Iggy Pop (49 page)

‘Kicking and screaming.’
JO: ‘Yes, [“Success” was written] in an ironic manner. And to me, just to have a little Chinese rug. But also the unironic manner . . . this happens to me, sometimes when my back is against the wall I’ll sorta kick the floor a little bit, enter a successful zone or situation and then proceed to bitch! And kinda have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the good outcome. But I kinda just felt, in that particular song . . . we had a good friction in the studio . . . and came up with that slightly demented vocal, which you hear a big difference in the vocals between [
The Idiot
and
Lust For Life
], rockism was starting to set in, and I was starting to revert, but there was a nice balance. And he [Bowie] was sick of the whole thing at that point and just wanted to get the damn thing over with. But he did well.’

Warren Peace.
Warren Peace, aka Geoffrey MacCormack, was Bowie’s backing singer and later travelling companion. He was supplanted in the latter role by Iggy. JO: ‘David was looking for a [new] sidekick [in 1976], he likes to do things that way, and Warren Peace had become more Hollywood than was great for their relationship.’

CHAPTER 13: MISSING IN ACTION

Main sources: JO, Charles Levison, Julie Hooker, Tarquin Gotch, Tony Sales, Scott Thurston, EF, Robin Eggar, Edu Meyer, Hunt Sales, Gary Rasmussen, SA, BE, Klaus Kruger, JW, GM, Kingsley Ward, Barry Andrews and Ivan Kral (IK).

Opening based on accounts by Charles Levison, Tarquin Gotch and Julie Hooker, all of Arista Records. Hooker points out that although many staff called Davis ‘the Godfather’, this wasn’t a comment on his business practices, but a reflection of how intimately he oversaw the business.

Lust For Life
disappeared.
Robin Eggar, RCA press: ‘The RCA pressing plant was, I think, in Hayes, and they didn’t just turn 90 per cent of their production to Elvis - it was more like 95 per cent, which was incredibly short-sighted.’

Pissing in the wastebasket.
JO: ‘I think I said something terrible up at RCA after [Elvis] died, saying, OK, that’s too bad, I’m the new Elvis, and I think I peed in the wastebasket under the guy’s desk whose office I was using during the interview and it became ta ta . . . it became psst psst pss.’ [i.e. Iggy started getting the reputation of being ‘difficult’.] I contacted some members of RCA’s A&R department in the late 1970s, and they couldn’t remember this incident, although as one of them succinctly puts it, ‘I was so stoned I don’t remember diddly. We were all out of it, all the time, back then.’ Iggy’s cocaine paranoia episode at the Gerhus occurred shortly before, or shortly after, this incident.

‘Needy and wanty.’
Scottie Thurston, when asked if Jim was more together in 1977 than in 1973: ‘Well . . . I don’t know. I really don’t know. You see . . . it was the age of cocaine, which is not a very together drug for a singer. He could have done a lot better job. So could have we all. I don’t look back on it as a regretful period, I just think . . . we honestly all could’ve done a lot better.’

Kill City
[was] released by Bomp
.
The
Kill City
album augmented the tracks recorded at Jimmy Webb’s studio with two songs, ‘Lucky Monkey’ and ‘Mastercharge’, recorded on a four-track at Scottie Thurston’s house, during the period when Scottie had found Jim an apartment near him in Venice Beach, probably in the spring of 1974. All the tracks were remixed by James Williamson - according to Ben Edmonds, the original version was much tougher and more like the Stooges.

The Sonic’s Rendezvous Band issued just one legendary single, ‘City Slang’.
This historical oversight was corrected in late 2006 with a lavish box set of SRB material issued by the Easy Action label (
www.easyac-tion.co.uk
). There is an excellent retrospective of the SRB by Ken Shimamoto at
http://www.i94bar.com/ints/srb1.html
, with a hilarious story of the time an unruly Scandinavian crowd threw fish at the band. Many Iggy fans cite SRB as one of his best backing bands, but some of their performances and song arrangements must stand as the absolute antithesis of Iggy’s original musical manifesto; their versions of ‘Lust For Life’ and ‘Little Doll’ in particular sound like dreadful Yardbirds ripoffs - this from a man who criticised Bowie for copying the same band.

