Iggy Pop (37 page)

Despite his unquenchable enthusiasm for music, there seemed little chance of a new record deal, even with the assistance a few weeks earlier of Cars founder Ric Ocasek, who’d produced some studio sessions for him in Boston, with Ministry guitarist Al Jourgensen. There was some good news from the UK, where David Bowie’s
Let’s Dance
album, which featured David’s version of ‘China Girl’, hit number one, dangling the prospect of songwriting royalties to come. But in the meantime Jim’s energies were directed at a tour of Hawaii, Japan and Australia.

On the plane over to Hawaii, Jim had a word with Mike Page, telling him he was worried about Mike’s drinking. Mike assured him he had it under control. Jim gave him a steady stare. ‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter,’ he warned him. A couple of weeks later, on 20 June at the Sun Plaza in Tokyo, Iggy spotted an attractive 22-year-old in the audience and employed his usual gambit of singing to the girl next to her, tantalising her. At the end of the show he sent Henry McGroggan out to find the girl, but she was not in the auditorium. But it happened to be raining outside, and the girl, whose name was Suchi, walked back in to collect her umbrella from the coat-check stand. That night she joined him on the tour. One week later, David Bowie’s version of ‘China Girl’ hit the Top Ten in both the UK and the US. Three weeks later, Jim had abandoned the tour and was on a plane to Los Angeles with his future wife.

The sun is beating down relentlessly in San Diego, the neatly maintained city that has always seemed a refuge for those with nowhere else to go, voyagers who’ve run out of friends in San Francisco and then LA, and eventually find themselves stranded in this last stop before Mexico. I’d been calling Mike Page, an enthusiastic, energetic man, for a few weeks before I made the trip from San Francisco in the summer of 1995, and he promised me a great time: he’d get us the best room at the city’s finest hotel, as he was friends with the manager. We’d get complimentary food and drink at the Hard Rock Café, which had one of his basses hanging on the wall. Then he would introduce me to some of the city’s young musicians.

I liked Mike; a big, solid-looking, funny guy who reminded me of New Order’s celebrated bassist, Peter Hook, and I could see why he’d been Iggy’s closest companion on those gruelling tours, night after night, when the singer was getting smashed in the head by Heineken bottles, dodging collapsing PA stacks, or rushing out of hotels. It was seeing Iggy shrug off all those assaults, Mike told me, that convinced him his ex-employer was indestructible. ‘Iggy is not a normal human being,’ he told me. ‘I’ve got proof of it. I’ve got pictures of him where he’d jumped in the crowd, when he’s been scratched from his shoulder to the bottom of his waist and you can see the marks. I took a photograph of it in the tour bus, when he was asleep. If it was you or I, a fingernail cut, which can be real dirty, those scratches would be there for a week. They’d broken right through the skin. But with him, within two days it was gone.’

As we chatted over successive rounds of Becks at the Hard Rock Café, the conversation was riveting, but like the stories Mike related, the evening was punctuated by misfortune. Mike called his hotel-manager friend who said he was sorry, but the place was fully booked. There was a new manager at the Hard Rock who’d never heard of him; I stumped up for their overpriced factory food despite his objections. Later in the evening Mike’s plans of being the perfect host took another turn for the worse as we sat, morosely, in a local ‘alterna-rock’ club, whose pale, listless patrons were not impressed by the English writer Mike had brought along. Then suddenly Mike disappeared. His friend Steve, a lawyer currently going through a divorce, asked me to help look for him in the toilets - Mike had blacked out there the previous week, Steve told me, and he was really worried about Mike’s drinking. Mike turned up eventually, without mentioning where he’d been, and rather than checking into the city’s best hotel, we went off to sleep on the floor of Steve’s one-bedroom flat.

But we didn’t sleep at all. Instead, we spent the night singing Rolling Stones songs, taking turns on a plastic Maccaferri guitar Steve had just bought, until dawn, when I left to catch my plane. I fended off the inevitable hangover by drinking throughout the next day, too.

