Iggy Pop (15 page)

Mackay played one performance with the Stooges, and was given the obligatory nickname - Stan Sax. Then in mid-April Jim called to tell him they were leaving for Los Angeles in two days. He postponed his college exams, convinced he’d be back in a couple of weeks.

For the Stooges, their followers and their publicist, the recording of
Fun Hous
e was the most blissful period of their existence. The band flew into Los Angeles on Jim Osterberg’s twenty-third birthday, 21 April, and promptly moved into the Tropicana - a universe of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll in one shanty motel.

Situated on Santa Monica Boulevard by the heart of the Sunset Strip, the Trop was owned by legendary Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax. It was LA’s premier down-market rock ’n’ roll location. Andy Warhol was a regular (he would film
Heat
there in July 1971), Jim Morrison had only recently moved out after a two-year stay, and the day the Stooges moved in, Ed Sanders was on-site writing
The Family
, his disturbing, shockingly detailed story of the Manson murders that had horrified Los Angeles the previous summer. The four main Stooges commanded a suite each round the central swimming pool, where Jim would spend the early mornings building up an impressive suntan. The rest of the entourage, including new boy Mackay, road manager John Adams, plus roadies Bill Cheatham, Leo Beattie and Zeke Zettner, shared crummier six-dollar rooms at the edge of the motel. The first night at the Tropicana, Scotty found a sap in his room; Jimmy Silver found a gun in his rental car. In the evening after the gruelling recording sessions finished, the band wandered the garish neon-lit Strip, or wandered down to Long Beach (where Scotty got a tattoo), hung out in diners and picked up actresses who aspired to the Hollywood big-time but paid the rent doing porno flicks. Andy Warhol stopped in to say hello - Jim obliged, although most of the other Stooges thought he was creepy and avoided him. The place was full of groupies, and people who had good - ‘and bad’ - drugs. Whoever you saw, girl or boy, the possibilities were endless. ‘You walked down Santa Monica Boulevard to pick someone up and said, “I have any named drug. Let’s go back to your suite”,’ remembers Danny Fields, fondly, who still helped out the Stooges as a publicist despite the fact he was now employed by Atlantic. ‘The whole place was like that. Free wheeling.’

Every afternoon, the band would tuck their guitars, drumsticks and saxophone under their arms and walk the few blocks to the Elektra West Coast offices on La Cienega. Don Gallucci, the man who had initially refused to record the Stooges, would work them hard, right from their preparatory rehearsals at SIR studios on Santa Monica. But he would also, along with engineer Brian Ross-Myring, show heroic dedication in his mission to record the unrecordable.

The Elektra Sound Recorders studio, situated within the company’s West Coast office, was a cosy bleached-wood set-up, perfectly suited for Elektra’s wistful folk troubadours. But it was hopeless for recording scuzzy rock ’n’ roll. The floors were draped with tasteful rugs and the walls were covered with baffling, to deaden the sound and ensure acoustic instruments could be recorded with utmost clarity. Holzman’s interest in audiophile technology also meant that the mixing desk was a state-of-the-art Neve all-transistor design, which gave a totally clean, clinical sound. The moment the band set up their Marshalls and started playing, Gallucci shuddered, and realised, ‘This is a nightmare!’

Gallucci is a talkative, voluble soul, although today he describes himself as ‘naive. I’d started young and I missed a whole lot of emotional cues.’ He was also faced with a remarkably truculent, uncommunicative bunch of musicians. Where Jim Osterberg was normally the conduit between the outside world and the Stooges, during these sessions Gallucci mostly dealt with Ron Asheton, and found the Stooges’ singer twitchy and nervous. There was a simple explanation for these communication problems: Iggy had decided to celebrate recording the album by dropping a tab of acid at the beginning of every day’s work.

In the face of such mutual incomprehension, it was quite remarkable that Gallucci elected to throw the rule book out of the window, and the sonic baffling and rugs out of the studio. After a couple of days of trial and error, he allowed the band to set up all their equipment in the same room so they could feed off each other’s performance. Finally, in an unprecedented move, Gallucci and Ross-Myring decided to record the entire band live, with Iggy singing through a hand-held microphone and amplified through a PA system set up on the studio floor. For Gallucci and Ross-Myring - a respected British engineer who had just come from a Barbra Streisand session - this would ordinarily have been anathema but for the fact that if they tried recording the band in conventional fashion ‘it simply sounded stupid. There’s no other explanation.’ By now, according to Jimmy Silver, there was a certain amount of bonding going on, thanks to Don Gallucci’s wife - ‘a white witch, with that gothic look, nearly twice as tall as Donny’ - who took the band to see Bela Lugosi’s old house. By 11 May the band had progressed to recording a set of promising run throughs - the sonic leakage contributed to an unrelentingly intense onslaught of sound, while Iggy’s voice was simply electrified, distorted and fiery like a Chicago blues harmonica. Thereafter, Gallucci dictated the band should work like a jazz outfit, recording one song per day, in the order of the Stooges’ live set.

