“I usually answer the phone here “Storage!” Or sometimes I answer in German or say ‘Rubinsky’s Deli!”’ Storage is very much like it, this very nondescript warehouse-style building not too far from the glamor of H*O*L*L*Y*W*O*O*D but too boring to look twice at. A hideaway. In it, Iggy Pop and his new band are rehearsing for a world tour, to kick off in Denmark, sweep across Europe, then the States, and then on into Japan. Such a task requires privacy and isolation, and this anonymous joint ensures it.

The only way I can be certain that this guy sitting across from me on the floor is actually Iggy Pop (he’s been introduced to me as “Jimmy”) is that instead of sitting cross-legged like I am, he’s engaged in this feline set of stretching, twisting motions, limbering his body up for the rehearsal. At one point during our conversation? he assumes the full lotus position, lifts, himself off the ground with his hands and walks around the room, sitting. He collapses on his side, raises a leg as high off the ground as it’ll go, catches it with his hand and twists it behind his head. There is an agonizing crack. Is this yoga? “Nah, I get in these moods and I just have to stretch or swim or something just to have something to do. I was in a wee car accident the other day and the doctor told me not to jump around for a little while, so I’m just a little bit sore. We’ve been messing with the music, and I just can’t stand sitting around anymore.” And Iggy pops another one. Ouch. But that’s what comes from 14 hours’ rehearsal each day. “Twelve actually, but I’ve been cutting it down to a hard eight. It comes out to 12 to 14 for me from the time my day starts to the time I turn off the left side first and then th^ right side. Of my head, I mean. I turn off the awe first and let that wind down, and then when that’s done I can just push the analytical button and stop that si<de and then I go home and sprout little mushrooms.” Bullshit. Nothing that healthy sprouts mushrooms.

And that’s just it: this prince of deviancy, the world-renowned Rock And Roll Geek, this son of the Michigan trailer-camps turned jet-set twisto, looks healthy. Even more unexpectedly, he talks, healthy. I walked into the warehouse defensive, ready for anything, but what I got was a polite, articulate guy who smoked Marlbpros, talked about the little kids who came around his house, and sent a friend (a lovely Afro-American princess) off to get his glasses fixed. Glasses? “With a strap on them like the librarians use, so I can hang them around my neck, okay?” “Okay,” she says, pecking him on the cheek.

There have been some changes made, I suspect. “Well, for a while there, I didn’t have the inclination to actualize anything,” he says in reference to something else. Was David Bowie the catalyst for the change? “I would say that the first catalyst, corny as it would be, is my psychiatrist. And not my psychiatrist so much as my own decision to say ‘Jimmy,’ I sez to myself, I sez, ‘I’m lockin’ ya up.’ And at that point the worm did turn. It was the summer of 1975, and ever since I made that decision, I’ve never really looked back. I committed myself to the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, and told them what I was in for and what I wanted to get out of it.” Do you want to say what that was? “Oh, it’s really not so...it’s obvious, isn’t it? I wanted to straighten up, that’s all. Nothing grandiose, just straighten up. And I had to learn how, because it’s like learning to walk, and up to that point, I’d always been such a hotdog, I never had to straighten up, for any reason, because there was always a way I could shimmy around it.

“But what really realized the process was that I approached David Bowie on his Station to Station tour, just wondering if there was any work we could do together, because we’d previously dabbled on some tapes together. He seemed very concerned...I don’t know, you’d have to ask him... but he seemed to be concerned with... with...doin’ some work. And much to my credit I trusted him, which is to my everlasting benefit because he’s a trustworthy person. I would have to say that in all honesty, in a lot of areas I’ve apprenticed to David for two years now. There’s no getting around that. I haven’t been asked, so I’m just going to tell somebody. He deserves the credit.”

"I am a dork."

Well, there are some people who’d say that he’s vampiring off your talent. “Not at all, not at all, but I try to make what I have available to him, and hopefully he gets something out of it.” Yet there are these rumors, I think; the whispers of perverse dominance/submission games one of my rumorcatchers was so sure of...Gingerly, I ask, what form does your collaboration take? Is it stormy when you’re working or is it a more reasoned thing? “I think that’s neither here nor there,” Iggy snaps. Then his face changes. “Who loves ya, baby?”

But Iggy’s still thinking back to that vacuum between 75 and 77. “I made an honest try to get out of the music business; there just wasn’t anything else I was skilled for. I applied for a position at the Pico Boulevard McDonald’s as a busboy or selling hamburgers or anything I could get, and they said I was too old and had no previous skills and my education wasn’t good enough. I was so dismayed I wrote ’em up a resume—I wasn’t gonna give up—this long and angry spiel about what a genius they were losing in me, but they wouldn’t hire me. I tried to be a proofreader, because I’m a pretty decent linguist, but they said I was too slow. I tried this and I tried that, but, in the words of Bennett Glotzer, as he told me, ‘Ig, you’re never gonna make it in this business because you’re too frenetic—I don’t want to use the word crazy.’ He told me that as he’s holding his fucking German Shepherd, this damn Yid standing there telling me I’m frenetic but he doesn’t want to use the word crazy.”

