IGGY POP: World’s Most Forgotten Boy Discovered Performing Alternative Service for the Bourgeoisie

COMING, on your own TV, sometime around 1986: A loud, but dry, staccato male voice opens the commercial: "Do you remember those thrilling days when 'dada' was the four-letter word on everybody's lips?" ("1969" is playing in the background, as an obscenely young Iggy Stooge thrusts his iguana-tounged beak at the camera. jSQy is wearing the gold-lame, elbow-length ladies gloves he bought at K-Mart, and he rams a gloved hand down his pants to extract his favorite hunk of Oscar Mayer.) Do you remember the first time you got it on with your sister's dog?" ("No Fun," "Real Cool Time," and "Loose" in the background, respectively, as their printed titles roll down the screen, past a shot of i9Sy's kamikaze carcass hurtling through the smoky ^concert air, to flop into a scruffy sea of sons and daughters of Buick assembly-line workers.) "Do you remember that day your best girl slipped acid into your Pop-Tarts, and you ended up getting canned by the White Panthers when you insisted that John Sinclair was really Betty Crocker in flour-power drag?" ("Fun House," "Search and Destroy," and "Penetration" play and roll by, over a picture of Iggy dazed and triumphant back on stage. Blood flows freely from his naked torso and face, but he just smiles the pop-eyed leer of the justly deranged.) "Then you'll want to relive those golden times forever, as you glisten to Popeil's dee-stroy new collection of the music of the original Iggy and the original Stooges' first three, long-out-of-print albums. Jv(st $29.95 for records or tapeS, send check or money order now to 'Stooge Offer,' care of this station!"

Do you remember those times? I don't, either. And I was even alive then, a full-fledged adult, no less, when THE REAL STOOGES and THE REAL MC5 came down here to play that mammoth Cincinnati Rock Festival in 1970. But do you suppose I went anywhere near Crosley Field that day? Naaah. Grim young activist/ masochist that I was then, I spent the day mailbox, anxiously awaiting yet more threatening letters from my draft board.

Ah yes, Lester Bangs and the other early CREEMsters hipped me to the way and the light a couple years later, but I never got to see Iggy-by-now-Pop live until the spring of 1977, when he played Cincinnati's Taft Theatre on the Idiot tour. I was overwhelmingly impressed with Iggy's manic performance contortions that evening, especially the way he would zoom from side to side of the huge Taft stage, and just keep going, right up the side of the proscenium arch, in loving emulation of Donald Duck when his cane-wielding Uncle Scrooge chases him.

But, except for my amusement at watching David Bowie attempt to hide his flaming-flag hair behind his grand piano, I didn't care for Iggy's band, that Sales Bros, outfit he got on sale in Todd Rundgren's bargain bin. One guy in the band was wearing hayseedy bib overalls, which struck me as an outrageous insult to everything Iggy had already bled and died for. I got real

cranky over those damn overalls, so when local pop impresario Brad Balfour introduced me to support act Blondie after the show, I told 'em, "You guys cut the Ig tonight." (No bibs for Blondie, Deborah Harry was in her trademark thigh-high black

leather boots, after all.) "Oh, no man!" said Blondie drummer Clement Burke, almost with tears in his eyes, "We couldn't cut Iggy! He's a LIVING LEGEND!"

Mr. Burke's eminently rational comeback has stuck with me since that night, both as living proof that somebody other than fellow rock writers actually believes all that stuff we rant & rave about in CREEM, and also as thoughtful commentary on the ever-declining powers of our rock 'n' roll idols as they age, a real hot issue through most of the 70's (Lester Bangs vs. Lou Reed, 2 falls out of 3, etc.), and undoubtedly one that will do nothing but accelerate in urgency throughout this decade, as all the performers and writers slam head-on into midlife crisis.

If you're so dumb as to come up with an idea, you'll be crushed to mush!

I'm well aware that it's almost completely inconceivable that Iggy Pop could ever recapture the maniacal, grovelling, snarling, permanently liberating raw power of the first three Stooges' albums. Iggy very nearly drove himself crazy, in the only way he knew how. I don't blame Iggy for not wanting to rehash those furious days when he was the Stooge to end all stooges. Beside, the 1980's-model Iggy Pop is sounding better and better all the time, as the new wave's solidarity collapses around us.

I was cool to Iggy's initial comeback trail on The Idiot and Lust For Life; the music was fine, but, as always, David Bowie's dominance of those albums' concepts seemed surreptitiously malign, as though he wasn't prepared to reveal all of the newly-recovered Iggy to us Americans, quite yet. But I'm as unabashed fan of the more recent one-two punch of Iggy's New Values and Soldier. Both sets are far too relaxed and "commercial" to be equated to the old Stooges' albums, by definition, but that voice has survived and persisted, and I love Iggy's new, liquid sense of humor, all sly and droll, where once it was simply tortured and apocalyptic. I listen to New Values and Soldier over and over these days. Iggy Pdp 198X isn't Iggy Pop 1973, but neither is Jim Carroll a junkie any more, and that doesn't stop me from cueing up his album repeatedly.

