Iggy Pop (29 page)

Jim was open enough to appreciate Bowie’s most left-field ideas, the quality of which he found staggering. ‘He only pitched me great balls, and I grabbed every one,’ he says today, although when dredging the deeper recesses of his memory, he can remember one song he rejected, a jaunty little number Bowie played for him on acoustic guitar, which went ‘Iggy Pop, Iggy Pop, when are you going to stop?’ (The song was recorded, however, and remains somewhere in the vaults.) Elsewhere, there was an almost intuitive understanding between the two, with Bowie pushing Iggy to extend the baritone growl that he’d used previously on ‘Fun House’, or experiment with storytelling lyrics on songs like ‘Dum Dum Boys’ (which had been called ‘Dum Dum Days’ back at the chateau). Musically, there are subtle tricks familiar from the Stooges which betray Jim’s influence on the songwriting - for instance, the way the strict structure of ‘Dum Dum Boys’ takes a little detour to follow Iggy as he pensively relives the moment he first saw Scott and Ron Asheton standing outside Marshall’s drug store and was ‘most impressed . . . no one else was impressed, not at all . . .’

Where some of Bowie’s later ‘Berlin’ trilogy - or triptych, as he termed it - of albums were regarded as cold, even glacial, this prototype demonstrated humanity and even goofy humour amid the hard-edged modernity. ‘Nightclubbing’ is all Germanic, robotically slow, impossibly imposing until you recognise the musical quote from Bowie’s old glam rival Gary Glitter; meanwhile, in a contrasting cultural reference, ‘Tiny Girls’ evokes Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’. ‘China Girl’ demonstrates Bowie’s emerging knack for crafting lofty, inspiring musical bridges - the ‘I’ll give you television’ line prototypes a similar trick used on, for instance, ‘feel all the hard time’ climax of the ‘Absolute Beginners’. Yet Jim’s lyrics subvert the simple message, as he tells how he’ll ruin it all with his western habits and megalomania. Although there are similarities with the dark, tonal palette of
Fun House
,
The Idiot
would represent a radical departure from the music Iggy had made with the Stooges - which was, of course, the plan. Like
Fun House
,
The Idiot
would remain an album that was more respected than loved, the reviews mostly neutral, at least until it was recognised that the album, released just as the punk wave was about to break, would prefigure the sound of post-punk.

As David and Jim crafted
The Idiot
over the summer of 1976, their personal closeness mirrored their musical relationship. At some point during those first few months in Europe, they had made an informal pact that they would get to grips with their prodigious drug intakes. Perhaps they agreed to cut down on cocaine; almost certainly Jim promised to steer clear of heroin. It was hardly a blanket ban, for they would each manage an occasionally heroic intake of cocaine and alcohol over the coming year, but for both of them, life in Berlin offered the prospect of being more firmly rooted and escaping the flunkies who’d encouraged their excesses. There was the odd lapse; one night, when Bowie took a taxi back to 155 Hauptstrasse, the cabbie recognised him, and as Bowie fumbled for change outside the apartment he informed him: ‘By the way you can tell Iggy that the dooj [heroin] he ordered has arrived.’ Instantly, Bowie warned that if the cabbie ever obtained heroin for Jim, he would personally make trouble for him. The cabbie fled, duly intimidated, and David never mentioned the conversation to Jim, aware that he shouldn’t humiliate him or make himself look controlling.

Bowie in particular relished the anonymity that Berlin seemed to confer, and it was several months before most Berliners noticed that he’d taken up residence in their city. Yet even after they’d realised, they helped maintain the illusion that his presence wasn’t registered; often he’d be seen in record shops, such as the Zip stores on Kurfürstendamm or Gedächtniskirche, buying a stack of vinyl with his collar turned up, happy to be ignored, only for the customers to rush to the till after he’d walked out of the door and ask the assistant, ‘
Was hat Bowie gekauft?
’ But the assistants, zealous of his privacy, wouldn’t reveal his purchases.