Over succeeding months I called Mike again and again, but he’d apparently walked out of the guitar shop where he worked. Months turned to years, and I often wondered what had become of him, reflecting on the grim toll Iggy’s lifestyle had taken - particularly on those who, like Dave Alexander, Zeke Zettner and Jackie Clark, played bass guitar. It was nearly ten years later when the phone rang in my LA motel room, and I recognised Mike’s voice. We laughed about our hilariously disastrous night in San Diego, and as our chatter continued Mike described how his life had since followed a familiar, but happy, pattern. He’d quit drinking, turned to soundtrack work, and his career was on the up. And in a typical California parable, he’d found the best place to network for new business contacts was in his local AA meetings.

CHAPTER 16

Hideaway

I found by having a fixed address I can actually roam farther afield. Because I have somewhere to come back and crash at.

Jim Osterberg

In the end, it all came down to money. It took five years for the farmer of sound to reap his harvest, but around the middle of 1983 the cash started flowing. There were royalties from the Sex Pistols’ version of ‘No Fun’, which had taken several years to arrive, then came income from Grace Jones, who had a Top Ten dance hit with her 1981
Nightclubbing
album, featuring Iggy and David’s song; around this time Dan Bourgoise from Bug Music had been putting Jim’s publishing in order, and the Grace Jones song was the first from which the royalties started to arrive without delay. Soon there was the cash from David’s hit version of ‘China Girl’, which started to trickle in quickly from radio and TV airplay.

On the plane back to Los Angeles, Jim walked back from the first-class section to talk to Mike Page. Jim was trashed, but not too trashed to tell Mike that he was thinking about taking a break for a while. Then he said, ‘She thinks I drink too much. Do you think I drink too much?’ The rest of the band were still in a state of shock - they had expected the tour to continue to New Zealand - but they had noticed Jim withdraw from them over the last few weeks and were reasonably resigned to their fate. Esther Friedmann, too, gradually realised Jim wasn’t coming back, despite Louella and James Sr’s protestations that the split was surely only temporary. ‘When he looked at her he didn’t think of blow; when he looked at me he probably did,’ says Esther, philosophically. ‘That’s what happens when you do drugs with people. So I knew it was time to get my shit together.’ Jim told her to keep whatever possessions she wanted, including David’s painting of him; but David arrived at Esther’s Kreuzberg apartment a few months later and asked for it back.

Back in LA, Jim hooked up with two of his confidants from
Kill City
days, Murray Zucker and Danny Sugerman, and decided he needed to stay in California for a while before he could brave New York again. Zucker counselled him through his stay on a chemical-dependency ward, and Sugerman sent an intriguing commission his way in the form of the title song for Alex Cox’s upcoming movie,
Repo Man
, for which Sugerman had wangled a role as music consultant. But perhaps the most crucial therapy was Suchi; for the first time in his life, Jim Osterberg had to take responsibility for another human being.

Suchi Asano was a music fan, stylist and occasional model whose father worked in the police department in Tokyo. She’d learned to speak English at school, and once the couple arrived in LA she enrolled in a Berlitz course. But it was Jim Osterberg who took on the responsibility of coaching her in the language. As the son of an English teacher, he’d been waiting to tell someone else how to speak properly for thirty years or so. ‘I’ve given her a good accent,’ he would proudly proclaim after a year’s tuition. ‘She doesn’t swallow her consonants like a lot of Japanese do.’ For the first six months their communication was pretty basic; Jim found it impossible to explain some of the dilemmas and issues that troubled him, which brought him to a crucial realisation: ‘OK, there’s not so much need to make a big flap over every little thing that happens every day.’ Conquering his need for chaos and drama would represent a crucial breakthrough.

During his stay in Los Angeles, Jim had introduced Suchi to most of his musical circle at a party at the China Club, an upscale restaurant in Hollywood; the couple seemed joyful and optimistic, while Jim looked markedly different from the rather raddled figure he’d cut of late: sparkly-eyed and boyish with short hair and a side parting, dressed with classic elegance in a red cardigan and banded white golf straw hat (some of his friends started calling him Bing behind his back, because his casual attire reminded them of Bing Crosby). Danny Sugerman seemed to be his constant guide around Los Angeles society and displayed a puppydog enthusiasm about being reunited with the singer who seemed like his surrogate elder brother. Sugerman, too, was supposedly drug-free; this was the new ethos in Los Angeles, which had belatedly wised up to the deleterious effects of cocaine - although quite often, as photographer Robert Matheu points out, ‘drugs-free’ simply meant that it was not cool to share your cocaine any more; instead, everyone snorted in private.

