Iggy Pop (35 page)

By early 1980, the demands on Jim Osterberg were becoming immense. So far in his career he had recorded eight albums, most of which had required a huge emotional commitment, but the stock of ideas that sustained him was being diminished just at the point when the pressure from his record company was being increased. Charles Levison had been understanding about the
Soldier
de bacle - he felt it was an ‘interesting’ album and believed that Iggy’s presence gave Arista UK a certain cachet - but the
Soldier
sessions had gone over budget and Levison was under growing pressure from Clive Davis to justify his investment. Jim and Charles had an unusually close relationship, characterised by long, late-night phone calls, and Levison made it plain that, for the next album, the company needed a commercial breakthrough.

Understandably, Iggy chose to pretend this pressure didn’t exist, and, he says, decided instead to spend his time thinking, ‘Where can I get fucked, where can I get stoned, where can I have a good time?’ Yet, however hard he tried to ignore the problem, Jim would also be troubled by the question of ‘Where can I make music that’s gonna go
Pow
?’ In retrospect it would be obvious to Jim that ‘Pow’ - the simple power and energy that had always characterised his music - could never be unlocked in his then mental state, with his inexorable live schedule, and with musical collaborators who could not make him focus his energies. And while Jim’s musicians were inclined to overlook their singer’s troubles as they expended most of their energies in pursuit of good times, it was increasingly obvious to a few of those close to him that Jim Osterberg’s mental condition was becoming increasingly desperate.

Dayna Louise was a 14-year-old music fan who lived in Austin, Texas and became Iggy’s regular companion on his visits to the state. When they had first met in early 1980, he was protective and caring: ‘He made me feel really smart and beautiful at a time I was younger than everybody else and felt a little inadequate.’ Dayna seemed to epitomise Iggy’s growing need for ‘adoration’; something he’d often complained wasn’t forthcoming from Esther, and that he could command more easily from younger girls. But during his subsequent visits to Texas, Dayna observed that Jim’s mental state seemed increasingly parlous. One moment he would be charming, considerate, ‘real loving’, and then all of a sudden he would be on the verge of tears: ‘Everything is shit, this all sucks, I hate my life.’ There was no purposeful nastiness, but it seemed to Dayna that Jim had never learned to be pleasant to other people if his own mood was low. ‘He’s absolutely sincere when he’s kind. But he’s never nice when [he doesn’t feel good] and his lows were pretty low. He was pretty hardcore.’

Dayna describes Jim’s mental state as ‘poster boy bipolar’; often he’d wake in the morning sober, energised and optimistic, in an ‘everything is beautiful and good’ mood. On such days he would enjoy scribbling lyrics while Dayna did girly things, took a bubble bath or painted her nails, enjoying the Humbert-and-Lolita vibe. Sometimes they maintained that blissful atmosphere for three or four days, ‘and then everything would fall to hell. It was very, very extreme. I really think he was cracking up.’

For once, Jim’s manic energy - what Vincent Van Gogh used to describe as the ‘electricity’ that underlay the artist’s periods of intense creativity - seemed to turn in on him, rather than powering his music or his showmanship. Whereas in Stooges or
Kill City
days he had been compelled to create even in the depth of his mental torment, over this period his own music was becoming stunted. Meanwhile, the force of his personality convinced the musicians around him that all was well. ‘I would never have seen [Jim’s predicament] for one microsecond,’ says Rob Duprey. ‘That his situation was for whatever reason declining.’

It was in this enervated mental state that Iggy was scheduled to make what had to be his breakthrough Arista album. Over the summer of 1980, Esther was staying in Port Washington, New York, with her friend Anita Pallenberg, who was undergoing a painful break-up from Keith Richards. Meanwhile, Jim spent a reasonably calm week in Haiti with Ivan Kral at the chic Hotel Oloffson, a favourite of Jackie Onassis and other jetsetters, before the two of them booked into the Iroquois Hotel in New York to work up material.

Ivan Kral remembers the genesis of what would become the
Party
album as being almost idyllic. Ivan would work out songs on his Prophet 5 synthesiser, then take cassettes over to Iggy who would work up lyrics: ‘really good lyrics’. This, thought Kral, was the opportunity and this was the material that would make Iggy ‘bigger than this punk who is left-field, only for a certain kind of people’. Ivan remembers the pair writing a huge number of new songs, and was driven by a belief that this was finally the opportunity for Jim, as Charles Levison used to put it, to ‘cross over ’.

