Iggy Pop (43 page)

As he had done so often before, Iggy turned his predicament into music, calling in Don Was, who had long wanted to collaborate on a largely acoustic album that showcased Jim’s voice. In the months before the recording started in May 1998, Jim worked hard, rehearsing standards with Cragin, to the stark backing of a string bass and acoustic guitar: ‘It really was cool . . .’ says Cragin, ‘but in the end he got paranoid about it.’

For those who’d followed Iggy’s career, the idea of a collection of dark torch ballads was an enticing one; there were precedents in his own work, notably his sombre, European-sounding
The Idiot
. More recently Nick Cave, who’d started out playing Stooges-influenced rock with the Birthday Party, had attained a career summit with
The Boatman’s Call
, a dark collection of minimalist acoustic ballads; later Johnny Cash would maintain his own career comeback with the stripped-down, spooky
Solitary Man
. Yet when Iggy started work on
Avenue B
, the album that would document the emotional ruins of his own life, he seemed simply to lose his nerve, tidying up the wreckage with a muso sheen courtesy of the super-competent Blue Note jazz trio, Martin Medeski and Wood. Behind the sonic air-brushing and the tasteful middle-class bongos, however, was a world of imposing darkness. ‘Nazi Girlfriend’, the album’s most fully realised song, sees the narrator intimidated by a woman with four-inch heels and a desert in her stare, set against crystalline broken chords. ‘I Felt The Luxury’ features diamond-hard lyrics in which the hero coldly speculates about his leopardskin-clad lover’s next suicide attempt: ‘If cold’s what I am, I’m cold to the end.’ (The song seemed both a warning to future lovers, and a threat to Eric lest he run up any more bills at his therapist.) Elsewhere, a workmanlike cover of Johnny Kidd’s ‘Shaking All Over’ exemplifies a crucial predicament: that with old age comes competence, but a certain dumb eloquence is lost.

By the time
Avenue B
was released in September 1999, Alejandra - the subject of many of the songs - was gone after another messy split-up, the dust had settled on his divorce and Jim had left New York for Miami - ‘I don’t mind being a millionaire, but I don’t want to live next to millionaires,’ was how he justified it to those around him, typically trumpeting his own wealth and the enduring belief that he was an outcast in one sentence. Predictably,
Avenue B
was marketed as a ‘divorce album’, and predictably, it was released to mixed reviews. Some proclaimed it an exercise in self-pity, failing to recognise its emotional brutality; and while most people assumed Iggy Pop had constructed a new warm and cosy retreat for himself in Miami’s North Beach, life was not quite as tidy. For the
Avenue B
tour that autumn - which effectively combined existential acoustic musings with meathead versions of Stooges classics - Jim was stealing women off his musicians like the old days; an ‘unprotected sexual predator,’ says Hal Cragin. There were minor emotional crises, though, such as the time he picked up a girl in Sweden and it turned out her dad was a huge fan of Iggy’s music, a generational juxtaposition that he didn’t appreciate. The encounter illustrated how Jim’s first career revival, back in the mid-1970s, was already a quarter-century away. But in a sense, the fact he was well into his fifties changed little about him: that childlike innocence had always been combined with a kooky eccentricity, the way he’d talk to odd-looking strangers in the street, or call people ‘sir’.

In the early days at the Christadora, Jim appreciated the eccentric mix of boutiques on one side, with crack dealers a couple of blocks in the other direction; once the whole area was cleaned up, the East Side lost its attraction for him. Miami offered a more exotic version of that eccentric mix, where he would spend afternoons on the more far-flung, seedier beaches, or drive around in his 1969 Cadillac convertible, checking out the little old WASP ladies, three decades retired, rubbing shoulders with heavy types who’d made their money from intriguingly vague, doubtless illegal pursuits. And, of course, the Miami chicks. It was on one such cruise around the city that he noticed two striking, Latina-looking women in a pizza parlour. He stopped, got out, walked towards them to say hello, thought better of it, then got back in his Cadillac - and finally offered them a lift. Nina Alu was half Irish, half Nigerian, a statuesque airline stewardess half a head taller than Jim. She was, as one friend puts it, ‘very va va voom’ and soon became his regular companion. They made a sweet couple, often talking quietly or sharing an expensive bottle of red wine together in the evenings.

