Iggy Pop (47 page)

‘That fucking carrot-top.’
This quote about Bowie comes from Lester Bangs’ April 1974
Creem
interview with Iggy and James. In the interview, James also suggests that ‘David waited five months to go in and mix
in three and a half days
an album that was so fuckin’ complicated’ - a time frame that, as so often, doesn’t fit the confirmed facts. In 2006, Williamson confirmed that his recollection was that the album was mixed in late October 1972, just after it was recorded. In 1991, Bowie told
International Musician
that ‘He had the band on one track, lead guitar on another and him on a third. Out of twenty-four tracks there were just three tracks that were used. He said, “See what you can do with this.” I said, “Jim, there’s nothing to mix.”’

Iggy . . . adrift on planet heroin.
Main interviews for where Iggy’s head was at include Nick Kent, Bob Sheff, Kathy Heller, Leee Childers, Nancy McCrado, Kathy Heller, Evita, James Williamson and Lonnie. Obviously, I also interviewed James, Scott and Ron about this period, but their memories don’t feature heavily here because by now they tended to ignore their singer’s erratic behaviour.

Ford Auditorium show.
Based on accounts by Robert Matheu, Ben Edmonds, Bob Baker and Skip Gildersleeve. Ben Edmonds recalls the performance as being comparatively restrained, the Stooges on their best behaviour, only enlivened by the crazed piano of Bob Sheff. Robert and Skip both remember James Osterberg Senior and Louella, in their best clothes, in the audience to hear Iggy introduce ‘Cock In My Pocket’ as a song ‘co-written by my mother’.

Warren Klein.
Although I traced him, Klein never returned my calls, and presumably wants to forget his momentary career as a Stooge. He has since gone on to contribute his tasteful, rootsy work to records by Marshall Crenshaw, Peter Case and, most notably, Beck’s album
Mutations
.

CHAPTER 9: BEATING A DEAD HORSE

Sources as for preceding chapters, plus Doug Currie, Scott Thurston, Jeff Wald, BE, Don Waller, Steve Harris, Michael Tipton, Natalie Schlossman, EK, Lenny Kaye, Bob Czaykowski (Nite Bob), Bebe Buell, Dave Marsh, Phast Phreddie Patterson, Robert Matheu, Joel Selvin, Bob Baker, Skip Gildersleeve and Hiawatha Bailey.

Opening quotes: all author interviews.

‘Don’t fuck with me or I will hurt you.’
Jeff Wald: ‘I was very intimidating. I would fight at the drop of a hat anybody, a cop or whoever. It was insanity, my behaviour, getting arrested for doing various assaults on a continual basis. I didn’t take any shit from anybody.’

‘You should count yourself lucky . . .’
This account is second-hand, but was described by Danny Sugerman to many friends, including Ben Edmonds, at the time.

Manager with a gun.
Bob Sheff: ‘This kid actually went into the bank with a gun to cash this cheque ’cause he was afraid somebody was gonna steal the money from him. I don’t know if this was Danny Sugerman but it was . . . dumb.’

Max’s rehearsals.
Both Ron Asheton and Michael Tipton mentioned how Iggy missed three consecutive flights from Los Angeles to Max’s, and arrived late for the first shows. But most other witnesses seem to remember the Columbia rehearsals being before that show, so this is how I’ve constructed the chain of events.

Ashley Pandel.
Pandel’s name was detailed in Iggy’s interview with Henry Edwards for
After Dark
, November 1973.

Watergate story.
Main sources are Bebe Buell, Scott Thurston and JW.

New York Dolls arrived in LA on 29 August.
Thanks to Kris Needs for the New York Dolls information and Syl Sylvain quotes; outtakes from
Trash
, Kris’s New York Dolls book on Plexus.

Whisky-a-Go-Go shows. Interviews and information,
Don Waller, Phast Phreddie Patterson, Tom Gardner and Jeff Gold.

Michigan Palace, October.
Thanks to Michael Tipton and Natalie Schlossman for their detailed accounts of this chaotic night. For the sake of accuracy, I should also acknowledge that Natalie points out that ‘Most of the time it was not as crazy as that - usually I would just see Jim with one woman,’ although she went on to mention that ‘I do remember three girls all trying to have a go at Jim at the same time.’ It was Michael Tipton who mentioned that the band reintroduced ‘Louie Louie’ to their set at the Michigan Palace: Michael taped ‘Raw Power’, ‘Head On’, ‘Gimme Danger’, ‘Search And Destroy’, ‘Heavy Liquid’ and ‘Open Up And Bleed’ from the second night’s performance, which have since turned up on several CDs; the first three songs were included on the original vinyl release of
Metallic KO
, and the entire recording was issued on the later
Metallic KO
×
2.

