Once you pop you can't stop

If ever there was an argument for reformation, The Stooges are it. Iggy Pop was always a Herculean live performer, but five years ago he’d reached a point of diminishing returns with a succession of road bands who couldn’t replicate the brutalising but highly nuanced thrust and throb of the Asheton brothers Ron and Scott.
When The Stooges did finally reform in Detroit in 2003, they had lost none of their astonishing raw power, delivering material from their eponymous debut and Funhouse, plus a handful of new songs, with an intensity and commitment that put bands half their age to shame.
This year saw the release of The Weirdness, their first album in over 30 years produced by Steve Albini, plus, triumphant performances at Glastonbury and the Electric Picnic, which re-established them as one of the greatest live bands in the world. Here, Iggy Pop reflects on the long term effort required to function within the confines of a band, his reputation as the Godfather of Punk, his complex relationship with David Bowie, his late father, and the difference between Dr Osterberg and Mr Pop.

Dave Fanning: Iggy, when the Stooges got together first, it was for friendship reasons. What was the motivation in 2007 for you all getting back together?
Iggy Pop: I had a relapse of a similar feeling when I brought ’em down to Miami, the two brothers, to play with me. I felt like it was somebody I knew. It’s a little different from saying it’s somebody you like. (Laughs) But it’s close enough. So, there’s something familial that goes on within the group. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was an only child. Raised in fairly bleak surroundings. Not relatively so, but just as I became more worldly I realised that your average mid-western trailer park next to a corn row in February is fairly bleak. I found maybe half of what I was looking for in the group, and then as one is inevitably in all human relationships, the other half is a hell of a big disappointment. I had to pack my bag at some point, and go live another life. And finally things brought me back. The other half was public response.
As in, 'Would people just shut up asking me for 25, 30 years, if The Stooges are gonna get back together? Let’s just do it, let’s stop people asking the question.'
It crept up, that way. I was just sort of surprised. The way I experienced it was more... I got a gig offer and I was too busy, and I kept saying, ‘No, I haven’t got time to do a gig with these guys.’ I think Ron Asheton had always thought, ‘Give me my chance and the world is waiting for us,’ and I think the truth kind of ended up somewhere in the middle. We’ve been able to go out and try to distinguish ourselves.
And was it very important to make sure you had new material to go with it?
I thought it was vital that we made and presented new material. Which involves de-shitting one’s drawers (laughs). Artistic pressures, the possibility of loss, the possibility of risk, and all those things. Because we were always kind of an edgy band, and I thought that would give edge to our relationships and our performance. I don’t think we’re the kind of group that can go out like The Police and just do our old numbers and re-release our old albums. Although, I’m experienced enough to know that as soon as we came out and played shows again, and particularly when we made a new album, that would bring our old stuff to all sorts of people, because we’re living in a… it’s a really strange arts world in the capitalist West right now, in that we celebrate the product.
It blew my mind when MTV came out and people were willing to sit and watch advertisements as entertainment in the ’80s. I just thought ‘(splurts) Who’s gonna go for that?!’ And people did. And why not; I suppose if I worked on a collective farm in the Soviet era it would be my dream to grow my own damn onions. And in our society everyone’s little dream is to have ‘a product of my own’, so products themselves become an occasion. So I knew if we had a new product then everyone would compare that to our old products, and they’d listen to them, and have something to talk about.
Approaching The Weirdness, the album – you’d been solo for a long time, you’d collaborated here and there obviously, but back with these guys again, was it like, ‘Oh God, what am I doing here?’
Yeah! (laughs) The work I did with them when I was quite young, it was intensive. And part of the calculation, one of the ideas I had when I asked them to form a group was, ‘We’re going to get a house’ – it was an exercise in utopian communism. ‘We’re all gonna live in the house together and that experience is going to allow us to create something unique of our own’.
The reality is, in a week the plumbing’s going to be broken, there’s gonna be puke in the sink, there’s gonna be a nasty girl in room three somebody wants to get rid of, there're gonna be cops at the door… various disappointments and disagreements, you know – all these things… Money problems, cashflow problems. So it was very intense and difficult work, and you only know half of how difficult it is ’cos you’re so young. And really for me after that, I followed the same sort of path when I worked with David Bowie, when I sort of experienced the collapse of the group. The idea was the same, it was all socially based first. The music just was supposed to come out.
