Iggy Pop (8 page)

Notwithstanding such japes, Iggy’s stage demeanour was restrained compared to his Iguanas persona. ‘They were actually quite shy on stage,’ remembers Dale Withers. ‘Not too much banter or extravagance. But they had a mystique about them.’

The Erlewines’ friendship with the Butterfield Blues Band, who had revitalised the American blues scene the previous year with their debut album, gave them a direct link to the source of Chicago blues: the band’s original rhythm section, drummer Sam Lay and bassist Jerome Arnold, were stalwarts of Howlin’ Wolf’s band, but had been lured away by the prospect of more money. Sam had become the best blues drummer of his generation, working countless sessions with Muddy Waters, Junior Wells and others, and he was also the inventor of the ‘double shuffle’ - a tricky variation of a standard blues beat, which Lay jazzed up, inspired by the sound of the tambourine players in a sanctified gospel chorus. It was a tricky beat, and when Iggy mastered it after hours of practice, with Ron Asheton standing in on bass, it was a source of pride to him. But despite such breakthroughs, the musical environment that had once felt liberating was starting to feel constricting. Although still regarded as a junior member by his bandmates, Iggy was ready to move on. And in the autumn of 1966 he spotted an opportunity to further his ambitions, when Vivian Shevitz, assistant manager at Discount, and bassist of R&B band the Charging Rhinoceros of Soul, became friendly with ex-Butterfield drummer Sam Lay. He recognised this as a unique opportunity to learn blues drumming from one of its greatest masters.

Iggy decided to break the news that he was leaving the Prime Movers to Dan Erlewine, rather than to Michael himself - a sensible move according to Ron Asheton, who explains that ‘Dan Erlewine was like Goering to Michael Erlewine’s Hitler - which is pretty funny for two Jewish guys!’ (Unfortunately for Ron’s historical analogy, the Erlewines were in fact Roman Catholics.) Dan describes their leavetaking as tearful: ‘He was afraid to tell my brother, because Michael’s a real taskmaster, there would have been a real confrontation. And he’d left it real late, so he was, I’m leaving tomorrow. I was, I don’t believe this. And that was it.’ The next day the young drummer squeezed into Vivian’s red MGB with her friends and fellow blues fans Barbara Kramer and Charlotte Wolter for the 200-mile drive to Chicago. They drove around the South Side looking for Sam, before they finally ran down their quarry at Curley’s Club on the West Side.

Curley’s, at Madison and Homan, was an archetypal West Side club, distinguished by its ‘upscale’ cuisine and music by some of Chicago’s younger generation of bluesmen, who would often hit the stage at three in the morning and then watch their audience leave for work, complete with lunchboxes, at seven fifteen. The club was rumoured to be owned by the mob, and it was a regular haunt of Otis Rush - who’d had his own run-ins with the Chicago mafia and was a regular, unwilling witness to shootings and stab bings. ‘It wasn’t the club’s fault,’ says Sam Lay, ‘but I call that area the Wild Side, not the West Side, ’cause that’s what it was. Infested with hookers, robbers.’

‘It was a heavy place,’ agrees Barbara Kramer, ‘but we were luckily too young and too stupid to be scared.’ Charlotte Wolter thought that Iggy seemed ‘a wide-eyed innocent’ about the whole trip, ‘As we all were.’

The teenage blues fans arrived at the club expecting its clientele to be flattered by their interest. Instead they were greeted with amusement or suspicion, but luckily the only patron who threatened physical violence chose to pick on the three girls, rather than Iggy, and was hustled away by more sympathetic clubgoers. It was only when Sam Lay, tall, polite and dressed for the gig in tux and tie, arrived and ushered them protectively back to his dressing room that the Ann Arbor quartet could relax. He listened indulgently and supportively as they told him how excited they were to hear the music in its spiritual home. The four went back to see Sam again the next night, sharing a room in a run-down hotel by the lake, by which time Iggy had convinced the drummer of his mission and secured his support. ‘The little I saw of him, I knew I could trust him,’ says Lay. After making a few phone calls, Sam established that his previous harmonica player, Big Walter Horton, was in need of a drummer, and invited Iggy to sleep over at his place.