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Rock ,'ri' roll life goes on, in strange and diverse forms; I waste no time in hopping over to Bogart's when Iggy Pop shows up there early in December, during , the first-anniversary week of 'the Cincinnati Wnb Tragedy, no less, to headline two sold-out evenings of club rock. (No Bogart's Patrons Trampled, Despite Proximity of Living Legend Inside.)

From the moment I see Iggy walk into Bogart's with his small retinue, that Lust For Life neo-shiteating grin extravagant upon his face, I know the evening is going to be all right. I haven't attempted to schedule an interview with the Ig this time, both because I have certain think-piece imperatives to get off my chest first, and also because I'Ve heard that Herr Pop is popping off rather heavily for Ronnie Reagan these days. That's his business, of course, but judging by other recent Iggoid interviews I've read, I'm sure he could readily convince me to support Reagan, too, and I'mtfoo young to die. A performance reality check will do nicely tonight, thank you.

Iggy takes the stage with his latest band, most of the members new even since Soldier: Patti Smith Band veteran Ivan Krai's still there on guitar and keyboards, but say hello to Robert duPrey on the other guitar, Mike Page on bass, and Doug Bowne on drums. Iggy's dressed in a brightstriped poor boy shirt, with big cutouts around the edges. As Iggy and the band tune up, I watch his incredibly limber muscles twitch and chase each other around his torso, like amphetamine-driven squirrels. Iggy looks healthier tonight than he has for years; maybe it won't be long before Bowie'll have to cpme over here and work out in Iggy Pop's psychic gymnasium, just to keep up.

' The band'launches into "T.V. Eye," one of the world's most forgotten songs, and sure enough it sounds slower now than I remember it from my well-worn copy of Funhouse. The new band's sound is slick and professional and suitably droning tonight, though also somewhat muddy, apparently due to unresolved equipment problems. The "Raw Power" that follows also sounds less urgent than the whitepunks-on-Michigan-studio-Stooges version but what doesn't?

Iggy seems to sense my (our?) dilemma, or maybe, in Lou Reed's immortal words, '''The cat just wants to talk." Whatever, Iggy yells, "What's your ideal? If you're so dumb as to come up with an idea, you'll be crushed to mush!" Hmmm. Notice' the internal rhyme scheme. He could be testing upcoming lyrics on us crossroads-of-America types.

I'm still Stooges-obsessed, despite my new-values resolutions to accept the latter-day Iggy Pop on his own terms, and I'm desperate for some archaic Stoogeminimalism like the minimalism that married dear old Dad Bangs, so long ago. But Iggy's not worried, he and his band begin the slow-fade intro of "Sister Midnight," a song as nouveau-poppish as the new Pop gets (thanks again, David), so I settle back to watch Iggy fling the mike stand around; he writhes around it in slow motion, with a whole new kind of lust for life.

I sink deeper into the gathering pleasure of this slick, new, Stoogette (but 100% Iggy Pop) rock, and all of a sudden I'm getting into what he means. My opening Best of Iggy and the Stooges fantasy, which I was sure the announcer said was available only-on-TV, is rapidly becoming true before my eyes and ears. Favorite tunes from all of the Ig's creative periods are rolling past me in the band's rapid-succession performances, while Iggy Pop supplies his own brand of hidden-persuader voiceover, between and among^iis vocalsf:

"Are there any cu'nts in this place?" (A show of hands, from a whole ,new generation of stooges.) "Well, 1-2, FUCK YOU!" (A twist of that supple waist so abrupt that it tends to transcend the Ig's self-parodying macho dumdum-boy etiquette.) And he has more, as the songs roll: "I know all you girls here got a problem with your guys having small dicks..." (Aww, David Lee Roth ratted on Cincinnati!) "I'm not a whore." (What was the question?) "I'm gonna squeeze you like a fucking tomato, baby, I'm gonna peel you." "You make me yawn." (To a persistent shouter for rf1970") "One nation under the thumb." Etc., etc., rock-your-roll one-liners, and the Ig's got a million of 'etn.

Iggy Pop's manic in his portrayal of Iggy Pop tonight; by the time he and the band reach the classic "Search and Destroy," Iggy's leaping in the air, and twirling his mike stand like everybody's all-American super-bitch majorette, just missing Ivan Krai with each revolution, Iggy and the band favor us with a nupnber of new songs, including "Rock 'n' Roll Hind" (?), "Where You Gonna Go Tonight," and an anonymous song that sounds like (I hope I hope) a cross between "Maggie's Farm" and "It's All Over Now."

By the time Iggy waves off our cheers and departs the stage to take his rightful place in the Reagan Millennium (after an encore in which he's reinterated his duality for us—"No Fun" is still part of his life, but so is "Nightclubbing"), I'm certain that the hyperbolic guy who graced Bogart's stage tonight really is th§ true rock 'n' roll archetype most people seem to find in Bruce Springsteen. Iggy's still with us, and I'm sure John Lennon would have wanted it that way.

Or, to quote 'Mr. Pop one more time: "Take Care Qf Me," on Soldier.