Iggy Pop (16 page)

As if to seal that compact with their fans, the release of
Fun House
, in August, would be the grand statement of the original Stooges. It would be one of the most uncompromising albums of the 1970s, an assault on the senses that remains exhilarating today. The album sounded dense and claustrophobic, with Iggy’s distorted vocals fighting to be heard above repetitive, almost funky guitar and saxophone riffs that would occasionally explode into thrilling climaxes. Where their debut was all deadpan restraint,
Fun House
was aggressive, outgoing and, at times, almost expansive and cocky. For a group whose technical prowess was often derided, the musicianship was deft: spooky and gothic on ‘Dirt’, strutting and greasy on ‘Fun House’, lamebrained and thuggish on ‘1970’.

Today,
Fun House
is the Stooges album most consistently cited by musicians, for instance Jack White, of the White Stripes, who reckons, ‘In my mind,
Fun House
is the greatest rock ’n’ roll record ever made. I’ll always feel that.’ Eventually, this music would spawn the dark gothic rock of Nine Inch Nails or Jane’s Addiction, but for many contemporaries,
Fun House
seemed to prove the Stooges were simply deluded. There was impassioned support from
Creem
’s Lester Bangs, who wrote a huge feature on the album that was serialised over two issues, and many others. Even industry bible
Billboard
weighed in on their behalf, although the positive review must have irked the singer by crediting ‘Steve Mackay and his magic saxophone’ as the leader. Even so, the album was generally reviled, in particular by the radio industry. Steve Harris, senior vice president in charge of marketing at Elektra, was a fan of the Stooges and pushed the record hard, but received an unequivocal reaction: ‘Oh my God! Isn’t Elektra a company of beautiful and wonderful and classy music? What are they doing with
this
?’

CHAPTER 6

Fun House Part II: This Property is Condemned

The end would be swift, but not particularly merciful. There were several portents. The first came from the city of Ann Arbor, who in June 1970 served notice that Stooge Hall - the Fun House - would be demolished in a year, to allow Eisenhower Parkway to be turned into a highway. The same month Jimmy Silver was offered a job at the Erewhon Natural Food company; he felt drawn to the challenge, believing that the Stooges were now in a good position, and that his old friend John Adams was well placed to take over.

The third portent was Goose Lake, a hellish festival on 7, 8 and 9 August 1970, which well and truly telegraphed that the 1960s were over. Most people who were there describe the atmosphere as post-apocalyptic, like something out of
Mad Max
. Bill Cheatham, finally promoted to rhythm guitar, remembers the show as ‘a blur, there was a huge amount of cocaine around’. Bill Williams, a music fan, was working security and saw vendors openly dealing heroin from trays slung round their shoulders, as if they were cinema usherettes selling ice cream; Hells Angels were dispensing a range of drugs from their bikes backstage. Roadie Dave Dunlap saw one boy who was so high he was picking up mud and eating it; Leo Beattie saw another kid fall from the PA stack, bounce on the ground, then get up and start dancing.

The Stooges’ performance was similarly on the edge, thanks to an order from the promoters that the singer was not allowed to dive into the audience. Williams and another 19-year-old security guard were ordered to restrain Iggy, and as the singer headed for the fence that separated him from the audience, they grabbed him by the arms and pulled him back. Iggy retreated to the stage, and as the Stooges riffing rose to an almost psychotic intensity, started screaming, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down!’ Williams was terrified. ‘Two hundred thousand people were there, and they were going
nuts
! They were ripping planks off the fence, we were trying to hold on to it, it was insane!’

At some point - no one seems to agree on when, or how - Stooges bassist Dave Alexander simply became overwhelmed by the spectacle and lost his place. Some say he lost the beat, others, including Iggy, that he forgot every song. The singer felt naked, exposed, and after the performance demanded that Dave was sacked. The others objected, according to Ron, then finally gave in. The first of the Dum Dum Boys was gone. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but at the same time Jim Osterberg announced that his professional name was no longer Iggy Stooge. From now on, he would be known as Iggy Pop.

Some of the Fun House residents thought that Dave’s fuck-up at Goose Lake was just a handy excuse; that Jim was irritated by Alexander’s reclusiveness, or even by his physical frailty. Years later, sitting outside his beautiful, peaceful house in Miami, the singer ponders his decision: ‘I’ve been reminded since that at one point I said, No, I won’t work with Dave any more on bass, and that . . . the whole thing began to slide apart. But there I was out on stage, and there was no bass - he just had a complete mental lapse, was too stoned, he didn’t know what he was doing. And that’s traumatic, for somebody that . . . erm, I was serious about this shit. So . . .’ he continues, sadly, ‘the group never had a focus after that.’