Ah, yes. Yids. Und you say your tour schtartz in Chermany, Herr Osterberg? Over dere, vould you say dey are...“Yid conscious? Yes. You’re damn straight they are. I freak ’em out sometimes, standing on the corner, giving the old salute and saying ‘Oi uey! Oi uey! Oi uey/’ They’ve got my number. They’re saving a berth for me, that’s for sure. I keep tellin’ ’em that I feel like an Aryan, but...” But you do like it over there, don’t you? “Ja! I like Berlin particularly. The country is beautiful, but Berlin is such a wonderful city because it doesn’t change as much as the rest of the world. It can’t—it’s still a four-power zone. I know that the next time I go there I can go to the same club and see the same guy with the same glass in his hand at the same hour of the morning. Even the dee-gens there are programmed. I like that. It’s very similar to Detroit, actually. Michigan, as is most of the United States, is a German product-more of a German product than an English one, actually. If you look back to the Continental Congress Convention of 1781, you’ll see that German was almost the official language of this country. It only lost by one vote—one stinking vote! Otherwise: lch bin eine Amerikanische! Jawoh! I’m from Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, and when I first went to Germany, I couldn’t tell where I was. The architecture, the frame houses and everything, is identical, and a lot of the American values, like the Protestant work ethic, you think of that as American, but who was the first Protestant? Martin Luther...

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“I find America a really odd place. You’re taught that you have the right to an opinion, and you’re taught it so often that finally you feel pressured to have one. And frankly, I don’t think so many people have, about so many things. I certainly don’t—I lack many valuable opinions. Take the pursuit of happiness. The men who wrote that into the Constitution, they were all nutters. They were occult dilletante dabblers, and they knew what they were saying when they said you had the right to the pursuit of happiness: Good. Luck. Boy. Hey—if I can imagine I’m happy, that’s fine for me. Because otherwise, I’d have to mess around with being unhappy, and I think unhappiness is a con.” He stares me in the eye, square on. This guy’s no idiot.

Okay, let’s get a little concrete around here. What about the so-called New Wave? Do you ever think of yourself as a Grand Old Man to them? “No! Not at all! Nobody owes me jack shit! When people come to my concert, they leave their tribute at the door, they render that unto me, and having gone out and purchased one of my albums, at the point it goes out of the store it’s out of my hands, and anyone’s free to plagiarize it in any way they want. That’s the nature of this art: that’s certainly what I’ve done...I’ve taken from everybody and made it my own, not because I necessarily have a grandiose scheme about it, but like a fly, I just sort of light on whatever’s around. I can’t help that it comes out of me the way I am. And I think the same is true of those people. They’re good in their own right, a lot of them. I hate hearing that somebody owes that to me or I owe that to someone.”

So you’re not worried they’re gonna put you out of business, and you can keep doing this for a while? “Yeah, as long as I want to.” As long as you want to? “Yeah, of course. Let’s get this straight. It works the other way around. You see, I’ve always made that clear in my concerts. I’ve never given a benefit for the White Panthers. Never. Ever. I’m not Patti Smith. I’m for me, and everybody else who comes is for me also.” But what if they stop coming? “Only if I don’t want them to. You see, it doesn’t matter how many of them come. You must remember that in the beginning I was doing this for 12 people and they used to walk out and I’d follow them out into the yard. I don’t ever intend to become a bleeding mosquito, which is what I call most of these rock artists. They choke fat on the blood lust of attention and thrive on it until they get so lazy that somebody’s gonna come along and WHACK! Swat ’em. When I wind up beached, it’s certainly not going to be in no reeking, stinking limousine full of horrible old scarves and snakeskin boots and a dead Swede.” But people keep coming. “Yeah, and I think I’ll just leave it in my own mind that they keep coming because they want to. I suppose that there are other...No, I don’t have the right to question why because they paid their money and they have every right to be there.” A long pause, “Why don’t we cool this down here and do some rehearsing?”

Good idea. The band (Stacy Heydon on guitar from the Bowie Station to Station tour, Scott Thurston from Detroit on keyboards, and the Sales brothers, Tony and Hunt on bass and drums respectively) have been pacing around for a while, and now they jump up and head toward the staging area in another section of the building. It’s a full-scale mockup of the stage they’ll be using on the tour, in front of which Iggy has erected a set of mirrors so he can carefully examine, his on-stage moves. He slides around on a strip of special plastic, then jumps off the stage, grabs a big chair, positions it in front of the stage and orders me into it. Moments later the rehearsal begins. I think: I’ll never have a seat like this again.

“Lust for Life!” Iggy calls out and Hunt Sales assaults the drums with amazing ferocity. Four bars and Iggy tenses, snaps into motion, fluidly stretching up, up, and collapsing in a shuddering heap, all the time barking out lyrics. He’s dancing better than ever before, transfixed with his image in the mirror, his body taking more chances with its arcing and twisting. Not chances with his personal safety, but esthetic chances, risking a possible ignominious collapse or silly blunder. But no. The longer he goes; the more assured he gets; the more assured he gets the more energy he comes up with, and that leads to more risk-taking. It’s exhilarating, celebrational. And it is immediately engaging.

