Iggy Pop (25 page)

There could be no better indication of the depths to which Jim had sunk than his first full post-Stooges performance. Jim and Ray had been working on a loosely themed piece, which pasted together a number of musical movements in the vein of the Doors’
Soft Parade
. ‘Maybe there’d be acting, talking, girls on stage,’ says Manzarek. ‘The idea was to keep on expanding it.’ The first anyone heard of actually staging this extravaganza was when Iggy turned up at Nigel Harrison’s apartment just by the Whisky early in the morning (‘which of course means he’d been up all night buzzing on something,’ says Harrison) on 11 August. He sat down on the edge of the mattress where Nigel and his blonde Bowie-lookalike girlfriend Suzette were attempting to snooze, insisted Nigel pick up his bass, and started singing a simple riff, telling Nigel to keep playing a drone in F sharp. It transpired that Jim had worked up the song - which was based on the Velvets’ ‘Some Kinda Love’ and revolved around the lyric ‘put jelly on your shoulder’ - with Ray, but that Ray had declined to participate in this ‘premature artistic ejaculation’. Ordering Nigel to turn up at Rodney’s English Disco at nine, and mentioning he was off to find a guitarist, a drummer and, cryptically, a virgin, Iggy disappeared onto the Strip.

He found his guitarist at the Coronet, knocking on the sky-blue front door of 404 to rouse Ron Asheton, telling him: ‘You still got your Nazi uniform? Good, bring that, and you’ll need to brutalise me, so bring a whip too.’

No one is sure where Iggy found his drummer, but, unsurprisingly, he found it impossible to locate a virgin, and instead had to settle for a gay youth who was dining at Denny’s, just down from Rodney’s. In the meantime, he ordered Danny Sugerman to phone up every journalist he knew and tell them to expect ‘a landmark performance’ at Rodney’s that evening, which would be entitled
Murder of a Virgin
. Sugerman spent hours on the phone, telling his contacts, ‘Your name’s on the guest list, and you better come because he’s only going to be doing this once,’ floating once again the delicious prospect that Iggy would commit suicide on stage.

Rodney Bingenheimer was delighted at the prospect of Iggy performing at his club - the singer told him ‘he wanted to show the glitter crowd what real rock ’n’ roll was all about’ - and volunteered to resume his old job as radio plugger. Rodney duly picked Jim up in his black Cadillac convertible and drove him to KNAC, where they buzzed on the intercom - only to be told that Iggy Pop was not allowed in the building.

There was a line outside Rodney’s for the show, although once inside the packed club it was impossible to see what was going on unless you were right at the edge of the mirrored dance floor, where Iggy, wearing a pair of Jim Morrison’s leather pants borrowed from Danny Sugerman, declaimed in front of a huge drum kit. Nigel Harrison kept up a rhythmic pulse, and Ron Asheton, wearing his Afrika Korps uniform, complete with swastika armband, brandished a ‘sconce’ he’d carefully crafted from a length of electrical flex. The ‘virgin’, who was wearing some kind of sacrificial white robe, looked nervous, but it soon transpired that the victim would be Iggy himself. Iggy had brought along a hang-man’s noose and started waving a steak knife he’d borrowed from Sugerman’s kitchen.

‘Do you want to see blood?’ he yelled at the Hollywood crowd.

‘YEAHH!’ they shouted back.

‘Do you really want to see blood?’ he asked again.

‘YES WE WANT TO SEE BLOOD!’ they shouted as one.

‘Beat me with the whip!’ he ordered Ron, who instead pulled on the noose, to choke him a little bit. ‘No, whip me, hurt me!’ he insisted, and Ron laid into him. ‘Then he goes up to a black guy,’ says Ron, ‘and tried to make him stab him with this rusty kitchen knife. He wouldn’t, so Iggy did it himself.’

‘Then he carved an X into his chest,’ says Nigel Harrison. ‘I was really scared, because he’d mentioned he wanted to kill off Iggy Pop. But also I was worried he might get blood on my brand new Kensington Market polka-dot top.’

‘We were not at all easily shocked back then,’ says Pamela Des Barres, ‘but that was really, really shocking. We were all very worried. Yet it seemed a logical next step for Iggy, letting us in on his anger and frustration.’

It was all over in fifteen minutes. ‘Then they put him in a burlap bag, out of the club and into the gutter,’ says Ron. ‘It was horrible. He was fried.’

‘I never really planned the blood,’ says Jim today. ‘Then as I got nearer I made the decision to use the knife. It was unnecessary. It didn’t really work . . . it was bad blood, the blood at Max’s Kansas City was nicer blood, much less cynical blood. I was desperate.’