Bowie and Jim both describe their Berlin days as one of the happiest periods of their lives - David remembers being full of ‘a joy of life, and a great feeling of release and healing’, while Jim describes himself as ‘maybe the happiest I was, ever’. For both of them, life was simple and ordered, ‘but always,’ says Jim, ‘with the idea, we’re trying to learn something here.’ Before his record deal was secured, Jim had the added discipline of living on 10 deutschmarks a day, which David would hand over each morning. Bowie, Jim and Coco’s apartment at 155 Hauptstrasse was part of a large block above a car spares showroom, situated over a tree-lined double carriageway. It was fairly elegant with high ceilings, but was generally nondescript, what Berliners would term a typical Altbau, or period, apartment, and while the furniture was tasteful, it was minimal. In Jim’s bedroom there was a simple mattress on the floor and not much else. David’s main room was full of books, and also a huge roll of paper on which he’d write notes and lyrics; another room housed David’s son Zowie, who was enrolled in school in Berlin. The fact that the apartment was nondescript and cheap was part of its appeal, for in the wake of his expensive split with MainMan, with another legal battle on the way, Bowie had to be careful with his cash. Coco kept a close eye on his spending; one night in Munich, Laurent Thibault had been an astonished witness to a scene when Coco interrogated Bowie about a new jumper he’d just bought, as the world-famous rock star assured her, ‘Really, it only cost twenty deutschmarks!’

Schöneberg, too, was an attractively anonymous district. There was a sprinkling of bars, bookshops and a market centred round St Matthias Kirche, ten minutes’ walk away, with a gay community huddled around Nollendorfplatz just to its north, where Christopher Isherwood lived until 1933; the U-bahn station bore a bronze memorial to Berlin’s gay population, murdered in the concentration camps. En route was a sinister, monolithic Nazi air-raid shelter, which had proved impervious to attempted postwar demolition, and was now straddled by a modernist block of flats. In the mornings Jim would take long walks on his own, sometimes wandering for miles, to the point where he eventually claimed he’d covered every inch of the city on foot. One time he came back from exploring the street’s Hinterhof workshops - the work premises found at the rear of many apartments - and excitedly told David and Coco that he’d learned how to milk a cow. Compared to David, Jim was confident about venturing into a bar or shop on his own, going up to people he’d never met before, chatting to them in English or his few words of German, and seeing what would transpire. On a typical afternoon Jim and David might stroll around the antique stalls at Winterfeldplatz, or catch the S-bahn to the Wannsee - a beach resort on the Havel river, a seemingly idyllic spot where Himmler had announced the Final Solution - for a leisurely lunch. One day they went out and bought acrylic paints and David showed Jim how to prep a canvas; they both painted all afternoon, and again thereafter. David painted a portrait of Iggy, a convincing work in an Expressionist style influenced by the paintings he’d often contemplated at the Brücke museum.

At night, Jim, David and Coco would often eat at Kreuzberg’s Café Exil, overlooking the Landwehr canal, or hang in the smoke-filled back room, which was invariably full, says Bowie, of ‘intellectuals and beats’. Other favourite hangouts included the Dschungle 2, the Asibini restaurant and the Paris Bar at Kantstrasse, while the beautiful but decayed Schlosshotel Gerhus, where Bowie and Jim had first stayed in Berlin, was always the favourite choice to house musicians or visitors. Some time after they moved in and added an extra cachet to the street, a gay café, the Anderes Ufer, opened a couple of doors down; Bowie breakfasted there many mornings, and when queer-bashers smashed the plate-glass window one night, David paid for the repairs but insisted they keep his assistance quiet.

If the trio were planning to try a new location, Coco and Jim would venture out on reconnaissance first, to see if it was safe for David. One such evening, they were checking out a fashion party in the Fabrikneu, a loft shared by a bunch of local artistic types, including Tangerine Dream drummer Klaus Kruger and photographer - and later artist - Martin Kippenberger. Kippenberger had created a photocollaged floor with another photographer, Esther Friedmann; together they’d made up over a thousand prints and pasted them all over the improvised catwalk. When Esther and her boyfriend Norbert slid open one of the glass doors that divided up the loft and Esther saw Jim chatting to Kruger it was, she says, ‘as if lightning struck’. Jim asked Kruger to introduce him, and a few days later invited Esther over to the Hauptstrasse to listen to the rough mixes of
The Idiot
.

Gamine, vivacious, smart and extremely feisty, Esther was born in Heidelberg but had spent most of her youth in America. Her mother died when she was just ten, and she’d shuttled back to Germany a couple of times to stay with an aunt, finally moving back to attend university, and taking an apprenticeship with photographer Hans Pieler. She would eventually become Jim’s first long-term girlfriend, but in those early days she was torn between Jim and Norbert, and encountered initial suspicion from David and Coco, who saw most of Jim’s girlfriends as a potential security risk. She’d also seen some of Jim’s messy break-up with his previous girlfriend, make-up artist Heidi Morawetz, all of which told her she’d be crazy to mess with him.

