Iggy Pop (13 page)

As it was, Cale demonstrated commendable commitment to his charges, who overran on their five-day booking at the Hit Factory and had to move to Mastertone studios on 42nd Street. Richard Bosworth and his band Jennifer’s Friends were booked into Mastertone and were forced to sit and wait as this session over-ran: ‘John Cale refused to relinquish the studio! He was a very intimidating presence, and no one was going to argue with him. But there was a big confrontation, a fist fight, because John wouldn’t let their recording time be cut short.’ One of the first people outside the Stooges privileged to hear their debut recording, Bosworth’s reaction would anticipate that of most of the American public. ‘It seemed
totally
alien. Disturbingly different, raw, with screaming vocals. It was very, very different from anything I’d heard before, and I remember thinking, This won’t fly.’

Iggy’s subsequent denunciation of Cale was a classic Oedipal sentiment, a need to prove he was superior to his mentors. But in many respects the Stooges, Jim included, were not as worldly-wise as they would later make out. Joel Brodsky was commissioned by Bill Harvey to shoot the album cover at the beginning of May. Once the band arrived at his studio on 27th Street he found them uncommunicative and unresponsive. But he’d heard that the singer, Iggy, was ‘physical’, and asked if he’d fancy jumping up in the air for the shoot. ‘OK, no problem,’ was the reply. Brodsky finally captured an image of Iggy leaping in the air with no thought of how he would land, while Ron and Scott wince at the prospect of his imminent fall - which was, inevitably, flat on his face. Brodsky rushed the singer to St Vincent’s emergency room, where he had five stitches put in his chin. The stitches were airbrushed out for the final album cover, which was a straight rehash of Elektra’s sleeve for the Doors’ debut LP.

The recording over, and with a release date scheduled for later in the summer, the band returned to Ann Arbor buoyed up by the supporters they’d found in New York, who included Josephine Mori and Natalie Schlossman - soon to be known as Natalie Stoogeling - from the Elektra press office, and Steve Harris, vice president in charge of promotions and marketing at Elektra. In the summer of that year, the Stooges became a regular on the festival circuit, and crowds from outside of Detroit were treated to the sight of them for the first time. On 23 May, Ben Edmonds, a fan of the MC5 who’d heard about the Stooges via Danny Fields, persuaded the Delaware, Ohio student union to book the Stooges at the Grey Chapel, a large college venue that held 2,500 people. The Stooges walked on to the huge stage to see around a dozen people in the entire auditorium. ‘It was a magical performance,’ says Ben Edmonds. ‘The three Stooges just stood there on this huge stage, while you could see Iggy checking out all that space and working out what to do with it.’

Dressed in cut-off jeans, in a page-boy haircut, with no shirt, Iggy launched into his dance, and the small crowd, not one of whom knew the band’s music, were transfixed. ‘I didn’t know any of the music, and couldn’t distinguish any songs apart from one that went “no fun, my babe”,’ says Edmonds, ‘but I was totally mesmerised by Iggy. I’d never seen anybody move like that before.’ The singer seemed transfixed by the elemental music, so much so that at one point he picked up the shards of a broken drumstick and started scraping it, almost absentmindedly, over his chest. ‘He apparently increased the pressure with each stroke,’ remembers Edmonds, ‘because red welt lines soon became visible, which then discharged trickles of blood down his torso. I was dumbstruck.’

After the show, Edmonds watched as the singer donned a white T-shirt and blood began to ooze through the fabric. ‘Watching that made me more queasy than even committing the act,’ says Edmonds. ‘This was mild compared to the damage he’d later inflict on himself, but this, it turned out, was the first time he’d ever done such a thing.’

One audience member who was also shocked by the spectacle came up to speak to Jim after the performance. Her name was Wendy Robin Weisberg. Nineteen years old, and an ex-girlfriend of Panther White, she came from a wealthy suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, and had met Jim via Panther during his one term at the University of Michigan. He’d been struck by the slim girl, with her long dark hair, the first time they met. Now that he was a professional musician, with a record deal, she seemed all the more intrigued, and the sight of him bleeding on stage had confused and stimulated her. Soon Jim established that Wendy ‘was a virgin. I just had to have her.’

What transpired, say Jimmy and Susan Silver, epitomised Jim’s obsession with getting what he wanted: ‘There was no logic to it. Remember, you’re talking about a guy who later nearly killed himself with drugs and addiction - not someone who makes good choices in life!’ Jimmy and Susan went up with Jim to visit Wendy and her parents. ‘They had a very nice house in a rich suburb, and for some reason I remember her father was friends with Jayne Mansfield.’

