Iggy Pop (24 page)

There was defiance as the Stooges took the stage. Nothing would change about the Stooges’ act; James still wore his slightly camp Bill Whitten Star Trek costume, but by now it was dirty and a little threadbare. Jim wore his leotard and ballet shoes, with a shawl wrapped round his waist. The evening was dank and depressing, with the sidewalks of Grand River Avenue coated in dirty slush, but still the hall, of around 1,200 capacity, was full, ensuring the Stooges would at least command a substantial fee. Hundreds of the Stooges’ fans had turned up to champion what was, with the slow and messy demise of the MC5 over in England, Detroit’s last great hope.

No Scorpions seemed to have turned up; so for their final show, the Stooges wouldn’t even have the dignity of meeting a formal enemy who’d set out to destroy them. Instead, those who came to mock did so purely to indulge Detroit’s traditional ‘fuck you’ attitude. ‘It was nuts,’ says Skip Gildersleeve, who’d followed the band around since their Ford Auditorium performance. ‘There were people that you thought lived out in the woods and only came out once in a while. It was like Charles Manson’s followers. The Michigan Palace at that time was always plagued with sound problems and power cutting out and little heat. It was frightening and it was cold.’ All the psychedelics and grass that had sustained John Sinclair’s attempted revolution were gone. Instead, all the survivors turned on each other fuelled on Jack Daniels and Quaaludes. ‘The Detroit biker attitude was to give the Quaaludes to the chicks and drink the Jack Daniels,’ says Robert Matheu, who notes that the more sophisticated clientele would have been dropping THC: ‘It gave a nice solid buzz. I believe its history shows it was a horse tranquilliser.’

Even by Detroit standards, the event was scary, but the Stooges had enlisted the help of God’s Children, a biker gang based in Ypsilanti, whose leader John Cole had often helped out John Sinclair and the Trans Love organisation. Cole looked on coolly at the carnage as the evening unfolded; he’d seen worse. Some Stooges fans, like Hiawatha Bailey, enjoyed the buzz of violence and the crunch of glasses which hurtled over the crowd the moment the Stooges launched into ‘Raw Power’. Robert Matheu went up to the balcony where he could see the crowd throwing projectiles at the singer, who threw them right back. ‘After a while it became like a theatre. Iggy was definitely prepared for it.’ Fortunately, the Palace’s lofty, large stage meant it was harder to hit the band with a bottle, although Scott Asheton and Scottie Thurston, both sitting targets, had more narrow misses. This is when Ron was cut by a flying coin, which gave him a scar he has to this day.

Michael Tipton was taping the evening and was convinced that Iggy knew it was all over. ‘That’s why he had fun with it, antagonising the crowd.’ Over the last few months, if a record company executive was in the audience, Iggy could be guaranteed to fuck up. Now, with maybe half the audience baying for his blood, he revelled in the moment as he prowled the stage in his ludicrous costume, soaking up the hate. The sound was often ragged, the singing just a shout, much of the music simplistic aural thuggery, but the real performance was in Iggy’s incessant insulting of the audience. The banter was drawn out, and any odd projectile - a coin, ice cubes, an egg - launched in his direction served only to prolong his speeches. Some fans threw objects as tributes: Bailey tossed an antique velvet neckpiece, which was greeted as a ‘certi fied cock ring’, and a quarter pound of grass which John Cole secreted in Rock Action’s bass drum. Watching Iggy confront this hail without flinching, a few audience members thought this meant the band would survive. Others, like Bob Baker, who’d also seen the violence at the Wayne show, were convinced it was over. ‘I was extremely depressed. You got the feeling that it was his farewell concert, although you didn’t know for sure. It was such a hostile environment, people were obviously trying to mess with his head . . . I thought, This guy’s not going to live to be very old.’

‘I thought they’d given up,’ says Skip Gildersleeve. ‘It was the end of something really good.’

‘Part of you was sad,’ remembers Scott Thurston, ‘and guilty, that you’ve seen something that probably was worthy of some respect [being] degraded. Otherwise you were just worried about getting hit with a bottle.’

After leaving the stage briefly, the Stooges returned for their last number, ‘Louie Louie’ - the song’s message was that anything more sophisticated would be lost on such a deadbeat audience. Iggy improvised new, obscene lyrics to the garage band staple that he’d sung back in the Iguanas. And as the song reached its conclusion, more missiles showered onto the stage, one of them a large Stroh’s bottle that shattered on Scottie’s piano: ‘You nearly killed me, but you missed again,’ sneered Iggy, ‘so you’d better keep trying next week.’