Later in August, David returned with Jim to the Chateau d’Herouville, where he worked with Tony Visconti, Brian Eno, and his band - Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis - on the album that would become
Low
. The recording sessions sparkled with creativity, but the atmosphere was often desperately unhappy, as David had to travel into Paris for legal meetings to pursue his disentanglement from Michael Lippman. He’d often return on the verge of tears, says Tony Visconti, at which times Jim proved a wise, calming influence - someone who’d been through the mill and survived. The chateau felt gloomy that summer, with most of the staff on holiday, and the evening meals consisted of rabbit, day in, day out, says Tony Visconti. Over this period there was also an argument between Thibault and Bowie; Bowie accused him of leaking Michel Santageli’s presence on
The Idiot
to French magazine
Rock & Folk
; there also seems to have been friction between Visconti and Thibault. Although the studio itself was ‘a joy’, says Bowie, ‘ramshackle and comfy’, there was an ominous air about the chateau, which the musicians were convinced was haunted by Chopin and George Sand. ‘Brian Eno was awakened every morning with a gentle tap on his shoulder around 5am,’ shudders Tony Visconti, ‘but no one was there.’ To lighten the gloom, Jim performed one-man shows a couple of nights, standing in front of a microphone and improvising long, tragicomic monologues about the Stooges, which would leave Bowie, Eno and Visconti aching with laughter at the unbelievable yarns of spectacular van crashes, drum kits being sold piece by piece for heroin or stage invasions by gorillas. Eventually, however, Visconti in particular grew terminally disenchanted with the poor food and the absence of technical staff at the chateau, and around 21 August they decamped to Hansa Tonstudio 2, a larger complex on Köthenerstrasse by the Potsdamer Platz, in search of ‘German efficiency’, says Visconti.

Hansa ‘by the wall’ seemed to embody Berlin’s ruined grandeur, and its spirit would imbue Jim and David’s recordings over the next year. Its imposing classical façade was designed to showcase the skills of the Berlin stonemasons’ guild, for whom it was built in 1912. The building, known as the Meistersaal, had been bought by the Meisel publishing dynasty in 1973 and they’d been rebuilding it and repairing wartime damage ever since, building two studios within it to augment their existing Tonstudio 1 on Kurfürstendamm. But in 1976 it still looked semi-derelict: the triangular pediment that topped it had been blown off, the fluted Ionic pillars were chipped and scarred, many of the windows were bricked up with pigeons roosting within, and one quarter of the square courtyarded block to which it was attached was in total ruins.

Köthenerstrasse faced Potsdamer Platz, a bleak no-man’s land adjoining the Berlin Wall. From the control room of Studio 2 there was a clear view, via a demolished house, of the wall itself. Behind the wall, on the East German side, was a tall building, on top of which a hut housed a couple of DDR border guards armed with machine guns and binoculars. Edu Meyer, the engineer who worked on
Low
,
Lust For Life
and “
Heroes
”, was blasé about their presence. One evening at dusk he pointed out to Bowie and Visconti that the guards were watching them through their binoculars, grabbed an anglepoise lamp and shone it at the guard post - Bowie and Visconti both leapt from their seats to seek cover behind the console. Yet the wall’s presence was, in some ways, romantic and optimistic - it emphasised that this city, marooned on the edge of the West, allowed both Jim and David peaceful anonymity. ‘The wall was beautiful,’ says Jim. ‘It created a wonderful island, the same way that volcanos create islands in the sea. The opposing pressures created this place that they all studiously [ignored] and nobody bugged you. It was wonderful.’

Every now and then they’d drive out to East Berlin, which still possessed most of the city’s most beautiful and historic houses and museums; Tony Visconti cropped both David and Jim’s hair in a military crew cut, and on one trip through Checkpoint Charlie the normally surly border guards doubled up laughing, once they compared the two studious-looking gents in macintoshes with their passport photos, which showed them both with flowing, rock-star locks. Occasionally, David, Jim and Coco would get in David’s Mercedes and drive into the East for days at a time, or head towards the Black Forest, stopping off at any village that took their fancy.