Wendy’s father, Louis, had played sax with the Ted Lewis big band in his youth, and had worked for the American Meat Company before building up a chain of fifteen Giant Tiger discount stores around Cleveland. Like Jim, Louis was a keen golfer, and Louis and wife Jeannette were at first quite taken with the intense, well-spoken singer, until it became obvious that Jim’s advances towards their daughter were getting serious. Within a few weeks Jim was obsessed with Wendy, and would take her to sunbathe that summer on the beach at Silver Lake, Michigan, the resort town where he used to take Lynn Klavitter; inevitably, he became the butt of the Stooges’ humour. ‘Everyone would laugh about the whole thing, and she’d be pouting. She was a pretty little thing, but I think they were all a bit too much for her,’ says Laura Seeger, who was living with roadie Roy Seeger. ‘The joke was that she wouldn’t dish out,’ says Kathy Asheton. ‘He was gonna marry her so he could have sex, and so he took a pretty good chiding from the guys.’

Jimmy Silver tried counselling his charge. ‘I didn’t think it made sense, he and I talked about it, and like everything else it was just something he wanted to do.’ He tried counselling Wendy, too. ‘I think I said, Do you have any sense of what you’re getting into, living in the attic?’ but Wendy was also intent on getting married, primarily, thought the Silvers, to rebel against her conservative Jewish background. Ultimately, arranging Jim’s wedding turned out to be another of Jimmy Silver’s many responsibilities, and the Stooges’ manager accordingly sent off to the Universal Life Church, which offered mail-order ministries in the back of
Rolling Stone
magazine. Duly ordained, Jimmy officiated at the wedding of the happy couple, with Susan providing a macrobiotic spread, on the lawn of the Fun House, on 12 July 1969. The Stooges and the MC5 attended the wedding, as did the MC5’s new producer, Jon Landau, and Mr and Mrs Osterberg. The Weisbergs stayed home. Russ Gibb telephoned the Fun House and put the call on air on his radio show. Ron Asheton presided as best man; showing commendable sympathy with Wendy’s Jewish heritage, he elected to leave the SS uniform that he normally sported on festive occasions in the closet, and opted for a Luftwaffe officer’s uniform (‘they were soldiers, not political’) with sword, Knight’s Cross with oak leaves and riding boots.

The nuptials were a blissful occasion for all concerned, bar the MC5, who were disgusted there were no burgers or steak on the strictly macrobiotic menu. ‘Of course we all wound up getting real drunk,’ says Ron. ‘I remember I fucked some girl, then I came back out in my uniform and passed out with her on the front porch. It was a historic party.’ Kathy Asheton made a more surprising conquest. ‘I decided to show up in this dress. I didn’t wear dresses. And the day of Jim’s wedding was the day he chose to make his advance on me. Which I decided was not a good sign!’ Bill Cheatham attended with Dave Alexander: ‘Dave looked at Jim’s new tennis shoes and said, I bet those tennis shoes outlast the marriage. ’

For just a few weeks, Jim remained up in the attic with Wendy, who tidied up Jim’s slovenly apartment and furnished it with tasteful wicker furniture from her father’s store. The Stooges, meanwhile, mocked her ceaselessly, particularly after they formed the theory that all she ever ate was potatoes. ‘She was a pretty girl, but they all referred to her as the Potato Woman and said she looked like a potato,’ says Silver. Meanwhile, says Ron, Dave and Scotty would raid the couple’s room during their absences, pilfering food, earning the unfortunate Wendy’s enmity. ‘Then Iggy realised it was her or the boys, he decided to start hanging with us again, so she got fed up with him and split.’ The Ashetons remember Wendy’s tenure as lasting less than a month; when it became obvious that the marriage was a failure, Louis Weisberg reportedly pressured for an annulment, so that Jim Osterberg would have no claim on the family wealth. ‘It was all done on the pretext that [Jim] was a homosexual and the marriage was never consummated, ’ says Ron. ‘That was the deal, so he would not be privy to any money.’

Soon after the annulment, Jim was sitting with Kathy Asheton in the TV room at the Fun House. They waited for everyone to go, then held hands and went up together to his attic room. ‘We both got up, went upstairs, and he was very sweet and very nice. We kept it private - he was very respectful because it might cause problems with my brothers. He was always very attentive, and one of the few people I could rely on.’

Kathy knew enough of Jim to understand that a long-term love affair was simply not on the cards. They would remain friends, even as she saw him and her brothers go to ‘a dark place’. But in that summer of 1969, the Stooges’ existence seemed blissful. The band were aware there was an envy of their mystique, but felt ‘untouchable’, remembers Ron; even though their live shows were often still greeted with bewilderment or disdain, nothing could disturb the Stooges’ magical aura, their conviction that their music was unique, and the belief that one day the world would realise this fact.

