Iggy Pop (48 page)

By the summer of 1975, Williamson had once more drifted apart from Jim.
This information comes from Ken Shimamoto’s interview with James. Ron Asheton has repeatedly mentioned that the original Stooges split after James attempted to get Jim to sign this contract, but I believe he’s confused the chain of events. There are plenty of witnesses, including James and Doug Currie, who confirm that all the Stooges had decided to quit before they returned to LA after the
Metallic KO
performance; the contract dispute was therefore almost certainly after
Kill City
was recorded.

Bowie moved to New York in Christmas 1974.
Date taken from Gilman, p. 493.

Fred Sessler and Lisa Leggett.
This element of Jim’s life has never been mentioned elsewhere; it derives from an interview with Jim I conducted around 1993, in which he mentioned his stint in San Diego and a ‘shady’ businessman whom he didn’t name. By coincidence, I discovered the complete Lisa Leggett story during a long, crazed evening with Mike Page a few years later. Jim then filled in the blanks during my interview with him in 2005, as well as including tasty details, such as the fact that Lisa paid for him to go on a motivational speakers’ course. Fred Sessler was a well-loved figure; he died in 2001. Lisa Leggett, according to Mike Page, subsequently married Willy DeVille, of Mink DeVille, and recently passed away.

CHAPTER 11: THE PASSENGER

Main sources include JO, Andrew Kent, Carlos Alomar, Roberta Bayley, Laurent Thibault, Kuelan Nguyen, Phil Palmer, Tony Visconti, Edu Meyer, Esther Friedmann (EF), Klaus Kruger, Angie Bowie, Tony Sales and Hunt Sales. The opening scene is based on a description by Jim Osterberg.

[Iggy is] ‘Not so hard and knowledgeable and all-knowing and cynical. Someone who hasn’t a clue . . . but has insights.’
Taken from Edmonds’ interview with Bowie for
Circus
, cover date April 1976, and conducted during rehearsals for the Station To Station tour.

Bowie . . . keeping Iggy ‘under his thumb’.
This is from Harald’s letter to Ben Edmonds, 17 May 1976.

Mick Ronson thought his old boss was almost besotted with Iggy.
Author’s interview at the Dominion Theatre, London, February 1989. I’m not suggesting that Ronson was a disinterested commentator, but his view seemed to be that Iggy had railroaded Bowie as much as vice versa.

They discussed David producing an album for Iggy at Musicland . . . in Munich.
Iggy mentioned the possibility of recording in Munich to
Punk
magazine in April 1976. All other details drawn from my 2005 interview with JO.

For a court appearance with Bowie the previous day.
Dates taken from Kevin Cann’s Bowie chronology and newspaper reports collected on the Bowie Golden Years website.

For the first time in his life, Iggy said no.
Jim: ‘And if I’d gotten high with him that week, we wouldn’t be here talking. And that was the first time I was beginning to turn a corner and acquire some powers of resistance. And it was something . . . that lightbulb that went on and off with me for quite a few years after that.’

[The] mysterious train trip to Moscow.
Most books on Bowie place his trip to Moscow as being right at the start of his European trip. It seems more logical to me that this journey took place a few weeks into it, between his shows on 17 and 24 April in Bern and Helsinki respectively. Although stories about Bowie having books confiscated have been repeated often, along with a quote from Bowie that he’d bought the book as reference material for a movie on Goebbels, they seem full of factual inaccuracies, with an impossible date and an inaccurate route. I haven’t found any contemporary reports detailing this affair and my suspicion is that the story has been exaggerated in the retelling. There’s no doubt that David and Jim had some interest in Nazism but - disappointingly for a good yarn, I know - it’s clear, from speaking to third parties, including Jim’s (Jewish) girlfriend Esther Friedmann, that Bowie’s interest in Hitler was mostly confined to an interest in his mythology, his graphic and stage design and generally to wind up his interviewers. Bowie’s most specific statement about Hitler was made to Cameron Crowe, around May 1975, and wasn’t mentioned in Crowe’s February 1976
Rolling Stone
story but was included in his longer
Playboy
profile of September 1976. In it, Bowie says, ‘Hitler was the first rock star,’ a quote I suggest was plagiarised from Ron Asheton.

