Iggy Pop (30 page)

It was at some point after the conclusion of the
Low
recordings that Angie Bowie came to visit her husband, who obviously had no intention of moving into the house that she had found for the family in Corsier-sur-Vevey, near Montreux. Angie wasn’t impressed with the ‘boring’ music they were creating; she was even more riled by what she saw as their cultural colonialism: ‘Two big-ass girls’ blouses thinking they were discovering something. It was cultural sluttery.’ On one of her visits David told Angie he planned to divorce her; shortly afterwards Angie went up to Coco’s room, took all the clothes she’d ever bought Coco and threw them out into the street. And then left. ‘That was what I thought of Berlin.’ With that long-dreaded confrontation out of the way, David’s demeanour markedly improved, and life at the Hauptstrasse seemed blissful, almost domestic. Jim called round to see Esther regularly, and sometimes would croon Sinatra tunes, like ‘My Funny Valentine’, while Norbert, a vascular surgeon who also happened to be a skilled pianist, accompanied him. When the time came to shoot the cover photo for
The Idiot
, Jim borrowed Esther ’s jacket for the session. David had bought the reproduction rights to Erich Heckel’s ‘Roquairol’ - a haunting portrait of the mentally disturbed Ernst Kirchner - but at the last moment they decided that Jim would echo his pose in a photo by Andrew Kent. With his hair dyed black for the shoot, Esther’s double-breasted jacket and his angular pose, Jim’s severe, European look signalled a radical departure from the music of the old Iggy.

David had masterminded his friend’s first solo album. He found him a record company, helping broker a deal with RCA. Finally, he arranged his first solo tour and found him a band: perhaps the only band in the world that could out-play the Stooges, formed round the nucleus of two crazy brothers, whom Jim had met back in his lost LA years.

Hunt and Tony Sales had grown up hanging with Frank Sinatra and other hep-cats. They had played professionally for mobster-connected Maurice Levy’s Roulette label while in their early teens, and recorded their first album, with Todd Rundgren, when drummer Hunt was sixteen and bassist Tony was nineteen, before they made their way to Los Angeles. David had met the brothers in New York in 1972, after which they’d sent him some demo tapes, and it was his idea to give them a call. They flew into Berlin in February 1977 to start rehearsals for a live tour to promote
The Idiot
.

Over the end of 1976 and beginning of 1977, the atmosphere around the Hauptstrasse had been, by most accounts, calm and optimistic, with a sense of damaged psyches being healed. In the wake of Hunt and Tony Sales, however, the adjectives being thrown around seem to change: ‘manic’ and ‘crazed’ are two that pop up regularly. From the moment the brothers checked into the Schlosshotel Gerhus, the intensity levels shot up into the red, and stayed there. Hunt Sales remembers staying up for days on end: rehearsing late into the nights, returning to his hotel to sleep for twenty minutes, then staying up drinking and drugging all night before going straight on to the next rehearsal. ‘The atmosphere was like the cover of that Doors record,
Strange Days
, full of these bohemian bums. I remember sitting at, I think, the Tribe Bar one particular night, and there was a midget on top of the bar, dancing with a girl.’

With Bowie playing piano and the quietly expert
Low
guitarist Ricky Gardiner on guitar, the quintet rehearsed at UFA studios, the giant, semi-abandoned movie lot that still contained filing cabinets packed with Nazi-era paperwork, starting at around 11pm or midnight, and continuing till five in the morning. After hours, one favoured haunt was a dark club named the Café Kees, its dance floor enclosed by panelled booths equipped with phones, which had, according to Tony Sales, been used by SS officers to arrange assignations with their mistresses back in the 1930s. Tony and Hunt, despite their Jewish heritage and jokes about being turned into lampshades, shared Bowie’s fascination with Berlin’s rich, seamy atmosphere, and the small team gelled instantly. Of the band’s two creative leaders, it seemed that David was the more effusive, the one who revelled in being part of a family. Jim, in contrast, was philosophical, content to ride the momentum of what was happening, even if he wasn’t in control, says Tony: ‘He was just like, Whatever. He doesn’t put up too much resistance to the improv of it all. It was sort of like jazz.’

After the unrelenting emotional traumas of the previous four years, it was hardly surprising that Jim was beginning to regard the prospects of success and failure with equal indifference. Every album he’d made previously had been conceived in a spirit of near-euphoric megalomania, only to disappear into oblivion with soul-crushing inevitability. Appropriately, now Jim Osterberg had attained his own sangfroid, it transpired that those long-neglected albums had inspired a new generation of musicians - musicians who, it turned out, regarded Iggy’s music as being as iconoclastic as did its creator.