But there was no next week.

CHAPTER 10

Kill City

There were no decisions. There was no plan. Jim was cast adrift, like a piece of flotsam, pushed back and forth by the desires of the people around him, all the while contemptuous of them, yet painfully conscious that he was reliant on them for shelter, drugs and human fellowship. Worst of all, while still in love with the raw power of the Stooges, he was convinced there was a hex on them. The drawn-out disaster of the band’s last tour had left him deeply spooked and his skyscraper ego was profoundly scarred by the knowledge that he bore the heaviest responsibility for the band’s failure. This was a time when the best he could do was to grasp whatever chances came his way.

Throughout 1974 and 1975, Jim would be reliant on the kindness of strangers. There was no form to his wanderings, he would simply find refuge where he could - fellow musicians, aspiring managers, kindly groupies or rich heiresses. It would only be at the orders of the Los Angeles police that he would find some structure to his life, in the dormitory of a psychiatric institute. But before that would happen, there were a few vestiges of dignity that needed to be ripped away.

When Jim returned to Los Angeles in February 1974 and holed up with James Williamson in the Coronet, he had not quite abandoned the idea of the Stooges - who were, with customary irony, featured on the cover of
Creem
a few weeks later, with their long-term champion Lester Bangs proclaiming that their time had finally come, just as the news filtered out the band had finally split. Yet Jim’s relationship with both of his one-time songwriting partners was crippled by mutual suspicion. Ron Asheton, still seething from the humiliation he’d suffered at his friend’s hands, had left brother Scotty in Ann Arbor and returned to his apartment at the Coronet, where he worked on assembling his own band, New Order. James Williamson, too, was hustling around for ideas, and Jim was content to sleep at his apartment whenever necessary, even though he himself was suspicious of Williamson, who he thought had tried to take over the Stooges as his own personal fiefdom in the band’s final days.

Still, there was a belief that the Stooges might reform, despite all their troubles, right up to the moment when James got trapped in a serious drugs bust. The LAPD had been keeping a dealer ’s house in Laurel Canyon under surveillance; James drove out there for his supply and was busted on the way home, with heroin concealed in a balloon inside his packet of Old Gold cigarettes. In jail, facing a charge for dealing with no money for bail or an attorney, Williamson called Evita for help. ‘I had never known him be scared, but this time he was, he was going through withdrawal and telling me, I am going to die, you have to get me help.’

Evita’s mom was a liberal attorney, who back in 1973 had consented to the 16-year-old living with James as long as he dropped her off at Hollywood high school each day - he’d managed it for two weeks, following which Evita had abandoned her studies. Mrs Ardura agreed to defend James, on the understanding that he and Evita parted, and her daughter return to school. The couple accepted the deal, and as James’s attorney, Ardura even put up her house to stand bail. She got the charge reduced to mere possession, and James was soon back in the Coronet, alone. The harrowing experience had at least cleansed him of his drug habit, but from now on he had to be extra careful about hanging around with Iggy, lest he infringe the terms of his probation.

Hollywood loves winners, but it’s a city where losers are meant to disappear into the background scenery. Yet Jim threw himself into playing a loser with the same conviction he’d displayed as the glamorous MainMan star. Indeed, there seems to have been a fascination with plumbing the depths, as if Jim, like his one-time fellow heroin devotee John Adams, revelled in living out the plot of a
noir
novel. And over the next year, his principal role would be as a kept man. 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 thought there was magnificence amid the sleaze: ‘The idea of being a kept rock ’n’ roll star was a very seventies one - these people would pay your way to give them[selves] credibility. And he was still this lithe, beautiful thing.’ Occasionally, Iggy could be sighted in upmarket 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 (the blonde was a well-known character on the Strip, who’d left her husband in New Jersey and spent months cavorting with LA rock types until her money ran out and hubby came to reclaim her). Conversely, there would be the same scenario played out in the most pathetic of guises, such as the time that one teenager, a Rodney’s regular and friend of Annie Apple, managed to bribe Jim out on a date with the offer of a couple of Quaaludes. It was possibly coldhearted calculation that made him encourage her to down her own supply early in the evening; a neophyte drugs user, she soon fell over and smashed her head on a car door, after which Iggy whisked her off to Apple’s house, warning Annie’s father, ‘You see, sir, she’s taken some pills,’ before abandoning the teenager once he’d divested her of the remaining Quaaludes. ‘She was mortified,’ says Annie Apple. ‘She’d been obsessed with Iggy for months, now she’d blown her big date while he managed to get the drugs and be done with us!’