A couple of days into recording proper, the Stooges took a weekend out for a trip to San Francisco, to headline for two nights at The New Old Fillmore, supported by Alice Cooper and the Flamin’ Groovies. By now Iggy’s reputation had spread within the city’s gay community, and on Friday 15 May the audience was packed with members of the Cockettes, the city’s outrageous theatre troupe, who sat on the floor, hypnotised by the spectacle of Iggy in tight jeans and silver lamé gloves. The singer, too, was transfixed by the outrageous gay posse, and it seemed to Rumi Missabu, a founding Cockette, that ‘He was playing just for us, looking just at us.’ After an exhilarating show, the singer came over to say hello, although it soon transpired that some of Iggy’s interest was inspired by Rumi’s companion, Tina Fantusi. Tina was a 14-year-old wild child, a regal beauty of Latin and Scandinavian blood, who’d moved into the Cockettes’ household a year before. Iggy’s fascination was reciprocated; Tina found him ravishing: ‘He was the first guy I’d ever been attracted to physically like that - an absolutely beautiful body.’ Iggy tried to entice Tina back to his hotel room, only to be told by her mentors, ‘No way. You can have her, but you’re gonna have to come with us.’

Hence, that evening Iggy Stooge followed Tina, Rumi and the others to the Cockettes’ communal house on Bush and Baker, a location far more exotic than anything Jim had encountered in the Midwest. The Cockettes had at that point only staged a couple of performances, but that summer their outrageous, camp, draggy revues would sweep them to notoriety. Soon, Jim and Tina disappeared into her bedroom on the ground floor for what felt to Tina like a romantic tryst - ‘almost like a school love affair, very romantic, while he was sweet, sensitive and rather vulnerable’. Tina found Jim earnest, almost child-like, and the difference in their ages felt irrelevant: ‘It’s possible he didn’t even know I was fourteen, as I could pass for a lot older. It was different then, people took care of each other, it wasn’t dark at all.’

For all the peace and love that still endured in San Francisco, however, the mood had turned darker with the killings at Altamont that past December, and heroin had joined the cocktail of drugs that were readily available in the city - and also in the Cockettes’ commune, where many of its members had already experimented with it. ‘It was a Saturday-night kind of drug, which a lot of us flirted with,’ says Tina, ‘and I think unfortunately we’re the ones that turned him on to heroin.’

Cradled with Tina in the house on Bush and Baker, nestled in the warm embrace of heroin for the first time, Jim was also subject to the attentions of the various Cockettes, who tramped in, many of them in all their finery, to admire the visitor. There was plenty to admire; Rumi still remembers Cockette Tahara’s stage-whispered aside as he contemplated the naked singer: ‘Check the size of that organ!’ It was a ravishing, disturbing, but exciting experience which seemed to echo the mood of the Stooges’ increasingly intense music.

Tina joined Jim back in LA for a couple of days at the Tropicana, as the recording hotted up for its last week. Although the band occasionally bridled at Gallucci’s insistence on recording multiple takes, they appreciated his commitment and there were many lighter moments: Ross-Myring joking on tape, or Bill Cheatham performing skits in the character of wrestler Red Rudy (afternoon wrestling shows were naturally a staple of the Stooges’ TV diet). But behind the scenes, according to Cheatham, dark clouds were gathering. Now that Jimmy and Susan Silver had a one-year-old baby to look after, they were becoming less enamoured of playing babysitter to a set of 20-year-olds and were spending much of their time in LA round the corner at the Erewhon macrobiotic store on Beverly, which was run by a couple of old friends. In their place, the Fellow - John Adams, the band’s road manager - started to take a more central role. And in LA, Adams’ ‘fascination with the abomination’, as Jimmy Silver termed it, was given free rein. Cheatham roomed with the Fellow, and noticed he was fascinated by their next-door neighbours on the sleazy side of the Tropicana, a gay couple in their forties or fifties, both of them cokeheads. ‘One guy’s septum was completely burnt out,’ shudders Cheatham, ‘and for some reason that set John off. He saw this older guy who’d been doing drugs for years, and John just wanted to be that, I guess.’ Adams declared that he too had to track down some cocaine; but the one-time heroin addict wouldn’t stop there.