CHAPTER 12

Here Comes My Chinese Rug

Little by little, Stooges disciples scattered along the length and breadth of the planet had been spreading the message. In New York, Lenny Kaye, a guitarist and writer who had written one of the first positive reviews of the Stooges’ debut album back in 1969, had formed a band with poet Patti Smith - the two of them had gone to visit Iggy and James in the Coronet back in 1974, and the next year had released their stunning debut album as the Patti Smith Group,
Horses
. The Ramones, most of whom had also bought the Stooges’ debut and seen them at the Electric Circus in May 1971, had recorded their own debut album, under the auspices of Danny Fields, in February 1976. In Germany and Paris, prominent fans included Harald Inhülsen - whose fanzine
Honey That Ain’t No Romance
published numerous photos of his girlfriend Mechthild Hoppe naked but for strategically placed Stooges literature - Marc Zermati, owner of the record store Open Market in Paris, and photographer and writer Philippe Mogane, who launched the Stooges fan club in France. In London, the influence of the Stooges was even more profound. Brian James had first heard
Fun House
in 1971 and had subsequently embarked on a long quest. Early in 1976, he met a singer named Dave Vanian and wrote to a friend that his quest had been fulfilled: ‘I’ve finally found my own Iggy!’ Together they would form the Damned, include the Stooges’ ‘1970’ in their set, and release the UK’s first homegrown punk single, ‘New Rose’, in October 1976. Mick Jones, a member of the audience at King’s Cross, and briefly a member of the band London SS with Brian James, would form the Clash with Joe Strummer, ex-singer of pub rock band the 101ers, in the summer of 1976. John Lydon was another member of the King’s Cross audience. In the summer of 1975 he started hanging out at the King’s Road clothes shop Sex, run by Malcolm McLaren, where
Raw Power
was a staple of the in-house record collection. Lydon joined up with the Swankers, the band that McLaren was masterminding, who were renamed the Sex Pistols, and christened himself Johnny Rotten. The Stooges’ ‘No Fun’ would become a cornerstone of their live set, and the B-side of their third single, ‘Pretty Vacant’.

It was during his visit to CBGB back in April 1976 that Jim had first become aware of what would be termed the punk movement (he himself ascribes the first use of the term to Lenny Kaye, via his description of the Stooges’ debut as ‘the music of punks cruising for burgers’). That first encounter with the CBGB regulars gave him a sense that ‘something was about to break’, which was heightened as he heard tapes of the Sex Pistols and the Damned later in 1976.

But even as the first punk singles trickled onto the market, Iggy would release an album that showed his acolytes how it was done.
Metallic KO
was a live recording of the band’s final, painful show at the Michigan Palace, and was midwifed by Nick Kent and Marc Zermati. Nick had obtained the tape of the show, which was recorded by Michael Tipton, in late 1974 from James Williamson. Zermati - who had launched his own Skydog label with an EP by the Flaming Groovies in May 1973 - later got hold of the tape of the Stooges’ earlier Michigan Palace show, and edited the two tapes to make up a 39-minute album that was released in September 1976. It remains for many the ultimate punk album: flawed, like so many contemporaries, pathetic in its proud inarticulacy (‘One, two, fuck you pricks’), yet unutterably majestic when the band was in full flight, on ‘Raw Power’ or ‘Louie Louie’. For Peter Hook, bassist in a Manchester band who’d later rename themselves Joy Division,
Metallic KO
would be both a huge influence, and a signpost to where he himself was heading. ‘It just sounds like the sort of gig that we used to have in the early days - on a knife edge. That was why it was so fucking exciting, the best live album ever made, far more so than most bloody live CDs where everyone’s clapping.’ Without a doubt,
Metallic KO
’s negativity and violence influenced the emerging UK punk movement, encouraging bottle-throwing and spitting, and for Jim himself, says Nick Kent, ‘It [was] a dark record. I know that Iggy was spooked by it.’