Other participants in the increasingly dark drama believed that there were simple solutions to Jim’s consistently erratic behaviour. Scottie Thurston found Jim an apartment in Venice Beach near his own, and tried working with him on demos for new material. The keyboard player thought that a little stability and focus, a chance to contemplate his own situation, might help Jim understand what was going on. ‘I did try. But I was naive. There were much deeper-seated problems.’

Instead, it was a Los Angeles character with deep-seated problems of his own who’d assume the role of Iggy’s new champion. Danny Sugerman had been hanging around the Doors office since he was just fourteen, was an occasional reporter for
Creem
, ran his own mimeographed fanzine,
Heavy Metal Digest
, and had pretty much started at the top of the music business by becoming manager of Ray Manzarek, the affable one-time Doors keyboard player. Now that Iggy needed a band, what could be better than to take over his management and team him up with Manzarek? It was a perfect plan, except that Sugerman was fast developing a drug habit of his own, and had nowhere near the emotional maturity to deal with the 27-year-old singer.

By the spring of 1974, Jim was rehearsing on and off with Manzarek’s band at Wonderland Avenue, a rustic two-storey Spanish adobe house that was used as Ray Manzarek’s office and practice space, as well as living quarters for Sugerman and, with increasing regularity, Jim, too, who was at one point on Manzarek’s payroll. The keyboard player and singer got along well; Manzarek found Jim Osterberg a well-behaved, intellectual conversational partner, and had huge respect for Iggy Pop’s ‘Dionysian’ energy. They worked with a small band of hip Hollywood musicians, including drummer Hunt and guitarist Tony Sales - the boisterous, crazed sons of comic Soupy Sales, who’d been playing professionally as a duo since Hunt was fourteen - and Nigel Harrison, who’d washed up in Los Angeles after his band Silverhead, led by Michael Des Barres, had crashed and burned. The group worked on complex, jazzy material, vaguely in the style of the Doors’ ‘Riders On The Storm’. Manzarek in particular was amazed by Jim’s genius at improvising lyrics, and the band worked up material in record time. The songs they crafted included ‘Ah-Moon’s Café’, based on the bizarre characters who’d hang out at a Venice café that was a favoured haunt of Jim Morrison, and ‘Line 91’, about the bus journey from Venice Beach to Hollywood. Manzarek thought Jim was affable and easy to get on with. Except when he would ‘Iggy out’. As far as Manzarek was concerned, this was a chance to liberate Jim Osterberg, with his versatile singing voice and intelligent demeanour, from his crazed alter ego. But Iggy refused to be erased.

Iggying out took many forms, but invariably it required someone having to come along and rescue him. Typical examples were his trips north to San Francisco, where he’d hang with the Pop Patrol, his own fan club made up of stalwarts from the Bimbo’s and Cockettes scene. On his return, Iggy would usually be, as Danny Sugerman put it, ‘feminised’: hair dyed black, wearing mascara and foundation and a skimpy dress. The dress wasn’t as much a problem as the fact that his San Francisco admirers would ply him with heroin and Quaaludes. On one occasion, Manzarek was called up by Sugerman, who begged him to come to the Hollywood jail to bail out his new bandmate. The two arrived and found, among the usual gang members, junkies and hookers, Jim Osterberg, in a long dress, with smeared eyeliner, bare-footed, drooling and mumbling. Manzarek, the only one with the necessary cash on hand, bailed him out.

Iggying out could also refer to his behaviour with Bebe Buell, who flew over to see him in April and took him to Hamburger Hamlet in her rented convertible. During a quick trip to the bathroom while the motor was being refuelled, Iggy doled her out a neat line of powder on the toilet cistern, which she inhaled in one go on the assumption it was cocaine, only for Jim to tell her that it was heroin. The pair took refuge in Ben Edmonds’ apartment, where Bebe was sent off to puke in the bathroom. Jim gently showered her clean, while Ben yelled, ‘Don’t you clog up my drain with your puke, godammit!’ from the living room. As Jim apologised, Bebe shouted at him, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ then got in her car and split.

