Iggy Pop (12 page)

John Cale and Danny Fields’ enthusiasm for the Stooges would help make them the darlings of New York’s hip society, and a couple of weeks after Cale’s visit to Ann Arbor, the band flew to New York, where Danny Fields introduced them to the city’s cornucopia of delights. They took in all of Fields’ hangouts: Andy Warhol’s Factory, Steve Paul’s The Scene nightclub and Max’s Kansas City, the haunt of various Warhol acolytes and, it seemed, just about anyone of sophisticated artistic sensibilities and exotic sexual predilections. According to Danny, however, Iggy needed little introduction. ‘He was born sophisticated and confident. He was a star before he was a star. He was Iggy. By that time he was already famous in the backroom of Max’s.’ Iggy moved with ease through Max’s various factions, the most crucial of which were the Drellas - the nickname for the Warhol crowd. The Miseries were ‘all these thin pregnant women in black, who always looked unhappy,’ says Fields; the Bananas were gay Cuban exiles. ‘The Phoebes were the busboys,’ says Danny; ‘I called myself Phoebe’; and then there were inevitably intriguing characters of indeterminate gender and orientation from John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam’s Play House of the Ridiculous set. Not that Ron and Scott were impressed, says Ron: ‘Being Midwest naive people, we never fell for that bullshit, man, it’s supposed to be great that you are some scumball, or some derelict, so Iggy and Scottie and myself are always like, fuck that.’

The Scene, the club run by Steve Paul - a canny, frighteningly smart friend of Danny Fields, invariably dressed in blue - was the other main hip location, and it was there that Jim met Nico, the Germanic icemaiden, whose recent album had attracted critical plaudits, but only marginal sales. Before long, says John Cale, ‘Nico was in love with Iggy. For Jim Morrison reasons. As usual.’ The pair, with their disparate backgrounds, were fascinated with each other, although Jim’s fellow Stooges sniggered at the sight of the couple: ‘Jim looked like the black dwarf next to her!’ laughs Jimmy Silver. The two, over a few brief nights, became the star couple at Max’s, where Iggy was the focus of everyone’s attention - boys and girls. Leee ‘Black’ Childers, one of the Warhol crew, was chatting to Jaime Andrews - an actor who went on to work for MainMan - when the two of them spotted Nico standing next to Iggy, with her hand down his pants. ‘I wonder if I could do that?’ Andrews said to Childers, before walking over to the couple. Nico pulled her hand out; Andrews put his in. Iggy stood there, enjoying the attention.

Nico became so enamoured of the young singer that she told him, ‘I vont to get out of the city, I vont to come to Detroit.’ A few weeks later, she flew to the city, and the two lovers spent two weeks sequestered in the attic of the Fun House. ‘It was totally bizarre,’ says Jimmy Silver. ‘This striking regal being, who somehow didn’t look real, living up in the attic.’ Nico charmed the Stooges - who were disturbed by the presence of a foreign woman disrupting their boys’ club - by lovingly cooking vegetable curries and leaving opened $25 bottles of wine for them to taste. Despite their suspicion of such effete European pursuits, the band were eventually won over. Jim, too, cheerfully admits ‘she had no problem corrupting me’ - although, in these as yet innocent times, the corruption consisted of drinking European wines and learning to eat pussy. In the last few days of her stay, Nico was joined by François de Menil - scion of the Texas oil-drilling and art-collection dynasty - who brought a small crew to shoot a promotional film for Nico’s song ‘Frozen Warnings’, shot in the cornfields behind the Fun House. The three-minute short was, according to de Menil, shot on spec rather than as a record company-financed promo, and looked like a cross between a European art-house movie and a low-budget horror flick: Nico plays the brooding icemaiden in a chill Michigan landscape studded with dismembered mannequins; Iggy revisits his white-face mime-influenced look, while moustachioed roadie John Adams wanders around with a flaming cross in suitably post-apocalyptic fashion. A few days later, Nico was gone, having left a beautiful Indian shawl for Jimmy and Susan Silver in thanks for their hospitality - and eventually she fled for Europe. Jim reverted to his former, carefree bachelor state. However, around that time, it transpired that Jim was to become a father, with Paulette Benson, a friend of Sigrid Dobat, who was MC5 guitarist Fred Smith’s girlfriend. Jim’s son, named Eric Benson, was born on 26 February 1969. For perhaps obvious reasons, Paulette decided to bring up her son without Jim’s help; she moved to California, and Jim would have little contact with the child over the next decade.