When Jim Osterberg had created Iggy Pop, his alter ego had been the medium, to help him communicate his music. Now, Iggy was the message, and the music was irrelevant compared to the spectacle of his ritual self-harm, which at this low point seemed to be all he had to offer.

‘He sacrificed himself for us at the rock ’n’ roll altar,’ says Kim Fowley. ‘As they did in the Roman Colosseum every Sunday when the lions would eat the Christians. And Iggy Pop is both the lion, and the Christian.’

Danny Sugerman, the man who had publicised this spectacle, took Jim to the beach. ‘So he could dive in the Pacific Ocean and bathe his wounds. I waited like an hour and he didn’t come back. What was I gonna do? I wasn’t gonna swim out there looking for him. So I went home, took a couple of Quaaludes and went to bed.’

The next morning, according to Danny Sugerman, he was woken by a phone call from a hysterical girl, screaming that Iggy was attacking her father’s Maserati with a hatchet. Meanwhile, Sugerman, too, was struggling to keep a grip on his own problems. But when Manzarek called to ask Sugerman how everything had gone at Rodney’s, Danny told him, ‘Great!’

The weeks after the sad spectacle at Rodney’s continued in much the same fashion for Iggy: confused living conditions, sometimes hanging with whatever women would give him shelter, sometimes crashing with fellow musicians, who by now were used to the sight of a Quaaluded Iggy at their door. ‘He would regularly show up in a yellow mini-dress with this huge dick hanging out of it, and would go “I’m cold, I’m hungry,” and empty your refrigerator. Then the next minute he would be trying to crawl in bed with me and my girlfriend. Between us. That’s what it was like,’ laughs Nigel Harrison. Even when Iggy lucked into more luxurious living quarters, such as a wealthy woman called Alex who had a pleasant house in Stone Canyon, he was still a creative scam artist, sticking Band-Aids over his face before he left the house, remembers Harrison, so he could hang out at the Rainbow and moan, ‘I got beat up by two Puerto Ricans, I got no money!’ hoping to beg some cash or drugs.

Unfortunately, real life soon conspired to imitate such scams, when Jim turned up to see David Bowie at LA’s Universal Amphitheater at the beginning of September. He’d already suffered the humiliation of trying to find Bowie at the Beverly Hills Hotel, cadging a ride there with Ron’s friend Doug Currie and realising his one-time champion was nowhere to be found. Now, walking through the parking lot, he and Sugerman were bounced by two surfers, who enticed Jim to a quiet corner with the offer of drugs, then beat the two of them up. Ron Asheton saw Jim sitting outside Wonderland Avenue the next morning, missing a front tooth and complaining that Sugerman had abandoned him to his fate. These weren’t the only humiliations over this period. In the autumn, Iggy ill-advisedly popped up on Flo and Eddie’s radio show. The KROQ DJs were celebrated for their witty lampooning, and when Iggy guested to chat and sing along to records, it was obvious his days of fast-talking repartee were behind him. Flo and Eddie, a hip duo who’d made their name playing with the Turtles and Frank Zappa, were laughing at him, not with him. The same scenario was being played out at locations like Rodney’s, the Whisky and the Rainbow, where, says Jim Parrett, ‘Every time we saw Jim, even though people were deferential to him in some ways, they were laughing about him.’

In October, Nick Kent flew over to see his hero and was shocked to realise that Iggy seemed to have ‘the word “Loser” tattooed on his forehead. I’d have to tell people, again and again, “This guy is not a loser. This guy is king of the world. This guy has created a music, you don’t even realise it yet, but it’s going to change the face of the world!”’ As the two sat and talked, Jim was quite often lucid, but revealed to Kent how spooked he had been by the disasters the Stooges had undergone, and how he believed there was a hex on the band. Kent was shocked by Jim’s condition, horrified to see him occasionally sleeping rough, or passed out in a parking lot, in a dress, zonked out on who knew how many Quaaludes. Sometimes Jim would cry about the condition in which he found himself. But although existential despair was sometimes the cause, the tears were just as likely to be inspired by his inability to score drugs. Overwhelmed with sadness at the condition in which he found his hero, Kent resolved to help him, and picked up an open-reel tape of the Stooges’ disastrous Michigan Palace show in the hope that he might be able to raise some money with it back in Europe.