Sam and Elizabeth Lay’s one-bedroom apartment on Flores was already cramped; their six-year-old son, Bobby, slept on the couch in the living room. The aspiring bluesman was allotted a space on the kitchen floor. He was the perfect guest, packing away his few belongings so as not to clutter the flat, making himself scarce and charming the neighbours, who were somewhat bemused by this new character in the street.

In late 1966 the parlous existence of the average Chicago bluesman was becoming rather less endangered thanks to figures like harp-player Paul Butterfield, who’d established new, better-paying white venues like Big John on Wells Street on the North Side, and record-industry figures such as Bob Koester and Sam Charters, who’d exposed old and young blues players to a new white audience. Walter Horton and other bluesmen discovered that playing white venues could almost double their income. Even better, employing white musicians cut down on their overheads, as they could be counted on to ask for less money. Horton didn’t even bother to audition the young drummer - instead, driving to the gig, Horton blew out a riff on his harmonica and asked Iggy to tap along. According to Iggy, Horton chose to motivate his new employee by brandishing a knife and asking him if he was
sure
he could keep up. Unfazed, Iggy shot back, ‘Look old man, I can do anything you can, give me a break.’

Over the following weeks Iggy played more dates with Horton, plus J.B. Hutto - a previously obscure slide player who’d been showcased on Charters’s album - and James Cotton, an amiable, easygoing harpist who’d played with Howlin’ Wolf as a kid, and was now enjoying a modest career revival thanks to Chicago’s new white audience. Through Vivian Shevitz, Iggy found a sympathetic patron in the person of Bob Koester, who was championing the new soul-influenced West Side bluesmen such as Buddy Guy and Magic Sam on his Delmark label. Koester had shown many blues fans around the city, including Michael and Dan Erlewine; a widely respected figure, he schooled a whole generation of future record-company bosses, as well as helping countless musicians, most notably Big Joe Williams, a cantankerous Delta bluesman who’d finagled a key to the basement of Koester’s Record Mart store. Williams played kazoo, harmonica and nine-string guitar, nailing metal plates or beer cans to his amp to add a distorted, dissonant edge to his eerie, almost African laments. Occasionally, when the trek upstairs to his third-floor apartment in the Record Mart building was too much bother, Williams would crash in the basement. Sometimes Koester, his employees and his customers would be locked out until Williams rose from his slumbers and condescended to unbolt the door.

The Record Mart basement became a crash pad for many employees and blues fans, including Iggy. The drummer’s enthusiasm and honest demeanour charmed the record company boss, who helped team him up with J.B. Hutto and would sometimes buy him lunch at the café round the corner from the Record Mart. It was at the café that blues fan and Wayne State University dropout John Sinclair was introduced by Koester to the as then-unknown drummer. Iggy was ‘kinda raggety, a skinny little rock kid’, and Sinclair was sufficiently impressed by the clear-eyed young musician to make a note of his name. ‘He wasn’t brazen or brash. But he was interesting.’

Koester today paints a different picture of his young charge. ‘He was egotistical. He was talking about Mitch Ryder, and was saying if his record made the Top Five, he would join him. Later I made a slip of the tongue and called him Ego. Which seemed appropriate.’

Koester remembers Iggy staying at his two-room apartment over two separate periods, between which the drummer spent some time sleeping rough in the Chicago Loop. The area was busy and heavily developed, with elevated train tracks, and the banks of the Chicago River were lined with swanky apartments, as well as water, electricity and sewage works, all of them powering the bustling metropolis. It was there that the drummer walked down around twenty steps to sit on the dock. He thought about the time he’d played with J.B. Hutto at a club on 64th Street, sweating to keep up, focusing on his drumming while simple but profound riffs dripped like honey off JB’s fingers, seemingly without him even thinking. Iggy smoked a fat joint he’d scrounged, and for the first time inhaled deeply as he contemplated the river. Then he decided that he was not destined to be a blues player. But in that simplicity lay ‘a vocabulary’.

It was a notion that would take a full year of gestation to develop into a musical manifesto. But he knew his time in Chicago was up, and he phoned Vivian Shevitz and Ron Asheton to ask if they could collect him. In the meantime he’d be staying at Bob Koester ’s.