Over the spring of 1969, the Stooges worked on developing enough songs for their debut album. John Cale had agreed to produce the band on the basis that they ‘make the record and forget about what’s on stage’. For that reason, apart from tantalising clues, no true record remains of early Stooges performances, and those early freeform ‘songs’, including ‘I’m Sick’, ‘Asthma Attack’, ‘Goodbye Bozos’ and ‘Dance Of Romance’, were abandoned or reworked. In three months of twenty-minute rehearsal sessions, minimal songs were sculpted, piece by piece, from the primordial matter of those early riffs.

The standout song was crafted from the fragment of Byrds riff that Ron had first heard on his last acid trip back in April. It would become the perfect illustration of the maxim ‘talent borrows, genius steals’, for the Byrds’ simple two-note guitar line was lifted wholesale to become the basis of ‘1969’. But where any other band, including the Byrds, would feel the need to embellish something so simple, the Stooges unlocked its primitive beauty simply by leaving it unadorned. The song was remarkable as much for what was left out as what was included; where convention would suggest augmenting the song’s basic two-chord structure, or resolving it by escaping to a third chord, the Stooges simply repeated themselves: ‘Another year for me and you. Another year with nothing to do.’ The musical dead-end, trapped within two chords, perfectly expresses the boredom and claustrophobia of the song’s deadpan disaffection.

‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ was carved out of another riff that Ron had started playing in his room; Jim had instantly spotted ‘that’s a goodie’. It was another simple motif, similar to a standard blues riff from Yusuf Lateef’s ‘Eastern Market’, a staple of the Stooges’ listening, but set against a musical drone it transforms into something elemental, inexorable and far more malevolent. Jim would later claim that its basic lyrics were romantic, expressing the simple yearning to lie in a girl’s lap, but the song’s sado-masochistic overtones undoubtedly betray the influence of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Venus In Furs’. ‘No Fun’, which the band were playing live by the spring, was based on a simple chord change familiar from Question Mark and the Mysterians’ garage staple ‘96 Tears’ - in this instance, though, it was shorn of its seventh-chords to make it, as Danny Fields put it ‘un-Blues’. Meanwhile, the dirgy ‘Dance Of Romance’ - what would today be called a classic ‘stoner riff’ - gained a lyrical, romantic opening, a vehicle for Jim’s desire to sing the words ‘I Love You’. It was given the title ‘Ann’, partly in tribute to the ever-tolerant and motherly Ann Asheton - although the gossip at Hill Street, according to White Panther Minister of Culture official Hiawatha Bailey, was that it was inspired by Anne Opie Wehrer, the charismatic, blue-blooded doyenne of Ann Arbor’s avant-garde scene: ‘She was an amputee, had lost one leg to cancer, and when Jim would see her stranded in the audience he would drop his wild-man persona and carry her, tenderly, to where she needed to be.’

As the Stooges worked with what was, for them, unstinting zeal, there was troubling news from New York. At the end of January, Danny Fields was gossiping in the company’s New York office about the company vice president, Bill Harvey, a man who had always been Fields’ nemesis: ‘He was a good art director, but the opposite kind of person I found attractive on this earth.’ Harvey heard Fields speculate that Bill’s daughter’s upcoming marriage was a shotgun wedding, ‘and smacked me in the head!’ says Fields. ‘He had been waiting for the opportunity [to sack me] for a long time.’ And he did.

With Fields gone, for a new job in publicity at Atlantic records, his major signings had no one to champion their cause at Elektra. Then on 13 February, Sinclair placed an advertisement in the Ann Arbor
Argus
proclaiming ‘fuck Hudsons’, in protest at the Detroit record store who had pulled the MC5’s
Kick Out The Jams
album from their shelves because of J.C. Crawford’s use of the word ‘motherfucker’. Holzman decreed that the ’5 were bringing the label’s name into disrepute, and dropped them. The spat produced a short-term benefit for the Stooges, for Jimmy Silver realised that Holzman might be intimidated by the loss of another high-profile band, and decided to push for a bigger advance. ‘Jon Landau (the writer and future MC5 producer) was in Ann Arbor to see the MC5 and he put me onto this fantastic lawyer called Alan Bomser, who was nicknamed Bomser the Momzer - Bomser the bastard - because he was so tough.’ Silver and Bomser went to see Holzman in New York, and when the Elektra boss started huffing about his ‘responsibility to his shareholders’, Bomser asked Silver to leave the room. ‘Five minutes later Bomser calls me back in, and says Jac’s agreed to what we’ve asked, $25,000. I’ve no idea how he talked him into it. Maybe Alan had a picture of Jac fucking an aardvark!’