Iggy and his band had a quiet year in 2000, restricting their shows to the usual huge, lucrative European festival dates. Hal Cragin had left after the
Avenue B
tour and was replaced by Body Count bassist Lloyd ‘Mooseman’ Roberts, who joined Whitey and Pete Marshall on guitars. Whitey’s brother, Alex, had joined as drummer for the
Avenue B
tour; Jim enjoyed the vibe of once again having a pair of brothers in the band and decided to name the resultant outfit ‘the Trolls’; that’s when he didn’t call them ‘my little band’, as if they were domestic servants. By now, he had forgone the routine of auditioning players; normally Art Collins would simply ask them to turn up, for Jim was more bothered about attitude than skills. After all, Whitey had been famously bad on his first tour with Iggy (Henry McGroggan said he thought the band was doing all new material, as he couldn’t recognise a single song), but little by little had started making a vital contribution to songs like
Avenue B
’s ‘Corruption’. By the winter of 2000, Whitey was cranking out most of the key riffs, which Jim would arrange and order, and the small band arranged and recorded a new album in less than two weeks, with Iggy producing.
Beat ’Em Up
was not remotely groundbreaking, but it was effective lamebrained metal, with Iggy’s maniacal diatribes attacking music-biz weasels, fakers and creeps with the temerity to chat up his girlfriend, and for the most part the stream of riffs and rants obscured the lack of original ideas. The most memorable track, ‘VIP’, was a quintessential example of Iggy mocking the hand that feeds him, a seven-minute attack on celebrity culture inspired by the band’s performance, at the personal invitation of Donatella Versace, at a Versace launch in January 1999.

By the time
Beat ’Em Up
was released in July 2001, its bassist had become a victim of the aggression that seemed to pervade it. Mooseman had returned to Los Angeles after the recording, and was apparently working on a car in his South Central driveway when he was killed in a drive-by shooting on 22 February.

Mooseman’s death filled out a grim roll call: Dave Alexander, Zeke Zettner, Jackie Clark and Craig Pike had all played bass for Iggy and died, while Tony Sales, too, had been found near-dead after a car crash in 1979, a gear stick in his chest, and was in Cedars Sinai Hospital in a coma for ten weeks before recovering (Bowie came to visit him; Jim never called). The number of musicians who had been damaged or drained to a husk by their career with Iggy was almost beyond number; but it was a matter of pride now that he keep going. It was simultaneously impressive and inexplicable - David Bowie used the word ‘obsessive’ about Iggy’s compulsion to tour - but there was an internal logic. Jim knew he’d made his best music in the first ten years of his career, and he also believed he’d blown it. He often blamed the Ashetons - even in 2000 or 2001 he’d still often bring up the subject of Ron’s laziness or predilection for dope - but he knew his own excesses or simple lack of psychic stamina were a key reason why the Stooges had crashed and burned. Now he still had to prove his stamina, to make up for those weaknesses of three decades ago. In interviews Jim was unfailingly charming, but there was a rare moment of testiness when one interviewer implied he was a flaky rock ’n’ roller: ‘Listen, dude,’ he retorted. ‘I’ve done this for thirty years. The first fifteen years were highly creative and featured a low discipline level. The second half has been a reverse. There was overall less striking creativity but more discipline.’

It was a classic control-freak situation. Iggy Pop had won the war, but he was still fighting to erase the memory of the battle he’d lost, twenty-five years before. And he continued that fight throughout most of 2001, battling against every band with whom he shared a bill throughout April, May, June, July, October and November. Although the shows were, by all accounts, generally superb, these were not easy months. There were the same old fights between brothers, the same escapades of musicians crazed on drink or drugs - which, in fact, were even worse when confined to a tiny private jet - as well as entirely new hassles, such as a falling-out with his son Eric, newly promoted to road manager for that tour, but who disappeared following an argument after the David Letterman show in New York and subsequently became estranged from his father. By the end of the tour, most of the band were in a state of paranoia that one or all of them would be sacked.

It wasn’t only Iggy’s band who were worried about their employment prospects. In March 2002, EMI announced it had been underperforming in the US market and that it was planning thousands of redundancies from its worldwide staff, accompanied by a drastic culling of its artist roster. It was inevitable that the company would be looking closely at how much Iggy was contributing to the corporate coffers.

Around the same time, Jim got into the habit of piling up his own CDs at home. They made a large stack. In the fickle, transient world of the entertainment business, the fact that he’d been adding to that stack every couple of years had been a source of pride. Now he started to think about how it would look if he were to divide the CDs into two stacks, one for the great albums and one for the mediocre ones. He was smart enough to realise that the latter stack would be much taller than it should be. And at some point he started to say to himself: If I’m going to add to the stack, it had better be for a good reason.