Charles Levison, [Arista’s] managing director.
Levison was given the job of managing director of Arista Worldwide, overseeing the entire company outside the USA. His main task, along with Edmonds, was to establish the company as a major force in the UK, bringing in new, hipper talent, trying to break artists signed by Arista’s head office in New York - in particular, Barry Manilow - as well as trying to eke out the careers of two artists the UK company had inherited, namely retro-glamsters Showaddywaddy and one-time bopper idols the Bay City Rollers. Levison was a charming, well-loved man; he died on 7 July 2006, of complications following a heart attack.

‘Peter was very together in the beginning.’
I have spent many days trying to track down Peter through ex-colleagues at RCA, friends and other acquaintances, to hear his own recollection of events, without success. He was universally respected by those who dealt with him in the early days, but unfortunately, as Barry Andrews and others remember, he was engulfed by the chaos that started to envelop Iggy over this period.

Bindon was a one-time gangster who’d made his living as an actor.
Barry Andrews: ‘Bowie was holding court really and talking about Princess Margaret being shagged by Johnny Bindon, who has the biggest dick in London, and cut a guy’s head off in a bar, and all those Johnny Bindon stories which we now know. And it grew out of the conversation, “What’s the safest thing you can be? A criminal.”’ The account of ‘Play It Safe’ here is based on the recollections of Andrews, who was there throughout the session, seems to have been more sober than most of the other musicians and has no axe to grind. James Williamson, however, while acknowledging that he detested Bowie’s intrusion, remembers the final row being about Iggy’s vocals. From this period, Glen Matlock has also told in print an enthralling story of how Steve New encountered David Bowie talking to his girlfriend, Patti Palladin, and punched Bowie out in the belief he was chatting her up - only to find that Bowie was merely cadging some cigarettes. However, Glen was in London during Bowie’s visit to the studio, and New was reportedly overawed with Bowie, so I have regretfully been forced to omit this story from the main narrative.

CHAPTER 14: THE LONG, LONG ROAD

Main interviews: JO, EF, IK, Brian James, GM, Charles Levison, Tarquin Gotch, Mike Page, Rob Duprey, Carlos Alomar, Frank Infante, Dayna Louise, Margaret Moser, Anne Wehrer (interviewed in 1996) and Gary Valentine. Thanks also to Dr Murray Zucker for background information. Tour dates courtesy of Per Nilsen.

‘I felt that David wanted to dump Jim on me
.
It was like, “I’m trying to help him, but he always screws up.”’
Note that this is what Ivan
thought
Bowie meant, not necessarily what Bowie actually meant. Ivan certainly thought that Iggy didn’t appreciate, or perhaps deserve, Bowie’s help, but this isn’t necessarily David’s perception.

‘One For My Baby’.
This song had first appeared in the set with SRB, but became a fixture over the
New Values
tour. It was later recorded, with a rather staid arrangement, during the
Party
sessions.

Iggy Pop would delight in stealing groupies from under their noses.
Glen Matlock: ‘There was these three good-looking birds [in Toronto]. And the guys in the band were sitting round having a drink and we’re kinda trying to chat ’em up. Didn’t really get anywhere. And then it kinda dawned on us that at certain times there was always a different one missing. And they’d all been up to Iggy’s room and come back. But we had the last laugh, ’cause the next morning he was in a foul mood. What happened was one of them had the coil fitted wrong, and it cut his dick up really bad. And when we got to do the gig that night, not only did he get his dick out, which he normally does, but he’d got it wrapped up in Kleenex. And he’s pulling bits of Kleenex off his dick and throwing it into the audience. You know they say the band behind the stripper gets the best view? Well, it was ’orrible.’

‘Cutting off his nose to spite his face’.
It is of course possible that the
Soldier
mixes were a mess for other reasons.

Boyce was the man to salvage Iggy’s album.
Charles Levison has been blamed for recruiting Tommy Boyce, but his memory was that ‘that was probably Tarquin’s suggestion, although I [would] have been involved in the decision’. Tarquin, meanwhile, although he doesn’t remember specifically, says, ‘I’m happy to take the blame if nobody else will, but I thought it was Charles’s suggestion, because it’s that sort of American older connection.’

