Fun Fun Fun Fun With IGGY!

"The aesthetics of failure are alone, durable. He who does not understand failure is lost. The importance of failure is capital. I do not speak of what fails—if one does not understand this secret, this aesthetic, this ethic of failure, one has understood nothing, and fame is empty."

The above passage comes from Jean Cocteau's Opium, which Iggy Pop is reading aloud from as we sit in his hotel room the day before his appearance at New York's Palladium, part of his first tour since 1974. "I or* iginally got this book from David Bowie—but I lost it," says Iggy. "I was over in England and I got it from Giavanni Dadamo. It's been great inspiration to me onstage. Here, listen to this," he says as he thumbs through the pages. "'It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after taking opium, to take earth seriously and, unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.' Which is the position I find myself in now because I'm not a saint and I don't take earth seriously and, having known opium and, uh,...it is difficult."

That failure passage, though, that's his favorite. "It's something I've always been involved with, you know, being the king of the failures, and now that I've learned to understand it even better, it's beginning to appear like success, although it's still just more failure. I've always been so determined to fail and I'm so glad that I was because it's hard to be a failure and for awhile I thought I'd given up and thought I'd failed at being a failure and now I'm starting to succeed at it. You understand what I mean?"

Oh, yes, I certainly do. Here is Iggy Pop, in 1977, not only alive and kicking but out on tour with a new album in the stores, getting press coverage every which way you turn, looking for all intents and purposes on the verge of finally becoming the star he should have been from the first time the Stooges ever turned a concert stage into a battleground. The same Iggy who made mincemeat out of his audiences—and himself—at the turn of the decade, who lost his contract with Elektra and disappeared, only to resurface with Raw Power in 73. The same Iggy who, by that time, had become a legend and was so angry at the universe that he began to torture himself onstage for all to see, rolling around in broken glass, throwing up on the first row. The same Iggy who played the Palladium (then the Academy of Music) on New Year’s Eve 73, sandwiched between (the then unheard of) Kiss, an oom-pah band, and Blue Oyster Cult, and who put on a show that drove the audience berserk not out of excitement, but out of sheer terror. The crowd stood and yelled because they couldn’t deal with all that pain up there on the stage. The Stooges’ life story—too much to handle.

I'm not a sain and I don't take earth seriously.

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I think I'm beginning to get the respect I deserve-

The same Iggy who, while Jim Morrison was screaming “We want the world and we want it now!” for the counter culture troops of 1969, was prophesying the attitude of the Seventies, articulating the displaced hostility of the blank generation before it had even arrived. Peeking out from underneath the covers in the bedroom to see their older brothers and sisters tripping their brains out, dayglo painting the rotten, stinking world that this next wave of kids knew couldn’t be changed. Fuck social consciousness, fuck ecology, fuck the war, fuck politics. What about your life, man? What about happiness, man? What about Fun?

Yeah. Fun. As in “No Fun.” As in Fun House. As in “Funtime.” As in this book that Iggy says he’s begun to write called Fun. “When I saw Ian Hunter’s disgusting book about what it’s like on the road, I decided I’d write a book about my life on my road. Little vignettes, little, scenes of the “real” story, because the sensationalism that the press has picked up on, believe me, that’s just the tip of the iceberg ’cause I’ve done...well, enough said.”

Well, I ask, what about fun? Are you having any now? Iggy stares at the floor a second, then looks up. “It’s a very touchy concept with me...uh, I don’t think I want to get into it, really.”

(That word. It’s been there from the beginning, a thread running through Iggy’s music like a knife scar on the side of the face. Hold me tight/I’m callin’ from the fun house...Let me in/ I’m callin’ from the fun house. Can’t get out. Can’t get in. Can’t get away. Positive, negative. The Amusement Park, The Looney Bin. The Fun House. Home of the Idiot. Hey, I feel lucky tonight/Gonna get stoned and run around/ALL ABOARD FOR FUN TIME. I don’t need no heavy trips/I just do what I wanna do/ALL ABOARD FOR FUN TIME* Dangerous territory to try and traverse in the afternoon, in a hotel room. I lay the thoughts aside, at least for now.)

