![]() Iggy has mostly gone against whatever grain there was to go against, beginning when his proto-punk band, the Stooges, played songs such as “We Will Fall,” “No Fun” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” serving as a fist in the face of the hippie movement. He made me think of the Rolling Stones’ song “Respectable.” He was married to Suchi Asano – that lasted nine more years he married Nina Alu in 2008 – and he had been lecturing at colleges. That’s discipline.Īt the time of this interview, Pop was 43, He wasn’t doing drugs anymore – remember “Lust for Life”? “No more beatin’ my brain with liquor and drugs” – and he didn’t drink to excess. Which is pretty comical, in a way, but you gotta hand it to Iggy: Say this for his impulse control. I was eating dinner with some people and I was wearing my glasses and some guy who had a few comes up to me - ‘What’s with the glasses?!’ - and I got mad. ![]() “Outside, in the real world, I have to face that a lot,” says Pop, about matching his madman public image. American Caesar era Iggy Pop (Image: Discogs)Īnd, he says, those specs have caused him some trouble. I know it’s kind of silly to think this – as many people of all persuasions from nerds to contract killers wear glasses – but somehow, you just don’t envision Iggy Pop behind lenses. And, yes, like the case with Keith Richards (at pretty much any of his birthdays post-40), no one would have placed good money on that happening. These kinds of guys, you’ve met these kinds of guys, they need somebody to pee in their wastebasket sometimes.” Like, once I did an interview in a guy’s office and during the interview, I wanted to pee, but I didn’t want to leave the room so I peed in his wastebasket. ![]() “If I look at the things I did, the actual things I did,” says Pop, “on one hand I think, ‘Boy that really screwed up my career.’ On the other hand, I have a feeling of great pride. He’s looking a tad professorial – it might be the spectacles – as he leans back on his couch at the Four Seasons hotel, not a fleabag, mind you. A composed Iggy – who seems more like James Osterberg (his birth name) right now – is dressed casually, in a bright, multicolored T-shirt and faded black jeans. The main point is somebody else is talking about me. “I don’t know if any of that’s true or not and it really doesn’t matter. Nearly two decades after that little incident – and I’m sure it was little in the grand scheme of Pop-ish misbehavior – Iggy and I are talking about this. Two days later, Pop returned at 5 a.m., banging on the door – my image is of Fred Flintstone, locked out yelling “Wilma!” – screaming, “I don’t think it’s funny I’m not laughing, let me in.” Sugerman hailed a cab, handed the driver $100, told him to drive as far north he could with the money and dump the lump of Pop out, wherever that was. I was almost done mopping up when he began to come to.” ![]() I can still see those blue specks dissolving in that platinum hair of his. I hosed him down and poured the rest of the Ajax out and wiped up the floor, holding him by the ankles. “Then using him as a sort of rotating stop block and mop, I got the shovel out of the service pantry and piled everything into the sink where the garbage disposal was. “I sprayed as much of the garbage up around Iggy as I could,” Sugerman wrote. That guest was Iggy, who was passed out, lying in a pile of garbage in his kitchen. (I do not know if or when she went away.)įlashback to a memorable scene (not one I was there for mind you, but one chronicled by Danny Sugerman in his book Wonderland Avenue): It’s the wee hours, somewhere in the early ‘70s, the aftermath of one big party, and Sugerman – you may know him as the Doors’ attache and biographer – had to hose down one of his guests. I’m downstairs but upstairs in my hotel room, there’s this girl I’ve been fucking and I just want her to go away.” We talked for about a half-hour and I was doing the polite-ish thing and saying, “Hey, this has been great” – and it was, truly – “and I appreciate your time …” Iggy said, “Hey, I’ll talk to you as long as you want. It was first interview I did with him, a phoner in 1979. This is also punk rock, though I suppose in 2022 hindsight it could be filtered through a different, or woke, lens. Iggy calmly says, “Thank you, but fuck you, good night.” I’ve seen a sea of encores and I will not forget that one non-encore or parting shot. Iggy milked it for five minutes, all of us looking at each like “WTF?” Then, he came back to the stage. The crowd is going wild, screaming for the (let’s face it, obligatory) encore.
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