It would take Bob Koester a long time to get over the experience of having Iggy, Ron and Scott Asheton, Scott Richardson and Vivian Shevitz as guests. Vivian was no trouble; she left after the first night to check on Sam Lay. Sam had recently gone out armed to a Chicago club after hearing that a harmonica player, just out of prison, was planning to cut up Sam’s bandmate James Cotton, whom he accused of messing with his wife while he was inside. Tooled up to protect his friend, Sam sat down at a table with the Colt automatic in his pocket and the pistol went off accidentally, discharging a .45 round straight through his scrotum. ‘Vivian was so gone, because Sam was in hospital,’ says Scott Richardson, ‘so she didn’t pay any attention to what was going on.’ What was going on was the baiting of Bob Koester. ‘He was just sorta mincing around, and that got to everybody,’ Richardson explains. ‘It was sheer punk sadism, that is all.’

Koester ascribes the tension to the fact he’d asked the ‘psyche delic dudes’ not to smoke drugs in his apartment. Iggy hints darkly at sexual predations by Koester and blames Scott Richardson for what ensued. Ron Asheton cheerfully admits that all of them were freaked out by their conviction - ridiculous, says Koester - that Koester was gay. And without a doubt, Jim Osterberg was also trying to show his new friends that he was as tough as they were.

‘We were goading him,’ remembers Ron. ‘It was bad, but we were just kids.’

‘We were like the Droogs from
A Clockwork Orange
,’ explains Scott Richardson. ‘We didn’t care what anyone thought.’

There had been one relatively subdued night, where the five listened to Koester’s rare records and tapes then barricaded themselves into their room with cushions. The mood turned nasty on the second night, as the Ann Arbor quartet started drinking Bali Hi wine, ‘and getting him drunk too,’ says Ron. ‘And teasing him.’

The Asheton brothers, Scott and Iggy set out to confuse and torture Koester, walking around naked in Iggy’s case, wrestling or piling on top of one another on the floor then jumping up as the confused record-company boss tried to work out what the hell was going on, or shining a desk light in his face to dazzle him. ‘They were doing all kinds of stripteases I had no interest in, I had specified I wanted no drug activity, and I had this viral infection and was feeling shitty . . . it was like a horrible nightmare.’

When Koester, incensed at being handed that glass of piss, threw all his guests out, it proved a strangely bonding and cathartic experience for the future Stooges. They recount that tale as if it’s slightly shameful but nonetheless a memory they seem to relish: ‘That was the beginning,’ says Ron. ‘That was when Iggy said, we should be in a band, and start something.’

CHAPTER 3

The Dum Dum Boys

It is Saturday 5 July 1969, a clear, balmy day in Pottawatamie Beach, and as the Stooges finish their opening number, the brilliantly lamebrained ‘1969’, Iggy Stooge looks blankly at the Saugatuck festival audience and announces, ‘I’d like to dedicate the set today to Brian Jones, the dead Stone. Oh well, being dead’s better than playing here.’

As they battle their way through their set, perhaps a quarter of the audience - high-school dropouts, a smattering of intellectuals, assorted misfits - is entranced, the remainder indifferent or actively hostile. One fan, Cub Koda of the band Brownsville Station, stands by the side of the stage to admire the spectacle of the freeform feedback-saturated jam which closes their twenty-minute performance. As uncontrollable shrieks squeal out of the PA stacks, Dave Alexander takes the neck of his Mosrite bass and jams it into the gap between two Marshall cabinets, then starts to hump them. Ron Asheton, in aviator shades and leather jacket, tosses his Fender Stratocaster to the stage; it moans and howls as he bends the whammy bar with his foot. Drummer Rock Action pounds out a Bo Diddley jungle rhythm on his tomtoms before suddenly losing the beat and, in a fit of childish frustration, starts kicking over the kit.

Iggy Stooge, meanwhile, simply writhes on the floor, in what looks like some shamanic trance, or even an asthma attack, blood trickling from his bottom lip where he’s smacked himself with the microphone.