CHAPTER 15: NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES

This chapter is mainly based around Esther’s account of her and Jim’s disastrous holiday in Haiti. It is the first time this story has come out in print, and I’m extremely grateful to Esther for sharing it. She tells me she has also performed a full, two-hour version containing other bizarre episodes not mentioned here, which is guaranteed to leave an audience frazzled and emotionally exhausted. I can’t wait to hear it. While it is of course amusing, like so many stories pertaining to Jim Osterberg it is also tragic, and ends in our hero succumbing to madness, and one bystander dead. At the close, I have written that Jim descended into madness, which is not the word that Esther used; she said ‘illness’. I don’t mean to be fanciful. It is the word, however, used by psychiatric experts such as Kate Jamison to describe the kind of behaviour Jim exhibited in Haiti. Other sources include Mike Page, Rob Duprey, Anne Wehrer, Murray Zucker, Ric Ocasek, and the JO interview with David Fricke also cited in Chapter 16.

Collapsing PA stacks.
Frank Infante remembers this show as being in Portland, Mike Page remembers it as being at the Santa Monica Pacific Auditorium. Unless the tour information I have is incorrect, Infante’s line-up didn’t play Santa Monica.

CHAPTER 16: HIDEAWAY

Main sources: JO, Nigel Harrison, Robert Matheu, Clem Burke, Dr Murray Zucker, EF, Kevin Armstrong, Erdal Kizilcay, Seamus Beaghen, Nancy Jeffries, Jeff Gold, Olivier Ferrand, Dan Bourgoise and Bill Laswell. For Jim’s years out of the limelight, one priceless source was an interview conducted in October 1984 for
People
magazine by David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
. David demonstrated an unrivalled combination of generosity and organisation - keeping an interview tape and then locating it twenty years on. Huge thanks also to Kris Needs for supplying a copy of his
Creem
interview from 1986, which filled in more gaps over this period.

Iggy’s tour was cancelled because of legal threats.
According to road manager Henry McGroggan, this tale is incorrect, and the tour of the Far East was cut short simply due to Iggy’s exhaustion.

Olivier Ferrand.
According to Ferrand, Iggy and Jones recorded eight songs: a mellow version of ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Get To The Point’, ‘Fire Girl’, ‘Warm Female’, a rather bland take on ‘Family Affair’, ‘Cry For Love’, ‘Beside You’ and ‘Winners And Losers’. It’s possible the songs also included ‘When Dreaming Fails’ and a messy cover of the Animals’ ‘It’s My Life’.

Iggy-flavoured Bowie album.
This was mentioned in a generally supportive review by Richard Riegel in
Creem
, February 1987.

New manager Art Collins
. Art was part of a management duo with Barry Taylor, but Art was the one that most A&M staff remember; he went on to manage Iggy solo, and was much loved. Art died in July 2005; Iggy’s long-term road manager, Henry McGroggan - also known for his work with the Corrs - took over his management.

Iggy seized a large teddy bear and started copulating with it.
In polls of greatest TV moments, this appearance has been listed as being on
Motormouth
, but it was actually the ITV kids’
No. 73
. Hopefully the video will eventually surface on
youtube.com
.

A three-month run of shows supporting the Pretenders.
For the Pretenders shows, Andy Anderson replaced Gavin Harrison on drums.

Iggy had made bad albums before, but
Instinct
was the first time he’d been boring.
Nick Kent, whose critical opinions I naturally respect, chooses
Blah Blah Blah
for his personal disdain: ‘I actually fell asleep the first time I heard it I was so underwhelmed.’ However, I would choose
Instinct
as the most soporific of Iggy’s albums, with its endless mid-paced chugging guitars, mind-numbingly predictable riffs, sterile solos and forgettable lyrics. However hard I try to concentrate on this album, I find myself diverted to some more stimulating activity, like filing press cuttings or tidying the cutlery drawer.

CHAPTER 17: UNDEFEATED

Main sources: JO, Nancy Jeffries, Don Was, Whitey Kirst, Charles Francis aka Black Francis, Eric Schermerhorn, Hal Cragin, Larry Mullins, Bob Gruen, Glen Matlock, Pete Marshall.