Even hostile, awkward encounters had their own share of comedy. When the band played the Delta Pops festival in July, at the Delta Community College just north of Saginaw, Michigan, there was a huge stir when Iggy confronted one woman in the audience, scooped her up from her seat, and started carrying her around the auditorium. Pete Andrews, the promoter of the festival, which included the MC5, the SRC, Bob Seger and others, was watching the performance ‘standing next to the administrator of the university. And it turns out the girl was this guy’s daughter.’ Andrews says he crawled across the floor of the venue to reach the singer, and held quite a lucid conversation with him. ‘I said, it’s a bit serious, could you put her down and stop this? He said, Oh gee, I’m sorry, put her down and went back to the stage.’ Even though he claims he withheld the Stooges’ $300 fee, and his acts were instantaneously barred from the college, Andrews was privately indulgent of the band. They had a pretty good act, and they’d never hurt anybody. The story of ‘The Dean’s Daughter’ would become a staple of press articles about the Stooges, and Iggy would subsequently claim he had become ‘obsessed with the chick’ and bit her - and that ultimately the college had backed down and paid his $300.

As the Stooges’ debut album finally reached the pressing plant, the band’s mood was one of cautious optimism. ‘We were happy - it was like a stepping stone was in place,’ says Jimmy Silver, and that optimism would be borne out by reviews that were generally supportive. Lenny Kaye, later a celebrated writer, and guitarist with Patti Smith, was one of the first in print, suggesting in
Fusion
magazine that the album’s rootlessness and lethargy perfectly captured the mood of the times, and that ‘1969 may well be the year of the Stooges’. The
Rolling Stone
review, which ran in October, described the Stooges as proof of ‘the causal relationship between juvenile delinquency and rock ’n’ roll’: the statement was a compliment, rather than a criticism, and writer Ed Ward concluded, ‘I kind of like it,’ although his employers were unconvinced. Nonetheless, the nation’s radio industry, and most of the public, generally ignored the album, which sold a just about respectable 32,000 copies in its first year and scraped to 106 in the US album charts.

In retrospect, the Stooges’ debut album was an album out of time, an artefact that was about as admired as an African tribal painting would be at an exhibition of Victorian pre-Raphaelites. Released the same week that the Woodstock Festival took place, into a world that was obsessed with surface detail, technical proficiency and peace ’n’ love, it was regarded as stone-age and retrogressive. Later it would become revered as an early punk classic. Both interpretations are equally simplistic. For
The Stooges
today actually sounds fresher and more contemporary than most of the punk, alternative, glam and thrash-metal material it allegedly spawned. The album took rock music and stripped it down to its barest essentials: simple three-chord riffs and unforgettable tunes, underpinning deadpan, bored lyrics. No one else had ever attempted to put this kind of anomie to music. The songs too seemed brutishly simplistic; the generally slow pace meant they were all the more immense and imposing. At a time when rock music was becoming positively baroque, it was no surprise that this simplistic manifesto met with general incomprehension. It would take a full decade for its importance to be recognised, as the Sex Pistols and other UK punk bands recorded cover versions of songs like ‘No Fun’, treating
The Stooges
as both a musical and lyrical primer.

Critics have often used the term ‘dumb genius’ when discussing the Stooges’ debut. Much of the album’s appeal comes from its flat, bored, cynical lyrics - lyrics that were a straightforward depiction of life in Ann Arbor: ‘Last year I was twenty-one. Didn’t have a lot of fun.’ Yet the minimalism of the lyrics derives from high ambition, not a small vocabulary, crafted by the boy who had impressed his school contemporaries with his gift for memorable phrases. The musicianship, too, is frequently stunning: Scott Asheton (or Rock Action, as he’d started to term himself) is arrestingly unconventional, his drum patterns echoing Iggy’s vocals, rather than simply marking out four beats to the bar. Ron Asheton’s guitar playing, meanwhile, was unique; some of the basic chord patterns obviously came from the band’s garage band roots, but there were ringing, droning open notes that added to the claustrophobia and monumentality of the music, and at points where other musicians would have resolved a sequence by switching chords, Ron would resolutely avoid convention. John Cale spotted the outlandish overtones of Ron’s playing and emphasised it by adding a droning viola or piano here and there. Bob Sheff, now a respected avant-garde composer under the name of ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, describes the results as: ‘So ahead of its time - it captures the simplicity of the blues, yet those minimalist, droning effects on songs like “I Wanna Be Your Dog” were very cutting edge. It paralleled the approach of composers like Terry Riley.’