The Idiot
rhythm tracks.
The final version of
The Idiot
incorporates parts from Davis, Murray, Santageli and Thibault. They can be distinguished, with some difficulty, according to the sound. Dennis Davis’s snare drum was smaller and tuned higher; George Murray uses a bass guitar with a rounder sound than Thibault’s Rickenbacker. Davis and Murray seem audible on ‘Sister Midnight’ and ‘Mass Production’; Santageli and Thibault seem to have made the final mix on, for instance, ‘China Girl’ (with its superb Joy Division-esque bass part) and ‘Baby’, although in every case the effects-laden mix makes it harder to work out who is who - and on several songs you can hear two snare drums at once. ‘Nightclubbing’ features a Roland drum machine and a bass part played on Bowie’s Arp Axe synthesiser.

As Palmer prepared to overdub guitar.
It has been reported that the recorded version of ‘Sister Midnight’ is played by Carlos Alomar, probably from an initial recording made during the
Man Who Fell To Earth
soundtrack sessions at Cherokee in Los Angeles. Palmer was certain he recognised his own work on the album, while Carlos Alomar regards it as perfectly plausible his own guitar parts were replayed by another musician: ‘[David’s] done this to me a million times. I’ll put down three or four guitars and then he’ll hire another guitar player and then one of those parts that I did he just goes to another guitar player and there’s another little difference in it.’

Hansa studios on Kurfürstendamm.
This is sometimes misidentified as Hansa by the Wall. There were two Hansa studio buildings; that on Kurfürstendamm contained a single studio on the fourth floor and opened in 1971. The Köthenerstrasse studio, in the much grander Meistersaal building, was purchased by the Meisel family in 1973 and overlooked the Berlin Wall. It initially contained two studios; Tonstudios 2 and 3, another was added later.

Thibault’s original mixes.
Laurent believes his original mixes were used on at least two songs. ‘Sister Midnight’ contains a squelch of feedback from the Musicland mixing desk that can be clearly heard [at 1.05] on the album version; while ‘Mass Production’, according to Laurent, uses his tape loop, and sounds like it was mixed using his trademark method, which involved mixing a section at a time, then splicing the final version together with a series of tape edits.

Musical quote from Gary Glitter.
‘Rock And Roll Part One’ features an identical drum beat and funereal tempo.

Favourite [Berlin] hangouts.
The information is mainly from JO, Esther Friedmann, Wolfgang Doebeling (who had an office at Hansa and often saw Bowie in the local record shops), Edu Meyer, Klaus Kruger and Tony Visconti. Bowie’s take on the Exil and his later quotes on Berlin come from an interview with
Uncut
magazine. Thanks also to Ed Ward, who helped me orientate myself in Berlin. The Schlosshotel Gerhus, for prospective sightseers, is now a Karl Lagerfeld boutique hotel named Schlosshotel Vier Jahreszeiten, and has apparently scrubbed up nicely. The Café Exil is now the Horvath bar.

Later in August 1976
.
Kevin Cann’s Bowie chronology states that Bowie and crew started work on
Low
on 1 September; however, according to Edu Meyer’s records from Hansa, the sessions moved to Hansa 2 on 21 August, so my assumption is that they must have started work at the chateau in August, a dating confirmed by Visconti’s memory that all the French chateau staff were on summer holiday, which would have finished by the end of August.

‘A joy, ramshackle and comfy’.
Bowie in
Uncut
.

Hansa seemed to embody Berlin’s ruined grandeur.
The Hansa information is from Edu Meyer and from the booklet that celebrated the restoration of studio 2 as a concert hall in 1994. The building is now used mainly as a venue for classical performances, but there remains a later-built Hansa studio on the fourth floor. Thanks to Alex Wende for giving me a tour of the studio and building.