Another typical Iggy trick might be to arrive at a practice two hours late, then walk into the rehearsal room stark naked. This sometimes happened when Ray was auditioning a new musician, for instance Alice Cooper’s one-time guitarist Dick Wagner. A similar example was the time when Danny Sugerman had persuaded Clive Davis to come and check out Ray’s amazing new band. Davis turned up at 2pm as arranged and started chatting with Ray. No Iggy. The conversation continued for another hour or so. Still no Iggy. ‘Finally it gets to five o’clock, and Ray’s run out of every Doors story he can tell Clive,’ says Nigel Harrison. ‘Then suddenly a yellow cab, which is rare in LA, shows up, and it’s Iggy in his underwear, totally fucking buzzing on something.’

Clive Davis looked at Manzarek and smiled. ‘Well, Ray, I guess some things never change.’

Ray Manzarek believes the psychological motivation behind Jim and Iggy’s behaviour was simple. ‘It was about: who are you? The problem was: am I Iggy Pop, the crazy wild man, doyenne of the Cockettes, or am I Jim Osterberg, the good poet, the good singer? He would have had to put that on the line in front of Clive Davis and choose one of those personas. And I think rather than confront that choice it was easier not to appear.’

When he wasn’t crashing at Wonderland Avenue, Jim would find refuge anywhere across the Valley. Despite his wild mood swings and eccentric behaviour, he usually seemed conscious of what he could get away with. Some people speculated that, despite his apparent confusion, he was simply using Manzarek and Sugerman until something better came along. ‘He was often out of it,’ says writer and producer Harvey Kubernick, who crashed at the same house as Jim for a few weeks, ‘but you also had the sense you were watching Rommel working out exactly where to place his tanks.’ Kubernick was staying in the Laurel Canyon home of his friend Bob Sherman, and Jim intuitively understood Kubernick and Sherman’s ambition to break into the music business. He charmed them, rather than exploited them, and when he cheerily welcomed Sherman with the words, ‘Hey, Bob, let’s go get a slab and a beer,’ Sherman hardly resented the fact that when they ordered their spread, at Harry’s Open Pit BBQ on Sunset, he was invariably expected to pick up the tab.

By the summer of 1974, Manzarek was openly floating the idea of producing an Iggy album, mentioning the idea to
Rolling Stone
, and Sugerman was keen to project his new charge as a responsible, reformed individual - despite the mass of evidence to the contrary. Over June and July, Iggy guested a couple of times at Manzarek’s sets at the Whisky, singing on old Doors numbers like ‘LA Woman’ or ‘Back Door Man’; he cut a respectable figure on stage, and a damaged, sad one off it. One night rock fan Jim Parrett and wife Dee Dee saw a ball of arms, legs and pink fur bouncing down the stairs of the Whisky. As the strange apparation hit the bottom it uncoiled and jumped up to greet them with a cheeky grin. ‘Hi, I’m Iggy!’ A couple of nights later he accosted Dee Dee backstage, asking her, ‘Hey, wanna see me do a somersault,’ and obliging, then boasting, child-like, ‘That’s nothing, here’s a double whammy.’ Another time, Kim Fowley invited Iggy onto the Whisky stage to introduce his latest creations, the Hollywood Stars. Clad in his pink feather concoction, Iggy commanded a beat from the drummer before improvising a monologue. ‘I didn’t useta like the Hollywood Stars, I useta like the New York Dolls, then I heard ’em play “Satisfaction”, now I wanna sleep with ’em.’ The crowd was impressed, until they realised he had no intention of leaving the stage; the Hollywood Stars’ roadies vainly attempted to peel him off the microphone stand, before the band gave up and allowed him to guest on a couple of songs. After the show he accosted Jim and Dee Dee once more, his face puffy and lined, asking them, ‘Wanna see my cock? Take as many photos as you want and send ’em to London. They love me there, you’ll make a lot of money.’

The Parretts interviewed Jim for their fanzine,
Denim Delinquent
; in conversation he was coherent, but his mood was dark and defeatist, and his main hope seemed to be that he would be asked to sing in a reformed Doors line-up. ‘He was so vulnerable, you wanted to wrap your arms around him and protect him, despite the bravado he occasionally projected,’ says Jim Parrett, who sensed that the singer felt angry about how he was being portrayed, yet was incapable of doing anything about it.