CHAPTER 18

The Reptile House

Jim Osterberg pads around his modest, single-storey Miami retreat with a puppy-like bounce and enthusiasm, attending to visitors with old-fashioned courtesy - fussing over you, asking if you need a cold drink, checking if the unrelenting Florida sun’s in your eyes.

Before we sit down, with Southern politesse he takes us on a tour of his tiny one-bedroomed house. A long lawn with wiry Florida grass, a couple of palms and four or five rhododendron bushes shelter the wooden-fronted bungalow from the street. A black Rolls Royce Corniche shelters from the sun in the lean-to garage adjoining the house. The house itself is tiny, toy-like, and although there are a good number of artworks - naive Haitian paintings, Russian icons, a Brion Gysin drawing, his own painting of the Stooges based on a photo a fan sent him, a Norman throne - the overall effect is spare, like a monk’s retreat. There are just a few boxes of CDs visible, piled up in a tiny room where Iggy writes lyrics at a toy piano. In a glass-fronted cupboard nearby sits a bright red toy Woodstock drum kit, about eighteen inches tall. It’s at this drum kit that the looming, six-feet-tall Scott Asheton - ‘Rock Action’, the hoodlum Dum Dum Boy - sits, when the reformed Stooges rehearse at Iggy’s bungalow, in a Latino district on the edge of the city. I can think of few things more ludicrous than this vision of three sixty-year-old men, childhood friends who’ve reunited over thirty years on, rehearsing and exchanging reminiscences in this tiny room, crouched over toy instruments.

On a table near the back door, there’s an affectingly conventional display of family photographs: a photo of Louella sits next to one of James Sr - a semi-formal black and white photo with an engaging smile, in his Air Force uniform. Jim is still in regular touch with his father, who’s now in an assisted-living facility in Myrtle Beach, although any photos of Eric, or Jim’s new granddaughter, whom he apparently has never met, are nowhere to be seen. Next to the photo of his dad is a fuzzy, amateurish kitsch snapshot of an elderly gentleman with a beatific grin embracing an Amazonian girlfriend whose torpedo breasts are on a level with his head. It takes a couple of seconds until I realise it’s a terrifically bad photo of Iggy, who, in what could be a snapshot of any Florida millionaire, looks like an old man next to Nina. There’s something touching about its lack of self-consciousness. Nearby, there’s the celebrated Gerard Malanga photo of a naked Iggy in his prime - another frame is strategically positioned to obscure his impressive penis. For a few seconds we discuss the photo, as I mention how featuring it on the cover of a particularly depraved issue of
MOJO
magazine, which I’d edited, was one of my proudest moments. He looks at me, seemingly in horror, and says, ‘I know, I can’t believe you did that.’ I examine his expression, hard, to see if he’s winding me up, but there’s no sign. This sets the tone for our afternoon: discussing depravity, betrayal, revenge and life in a mental institution, with a mature, well-bred innocent who speaks as if all of this happened to somebody else, or as if he were Candide, simply carried along on the mad tide of history.

This is not Jim’s only house - there’s a bigger apartment he shares with Nina in Miami proper, as well as a holiday home in Mexico and another property recently purchased in the Cayman Islands - but this is his retreat, where he works and sits alone contemplating nature, and he frequently displays a childlike wonder at the beauty of the calm but slightly grungy surroundings. Occasionally manatees swim slowly down the creek at the back of his house, and he jumps up in pure, simple excitement as he spots a turtle or a crane - ‘Look at that little fella, there!’ At the back of the garden there’s a Tiki Hut - a palm-topped gazebo built in one day by a sturdy crew from El Salvador - where he often sits at three in the morning, listening to Dean, a Hell’s Angel who lives on the other side of the creek, working on his cars. Sometimes trains pass by on the other side of the road early in the morning ‘and you hear a blues whistle’, like the noises he remembers from the trains behind the Leveretts’ fields in Ypsilanti. This place gives him the kind of tranquillity he’d enjoy walking in the wilderness around Coachville, he says, before they built a four-lane highway through it.

He tells me a five-foot-long iguana lives in a tree at the edge of Dean’s plot - he often sees it basking in the sun. I wonder if his metabolism, too, slows down in this idyllic spot, how much time is spent in contemplation and how much in reflection on events past. But it’s apparent that, like a reptile’s, Jim’s is a pragmatic view of life. There’s no energy expended on regret, either for his own sufferings or for those casualties trailed in his wake.