Dark as it was,
Metallic KO
would be the first Stooges album released into a world that was finally ready for it. In the UK, both leading music weeklies,
NME
and
Sounds
, had reinvented themselves on the back of the emerging punk movement, and both the
NME
’s Nick Kent and
Sounds
’ Giovanni Dadomo championed the album and its singer consistently and devotedly. Despite legal threats from Tony Defries, who sent cease-and-desist letters to Zermati, stating the Stooges were still under contract to MainMan, the three-year-old recording became one of the key releases of the UK punk scene in particular, and would sell over 100,000 copies. It would soon be followed by a Stooges single, ‘I Got a Right’, mastered from a MainMan-era demo supplied by James Williamson. Released by Philippe Mogane’s Siamese Dog label in March, this lost, once-rejected piledriving track was greeted with extravagant praise right across Europe.

As England embraced his past, Jim flew over to showcase his present, opening a tour to promote
The Idiot
on 1 March 1977 at Aylesbury Friars - a small club an hour out of London that David Bowie favoured for low-key launches before the higher-profile London shows. The tour was organised by Bowie’s MAM agency, run by John Giddings and Ian Wright, who told Friars promoter David Stopps that Bowie would be guesting on keyboards, but swore him to secrecy. That afternoon, the band were tense, with Iggy quite obviously nervous; instead it was David Bowie, in brown cords, chequered shirt and flat cap, who was the epitome of low-key affability, greeting Stopps like an old chum - ‘What’s a smart young guy like you still doing in a place like this?’ - remaining calm when the band’s equipment was delayed in customs, and instructing the promoter to open the doors and let the fans in, even though they’d had time for only the most cursory soundcheck. ‘David was definitely playing second fiddle to Iggy - and enjoying it,’ remembers Stopps, ‘revelling in the lack of pressure.’

The show was packed with London’s punk aristocracy: the Damned’s Brian James, the Heartbreakers’ Johnny Thunders and Billy Rath, the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock and Iggy’s long-time supporter Nick Kent were all present, as were members of Generation X and the Adverts, who watched a slick show, drawn from all three Stooges albums plus
The Idiot;
as the audience realised who was playing keyboards, the crowd grew deeper at Bowie’s side of the stage. Faced with the legendary singer who, for many of them, was a icon of aggression and excess, the crowd were mostly ecstatic at seeing him alive and well - albeit disappointed to see him dispensing with the practices that had nearly rendered him dead or damaged. ‘[Iggy] was mesmerising,’ says Brian James, who was slightly disturbed by the presence of David Bowie on keyboards, while Kris Needs, who reviewed the show for
Roxette
magazine, pronounced Iggy ‘captivating - but not the Detroit Demon we’d hoped for’. After the show, Brian James got into an argument with Johnny Thunders, who complained that the Bowie-backed Iggy had ‘gone cabaret’.

Much the same positive but restrained reaction attended subsequent live dates, as well as
The Idiot
itself which was released later that month and was promoted in tandem with Bowie’s own
Low
, released in January. Some fans expected Iggy’s new album to sound like the last one and regretted the loss of James Williamson’s high-octane guitar assault, although there were enough adherents to ensure that, at last, Iggy made the upper reaches of the album charts:
The Idiot
appeared at a respectable number 30 in the UK (it would later chart at number 72 in the US). Only in retrospect would most people realise the dark power of songs like ‘Nightclubbing’ and ‘Dum Dum Boys’, which prefigured the sound of 1980s pop. Those juicy synthesisers, doom-laden vocals and dark, gothic guitar work would establish the tonal palette for bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine, the Birthday Party and Bauhaus. More poignantly,
The Idiot
would be the favourite album of Joy Division’s inspirational, emotionally disturbed singer Ian Curtis; the album was still spinning on Curtis’s turntable when the singer hanged himself in May 1980. ‘Although,’ says Curtis’s friend and bassist Peter Hook, with a mixture of sadness, sympathy and trademark black humour, ‘I don’t think Iggy can take the rap for it.’