Sessions were booked at New York’s Record Plant in the late summer of 1980, with Thom Panunzio engaged as producer. Panunzio had worked with Jimmy Iovine to help Patti Smith score her first mainstream hit with 1978’s ‘Because The Night’ for Arista, and the intention was that
Party
would do the same for Iggy. Perhaps the idea was his music just needed to be shorn of its rough edges; perhaps it was that typical 1980s record company belief that an expensive studio, a glamorous photo session and an impressive drum sound was all that was needed to score a hit. But the sketchiness of the plan was evident from the moment the sessions started; even Iggy’s band felt like passengers on the venture, reduced to plonking away like automatons on horribly predictable chord sequences.

During the first sessions for
Party
there was some pleasant material recorded, notably ‘Pumping For Jill’, based on a chugging guitar sound reminiscent of the Cars’ ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’, the archetypal New Wave crossover hit. ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’, however, had a chorus, a necessity conspicuous for its absence on
Party
’s supposedly ‘commercial’ material. Most of the other songs were competent and eminently forgettable. ‘Happy Man’, however, wasn’t, however hard you tried: a cringingly simplistic ditty with risible lyrics, in which the singer who once crafted taut poetry of streetwalking cheetahs yelps ‘I’m a happy man and she’s my only romance’, against an oompah Eurovision brass band backing, in an attempted ska genre. A truly pitiful moment, it even made those present on the recording wince; Mike Page reckoned, ‘He was really bending over and taking it in the butt.’ Page speculated that the mostly pitiful lyrics represented Iggy’s attempt to ‘screw up’ this shot at commerciality. Kral, too, believes that Iggy set out to ‘destroy the project’ himself, although in fairness Kral’s own bland and dated music must take at least some of the blame.

Although Iggy must shoulder the ultimate responsibility for this distressingly dull album, there is something ineffably sad about the story of
Party
. One is reminded of a toothless old lion, once the proud king of the jungle, now a sad flea-bitten relic shuffling round a circus ring to the crack of a whip.
Party
stands to this day as a warning against the dire effects on the brain of cocaine and alcohol (if one conveniently forgets that
Lust For Life
was fuelled by the same chemicals).

Nonetheless, there were more indignities to come. Having heard the original recordings, Charles Levison decided that ‘we had lost the plot’. Somehow, after casting around for a name producer who could rescue the project, Arista settled on Tommy Boyce, who, with Bobby Hart, was best known for writing ‘Last Train To Clarksville’ and other Monkees hits. Boyce had found a profitable niche in the UK music business working with 1950s revivalist bands like Showaddywaddy and Darts, both of whom notched up bestselling singles in the supposed heyday of punk. Levison knew Boyce via his work with Showaddywaddy and Beatles pasticheurs the Pleasers for Arista, and in desperation, for the label had now spent heavily on Iggy and Clive Davis was ‘breathing down my neck,’ says Levison, he and Tarquin Gotch decided that Boyce was the man to salvage Iggy’s album.

Boyce’s arrival at the studio, says Mike Page, was ‘a horrible joke’. The producer arrived with ‘an LA haircut, and clichéd LA garb right down to the gold cocaine spoon round his neck’. According to Kral, Boyce’s main obsession was scoring cocaine with Iggy, and the two locked Kral in a cupboard to prevent him interfering. Boyce picked on Ivan Kral’s song ‘Bang Bang’, another tune with Cars-style throbbing guitars, adding strings and shuffling disco drums. The song was inoffensive, if blatantly derivative of Blondie’s New Wave dance songs, which is more than can be said for two ghastly, syrupy cover versions, of Phil Phillips’ ‘Sea Of Love’ and the Outsiders’ ‘Time Won’t Let Me’. ‘I was forced, I had no choice,’ says Jim today, of recording the songs. ‘And boy, did I butcher them.’

Mike Page, a positive, generous man who treasures his work with Iggy, describes
Party
as well as anybody when he says ‘it stood for everything Iggy tore down’. Charles Levison readily admits the album ‘didn’t work. And it broke the confidence that Jim had had in me.’ The album’s reception, when it was finally released in August 1981, confirmed their misgivings. One review speculated that Iggy had spent more time phoning the Uptown Horns to book the studio session than he had writing the lyrics for the entire album. It was the first Iggy Pop album to be universally panned, and reached just number 166 in the US album charts.