And it was all loony, which is the nice part. I always had faith in the non-sensible parts of business. I always thought if you could present something that really wasn’t so sensible or with-the-flow to people, they’d go for it. I just didn’t realise you needed lots and lots of people to go for it. The business pressures. A little bit of success was enough for me, as long as I could play my music.
But were you trying to make sure that you were in charge of all the business in those days? Were you micro-managing?
In the old days, no. (Laughs) I had no idea, ever. There was no business! No, on the contrary. Au contraire! I was basically your completely untenable pure artiste until I hit about 30. And then from about 30 ’til I worked with these guys again, I just sort of slogged it out within a narrower field. Got a little more sensible, got into a position, slowly but surely, of relative independence and power. And the music went within a narrower field.
And when I started working with these guys again I tried to re-create some of that by insisting that as soon as we started playing gigs that we’d begin getting together, travelling to get together at our own expense, without any backing from my record company, or anybody else, to write. I said, ‘Look, we’re doing well here, research and development is part of modern corporate life, let’s plough something in’, and we tried to always do that in personal houses, mostly mine in Florida, and keep it intimate and small.
What you were doing was taken up by Alice Cooper, KISS, Bowie. You didn’t get the showbiz, didn’t want the showbiz. Did you ever think that the drugs got in the way?
I suppose some drugs got in the way, but ultimately it just had more to do with there being different rewards for different virtues in this world. I’d still rather be me than any of the people you mentioned. I’m real happy being me. Our stuff was never designed to make a buck. Once I got to a certain point in my life, I looked around and realised, ‘Oh shit, you have to make a buck’ whether you want to or not. And I kinda got on that, and I made some bucks.
I don’t have the pride in that, that I have when I put on certain of the recordings I’ve been part of and listen to it and get a giggle of glee almost, cause I know damn well they’re out there where other people feared to tread, they’re more for real, I think, and they’re just better. But I do get a kind of a grim, ‘Alright, got some bucks for that, got some safety for that’. I had a late manager, a wonderful guy who arched his eyebrow at me one day and said, ‘Some people thrive on drama and crisis.’ (Laughs) I think he was trying to talk to me. So I may be one of those people, who always needs…
Okay, drama and crisis. I don’t know if The Stooges were kept together by LSD or fell apart through LSD, but by the mid-’70s, when David Bowie came along, did he save you from heroin addiction? Or did you save him?
There was a nice exchange there, and I think that the central… I think he’d offered to work more with The Stooges, a couple of times.
You would’ve met him at Max’s, Kansas City. Was that the first time?
Yeah, I met him at Max’s. And the group had folded for the first time. The group folded twice. Once the original Stooges folded in 1970, and I had become unsound. And the group folded again in about ’75, for good, until the new century. That first time, yeah, he was around, and Tony DeFries, his manager, was around, and they seemed to be on a mission to establish a beachhead in New York, and in some way to co-opt certain elements of the US underground.
(Laughs) You see, there you go – there’s no way you’d have done that! That’s almost Machiavellian…
It’s a different take on things. But if you listen to the records he was making at the time, they’re good solid finite skills that could be applied anywhere. Really. And I think that became a great musical strength for him later. You listen to Station To Station, and it’s kind of singing to a jazz band, a black jazz band, but it works. So he had some very nice skills and he wasn’t sure where to put ’em.
Whereas I would say, my band, we really knew where we wanted to put it, but the skills were really basic and sketchy. And I think with Lou Reed, he had a similar problem. He had a skill range which was awfully interesting to certain people but then to the rest, especially in America, you know, where people are… you’re raised to be a spud in that country, nobody knows where they are, for Christ’s sake – they’ve just learned to sit in chairs! They just scratch their head, really! (Laughs) Listen to that stuff! So I understood what they were doing.
Did the collaboration with Bowie open the European door to you?