Koda looks on, entranced, as Iggy leans over and starts to throw up in the middle of the stage, when suddenly he senses someone leaning behind him, trying to get a better view. He glances behind and sees it’s Muddy Waters, the grand patriarch of Chicago blues, who will be playing the headlining set in a couple of hours.

Muddy watches, fascinated and perhaps appalled, for a few seconds. Then he shakes his head, points at the stage and shouts over the feedback: ‘I don’t like that. Those boys need to get themselves an act!’

‘Muddy!’ laughs Cub. ‘That
is
the act!’

For a generation of kids, 1967 was a pivotal year. Jim Osterberg was one of them, for it was over that extraordinary summer that he lost his virginity, dropped acid and left home for good. But there was a more crucial rite of passage. Over this period, this ambitious, solitary figure became part of a raggle-taggle band of brothers, influencing their path through life and, in turn, having the course of his life, and even the shape of his own personality, irrevocably altered. For better or worse, the Stooges were the making of Jim Osterberg.

The Stooges could only have existed in Ann Arbor, for no other town was as smart and as dumb. They originated at a place where high art met greaser thuggery, where the intellectual met the dysfunctional. And that collision was exemplified by the moment that Jim Osterberg teamed up with the Asheton brothers; the moment when the Boy Most Likely To became, as he boasts, ‘corrupted!’

There are people who saw the Stooges up close who suggest that Iggy’s bandmates were programmed by their leader. ‘They were his stooges. Teenage glueheads, I’m not trying to slander them,’ as John Sinclair puts it. Others maintain the Asheton brothers had just as profound an effect on their leader, who adopted their values and tough-guy persona. Some fellow musicians, such as Scott Richardson, contend that ‘for the people that
really
understood, Ron Asheton was the creative force behind the whole thing’. Ann Arbor High student, Bill Cheatham, later a Dum Dum boy in his own right, describes how Jim Osterberg ‘felt he was an outcast. [But] Ronnie, Scotty and I, we
were
outcasts.’ And without doubt, much of the alienation, boredom and gonzo humour that pervades the persona of Iggy Pop originates from his fellow Stooges, Scott Asheton and Ronald F. Asheton Junior.

Ann Asheton had brought her two sons and daughter from Davenport, Iowa, to Ann Arbor in December 1963 immediately after her husband Ronald’s death; her life was a struggle, for Ronald Senior ’s pension was too meagre for the family to survive, forcing her to take a job at the Ann Arbor Ramada Inn, in addition to looking after three intelligent but feisty teenagers.

Ronald Asheton Junior believed, like Jim Osterberg, that he was destined to achieve something significant in his life, a belief reinforced by his 1960 encounter with John Kennedy when the Democratic nominee was campaigning in Davenport Iowa. Dressed in his cub scout’s uniform, young Ronald was propelled forward by a surge in the crowd and ended up with his face in the future president’s crotch. As a Secret Service agent attempted to tug him away by his cub-scout scarf, the future president intervened to save the unfortunate scout from being throttled, ordering the agent to ‘leave the kid alone’; Ronald’s fingers brushed those of the charismatic candidate as he was bundled away, star-struck. John F. Kennedy joined Ron’s pantheon of showbiz heroes, alongside Adolf Hitler and The Three Stooges. Soon that select band was joined by The Beatles and the Stones, inspiring Ron to drop out of high school, along with his classmate Dave Alexander, and travel to London, hoping to see John Lennon or Mick Jagger walking down Carnaby Street. He settled for the more than satisfactory alternative of seeing the Who at their superviolent mod peak, bringing home a shard of splintered Rickenbacker as a souvenir. The Who’s Pete Townshend would become his inspiration, although he started out on the bass guitar. After getting kicked out of the Prime Movers, Ron joined Scott Richardson’s snotty English-flavoured R&B band, the Chosen Few, and would soon enjoy the distinction of playing the very first notes to be heard at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom as a live rock ’n’ roll venue: his bass intro to the Stones’ ‘Everybody Needs Somebody’ launched the Chosen Few’s opening set for up and coming band the MC5 in October 1966.