They go through “Night Clubbing” and “Sixteen” and I don’t quite catch that last title. But no! It couldn’t be! The olfl Mitch Ryder classic, “Jenny Take A Ride.” I can’t believe it. For this one, Iggy’s flat on his stomach, doing the classic iguana moves right up to the lip of the stage, spitting out the words like nobody’s done since the last time Mitch decided to call it a day. The song ends and I realize I’ve been gasping the whole time.

Iggy comes down off the stage, flushed and sweating. “Anybody come back with any beer?” he asks. Negative. “C’mon, let’s go get some,” he says to me, and we’re off in the Grand Prix to the corner of Vine St. “I used to live in a set of furnished rooms right around here,” Iggy muses as we creep in rush-hour traffic through a very seedy Hollywood. It was a while back, I suppose. We park in a red zone and run into a corner market for the beer. Iggy. Midwesterner still, buys Coors, while I opt for Bud. We somehow get into a rap about audiences and violence on the way back to the warehouse, and I find myself urging Iggy to attend a black gospel show sometime, an idea that lights him up. But he’s adamant on one point: nothing happens at one of his shows that he doesn’t allow to happen.

I’m skeptical about that one. “No, honestly. It’s like this: I’ve been told that this scar on my chest with the 13 big horse-stitches occurred one day when I grabbed a glass and tried to do myself. I’m told thatNthat was a selfdestructive act. That’s very shallow logic, because what it takes other men 15 years to do to themselves slowly, until it does in their very chest—they drink, they’re slobs, and they refuse to go out and get fucked and et cetera—I did it in five seconds and I have a good chest. Look, there’s a pathos and a misery that has been consistently recognized in the human condition throughout all written culture. It's in all the great clowns, the people I admire, and whose lines I try to work along: Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, Alfred E. Neuman. That’s what the album cover is^ a tribute to Alfred E. Neuman. That’s why I picked it, because I am a dork, I’m a fucking nurd, just like him! That’s right— damn straight! And I’ve always* assumed that I was doing the most beautifully logical things, and 6f course the proof of it is in my present condition.” He snaps his fingers and grins. “Who loves ya?

“But of course, I’ve come to understand, since there came a day in my life when it was like a coyote that has come into town because all the food’s run out where he is, like him, one day I had to go walking into town and start meeting the humans. I found out that by their values, yes, I understood what I looked like. I understand it now, in my heart what I do Is exactly the same as a 16-year-old kid in a 50’s greaser band playing the sax solo in ‘Wild Weekend.’ It’s that benign—to me— there’s utterly nothing malignant about it. No malice, no malice at alL Anything I’ve ever gotten from an audience I’ve gotten because I’ve wanted it.” Even that howling melee on the Metallic K.O. record? “Even that, even that.” No malice aforethought. “Forethought aplenty, but no malice. I leave that up to other people because if that’s what they want to do, fine. Some people. But not my fans. I draw the finest audiences in the whole history'of the world. You should just look at one of my audiences; it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. They just take your breath away.” Who are they, as far as you can tell? “Who am I? They’re just an illusion, like I am. They’re something I see and they see me and we say hello.

“Well, look. I gotta go back to rehearsal, and you gotta leave. It’s like, I’m still recovering, and you just saw what I was talking about earlier. If I’ve got an Audience—and just one person sitting there corishtuted enough of arv audience—I’ve gotta do it all.” You must be ready for the body bag after a work-out like that. “No, the other way around. I have theories on everything, I have opinions, I rant, I’m like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove. You notice, even after three songs, the difference in my speech pattern? If I drink this whole beer, I’ll turn into a blowtorch.” What’s with your metabolism? “It’s very sensitive. Very highly strung. By design. Ve haff vays...Good doctors ...” His eyes are bugging, we both crack up. He’s right, I should leave. We shake hands, and I’m back in the California sunshine.

Driving back to the P-Funk office to meet a friend (“Be sure and say hi to George Clinton,” Iggy’d said. “He was a big inspiration to me.” And you to him, I add. “That’s great!”), I reflect on something Iggy had said earlier, when we were talking about musical innovation and fear of unemployment. “It’s, can you twist your size 28 imagination into this set of size 17 employment capri pants? How many positions do you know to fit into the social fabric?” Immediately, he’d been seized by a paroxysm of contortionism, twisting his body into unimaginable shapes. “Well, I know 102, baby! You wanna fit the fabric? I’ll show you some fuckin’ fabric—the social fabric ain’t got nothin’ on me! I know the weave!!” Ido believe he does. Somehow, I muse as I hit Franklin Avp., he’s gonna figure a way to twist himself into it for a long time to come. If, that is, the blowtorch doesn’t get him first. Ve shall zee...