It opened it this way: it got my ass over there. Once to England, and then again to Europe. But once those records came out, at first, a lot of Europeans just scratched their heads and said, ‘Who is this weird guy with Bowie?’ And the records got attention half because of his involvement and half because they were very good. Half the reason they were very good is cause he was really good on the records. But when I would go out live to play – except in London and Paris, where there were people who’d been waiting four years at that point to spit on me and pogo in my face – the rest of Europe, they just couldn’t care less.
He looked at what I was doing in the group and thought I didn’t need to be in the group. It was really good experimentation and a good outlet for him to fool around and try out some ideas on an Iggy Pop record. And sometimes he would just, on a very simple level, use me for practice, if he was gonna make a record in a certain studio with a certain engineer, he’d do mine first, and everything would get nice and greased up and his would go that much more smoothly, he’d know to avoid the cheese because there were flies on it. So there was some of that too.
And then I think he felt like giving somebody a hand, probably just for personal reasons in his own life and also cause I’d gotten tangled up in his management, which was never really his frankly, but with some people and production contracts that had kinda become a mess. So there was a lot of stuff going on.
You mentioned earlier on about growing up in a trailer park. Your dad was a university-educated English teacher in school, and you were living in a trailer park? Explain that one.
Dad was a wonderful man. He just passed away and I’ll be happy to get done with this tour and have some time at home to come to terms with that. Yeah he was, because my father had been orphaned, and he was raised during the Depression. As was my mother. And both of them were raised by people who had lost everything. And they’d retreated to their country cabin in Michigan, where I was born.
And on top of that, when he got to the age at which I was when I started to pursue my boyhood dreams, and he started to pursue his – there was a Second World War! And thank you very much, you’re now required to go to a stinking jungle for four years, and possibly get killed, and – he wanted to be a baseball player, originally – forget about that, and then when you come home (laughs) support this brat! While you try to put yourself through school that you never had a chance to do because you were off working. By the time I was old enough to observe him, it made him a person who was very concerned with things not going wrong. And he just didn’t want the burden of… Are you a home owner?
I am.
Do the pipes burst? (Laughs)
Absolutely!
And then you get not only a big bill but also some weird guy that said he was gonna show up at ten in the morning; he shows up at midnight with a gold chain, stinking of beer, and says ‘I’m a plumber, and I’ve got you by the balls’. (Laughs). And then they raise your tax, then the value of your property goes down, but you borrowed on it! He wasn’t looking for that, so that’s why we were in the trailer camp.
Did going to school with kids from a richer background make you aspire to something different?
I did see the money, and yeah, ‘I want to be part of that groovy life’. I didn’t know exactly what that life was like, but I knew that looked more impressive, and more the norm than mine. My dad made sure that the trailer park where we were living was in the Ann Arbour school system. It was nearer the bad town Ypsilanti, where he had been a teacher one time. It was tough black kids and hayseed hillbillies, unskilled labour, up from the South to work in the war plants, mostly. Had I been raised there, I might’ve wanted to conform to that ethic, and I might’ve ended up trying to mastermind some sort of robbery or something, I don’t know.
And then also, I mean I’m a vocalist in a band, like a lot of them, I’ve got kind of a big mouth. So I just kind of gravitated to… I enjoyed Civics, I enjoyed English Lit, I enjoyed debate, I enjoyed school politics… Until I got my first drum kit, and then it was like, (exhales loudly) ‘Fuck that, this feels good. Here’s something that feels good for me inside.’
And your parents loved you so much they let you rehearse in their bedroom, in the trailer.
They gave up their bedroom, yeah. Later, when I was trying to put The Stooges together, and work out what was behind a Muddy Water song, I had a piano in the living room that my mother rented for me, it took up half the room. They definitely went about twenty extra yards with me. So in a way, I found out later that I was a spoilt kid compared to the kids who were richer, cause I got a lot of attention, and care, and thought put into what they could do to help me grow. And I think a lot of kids who’s parents are job-overwhelmed don’t get that.
Okay, The Stooges come together, you start playing gigs, you do your three albums, it seems to go by in a blur. Did you consider that it could’ve gone on much longer, and that people would’ve got it by the end of the ’70s?