Scott Asheton, too, was a crucial Dum Dum boy, an aspiring drummer who at one point played with Ron, Dave Alexander and Bill Cheatham in a garage band called the Dirty Shames. As a kid, he’d spent countless hours with his dad discussing plans for racing go-karts and building V8 hot-rods, only for his whole world to fall apart with the premature death of his father. After that he became a wild child, thrown out of the house by his mom, hanging out with his hoodlum-looking friends on State and Liberty, spitting on passers-by. It was his tall, Brando-esque good looks and tough guy cool, together with the wickedly cynical Asheton sense of humour, that first entranced Jim Osterberg.

Iggy and the Asheton brothers returned from Chicago at the precise moment that a psychedelic revolution was engulfing Ann Arbor. Its huge student population, cosmopolitan atmosphere and Democrat administration contributed to a liberal ethos which meant that its fines for drugs possession were lower than neighbouring Detroit, and before long the town possessed its own mini Haight-Ashbury in the form of a gaggle of headshops around Liberty and State, at the edge of the university campus.

Jim, Ron and Scott Asheton had decided to form a band together. They hadn’t by this point decided who would play what - at first the plan was for Scott Asheton, the most physically magnetic of the three, to sing, and Iggy to stay on drums. And as there was no immediate prospect of making money from their music, they needed a source of income. Fortunately, Ann Arbor’s embryonic hippie subculture would become the perfect outlet, as they established their own little niche on the drug-supply chain, buying marijuana plants and drying them to sell on as grass. Jim had moved back into the family trailer on his return from Chicago, and he and Ron discovered that Coachville’s communal laundry and service area was the perfect location to dry the leaves. Unfortunately, they often got high on their own supply, and left the plants drying for so long that they started to cook, filling the building with the distinctive smell of burning grass. Beating a retreat to the trailer, they had to plead ignorance as James Osterberg Senior sniffed the air and asked what they were up to.

Jim Osterberg was still firmly tethered to the parental purse-strings, particularly when major purchases were required for the trio’s musical experiments. Early in 1967, Jim had his eye on a Farfisa organ and embarked on a campaign to persuade James Senior and Louella to finance the purchase. Eventually Louella agreed on condition that Jim cut his hair; there were complicated negotiations about what constituted a sufficiently short haircut, which revolved around the collar length. Negotiations concluded, Jim opted for a style which was short at the back with long fringe up-front. The results were so bizarre that, according to Ron, Jim attracted the attention of the Ann Arbor police. ‘He was wearing baggy white pants, came here to my mom’s to practise, and the cops stopped him ’cause they thought he was an escaped mental patient. That is how weird he looked, with that little haircut and those big eyes.’ It was a 40-minute bus ride from Coachville to the Ashetons’ home on Lake, and according to Jim, even when he got there, with Ann at work, it was often a long wait until the brothers awoke from their morning nap or marijuana stupor and let him in.

Over those early months, Ron, Scott and Jim recruited the Ashetons’ friend, Dave Alexander - ‘A spoiled child and a wild thing,’ according to Scott - to assist in their musical experiments. Once the ever-tolerant Ann Asheton started to bridle at the incessant rehearsals at her house, the quartet moved to the Alexanders’; Dave would supply Ron, Scott and Jim with Colt 45 malt liquors as they crafted an embryonic rock opera. At first, they had debated a line-up with both Jim and Scott on drums; after the purchase of the Farfisa, Jim switched to organ, while Ron fed his bass guitar through a fuzz box and wah wah, and Scotty played drums on a 45-minute instrumental epic, which they named ‘The Razor ’s Edge’.

It was the summer of 1967 when the tiny crew moved into their first band house, a Victorian building on Forest Court, in the heart of the campus. It was being sub-let by a group of University of Michigan students, who naively thought that the earnest Jim Osterberg and his chums were a better prospect than their other applicants, ‘a bunch of broads. But woe betide the day those frat dudes let us in,’ enthuses Ron, ‘’cause we totally destroyed the building.’