Iggy was asking a promoter for a one-million dollar fee to commit suicide.
The rumour going around Rodney’s, according to Kim Fowley, was that Iggy had told one promoter, who was associated with publicist Gary Stromberg, that if he could guarantee him $1 million to play Madison Square Garden, then he would commit suicide on stage. I contacted Stromberg, who said no such conversation took place.

News of the death of Zeke Zettner.
Zeke, who played bass with the Stooges for just a few months, died on 10 November, 1973 in the Bi-County Community Hospital, Michigan. The cause of death was recorded as perforated peptic ulcer and cerebral oedema caused by a heroin overdose. Zeke was twenty-five and had returned to East Detroit, working in the automotive industry and living with his parents.

Rock and Roll Farm, Wayne, Michigan.
Ken Settle was a photographer who frequented several shows at the Rock and Roll Farm including Bob Seger the same week. ‘The Scorpions were a rough biker club from Detroit’s West Side. They seemed to hang out at the R and R Farm; I think the guy that ran it liked them hanging out there because they were like free bouncers if anyone got too rowdy.’ The farm was at 34828 Michigan Avenue.

‘That’s it, we’re gone.’
Ron Asheton: ‘The leather-studded big dude blasts Jim, Jim fell down, then got up and goes to me, “We’re gone, that’s it, unplug, we’re getting out of here.” We go back to the dressing room and all of a sudden these biker dudes are coming in . . .’ In
I Need More
, Iggy remembers playing ‘Louie Louie’ at the end; Ron believes they didn’t.

That didn’t stop them from appearing on Detroit’s WABX radio station and challenging the Scorpions.
Unfortunately, despite my interviewing WABX DJs, including Mark Parenteau and Dennis Frawley, no one is certain whose show the Stooges’ challenge was broadcast on.

Dirty and a little threadbare.
Ben Edmonds: ‘The costumes looked impressive from a long way away. Close up it was obvious they’d seen better days, and that the band needed someone to do their laundry.’

The Stooges had enlisted the help of God’s Children, a biker gang based in Ypsilanti.
Hiawatha Bailey (
www.thecultheroes.com
): ‘God’s Children were based in Ypsilanti and were like the police force for the revolution. John Cole was the coolest guy. In order to join you had to have the Kiss of Fellowship. All the bikers would all get drunk, then puke, then French-kiss you. Then they’d shake your hand and you were one of the guys.’

‘He had fun with it.’
It was Michael Tipton’s tape that was used for the
Metallic KO
album. ‘There [was] so much more antagonisation of the audience than you hear on the record - there’s a lot of dead time between songs where he’s rambling on about shit, which I edited.’

CHAPTER 10: KILL CITY

Main sources for this chapter include JO, JW, RA, BE, Philippe Mogane, Ray Manzarek, Danny Sugerman, Jim Parrett, Thom Gardner, Michael Tipton, Annie Klenman (aka Apple), Doug Currie, Harvey Kubernick, Pamela Des Barres, Don Waller, Nigel Harrison, Rodney Bingenheimer, Michael Des Barres, Tony Sales, Brian Glascock, Dr Murray Zucker, Nick Kent and Mike Page. The Danny Sugerman information and quotes come mainly from an interview conducted by Chris Carter and George Hickenlooper, in an out-take for the movie
The Mayor of the Sunset Strip
, for which I must offer my grateful thanks. I have also selectively used information from Danny’s book
Wonderland Avenue
. Thanks to all these sources, I believe I have for the first time mapped out Jim’s movements over this period. In particular, the story of his mysterious trips to San Diego has never been told. However, the hand-to-mouth nature of Jim’s existence means it’s difficult to be confident that all the events are always in the correct order.

[Iggy] was convinced there was a hex on [him and the Stooges].
Nick Kent: ‘I had a number of conversations in 1975 where he felt like the Stooges were hexed. There was a curse on them. He became superstitious and he felt that there was no way out.’

New Order.
The main New Order musicians included one-time Stooges bassist Jimmy Recca, the MC5’s Dennis Thompson on drums and Dave Gilbert, who’d previously sung with Ted Nugent.

Danny Sugerman [took over Jim’s] management.
In
Wonderland Avenue
, Sugerman describes Iggy as suggesting that he become his manager and team him up with Ray. Ray remembers that it was Danny who talked both Ray and Iggy into the scheme.