As the
Party
tapes sat around, awaiting release, the band resumed their incessant touring, again to approving and often ecstatic audiences. The shows were ramshackle, but still powerful, and Iggy still seemed a potent force while, in his ‘up’ moments, his mental powers seemed undimmed. That February, there was a hilarious appearance on Tom Snyder’s chat show in New York; breathless after playing a raucous version of ‘Dog Food’, Jim mumbles while regaining his energies, and then, in response to the usual predictable questions about being a cartoon punk, delivers a brilliantly lucid explanation of the difference between Dionysian and Apollonian art as Snyder looks on in open-mouthed incomprehension. The interview was illustrative of a wider lack of understanding of Iggy’s own art: how he was celebrated for the broken glass and blood rather than the music. One night around this time, Jim broke down in tears, telling Mike Page how he was fed up of becoming ‘the Don Rickles of rock ’n’ roll’, known only for insulting his audience. Yet mostly, he drowned his feelings in alcohol. ‘I had to get drunk onstage to make it sound good and that was the worst part. I feared playing without being drunk. Because it didn’t sound good enough.’ Sadly, with most of Arista’s advances swallowed up in recording expenses, he had no choice but to continue.

For Ivan Kral, the hit record that he hoped to make for Iggy had become a travesty, and there were stories within the band that he had been accosted by Bowie in the streets of New York, who asked him, ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ A sincere, passionate man, when he had joined Iggy he had somehow thought, ‘I would always look after him,’ but on the first night of the tour to promote
Party
, he’d finally had enough. Kral was disgusted by the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, of ‘using women as receptacles’, and had himself been riding an emotional rollercoaster which he could endure no longer. He had hired the Uptown Horns, for the opening dates at New York’s Ritz Club on 31 July 1981, and arrived for the soundcheck, he says, to find that Jim had dropped a tab of acid and was crying like a baby. He made his decision then to quit, phoning road manager Henry McGroggan after the third performance.

More replacements were called in to fill the breach. Gary Valentine had been Blondie’s bassist - he’d written their hit ‘(I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence Dear’ - and stepped in on guitar for Iggy’s tour, while Patti Smith keyboardist Richard Sohl joined up too; he lasted until 3 September. Like his predecessors, Valentine found touring with Iggy ‘a blur’, full of relentless dates, many of them ‘tiny, hole-in-the-wall dumps’, fuelled on alcohol and, in the main, inspiring performances by Iggy, who still seemed in full possession of a Nijinsky-like grace and was, even in this reduced setting, ‘unequivocally one of the best performers I’ve ever seen. I can’t think of a time when I came away from a show thinking he wasn’t on it tonight or he didn’t really nail it. There were a couple of times when we didn’t - and he would give us a strong talking to.’

Even Carlos Alomar, who joined the tour along with Blondie drummer Clem Burke in October 1981, thought Iggy was ‘very controlled’ - although it was all a far cry from the refined atmosphere of a Bowie tour. Carlos learned to dress in black leather, which offered more protection against the beer with which the band were constantly splattered, and particularly remembers one performance on a New Orleans riverboat, from which, once it had left the pier, there was no escape. ‘Iggy came out in a little T-shirt, fishnet stockings, and he’s hung like a horse so with not even a third of the song finished he would always rise up and there he was totally exposed and singing his ass off. At one point I think he took a shit on stage right behind the speakers. It was, what the hell is that smell? It was outrageous.’ Carlos loved the experience, and Clem Burke later told the band his three months with Iggy were the most enjoyable tour of his life. ‘It was certainly the most debauched,’ he says today, while Gary Valentine in particular remembers the ‘rough customers’, who would be lined up in the dressing room after the show. ‘They weren’t very attractive. Maybe they could cater to his needs, I don’t know. I do remember this one woman in a dressing room telling [Iggy], “Your cock never tasted as good until it was in my cunt.” Or something like that. It was pretty rough language. I remember this one girl there and she was pretty new to this and she was like “Oh my God!” She’d never heard anything like this before.’

Even in his reduced state, forced to tour to pay the bills, aware by now his record contract was in jeopardy, and reliant on alcohol - ‘Is Mr Daniels here yet?’ was his customary query before a show - both Jim Osterberg and Iggy seemed reliably intact. Backstage, Jim’s thick glasses and unkempt hair were a vital camouflage. But when Iggy was on, there was still a sharpness about his thinking - just like the behaviour of
Kill City
days, which prompted one observer to liken him to Rommel positioning his forces ready for an assault. Valentine noticed how adept Iggy was at playing a backstage crowd, the promoters and hipsters who turned up with their little offerings of drugs or gifts. ‘He would just eat them up. He’d just take and keep on taking whatever they had and they’d get maybe three minutes of conversation. Then they were standing there empty-handed and looking like, what was that all about?’