Jim talks with an earnest simplicity and enthusiasm, his conversation full of joke voices, deep laughs and moments of silence as he stares in rapt attention, listening to a question or pondering a response. The five-year-old Jim Osterberg described by his friends - coy, funny, adept at incorporating his questioner’s thoughts and expanding on them to build up rapport - is instantly recognisable. The Iggy Pop I’ve seen before - all staring eyes, muscular springiness, as magnificent and scary as a wild horse - is only occasionally with us today, but Jim mentions at one point how perhaps he really is Iggy, now that he’s inhabited that persona for most of his life. Occasionally he’ll encourage this duality, this idea of an alter ego; at other times he’ll mock it. Overall, you get the sense that Iggy Pop was a place he had to go to make his art; a place from which in the past he couldn’t always return, but which is now safer, because it’s been mapped. He knows where the edges of this world are now, and is in less danger of falling off.

Later I’ll discuss this issue with Murray Zucker, who back at NPI in 1975 diagnosed Jim Osterberg with a bipolar disorder but who now wonders, given Jim’s present-day stability, whether the talent, intensity, perceptiveness and behavioural extremes were who he truly is, not a disease: that Jim’s behaviour was simply him enjoying the range of his brain, playing with it, exploring different personae, until it got to the point of ‘not knowing what was up and what was down’. With illness eliminated as a cause, we are therefore left with someone who went to the brink of madness simply to see what it was like, in the cause of his art or for the joy of exploration. And someone who returned from the brink simply because the time seemed right - someone who simply, his friends recall, decided to give up drink and cocaine with an almost superhuman strength of will.

In some recent interviews, I’d heard Jim - or was it Iggy? - revel in a sense of triumph. His schoolfriends tell me of an interview broadcast recently on PBS, in which he described how casually nasty they’d been, and boasted how Iggy had made him a rich man, a comment surely aimed at the architects’ and realtors’ sons he believed looked down on him at school. Today, in contrast, he revels in a sense of calm; that his reputation is assured, that a restful retirement awaits, and that he has made some kind of peace with the world, and with the Asheton brothers, those strange, lost boys who helped Jim Osterberg create Iggy, forty years ago.

He’s engagingly honest about the Ashetons, in that Darwinian way of his, describing how commercial reasoning rather than mere camaraderie got them together. It turns out that his record contract at Virgin was under review, and when he suggested including the Stooges on
Skull Ring
, his 2003 album full of guest stars, his A&R belatedly got excited. The Ashetons, meanwhile, had been touring successfully with J. Mascis and Mike Watt, which meant that Iggy stopped thinking of Ron as someone who lived with his mom, but instead as someone with a following in his own right. As he discusses working with them again, he starts to analyse it in almost businesslike terms, how in America particularly ‘people love to see reunification, they like to see you haven’t forgotten your friends, and there’s something very basic about that’. It’s intriguing how he ascribes such warm fuzzy sentimentality to others, rather than himself, but it’s nonetheless obvious that, behind that reptilian exterior, there is a deep fellow feeling with two men who are in many respects his own crazy, lost brothers.

Belatedly, this ambitious man, who was always driven by a need for more love, more affection and more respect, is finally satisfied with the reception he’s receiving. ‘I do feel that affection. I’ve been getting more appreciation than anyone deserves. Sometimes people write something kind about what we did and I think why not the Seeds, why not the Thirteenth Floor Elevators? And of course the answer is what’s happening now turns people’s attention towards what you did then. So for me it’s been really, really, really good. It’s a nice circle.’

Throughout the baking hot afternoon, we disinter the remotest events of his past, mostly with a rare openness, although he’s adept at changing the subject when necessary: ask him about his abilities in the school debating team and he shifts the discussion to how it prepared him for being a rock singer. When we briefly allude to Bob Koester, the man who sheltered him in Chicago and was rewarded with a glass full of piss, his face goes dark: ‘What did he say about me?’ he glowers. I answer vaguely, saying Bob told me they had not parted as friends; he ponders for a moment, wondering whether to go into a detailed backstory, before telling me, regretfully, that there’s a ‘gang mentality’ prevalent in rock ’n’ roll, and then blames Scott Richardson for leading the escapade. ‘Scott represents a certain kind of musical expediency . . . he made fun of Bob, they weren’t nice to him, and I didn’t stop them.’ He looks sad, and it occurs to me that perhaps this is how he really remembers the encounter, the way all of us erase unpleasant family squabbles from our memories. For at other moments he’s disarmingly honest. When we discuss the latter-day Stooges, when James Williamson had supplanted Ron Asheton as his musical foil, I ask whether he ever noticed Ron’s grief at being demoted to playing bass guitar, relegated to a mere sideman in the band he’d co-founded. He pauses for a long time, before responding, without evasion: ‘No. I never noticed. I was too busy trying to do what I was trying to do. So I just never noticed.’