“From Raw Power onward I became more and more on an ego trip,” Iggy reflects. “More, uh, weak in my heart and therefore more contrived and phony and it was odd, because from then on, people thought I was more and more real. The only real thing about it was that I was spewing forth a lot of my self-hate and problems, which is similar to what I’m doing now, still, but there’s a difference. I still think...hey, have you heard Metallic K.O.?” I nod my head yes. “I think that’s a great record, ’cause that represents the height of that, but on that particular night I think I did succeed at failure, especially that second side. Though it sounds like there’s no one there ’cause of the mix, there were about 6000 people. Absolute confusion and mania. Girls just screaming and yelling and begging and ripping their clothes off to get onstage and then the bikers throwing everything they could at me, hating me. Everything a mess and me just snarling.”

I ask Iggy about The Idiot. He picks up the Cocteau book again and reads to me. “ ‘Make oneself loved by the gloomy indirectness of one’s work.’ You know, when the first Stooges album came out, everybody was convinced that I literally didn’t know a two-syllable word, where in fact I wasn’t trying to trick anybody. What sounds best to me is just very few words with a delicate borderline between thought, feeling and mindlessness. Never trying to be too direct. Which is, in fact, The Idiot. All I wanted to do was to make a record and have pleasure in making it and give people who listen to it pleasure. To have my ego stepped instead of being the little star in the studio. To dare to say, ‘I’m an idiot.’

“Like on ‘Sister Midnight.’ I was doing the vocal and it wasn’t working, and David suggested I try it an octave lower, and while we were listening to the playback, the coffee girl came in and said, ‘Wow, you sound like Frank Zappa,’ and I thought to myself, ‘Zappa? There goes my sex appeal,’ and I kept asking if we could do another take, but David said, ‘Look, in a few weeks you’ll hear it and you’ll love it.’ And he was right. I mean, I sound like a man on it, you know?”

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As for the inevitable question regarding the new punk scene in the O.S. and England, a scene that his spirit hovers over, Iggy frowns on it. “They’ve misinterpreted very much what I do, they don’t understand. Most of them are out to exploit— with the exception of Johnny Thunders (from the New York Dolls) and the Heartbreakers. He’s got real heart and plays real music from his soul and someday soon he’s gonna be great. But I do think that I’ve had a part in changing the face of things over the last few years, which is odd because I’ve never sold out a big hall or sold an incredible amount of records. But I think I’m beginning to get the respect I deserve.

“I think that I’ve had an influence, either directly or indirectly, on lots of things, and not just music. Take a movie like Taxi Driver, or Chris Burden, that artist who drags himself through glass and hangs inside a canvas bag for days on end.”

Before I leave, Iggy asks me if I like The Idiot. I tell him that, honestly, I don’t know. “Well,” he says, “I think you’ll be surprised when you see the show, ’cause it hasn’t changed a bit except that instead of giving it four songs and a prayer, I’m doing fifteen songs onstage, which makes me feel good ’cause I’m giving people more.”

At the concert the next night, Iggy’s assessment of his current performances ring true. With a four-piece band that includes a totally subdued Bowie at the keyboards (set up one foot from the side of the stage so that he doesn’t even really walk out there for everyone to ogle at; plays head down with absolutely no lights on him while he leads the band), Iggy does a set that has the audience spellbound from beginning taend. All eyes are on him as he dances, bare chested, to “Raw Power” and writhes on the ground during “Dirt.” It’s a perfect selection of material, from the riveting “T.V. Eye” to “Search and Destroy” to “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (I check on Bowie during this one and he’s right there, banging away at that one chord non-stop) to an encore of “China Girl,” a-hand-held spotlight under him as he lifts his hands up and pulls his skin back to slant his eyes and bounces around with his legs together like an Oriental princess with feet tied. There are moments so compelling that you want to cry for Iggy because there he is, on his knees, naked, exposed, alone, anguished. But there’s beauty in that pain—the beauty of art, the beauty of truth. Thought, feeling and mindlessness all raging together in a tidal wave of activity. On that stcige, with the lights shining down on him, with the audience hanging on his every move, Iggy leaves this earth. Terrible and lovely at the same time, he is transcendant. He’s jumped aboard, and it’s funtime. ¶||?

‘Copyright® Bewlat Bros. Music/Fleur Music Ltd./James Osterberg Music