Over the same period, the Stooges’ singer was also sampling new drugs. He’d been given his first taste of cocaine by Danny Fields early in the sessions, but had told his publicist, ‘I don’t feel
anything
!’ - then a few days later climbed in Fields’ motel-room window to beg for some more, before hoovering up all his supply. Towards the end of their stay, freelance photographer Ed Caraeff came in to shoot the album cover and photographed the band sprawling around the studio: ‘And it was, oh, you want the band to look perky for the shoot,’ says Steve Mackay, ‘so we all took a whole bunch of cocaine.’ Jim Osterberg today still recalls the ‘charming hippie photographer’ fondly, as well as his pink cocaine from Peru and psilocybin, in pill form (although today Caraeff recalls no cocaine use during the sessions). For Iggy and John Adams in particular, cocaine soon became an obsession.

On Monday 25 May, the band recorded twelve takes of ‘Dirt’, deciding the final one was the keeper, before embarking on the final song, a freakout that they’d generally referred to as ‘the hippie ending’, or occasionally ‘Freak’ and would eventually be titled ‘LA Blues’. The hippie ending normally followed on directly from the song ‘Fun House’, but rather than attempt to record twenty minutes of material in one go, Gallucci decided they should record the freakout as a standalone. To get in the mood, and to celebrate the album’s conclusion, all five Stooges, bar Ron, dropped acid. Ross-Myring rolled up his shirt sleeves and manned the board. ‘You could tell the Edge Patrol was finally getting to him,’ says Gallucci, ‘but still, he figured, if we’re going out the box, let’s go all the way.’ Steve Mackay still remembers lying on his back on the studio floor, wailing away on the sax, feeling out on a limb, looking over at ‘Pop’ and feeling freaked out: ‘Does he hate me, this is scary, all that stuff. You know.’

Finally, the Stooges had recorded the unrecordable.

As if to consummate their sleazy love affair with LA, the band played two nights at the Whisky-a-Go-Go. The feeling was mutual. Their performance, like that at Ungano’s, shocked and awed the audience; even Gallucci was shaken when he saw Iggy pick up one of the wicker-clad Chianti bottles, which served as candlesticks at the Whisky, and pour hot wax over his midriff. Photographer Ed Caraeff, too, was astonished, but not so much that he missed the shot. The story of this new outrage became legendary, so much so that fans who saw Iggy in New York, San Francisco and countless locations across the US claimed to have seen him do it at their local club. In fact, it probably happened only at the Whisky, but like so many moments in the Stooges’ brief career, it would be obsessed over for decades.

A few days later, on Memorial Day weekend, Dave, Scott and Steve flew back to Detroit, with Jim and Ron following a few days later. When he returned, Jim looked healthier than anyone could ever remember, tanned and relaxed. But according to several denizens of the Fun House, when Jim hit Ann Arbor, so had cocaine, almost as if it was planned. (In some respects it was; Nixon’s Operation Intercept, launched in late September 1969 to cut down the supply of marijuana, had inspired Michigan grass-smokers to seek out alternatives, initially opiated hash, sourced from Canada, then cocaine, and finally heroin.) Within a few weeks, even his fellow band members were calling Iggy a ‘coke whore’, after he started hanging out at a local dealer’s, Mickie B, washing her dishes in the hope of scoring more white powder for free.

Over the summer, the Stooges seemed untouchable. Major stories in
Rolling Stone
,
Creem
,
Entertainment World
,
Crawdaddy
and more attempted to address this new phenomenon. Then on 13 June in Cincinnati, at the Summer Pop rock festival, the band reached their zenith, performing their
Fun House
set at a peak of intensity. Iggy, who had taken to wearing a dog collar, which emphasised his blending of choirboy innocence with animalistic depravity, plunged into the crowd again and again, in a glorious, exhilarating interaction. No performer had ever been this open, this confident, and singer and audience collaborated in an unforgettable event. Lifted above the crowd Iggy laughs, sings, poses, and at one point takes a tub of peanut butter and throws its contents at the audience. Iggy had practised this impossible feat at Cincinnati just a few months before, but now there were TV cameras present, to prove this was real and not just a figment of overwrought fans’ imaginations. Broadcast by NBC as
Midsummer Rock
at the end of August, a tantalisingly brief snippet of film, just over five minutes in length, remains the best record of the Stooges at their height.