band. This was more like the Stooges were playing
their
bar.’

Bob Baker, another Stooges fan, had arrived early and found himself a good vantage point at stage right, on the edge of the dance floor. He too started feeling uneasy when he saw how many bikers were filling the bar. There were several dozen scattered around the audience, with a huddle of six or seven at the edge of the dance floor; heavy-set bearded guys, aged around thirty, most of them in dark denim jackets, several of which were decorated with the colours of the Scorpions, a West Side Detroit biker gang.

Baker loved the Stooges; this was the first time he’d seen them since the Ford Auditorium. This time round the music was more cutthroat and malevolent, and their look was far more extreme too; Iggy was prancing in a leotard, while James Williamson was a dark, powerful stage presence, who also seemed bizarrely androgynous - ‘If you were too drunk you might not be sure he was a man.’ It was not a combination calculated to appeal to the typical Michigan biker, and even as the Stooges launched into their set - which still opened with ‘Raw Power’ but was now augmented with more new songs, including another poignant doomed anthem, ‘I Got Nothing’ - there were scuffles at the back of the venue. Robert Matheu and his friend Mark heard shouted threats, and the word ‘motherfucker’ being uttered from the stage: ‘And that is not a word you should say to a biker. Because they tend to take it personally. ’ As the violence continued, randomly across the crowd, it was impossible to see what was happening; Matheu and his friend Mark decided they’d had enough and left. Then at some point during the set, the group of six or seven bikers produced a carton of eggs and started throwing them at the stage.

What happened next would be heavily mythologised by the Stooges, especially their leader. The reality, witnessed from a few feet away by Bob Baker, was perhaps even more scary. He was used to seeing Iggy surge out into the audience as the mood took him, and he saw the singer head straight towards the biker gang. In Iggy’s own retelling of the story over the years, his encounter would have an almost ritual air about it, as the crowd parted to reveal his nemesis, dressed in studded leather gloves, like Goliath confronting David. As Baker watched from a couple of feet away, the flurry of violence seemed more hurried, nastier and altogether more brutish. ‘Iggy came into the audience, went right up to one of the bikers. This guy was big and heavy. And the biker just nailed him right in the face and he went flying backwards through the crowd. It’s just a law of physics if you weigh 300 pounds and you punch somebody, that punch carries a lot more wallop than a 100-pound guy punching you. So when he hit Iggy he just flew backwards through the room, like something in a movie. And then they all just laughed.’

‘I’ve heard how the biker was supposed to be wearing studded gloves or a knuckle-duster,’ says Skip Gildersleeve, a teenage Stooges fan who saw his favourite singer being punched out. ‘He didn’t. He didn’t need one.’

As Iggy staggered back onto the stage, he shouted, ‘That’s it, we’re gone,’ and the band scrambled out of the venue. ‘We all thought we were going to die,’ says Evita, who’d come up for the show, but they managed to face down more bikers as they cleared the dressing room.

Speaking today about the violent, scary confrontation, Jim sounds philosophical, as if conscious of the inevitability that one day his confrontation of the audience would invite revenge. But to his fellow Stooges, who had come to believe in his invincibility, the shock seems more profound. ‘It did change everything,’ says James Williamson. ‘The invincibility of the band was shattered. Think about all the gigs we played and Iggy always did this crowd interaction thing. Then somebody just knocked him down. It basically shattered our world.’

The Wayne show was on a Monday. It had been a mere stopgap to earn a little money before the Stooges played a much bigger show at the Michigan Palace, the once ornate, but now rapidly decaying 1920s movie theatre on Bayley, just off Grand River Avenue, on the Saturday, 9 February. In the days after the Rock and Roll Farm show, phone lines around Detroit burned red-hot with conflicting rumours: more predictions of Iggy’s suicide, boasts that the Stooges would enlist another biker gang’s assistance, speculation that the Stooges wouldn’t show. In reality, there was no doubt that the Stooges would appear at the Palace; every member of the band and crew desperately needed the $5,000 plus share of the gate they were being paid for the show. What would later look like heroism was, in fact, more like simple destitution. The band was upset, scared and simply fed up; but that didn’t stop them from appearing on Detroit’s WABX radio station and challenging the Scorpions to show up at the Michigan Palace.

Jim Osterberg was known for his physical courage. Just as he’d stood up for kids who were being bullied at school, there was little doubt that he’d show up for his encounter at the Palace. But he knew he was fast running out of road. Throughout the previous five years, even though he’d abandoned friends like Ron Asheton or James Williamson when it seemed expedient, he’d stayed true to his music, refusing to compromise even when it would have made his life easier. Now Jim, more than anyone, was aware that his music was becoming a parody of its former self. Although there were still flashes of brilliance like ‘I Got Nothing’, songs like ‘Rich Bitch’ (‘when your cunt’s so big you could drive through a truck’) were forgettable jokes. However, any confrontation of reality was surely momentary, if a rumour from that time was true. Michael Tipton: ‘We heard that when the band came home for a rest before the last hurrah, Iggy somehow conned some people that were working at the University of Michigan giving monkeys cocaine for a medical test. He took all the monkeys’ cocaine and was doing all of it. And the monkeys were living on sugar water. Whoever it was got fired.’

In the weeks running up to the Rock and Roll Farm performance, there had been something close to contempt among the Stooges for their singer, the man who’d commanded them imperiously for so long, but who now seemed to be blowing every crucial show. Yet as they approached their Saturday-night show at the Michigan Palace there was renewed sympathy. James Williamson, an ambitious man, had seen Iggy trash his best shot at the big time. Despite the bravado he showed others, Williamson felt he himself was a failure. But as the Stooges prepared for the Michigan Palace, he felt the singer’s plight was worse than his own. And he, like Jim, had quite simply had enough. ‘We were all fed up with the rock ’n’ roll thing. We’d been on the road for months and months and months, hand to mouth, and it wasn’t working. I think for everybody this was it.’ Scottie Thurston knew that the band was ‘lost. Lost people, without resources mentally, financially or physically to try to group back together and make anything happen.’