There are certainly other possible worlds, but I wouldn’t bother about it really. Why bother about it? I would say the third album, Raw Power, by that point – I hadn’t thought about it that way ’til recently – but really that was a collaboration between The Stooges, the original Stooges, which was really Ron and Scott Asheton and myself, and a friend, but it was the three of us more, and James Williamson. He really was more a collaborator than ever really a group member. He was the first guy who didn’t want to live in the house, and then later when he did live in the houses during the Mainman period he would be the only one that had a girl in there.
He was more advanced than us as an instrumentalist. So, those things could’ve worked out in a certain way, but I doubt it. I don’t think that we were ever what the market, and especially the people who run markets, wanted. You know, Ron Asheton made a point in an interview recently, saying, ‘Well, if things had been cool, if we’d stayed together, we could’ve been the American Stones’. But I wouldn’t have wanted to be the American Stones, and more to the point, if America’s gonna have a Stones, they want a really really accomplished imitation. They want Aerosmith. (Laughs) They don’t want scruffy, punky... so what we became was a prototype.
If anger was the motivation then, what’s the driving force behind the new Stooges album, The Weirdness?
I sing a lot about disappointment on The Weirdness, actually the dude singing is still the same dude in his twenties. It was the drummer’s idea to get me to put ‘Trollin’ first on the record. The guy in ‘Trollin’, he’s like: ‘Look, I just wanna walk down the street on a nice day while everybody else is working and I don’t feel like it, and I want to see a nice chick, and say hey, and see if I can pull, and la la la la la, and enjoy my car, and wear a cool t-shirt’.
And you know, that guy is gonna get ensnared in Weirdness. As that record goes on that poor little fella gets ensnared in more and more, and he’s going to the ATM to give money to everybody, and he’s feeling estrangement from just about everybody. ’Til finally at the end he’s fucking fried, which is why I put ‘I’m Fried’ at the end, you know? He’s fucking fried! (Laughs)
That would it in a nutshell. I don’t know if there was anger in those first records, it was real repressed, and we never… I mean you don’t hear me screaming much except during the guitar solos in those first records, the vocals sound like a guy throwin’ out a drawl. I could be almost a southern tobacco auctioneer, or pig seller.
While these guys, they play with a certain fury. But for some reason, it provoked a lot of anger. And that really surprised me, that the things I said just really upset people.
Well, first of all, you probably invented stage-diving, for God’s sake Iggy! And that was a new thing to a lot of people.
Yeah, there was that… Before me you had R’n’B singers like PJ Proby, who would…
Split his trousers.
Yeah, what he’d do was, he’d have a pair that were just tied up with fish line, and then he’d come out and (makes yelping sound), and you’d do the splits…
You mean it wasn’t real!
So with me, once mine started splitting, I thought, ‘That looks cool!’ and I started coming to the show with them already split, and tattered jeans. I don’t know who was doing tattered jeans in public before me. So there were a few innovations.
The ‘Iggy’ thing that you mentioned earlier, your real name is Jim. You allow people to call you Jim, and you allow people call you Iggy?
Sure.
I mean, you’re not going to go and see The Police, and go, ‘Oh there’s the lead singer: ‘Hi Gordon’.’ It’s not gonna happen.
(Laughs) They should!
If years ago the gap was between Jim and Iggy, are you both people now?
Oh... that’s a really, I haven’t thought about that, if there’s a gap. No, you’re right...
David Bowie created Ziggy Stardust to pretend that it wasn’t him, cause he might’ve wanted to do American soul music in two years time, or Station To Station, the jazz stuff, as you call it, a few years after that. So he had to create something that would last a certain amount of time.
I’d say fundamentally, the two have pretty much come together. I don’t know exactly who I am when I sit here and talk to you, but when I’m working I know who I am and that’s Iggy.
Well, as a final one, Iggy, you’ve reached 60. Cartilage lost in your hip, you got knee trouble, you got one leg shorter than the other. Where next?
Well, I don’t know. I suppose another week’s work now, and then, other than one show in Las Vegas, seven very nice months spent in the tropics. Probably the hardest thing I’ll have to do is pose for Playboy. I think I can manage!