Forest Court was where the band’s distinctive lifestyle evolved, summed up by Kathy Asheton as ‘Crazed, pig-style, crazed bachelors, fun times.’ Jim Osterberg was often recognisable as his wide-eyed, charming self, but equally often the entire band could be found slumped, stoned, in front of the TV until early in the morning, giggling at horror movies or rerun comedies. Slowly, they evolved, like cavemen, their own language. At first, after Jim had cleared out the basement, the three worked on developing their embryonic songs, but after incessant complaints from the neighbours about the noise, they found other diversions. Sometimes they would descend like a marauding tribe on family or neighbours, and denude their houses of everything edible. Frat parties around the campus were other useful venues for loot and pillage - the four could fill their stomachs and disappear with armfuls of drink before the hosts realised what was happening. Yet for all the squalor of their living quarters, the group boasted a certain glamour. ‘They were pioneers - cool, special,’ says Kathy Asheton. ‘They got a lot of attention, they got the girls, they were cool guys, people wanted to be around them.’

Both Ron and Jim lost their virginity during that psychedelic period. Both were essentially well-brought-up Midwest boys and had delayed that fateful moment, but one friend of the band, Mary Reefer, was an older woman who was taken with Jim’s wide-eyed charm. She embarked on a campaign to seduce Jim, and finally succeeded with such memorable results that young Osterberg rode his bike back to the band house in a kind of trance, utterly transported. So transported, in fact, that he cycled straight into the path of a car, bounced over its hood and then landed on his feet. He arrived back carrying his mangled bike, a beatific grin on his face.

By the end of their stay at Forest Court, acid had become the band’s new obsession. The four had an older adviser on its use in the person of Ron Richardson, a handsome, slightly nervous, intellectual character, who taught in Ypsilanti’s Sumpter Townships, and who had been the manager of the Chosen Few. Little by little he was persuaded to take on Jim and Ron’s band. Ron boasted two vital qualifications: he owned an old Plymouth Washer Service van, and was involved in University of Michigan tests on LSD, and located a supply of the then-legal compound via a medical school acquaintance. Richardson took such a serious approach to his students’ induction to acid that he required them to complete a rigorous reading list before they took their first trip. Soon, their collective psychedelic experiences became a vital part of the band’s fraternal bonding. Ron, Scott and Jim went first; then later, Dave Alexander’s induction into the band was formalised by a trip with Jim, during which they flashed on
The Wind In The Willows
, and realised that Dave was Rattie and that Jim was Toad.

Regular acid trips became a staple of the band’s cultural diet, which also included Dave Alexander’s books on the occult, the Mothers of Invention’s
Freak Out
, Jimi Hendrix’s
Are You Experienced?
, Pharoah Sanders’
Tauhid
albums, Dr John’s album
Gris Gris
, and the constant background noise of late-night TV, including Ron’s particular favourite,
The Three Stooges
. Ron was devoted to the comedy trio, whom he had gone to see at the Illinois State Fair as a child, and his own humour, whether dry, gonzo or black, defined the atmosphere of the band house. Ron claims it was he who that summer declared, ‘We’re like the Stooges, but we’re psychedelic. Let call ourselves the Psychedelic Stooges!’

Around the rest of Ann Arbor there were ripples of interest stirred by what Jim Osterberg and Ron Asheton were cooking up - Jim’s role in the Iguanas and the Prime Movers meant he was well known in the musicians’ community, and the extended gestation period of his new project became a talking point. ‘I bumped into Jim in the middle of the summer and asked what he was doing. He just said, practising!’ says ex-bandmate Jim McLaughlin. ‘He’d been practising for six months, which was hilarious, ’cause I couldn’t remember him rehearsing for more than fifteen minutes with us!’ Other bands on the scene, like the Rationals, and the SRC - a local supergroup formed by the alliance of Chosen Few singer Scott Richardson with hit greaser band the Fugitives - were intrigued, as were other local figures including Jeep Holland, who by now managed both the Rationals and SRC, and the hottest new partnership on the local scene, the MC5 and John Sinclair. The toughest, highest-energy band to come out of Detroit, the MC5 had realised they needed to hitch themselves to the hippie revolution engulfing the US, so they joined up with Sinclair, Detroit’s psychedelic guru, in August 1967. Together, they aimed to revolutionise Detroit and the rest of the country with a manifesto based on loud rock ’n’ roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.