Sugerman had the idea of teaming Iggy for the title song with Chequered Past, the short-lived LA supergroup comprising Blondie’s Clem Burke, Silverhead’s Michael Des Barres, Silverhead and Blondie bassist Nigel Harrison and ex-Sex Pistol Steve Jones; Jones had recently kicked heroin with the aid of Sugerman and Harrison. It was an inspired pairing, and singer Michael Des Barres stepped back with good grace, although Chequered Past’s fifth member, Tony Sales, was understandably upset at not being included, given his previous relationship with Jim; the insult was compounded by the fact Jim seemed to be avoiding him.

With a clean-cut, organised Iggy singing and directing rehearsals, the quartet, all efficient and drugs-free, spent a couple of days working up the song at EMI America’s rehearsal studio on the Sunset Strip; Jim was focused, and showed his familiar, hard-working, creative side, working up perhaps seven or eight sets of lyrics, remembers Nigel Harrison, for the intricate song arrangement.

Despite his clean-cut, reformed image, it turned out that Iggy was still in love with the idea of chaos and drama and the conflicts that often made music - and life - exciting. There was one last escapade, which started when he sent Robert Matheu and Steve Jones off to borrow a Les Paul guitar from David Bowie. The two were delighted with their errand and the sight of David’s abode just behind Sunset, which was furnished in a tasteful East Indies style; David was in town to play the Los Angeles Forum, and Jones chatted with him for ten or fifteen minutes. But when Matheu brought the guitarist back to the studio, he realised the stunt was at least partly a ruse to keep Jones - who was under heavy orders to stay drug-free - away from Danny and Iggy, who were ‘definitely up to something’.

Once the session started, says Nigel Harrison, ‘Iggy was buzzing!’ The singer had ‘scabs of cocaine and a cold sweat, and everything we’d rehearsed went right out the window’. They started taping at Cherokee studios at four in the afternoon, and at four in the morning the band had run through perhaps thirty different versions of the song; for the final version, Iggy made Harrison play two bass parts, then came up with yet another set of lyrics and contributed a crazed vocal performance. The recording sounded all the more thrilling for the fact you could hear the musicians tracking Iggy, locked onto him like guided missiles on the trail of a fighter jet. Although, as with all of Iggy’s music, this song had little connection with blues, its very mutability recalls the way John Lee Hooker ’s musicians would swerve to follow their singer. ‘There is an analogy between Iggy’s music and someone like Hooker,’ says Clem Burke, ‘in the way it doesn’t have to be completely in time and meter - he leads the band with his movement and expression and being primitive. It’s a jazz ethic. And to work with the energy he exudes was amazing.’ With its claustrophobic semitonal riffs, vaguely reminiscent of the
Batman
theme, Jones’s roaring guitars and galloping, muscular bass and drums from Harrison and Burke, ‘Repo Man’ was undeniably the best rock song Iggy had recorded since
New Values
days - it was also scarily appropriate for a skewed LA movie whose script was inspired by the Liverpool-born Cox’s time spent studying at UCLA, during which he lived next to an auto repossession specialist. The song was the highlight of a raucous, rowdy soundtrack that leant heavily on LA punk bands including Black Flag and the Circle Jerks; it was significant, too, in that it illustrated how Iggy’s music sounded as contemporary against a backdrop of 1980s hardcore as it had against 1970s punk.

‘Repo Man’ provided a fitting coda to Jim’s Los Angeles experiences, which had inspired both the wired optimism of
Fun House
and the washed-up rootlessness of
Kill City
. But where both of those albums had embodied a current or imminent crisis, ‘Repo Man’ commemorated one; in the following years Iggy Pop would generally only get loaded, he says, at ‘weekends and special occasions’. There were several strands to this profound turnaround in Jim’s life: as well as the crucial new element of financial security, the encouragement of Murray Zucker and other professionals and the influence of Suchi, Jim’s own intelligence and even his narcissism all unmistakeably told him, ‘It never looks good to be forty and failed.’

As much as he had deluded himself, says Jim, there was a point at which he was forced to realise that ‘there was a line I was crossing into picaresque behaviour. I was becoming Don Quixote. There’s a fine line between entertaining flamboyance and being a prat - I had known I was becoming one [earlier], but that realisation would last for about thirty seconds.’