He seems entirely without paranoia, open to intrusive questioning, perhaps even revelling in it - he knows he can tell a great yarn, and relishes the opportunity to dust down a new one - so it’s easy to forget that this is so often a tragic tale, full of failure and the prospect of oblivion. At one point I mention Michael Tipton’s remark that those later days of the Stooges were actually comedic, and I see a flicker of hurt register in his eyes. ‘There must have been some humour . . . to the audience . . . at least we were alive.’ Then I think of all the people laughing at his depression and misery, Flo and Eddie mocking him on their radio show, Hollywood types pointing him out as a loser backstage at the Whisky, and I feel briefly guilty, as if I’ve mentioned enjoying a snuff movie, before pressing on with the story of the Stooges’ dark days. And again I’m struck, as people so often are, by his lack of self-pity and his obvious sense that there was always some historical destiny at work. For, as he says of Slade, or Peter Frampton, or Blue Öyster Cult, or any other band that was triumphant when the Stooges were floun dering, ‘Where are they now?’ Even as he confesses to the Stooges’ present-day quarrels, problems that ‘surface and resurface’, he calmly pronounces himself blessed that this kind of peace took so long to arrive: ‘I feel lucky, I really do. Who else, at my point, my age, whatever you call it, can say there’s that kind of ascension?’

Comebacks are never cosy. In fact, comebacks in pop music are usually simply not very good. Perhaps the closest counterparts to the Stooges were the Velvet Underground, who reassembled for an uninspired reunion tour in 1992, all their aggression and frustration replaced by a dull professionalism, tarnishing their reputation in the process. The same was arguably true of the Stooges’ first reunion on record, four noisy but unfocused songs on
Skull Ring
, the generally underwhelming Iggy album released in November 2003. But by the time the album appeared, the real story was the Stooges’ appearance at the Coachella festival on Sunday 27 April, sandwiched between the White Stripes and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

There was a certain matter-of-factness about the performance. On a clear, dry evening in the California desert, the Stooges hit the stage in a workmanlike, Detroit kind of way, as if topping a bill in front of 33,000 people thirty years after they crashed and burned were no big deal. The one concession to nostalgia was bassist Mike Watt’s T-shirt, given to him by Scott Asheton, which bore the image of Dave Alexander (‘So we were all there,’ says Ron). Yet the true marvel of the Stooges at Coachella was not that they acquitted themselves well with their fire largely undiminished, nor that sax player Steve Mackay made a surprise appearance, it was simply that in this setting, the 30-year-old music sounded every bit as contemporary as that of the other bands topping the bill. There was no fanfare, no allusion to the fact this moment had taken thirty years to arrive - here was simply another rock ’n’ roll band, but one who happened to be,
Billboard
would report later, ‘the dirtiest, sexiest, rawest’ band of the festival. Their performance was proclaimed a ‘miracle in the desert’ by Jay Babcock, reviewing the show for the
Los Angeles Times
. ‘Even today, I remember the enthusiasm in which I wrote that review, and I feel it now,’ says Babcock. ‘It was astonishing. I still think it’s a miracle.’

There had, in fact, been a little last-minute argy-bargy behind the scenes. Pete Marshall had been expecting to play bass with the new Stooges ever since Ron had started sending Iggy tapes in the late 1990s; Iggy had pushed for him too, on the basis he wanted someone familiar standing beside him, but finally backed down and agreed to Watt taking the job, on condition that there was ‘no slapping, no triads . . . and no Flea-ing around on stage’, alluding to his friendship with Chili Peppers’ funky bassist, Flea. In retrospect the decision was the right one, for Watt brought a new propulsiveness to the sound, as well as his own following from the LA punk SST-label scene, and proved utterly dedicated to building on the Stooges’ legacy. Called in to play at short notice in the middle of a tour with the Secondmen during which he’d been beset by ill-health, Watt had been doubled up in agony in the lead-up to Coachella, hiding his predicament from Iggy in case it sapped his confidence. Iggy had seemed almost scarily on the ball during rehearsals, specific about what he needed, assertive yet diplomatic. When the show actually started, Watt was transfixed with fear, feeling ‘real pale, whiter than a winding sheet’; yet as the band hit Ron’s guitar solo on ‘Down On The Street’ and he saw Iggy leap on top of his amplifier and start humping it, the adrenalin pumped in, and he was able to hold on.