‘Do you want to see blood?’
Details of this exchange come from Ron Asheton.

Attacking the Maserati with a hatchet.
Danny cited this as happening the morning after Rodney’s in his interview with Carter and Hickenlooper. However, it could well have happened at some other point and, as with some of the stories in
Wonderland Avenue,
it’s possible that he reworked some for dramatic affect, or else confused them. In fact, over a period in which most of the participants were heavy users of heroin or Quaaludes, time frames can often seem elastic, to say the least . . .

Scott Morgan was called in to guest on harmonica.
I interviewed Scott twice without him mentioning that he’d played harmonica at the Hollywood Trash show. I was inspired to interview him once again by the excellent story on Sonics Rendezvous Band, formed with Morgan and the MC5’s Fred Smith, at
http://www.i94bar.com/ints/srb1.html
.

The [Hollywood Trash] show was competent.
Most fans, including Jim Parrett, Don Waller and Greg Shaw, thought the outfit looked like a competent bar band; a couple thought they sounded like a semi-competent bar band. Nick Kent says, ‘[They] decided, let’s kick the New York Dolls’ arse, [and] that’s what they did. It was good. It was the Stooges with Manzarek on keyboards, basically, and it was fantastic.’

Danny’s growing reliance on quaaludes and heroin.
Several people maintain Sugerman’s heroin addiction was never as serious as portrayed in his uproarious memoir,
Wonderland Avenue.
But Ray Manzarek, while acknowledging the book’s dramatic licence, agrees that Sugerman was indeed ‘fucking stoned’ all the time . . .

Shortly after the Palladium show.
The only independent evidence I have for this is Danny’s
Wonderland Avenue
, which is elsewhere inconsistent on timing, but this sequence fits with all the surrounding events.

‘Hello. This is Dr Zucker.’
This exchange is based on that remembered by Danny in
Wonderland Avenue
. Dr Zucker: ‘I don’t know whether [the first visit] was involuntary or not but he certainly had no problem in staying until stabilised; it wasn’t under contest that he was there.’

Jim Osterberg was fortunate to have landed up at one of the world’s leading psychiatric facilities.
Dr Kay Jamison wrote an enthralling memoir,
An Unquiet Mind
(Picador 1996), about her struggles with manic depression, which encompassed her time at NPI and makes illuminating background reading. A second book,
Touched with Fire
(Free Press 1993), analyses the links between manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament. She cites, for example, more than eighty poets thought to have suffered from mood disorders, including Baudelaire, John Berryman, Blake, Burns, Chatterton, John Clare, Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Gray, Victor Hugo, Keats, Robert Lowell, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Plath, Edgar Allen Poe, Pushkin, Delmore Schwartz, Shelley, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman; the list of novelists and musicians is just as comprehensive. Recently Vincent van Gogh, a celebrated bipolar, has been claimed by the temporal-lobe-disorder crowd.

The diagnosis was that his underlying condition was hypomania, a bipolar disorder.
In 2005, John Gartner’s
The Hypomanic Edge
theorised that hypomania drives many of the USA’s entrepreneurs; Gartner suggests that hypomania and manic depression are more common in immigrant societies, which are less risk-averse, and that there is an evolutionary advantage to this behaviour.

Bowie was one of the few who gained admittance . . . accompanied by the actor Dean Stockwell.
Jim Osterberg: ‘[Bowie] came up one day, stoned out of his brain in his little spacesuit, with Dean Stockwell the actor. They were like, “We want to see Jimmy. Let us in.” Now the strict rule was to never let outsiders in: it was an insane asylum. But the doctors were star-struck, so they let them in. And the first thing they said was, “Hey, want some blow?” I think I took a little, which is really unpleasant in there. And that’s how we got back in touch.’ (1996, quoted in
MOJO
’s Bowie special edition, 2003.) Kevin Cann places Bowie’s first visit at around June 1975, but it must have been several months earlier, predating their studio work together in May, which followed the chance meeting on Sunset Boulevard. In my interview with Jim Osterberg in 2005, he mentioned that Bowie was about to work on
The Man Who Fell To Earth
, and played him recordings from
Station To Station.
According to most Bowie chronologies, of which Kevin Cann’s is the most informed, this too seems impossible, so it’s likely that Jim conflated two periods, or that the recordings were demos. Although most magazine features and stories date the recording of
Kill City
to mid-1975, the sessions were definitely complete before Edmonds played the first mixes to Seymour Stein in late January 1975.