By now Jim seemed to have made up whatever his last disagreement with Williamson had been. It was impossible to make sense of most of his relationships at the time, says Tony Sales, who had become friendly with James and his girlfriend Evita. ‘I know Jim confided in James over that period. And he also told James to fuck off. At times we’d get along, and at other times he’d tell me to piss off. A lot of the time it was the drugs speaking. One’s values and intellect and integrity [are] challenged by that shit - it’s hard to put a marker on something like that and say that’s how someone [really] is.’ Jim moved into James’s apartment at 306, the Coronet, which gave him some stability, even though most of the building’s hookers and Hollywood wannabes who maintained a sideline in selling junk and Quaaludes refused to speak to him, thanks to unpaid drug debts. Earlier in 1974, Jim had been so desperate he’d even contemplated making a living playing with pick-up bands for Hollywood’s jet-set house parties. He’d also at one point arranged to audition as the singer for Kiss, but hadn’t turned up. He was, however, mortally offended when Nick Kent asked him if he’d ever considered putting his impressive penis to work in Hollywood’s thriving porno industry. By the autumn he was becoming more committed to the idea of reviving the spirit of the Stooges and reuniting with James - which meant a break with Manzarek, for the ex-Doors player and James Williamson had little time for each other musically or personally. However, for the one show Danny Sugerman had actually booked for the Manzarek and Iggy supergroup he was attempting to tout, Iggy insisted that Williamson join the band, despite Ray’s misgivings. Iggy sported pristine new front teeth for the occasion, presumably funded by Sugerman or Manzarek.

The show Sugerman had booked was a prestigious event that set Hollywood’s rock ’n’ roll community abuzz. The Hollywood Street Revival and Trash Dance, staged at the Hollywood Palladium on 9 October, would be popularly known as the Death of Glitter once the MC, Kim Fowley, and others got it into their heads that the event would be a modern-day counterpart to Haight-Ashbury’s symbolic Death of the Hippie ceremony in October 1967. The event was built around the New York Dolls - the Cockettes were also booked but were banned by comedian Lawrence Welk, who considered them depraved - and Iggy was determined to show these upstarts how high-energy rock music should really sound. Unfortunately, a hurried rehearsal at Wonderland Avenue the day before meant the band only had time to throw together a set full of cover versions. The show was competent and aggressive but for many fans it was a disappointment. As Manzarek, Williamson, Scott Morgan - ex-singer of the Rationals, who’d ended up in LA and was called in to guest on harmonica - Nigel Harrison and drummer Gary Mallaber stormed through rock ’n’ roll staples including ‘Route 66’, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Everybody Needs Somebody To Love’, there were flashes of fire and energy - notably when Iggy kicked a stage-invading female fan in the backside, propelling her back into the audience - and Manzarek was delighted, declaring the band ‘rocked like a motherfucker’. But the show represented an end, rather than a beginning. Manzarek declared he couldn’t work with Williamson - ‘there was no sonic space when you had this guitar turned up to 11, like Spinal Tap’ - while Jim responded that without Williamson he would lose his audience. To which Manzarek’s response, of course, was, ‘What audience?’

Before the show, Iggy had been excited and energised. In the hours before he’d gone on stage, Iggy had discovered that Scott Morgan couldn’t get to his harmonicas, which were locked in the room he’d borrowed at the Coronet. As the others discussed breaking in the door, Iggy got into an adjacent third-floor apartment and leapt across an airshaft, over a three-storey drop, to rescue the stranded instruments. After the show, Iggy wandered with Annie Apple, Fred Smith and Johnny Thunders for a bizarre ramble up into the Hollywood Hills, before Iggy and Thunders gave the other two the slip around dawn and hailed a cab to Johnny’s room at the Hollywood Inn, undoubtedly to score junk together.

To Danny Sugerman, who’d brokered Jim’s collaboration with Ray Manzarek, its termination seemed another example of Iggy snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But he was running out of ideas, too, struggling to control his own fast-fragmenting life and growing reliance on Quaaludes and heroin. The next time he heard from Iggy was shortly after the Palladium show, when the phone rang at Wonderland Avenue.

‘Hello. This is Dr Zucker.’

‘I don’t think I know a Dr Zucker.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I work at UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital, where I’m on call. So far I’ve admitted two Jesus Christs, a Napoleon Bonaparte, an albino who thinks he’s Santa Claus, and now I have this guy the cops brought in who claims he’s Iggy Pop, and you’re his manager.’

As the conversation continued, it became clear that Jim had again been picked up by the cops, who’d called following a complaint by a cashier at a Hollywood burger joint and found the singer Luded out and drooling aggressively at the diner’s clientele. By now the singer was well known to the LAPD, who’d previously picked him up for impersonating a woman. This time they gave him a simple choice: a prison cell or the psych ward. Iggy was sane enough to elect the latter, and when Sugerman turned up to drop off clothes and other necessities for Jim at the Neuropsychiatric Institute’s complex of buildings on Westwood Plaza, he felt a sense of relief. Finally, he could hand the responsibility for his friend over to someone who knew what he was doing. As for Jim, who for so long had rebelled against authority and convention, giving in and finally confronting his mental problems was liberating. It was possible he could have objected to his confinement to a psychiatric ward. Instead, he seized the opportunity.