“C’mon, I’m on acid,” Iggy whines. "Can’t we talk about something else?”

Chances are that he’s merely suffering a flashback, but one can’t be sure. One minute he’s laughing in great gravelly guffaws about Lucy burning Ricky’s toast, explaining, in second person, how Iggy Pop hasn’t been able to swallow TV plots since he started smoking marijuana. Then a moment later he’s sadly reporting that his golf game has been going to hell as of late. The real wild child we’ve come to know and idolize is mellowing out.

"Oh, why don’t you shut up?!,” he laughs with a deep guttural howl that makes him sound as if he’s just swallowed a chunk of the Brooklyn Bridge. ‘‘Fuck off! Maybe I could get a little tape machine and play an angelic choir whenever I enter a room. Heeerrrrre’s Iggy! I live easily with my adulation. I’m very comfortable with it.”

He’s certainly had time to get used to it. James Newell Osterberg will turn 42 next April. It’s been 21 years since the Stooges first kicked up a ruckus and it’s been a roller coaster ride through fame and failure, self-abuse and near-comatose stupors ever since. He’s currently on an upswing, thanks to the success of last-year’s Blah Blah Blah, and if Iggy has it his way, the new Instinct LP’II push him closer to pop stardom.

ANIMAL INSTINCTS

“I finally have a good stereo,” Iggy happily reports from, almost literally, the top of the world in his Manhattan penthouse. “I never had one before— it’s my first. I can listen to my favorite records as loud as I want. See, if you can’t listen to stuff.. .if you’re not listening and enjoying other peoples’ music, then your own music will turn into shit. That’s what was happening to me in the late ’70s—1979 through 1982. I didn’t like my records as well as what I was doing before or what I’m doing now.”

Part of the reason for that is that he was ‘‘living hand-to-mouth, flophouse to flophouse, hotel to basement to some society mansion with some girl.” And that, he says, ‘‘just don’t go. It wasn’t helping me do what’s really exciting to me, which is to make a riff that’ll get you off. Ultimately, that’s what I want to be able to do.”

Apparently he has hit upon one or two of those riffs. Or 31 or 62. “I like Funhouse, I like Raw Power, I like... there’s about three or four outtakes from Raw Power that come out in specialty stores called ‘I Got A Right,’ ‘Gimme Some Skin,’ ‘I’m Sick Of You’ and ‘Scene Of The Crime.’ Those four songs were gonna be on Raw Power but then Tony DeFries thought they were too subversive. And then there’s parts of The Idiot that I think are great, like ‘Nightclubbing’ I think is really cool.”

Obviously, Iggy doesn’t care much for any of his contributions to music.

‘‘Fuck you!,” he shouts with glee. ‘‘Wait! I’m not finished! And I really like the new one.”

Instinct is the hardest, most honestly energetic offering he’s made in years. He’s avoided the blatant commercialism of the previous Blah Blah Blah and Zombie Birdhouse and, coincidentally, he has also avoided the coddling of a well-meaning but nonetheless smothering mentor. Iggy’s not gonna be tucked under anyone’s wing for quite some time.

“Yeah,” he affirms. ‘‘I took a lot more responsibility on this one. It’s more my baby than Blah Blah Blah was. I don’t think I was quite ready then. I think I needed a strong producer and David (Bowie) did a great job, but on this one this is my ballgame. It’s my conception and I wrote it myself. It’s the very first time I’ve written the majority of the material on an album of mine—either the Stooges or Iggy Pop.”

He decided to take the risk now and jump headfirst into his tenth solo project because of a simple fact that he’s avoided copping to until recently: “Because my name’s on the front of it, so I ought to be the one that’s portrayed inside. The people that get it ought to have a clear understanding of what this fucker’s about. I want them to know this is the music / dig. This is what I’m capable of writing. This is what I’m singin’ about and this is the way / think it should sound.”

But Iggy, why...

“And then you could say ‘Why didn’t you do that before, asshole?’ ” He laughs again and the Brooklyn Bridge shudders. “I don’t think I was ever as capable. I always tried to do as much as I thought I could do well. But at this point, I felt very competent.” So don’t expect Bowie to give Iggy a boost in the near future. In fact, the only thing Bowie lent to Instinct was his ears when Iggy played the finished master for him. “He heard side one when he came over the other day and he really liked it a lot,” he brags.

That’s not what he told me, I tease.

The bridge topples as Mr. Pop lets out another steam of har dee har hars. “He said, ‘Vicki, that shit sucks.’ Ha!”

Precisely. Now Iggy, when...

“When you whip out your cock...”

Uh, not exactly what I had in mind. Do you have a train of thought going?

“No,” guffaw, guffaw. “Why don’t you bite my cock Vicki? You can put that in the article; ‘And then he said “Why don’t you bite my cock?” ’

“It’s bigger than ever now,” he boasts of his I’il Ig. “It gets really big whenever I get below the Tropic of Cancer. I think it’s the humidity! I challenge (fill in the name of the band you most detest) to compare their cock sizes! My cock’s bigger than anybody’s! It’d take a bigger man.”