As the tour progressed, Iggy’s antics became wilder, and the band’s performance at London’s Rainbow, propelled by the Sales brothers’ unstoppable momentum, was viciously efficient (Johnny Rotten turned up after the show to pay tribute). Ironically, they would still fall foul of a newly emerging punk conservatism in the pages of
Melody Maker
, where Mark P, of punk fanzine
Sniffin Glue
, complained that Iggy didn’t ‘get in the audience and break some seats’. Ricky Gardiner in particular was regularly criticised in print for his lack of aggression, but in fact that was part of the plan: Gardiner’s clangy Stratocaster sound and Bowie’s electric piano had both been chosen to add a new clarity to the mix and give Iggy’s voice more prominence. But if the band ignored punk convention for those early dates, as they tore through twenty-six shows in six weeks there was plenty of backstage carnage to complement the onstage professionalism. Tony Sales would regularly find himself ‘walking through the hallways of hotels naked and stoned. It wasn’t a party. It was strange. It was over-the-top exhaustion and to cover the exhaustion you’d do more cocaine and after a while it doesn’t do anything.’ Hunt and Tony Sales calculate they each lost around twenty-five pounds in weight over the six weeks; as the tour went on, Tony remembers Iggy climbing a monitor stack before falling backwards and smashing onto the stage. ‘He didn’t feel anything when it happened, because he was so out of it.’ Bowie reckoned, ‘The drug use was
unbelievable
and I knew it was killing me, so that was a difficult side of it.’ By the time the band reached America, says Hunt Sales, they were ‘pretty burnt’, while their singer was becoming ‘very erratic, very obsessive, and you don’t know from one moment who you’re dealing with’. But for all his infuriating, confusing manias and obsessions, Hunt points out, Iggy was ‘a trooper. He did a great job every gig.’

Jim Osterberg, too, would turn in some fabulous performances, most notably on Dinah Shore’s afternoon talk show, where he incongruously guested alongside Bowie on 15 April. The show was filmed at the CBS studios off Beverly Boulevard, and Iggy is introduced as the ‘originator of punk rock’, performing elegantly on the two songs, ‘Sister Midnight’ and ‘Funtime’ - a taut bundle of callisthenic energy, kept firmly under control until the thrilling climax of each song. But it is Jim Osterberg, doe-eyed, boyish and coy, who wins over Dinah Shore, who sighs in horror at the prospect of what Iggy was doing to himself physically, before Jim cheekily interrupts, ‘and to other people too’, fluttering his mascara’d eyelashes, charming with his Jimmy Stewart voice and his naughty Donald Sutherland smile. The same cheeky charm was evident in the many press interviews Jim participated in on what was his first proper, professionally organised world tour. Throughout all of these encounters there were two common threads: first, the open acknowledgement of his many faults, and his readiness to denigrate or mock himself. Second, the almost scarily consistent belief in his music, the sense that he has a manifest destiny to make it, and the conviction that his music will change the world.

Perhaps this sense of destiny was what drove Iggy’s next creative act. Possibly it was augmented by the unique, intense artistic environment of Berlin, by the supreme musicianship of his band, or by a newly emerging creative rivalry with David Bowie. In truth, all of those involved in the recording of
Lust For Life
share the same feeling, that it was impossible to analyse what lay behind the sensation of being carried along in something that was bigger than all of them: ‘It was like a dream,’ says Tony Sales. ‘We were sleepwalking.’

A necessary rite of passage before Iggy’s recording of
Lust For Life
was Jim’s renting of a flat of his own. It came shortly after a last fling in LA at the end of
The Idiot
tour, when he sunbathed on the beach, enjoyed a brief romantic idyll with writer Pleasant Gehman, and hung out at the Whisky, just as he turned thirty. On his return to Berlin, Jim signed the contract for his new flat with landlady Rosa Morath, who also owned Bowie’s apartment; incredibly, it was the first time Jim had had a long-term lease in his own name, paid for with his own money, thanks to a new contract and a $25,000 advance from RCA, negotiated back in January. The flat was at the rear of the 155 Hauptstrasse building, in the Hinterhof - the more modest, lower-ceilinged mews apartments that would once have served as servants’ quarters or work premises. The rent was just 184 DM per month - cheap, because the flat had no hot water, which suited his new no-frills, hard-working ethic. It was a new start and Jim Osterberg ‘felt real good’.

For
The Idiot
, David Bowie had contracted the studio time and owned the master tapes, according to Jim, and had been in the stronger position. By now, Jim believed, Bowie was pretty sick of Iggy’s rock histrionics, and Jim was ‘pretty sick of where Bowie was coming from - so there was a lot of friction’. But both were fired up by the project, and the irritation each felt with the other was laced with respect: ‘It was an ideas friction, not a personal one,’ says Jim.

From the moment the project was mooted, there was intense competition between the two, both of them vying to contribute more songs. Bowie called Carlos Alomar to ask him to take charge of the band - which in the case of the Sales brothers, and quite possibly Bowie and Iggy too, was like being asked to tame a particularly nervy purebred stallion. Alomar loved the challenge of harnessing what he called their ‘wanton abandonment’, realising he could channel the Saleses’ rambunctiousness, even if he couldn’t hope to turn it on and off like a light switch.