Tellingly, Jim describes how in life, little by little, ‘you change as much as you have to’. By the autumn of 1983 he finally had no choice. The example of ‘Repo Man’ notwithstanding, he had been forced to recognise that the habits that had once powered his music were now handicapping it. In place of drugs, success and normality would be the experiences Jim would now experiment with, and savour. Without the aid of conventional therapy, or rehab, he simply decided to give up drink and cocaine relying solely on his willpower. While there were occasional relapses, and even a couple of frenzied spending sprees, this was pretty much how it would stay.

After three months in Los Angeles, it was time for a more traditional therapy in the form of a vacation at the invitation of David Bowie, whose Serious Moonlight tour had concluded in Bangkok on 12 December. Jim and Suchi flew over to meet with David and Coco for their trip to Bali and Java after the tour finished. The quartet spent New Year’s Eve together, and over the vacation David and Jim came up with a new song, ‘Tumble And Twirl’, their first real collaboration in seven years and the beginning of a renewed songwriting partnership that would underpin both of their next albums, albeit one that was radically different in mood from the manic creative energy of
Lust For Life
and
“Heroes”
.

For Jim and Suchi, there was a quick trip to Manhattan in February 1984 looking for a new apartment; like many, they found the rounds of real-estate agents and overpriced property a drag, so they flew down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where James Sr and Louella had retired in the autumn of 1982, to relax; Jim spent much of his time playing golf with his dad. Back in New York a couple of weeks later, they found a rental in the Gramercy Park area, and Suchi and Jim spent much of the time exploring the neighbourhood together, like wide-eyed tourists, before heading for Canada in May, where David Bowie was recording what would become
Tonight
, the follow-up to his multi-million-selling
Let’s Dance.

For perhaps the first time, David Bowie was about to deliver a train-wreck of an album. Again, for the first time, David Bowie - a personality who, like Jim, was so often animated with an infectious, boyish enthusiasm - seemed bored. And according to Hugh Padgham, who would be credited as producer on this problematic, but ironically bestselling album, the one change that would have made the work better would have been more input from Jim Osterberg: ‘I think Jim was there for around five days, he was an inspirational influence. If he had been around for longer, we might actually have had a great album.’

Tonight
, it turns out, was rather like Iggy’s own
Soldier
, meandering through two producers, with no guiding ethos and generally indifferent material. Bowie had recruited a new producer, Derek Bramble, who soon proved inadequate for the task. Padgham, who’d already produced huge hits for the Police, had taken the gig as engineer because he was eager to work with David, so was the perfect person to step in when Bramble left the session after a couple of weeks. Yet Padgham ultimately found the experience frustrating. David was energetic, chain-smoking with that slightly jittery intensity, but most of his energies seemed focused on outside distractions, rather than the songs. They were recording in a residential studio, Le Studio, in the rather boring provincial ski resort of Morin Heights, Quebec, and David seemed more preoccupied with picking up a local girl, who invariably had a friend in tow. Jim, in comparison, was a calming influence. ‘He was laid-back . . .
very
laid-back, I did wonder if he might be on tranquillisers,’ says Padgham, and the two had experimented on more inventive, left-field material that, if included, would have hugely improved the final results, Padgham believes.

There was still plenty of David’s craftsmanship on view - the album’s major hit, ‘Blue Jean’, was neatly constructed, with a luxurious sheen that concealed the absence of an inspiring chorus - but for once, he seemed to have run out of creative ideas. In Berlin, in Jim’s company, he had fused a kind of European expressionism and intensity with jagged electronic instrumentation and R&B rhythms, making music that was uniquely emotive and original. This time around, the guiding principle seemed to be that of recording an assortment of cover versions in a bland, airbrushed reggae style. Yet there must surely have been another motive at play when one considers that five of the nine songs included on the album feature Iggy Pop’s name on the credits: the newly written ‘Tumble And Twirl’ and ‘Dancing With The Big Boys’, plus ‘Tonight’ (in a dreadful reggaefied version, with Tina Turner duet-ting on over-emotive, strangulated vocals) and ‘Neighborhood Threat’ from
Lust For Life
, and finally ‘Don’t Look Down’, one of Iggy and James Williamson’s last collaborations, from
New Values
.