Like Frank.Sinatra maybe? After Jim Morrison, he’s always the next to be mentioned on Iggy’s list of idols. It’d be interesting to hear what Ol’ Blue Eyes thinks of the World’s Forgotten Boy following in his footsteps.

“Yeah right! I know, I know. He’d probably get really upset! Especially if he got a hold of a nude picture of me pinching my tit with my cock out or something. He’d get pretty upset.”

Ahh, the Iggy charm. His animalistic behavior stemmed from a belief that he had to break all the rules. But that started to change when he came to realize that simply being da Ig is the biggest crime of all.

“That was when I realized that just to be able to do what I do for a living, or whatever you want to call it, is really getting away with a lot,” he muses. “It’s something that a whole lotta people would aspire to, and something

I’m really lucky to be doing.. .so the other stuff kinda pales by comparison.”

The “other stuff” is the stuff of legend. Things like slashing his chest with glass, waving his dick around onstage, becoming a drug addict, losing his mind. You know. Stuff.

“And the other big thing is—and I’m going to be serious now—is that it was when I got the confidence to start thinking that instead of just being a failure that everybody says ‘Boy, he may be a failure, but he’s better than these successful guys,’ I can be better

and I can be successful too. And once I started to think that I could make it, then a lot of things fell into place and I started to do things out of confidence and aggression instead of fear and defensiveness.”

Did success become his motivation at that point? “No, but it became a possiblity. For years I had to eat a lot of crow. Let’s look at 1972. I recorded Raw Power and £lton John recorded ‘Rocket Man.’ You know what I’m saying? He got the hit, he got the money, he got the push and I got dirt."

Hell hath no fury like Iggy scorned.

Some targets, are, of course, easier than others, but his aim is actually pretty true. The old trailercamp baby knows resentment all too well.

“You betcha. You betcha,” he steams. “I even resented having to hear (‘Rocket Man’) when I went to eat pizza. And I didn’t like him promising he’d help out the Stooges when he really wanted to have a go at James Williamson’s behind. That’s what he wanted. He was infatuated with James, which I believe he mentioned in the pages of CREEM magazine back then...

“There were a lot of guys like that I felt were not even in the same universe with me as far as the quality of what they were doing. But they were gettin’ it and I wasn’t. You know what I mean? So it discouraged me and things got worse. Now I kinda feel that people might check out what I have to offer.”

On the goods he’s currently got to peddle, Iggy once again gets a hand from a collaborator of a different color: ex-Sex Pistol and hotshot guitarist Steve Jones.

“We worked together real natural—I don’t think either one of us has had any problems with the other’s taste. We worked a whole lot, for months and months. I came out to L.A. and actually moved there for the summer before I recorded Blah Blah Blah, and I worked with him every day doing demos and trying to improve my singing and soitgwriting. And I think that work formed the basis for our collaborations on Blah Blah Blah and on this album. We’ve still got maybe 20 songs in the can—some have parts of the chorus missing or I don’t like the title. One of them has a bit of funk in it, so I sent the tapes to a few funk musicians. Bootsy Collins is laying a track on it today, in fact, to put that on a soundtrack. And some of the other stuff we may redo on another album, either his or mine.”

Another track, he’s proud to point out, is prominently featured in Crocodile Dundee II. Iggy isn’t. Despite his frequent auditions, you also didn’t see him in Splash, Cocoon or Making Mr. Right. If all goes well, however, you’ll see him star in the made-toorder title role for Zombie Cop.

“It’s a killer script,” he enthuses. “I hope I get it. I haven’t had time to dick around with lessons lately, I’ve been making records. In New York circles, analysis is something that often comes up. Actors, like Dustin Hoffman, commonly go through that. But it’s not really for me. I just went straight into the institution when I felt like (I needed) it.” He cuts loose another skyline-leveling laugh. “I went in in 1975, knocked on the door and said ‘Let me in!’ I didn’t need to go through therapy or anything else! I went to the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute and I said ‘Look, I’m a young guy and I’ve lost control. I’d like a little help while I get it back.’ ”

“I even resented having to hear ‘Rocket Man’ when I went to eat pizza.”

He knew he’d totally lost it when he found himself treating one too many record bizzer to a vomit shower. Still, Iggy has no time for regrets.

‘‘None. It’s just the sort of thing that this particular creative person had to go through. ‘‘A lot of people I know who have the least problems with things like that and people who are always correct in their lives are the biggest assholes I’ve ever met. It’s an easy life if you can’t create or if you don’t have any emotions that you’re willing to stick by. It’s pretty easy to just cruise by in this world.

‘‘Like when I started out I was like a tomcat or something, you know? It was like, pluck me out of the garbage and I’d get real stoned and sing a song for a while then I’d go off and chase a girl or chase a high or something. Whereas I’ve learned discipline over the past few years and I knew I as I was acquiring it that it was going to be years before the discipline was going to pay off. But now I’m gonna tell you, it’s paid off. And I can express myself, and I know it.

“And it feels real good.”