The Stooges’ many detractors would not have been surprised to know that the band’s first recording session started on April Fool’s Day, at New York’s Hit Factory, at one in the afternoon. The studio was situated on Times Square, over a peep show, according to Jim. There was conflict from the off when an engineer told the band their Marshall amplifiers were too loud, and that Hit Factory owner Jerry Ragovoy always had his soul musicians record with smaller amps. Iggy’s negotiation tactic was to have a tantrum: ‘I took a deep breath, and said I don’t care who the fuck Jerry Ragovoy is, you don’t know anything about
this
! And that was always my attitude: stay away, get back. And then we set up the full stack.’

Ron Asheton remembers the band staged a sit-down strike and sat in the corner smoking hash until John Cale suggested they turn the amps down from full to nine, in order to get the performance on tape without too much leakage. But still there were problems. ‘It was very hard to get those tempos up,’ Jim remembers. ‘With an audience the tempos would come up because we were nervous. In fact, we’d all be shitting our collective little pants. But without the audience the dope took over.’ Finally, Iggy and Cale realised that if the singer danced in the studio as the backing tracks went down, the band would speed up somewhat from their pot-induced torpor.

The Stooges had arrived with ‘1969’, ‘No Fun’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and ‘Ann’ prepared, and realising that this would be insufficient, worked up the dirge-like ‘We Will Fall’, based on a chant by Indian guru Swami Ramdas, whose biography Dave Alexander had borrowed from Jimmy Silver. In addition, they also recorded a freeform jam - a chaotic assemblage of wah wah guitar and wordless moans - that would languish in the Elektra vaults for many years, and is quite possibly a version of ‘Asthma Attack’. Each song featured a lengthy freak-out, and together the six songs made up well over half an hour, plenty for a vinyl album, thought the Stooges. But Holzman disagreed after hearing the first mixes, and asked if there were any more songs. ‘I said, yeah, we’ve got more,’ said Ron, and the band returned to the Chelsea Hotel and wrote ‘Little Doll’, ‘Not Right’ and ‘Real Cool Time’, ‘in an hour’, according to Ron. ‘That was the magic Stooge time, when I could just sit down and come up with the shit.’ In every case the lyrics were drawn from Stooges slang. ‘Little doll, real cool time, those were words we used every day,’ says Ron. ‘Real Cool Time’ and ‘Not Right’ recycled the basic chords of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ to great effect; ‘Little Doll’ was a straight lift from a bass line that appears halfway through ‘Upper And Lower Egypt’ by Pharaoh Sanders - the ex-Coltrane sax player and new jazz pioneer who, coincidentally, shared an interest in ancient Egyptian anthropology with the Stooges’ singer.

According to Cale, the recording sessions at the Hit Factory were too frenetic for Nico to visit for long, but Jim still retains a memory of her ‘sitting in the control room, with a very severe expression, knitting, while [Cale] sat there in a Transylvanian black cape. It set up an atmosphere.’

Although Cale was undoubtedly the dominant presence at the sessions, the first-time producer was actually slightly nervous: ‘I was wet behind the ears running a studio session and it was really difficult. I found myself just wanting to be part of the band.’ Jimmy Silver remembers Cale as being committed, communicative and full of suggestions. ‘Jim described a sound he wanted, and Cale goes, That’s a Cuban instrument called a guiro, there’s a 24-hour music store near here, do you want me to send out for one? Then they got into the Stooges’ mentality, and it was, Oh that’s too much trouble, don’t bother.’

Nonetheless, Cale managed to get the Stooges’ ‘monosyllabic slab of noise’ on tape, while adding his own more literate, European sensibility. But when he attempted to bias the mix to give Iggy’s voice more of a Kurt Weill ‘art’ edge, there was a confrontation. ‘I was trying to characterise Iggy’s vocal, make it a little more evil,’ confesses Cale. ‘I decided I was going to work the [mixing] board and went after this idea to the horror of Jim, who was sitting there listening to his vocals get thinner and thinner.’ For a studio novice, Jim was very specific about what he wanted - in fact, today he maintains that after a major fallout he remixed the album himself, without Cale, assisted by Elektra boss Jac Holzman. Cale remembers he abandoned his approach and that engineer Lewis Merenstein helped broker a compromise mix. Today, Holzman has no memory of a remix, while Lewis Merenstein - a celebrated producer in his own right, responsible for Van Morrison’s
Astral Weeks
- concurs with Cale: ‘It is as John said. I certainly know that without John the album would not have happened.’ Nonetheless, Iggy would later claim, ‘John Cale had little or nothing to do with the sound. He shouldn’t have been there,’ a sentiment that Danny Fields dismisses as ‘unworthy’.