The Sales brothers had played professionally for mobster-connected Maurice Levy’s Roulette label.
Maurice Levy was an intriguing, slightly scary figure, of the type who built the early rock ’n’ roll business. He was Chuck Berry’s publisher, was the inspiration for mobster/music mogul Hesh in
The Sopranos
, and was also involved in the bizarre saga of John Lennon’s
Rock And Roll
album, in which Lennon covered several songs by Levy artists to avoid a lawsuit over his ‘borrowing’ a melody and some lyrics from Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ for
Abbey Road
’s ‘Come Together ’.

It was [David’s] idea to give the Sales brothers a call.
Jim: ‘Hunt and Tony had always been his boys. They got his gig with me because they’d submitted tapes to him.’

CHAPTER 12: HERE COMES MY CHINESE RUG

The sources are as for preceding chapter, plus Ricky Gardiner, Marc Zermati, Nick Kent, Kris Needs, David Stopps, Brian James and Glen Matlock (GM).

‘Punks cruising for burgers’.
This would have been in Lenny Kaye’s review of
The Stooges
; apart from his obviously crucial roles as guitarist and songwriter in the Patti Smith Group, Lenny was also responsible for the superb
Nuggets
, a groundbreaking compilation that gathered together many garage classics that had influenced the Stooges, the Ramones and others.

Both leading music weeklies.
The third UK music weekly was
Melody Maker
, which was owned, like the
NME
, by IPC. The
NME
set out to differentiate itself from its sister publication by its focus on punk; their contrasting reactions to the Stooges are exemplified by Nick Kent’s masterfully researched and written May 1975
NME
feature ‘The Mighty Pop versus The Hand Of Blight’, and Chris Charlesworth’s 1973
Melody Maker
review, in which the outraged writer asks, ‘How low can rock and roll sink?’ ‘I don’t know what the songs were called,’ Charlesworth har rumphed (obviously having done his pre-show research), ‘but they all seemed to contain more than a smattering of strong language intended, it seems, to insult the audience.’ On the same page, the venerable journal saves its praise for Stackridge, and the cutting-edge saxophone skills of Tommy Whittle, Kathy Stobart and Jimmy Skidmore.

Bowie reckoned, ‘The drug use was
unbelievable’.
Interview in
Q
magazine, 1993.

Jim Osterberg would turn in some fabulous [TV] performances.
There’s also a hilarious interview with Peter Gzowski in the Canadian Broadcasting Company archives,
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-68-102-761/arts_entertainment/punk/
.

A romantic idyll with Pleasant Gehman.
Pleasant had met Iggy back in 1975 when he was a classic fallen rock star, living in a decayed apartment on Flores and asking visitors, ‘You got any drugs?’ the moment they walked through the door. She met him again in 1977, a couple of days after she’d fallen down some steps; she had a cast on her wrist and a bruised, swollen face. Jim recognised her and whisked her away from her friends, and they spent an idyllic couple of weeks in a beachfront house in Malibu. ‘We were smoking pot and drinking red wine and went out onto the jetty. We were talking about everything; about the Romanovs and the Russian Revolution, we were talking about painting and abstract stuff, we were talking about communism, we were talking about life. Then we had sex a lot, more than I’d ever had. He was amazingly considerate. He had a great body and then the next morning he asked if I wanted to move in with him . . . I was treated like royalty.’ Over the same period, Jim also hung out with the Germs and others, and he posed for some excellent photos by Jenny Lens.

New flat and contract details.
These are from paperwork in the possession of Esther Friedmann, which she kindly allowed me to examine to help identify some of the crucial dates.

The irritation each felt.
This is according to Jim’s recollection. It could be that David Bowie felt no irritation whatsoever with Jim; unfortunately, he declined to speak to me to tell me himself.

By the time the sessions began in June.
Edu Meyer’s partial records of the Hansa sessions detail the recording session as being on 8 to 12 and 14 June, with mastering in July. This contrasts with most other chronologies, which date the sessions in late April. Most of the musicians remember the recording sessions as lasting about ten days.

Ukulele.
This story has been told by Jim many times; asked by
Uncut
if this account was correct, David replied, ‘Absolutely.’