On 11 August, just as Alexander was being ousted by his old high-school chums, Iggy was a guest on DJ Dan Carlisle’s WKNR radio show. On the recording, the voluble, talkative Jim Osterberg is absent; you can hear Dan Carlisle losing the will to live as he attempts to extract a coherent sentence from the distant, uncommunicative Iggy Pop. There is a disturbing lassitude about him: the singer sounds flat, as if in the grip of depression. It’s likely that Jim was already beset by drastic emotional swings, an affliction familiar to many musicians or artists who speed towards a deadline on an almost manic high, then hit a trough of despondency when the work is finished. Those emotional swings were undoubtedly exacerbated by Iggy’s ingestion of acid, hashish and cocaine - and the latter was, as Iggy’s close observer, writer Nick Kent, points out, ‘absolutely the worst drug for him. It sent him absolutely crazy.’

A few days later, in New York, another connection was made that would intensify the evil miasma that was gathering round the Stooges. The band was booked into Ungano’s for a four-night run in mid-August to showcase
Fun House
, with roadie Zeke Zettner - a quiet, sweet blond boy, who often played with his back to the audience - promoted to playing bass. When the band hit New York, their acting manager, the Fellow, had a single obsession: scoring heroin. It was all Adams could talk about; most of the junior Stooges with whom he hung out were unenthusiastic, but the Fellow kept at it, telling them, ‘No no, you don’t understand. This is the best high.’ Adams described the effects of heroin, says Billy Cheatham, ‘as if it was Coleridge. It was a place he wanted to be.’

The Fellow shared a room at the Chelsea Hotel with Steve Mackay, and as the band checked in, there were twin drug obsessions. Iggy wanted cocaine; John wanted heroin. Chatting with Mackay, Adams told the sax player, ‘A weird thing happened to me. I was standing on the corner waiting for a connection for junk. And I found one.’

That evening John Adams returned to the loving embrace of heroin, sharing ‘a snoot’ of his new haul with Steve Mackay; meanwhile, Iggy approached Bill Harvey of Elektra and explained that if the Stooges were to perform, he needed $400 to buy cocaine. Although Harvey usually seemed hip to the presence of soft drugs - and is said to have had an official ‘lawn-keeping allowance’ to purchase the other kind of grass - such effrontery was guaranteed to enrage him, as he was no fan of the Stooges. Reluctantly, Harvey handed over the $400, but although the band had the cash, their dealer was late. Showtime came and went; finally they decided they could wait no longer and made for the stage, only to run into the dealer on their way through Ungano’s kitchen. Then it was ‘Zoom, back to the dressing room,’ says Mackay, where the Stooges gleefully opened up a huge tinfoil package, snorting up ‘a mountain’ of cocaine, before they finally hit the stage, hopelessly late. That night was, by most accounts, a good show - ‘All glistening and sparkly,’ says Mackay - which featured lengthy improvisations, including a new song, ‘Going To Egypt’.

A recently discovered tape of one of the Ungano’s shows sounds terrific; the following nights’ performances were apparently inspired, too, memorable for more than just the sight of Iggy’s penis, which he waved at the audience on the final night. Indeed, over the same period the Stooges headlined over the MC5 in Asbury Park, went on last and demolished their one-time big brothers. But, as Scotty Asheton puts it, the evening in New York finally ‘woke up [John’s] worm. And it was like a sledgehammer in the head, memories after that, ’cause it was all downhill. All of a sudden, heroin was cool.’

In the autumn of 1970, heroin was starting to flood Detroit. As the MC5’s leader Wayne Kramer points out, ‘One day heroin was like some exotic jazz musician’s drug, and the next day everybody could get it - cheap. It was plentiful, and it was potent.’

The MC5 succumbed to heroin just before the Stooges; for Wayne Kramer, it eased the pain of the awareness that the MC5’s career, their hopes and dreams, were on the wane. For Jim Osterberg, heroin brought welcome ease. ‘I always felt the group could work harder . . . I always felt it incumbent on me to do certain things for everyone and there was a resentment. It became a weight. And a great excuse. And it’s only an excuse. Honestly, there were tensions at that time, the amount of acid I was taking, things like this . . . it became a burden on the psyche, frankly. Heroin was a great way to calm down. And it was around.’

In the early days of the Stooges, it had been Jim Osterberg who’d turn up for rehearsals and struggle to get his fellow Stooges out of bed. Now it was Ron who attempted to keep the band together, like a mother hen. In the grim heroin roll call, Adams and Mackay went first, in New York. Then the Fellow had a package of heroin sent to the Fun House, and Jim went next, following his first experience of mainlining back in San Francisco. Scotty and Bill followed - ‘sniff ing first, then skin-popping’ - followed at some point by Zeke. Inevitably, the band split into factions - with the Asheton brothers on opposing sides. It seemed that Ron was irrevocably sundered from his singer and, worst of all, his brother. ‘There was no relationship, ’ says Ron. ‘Scotty was in the Iggy sphere. I was totally shut out and alone.’

When Jimmy Silver had handed over the financial reins, with John Adams taking day-to-day control while Danny Fields oversaw operations from New York, there had been a healthy surplus in the Stooges’ bank balance. Within a few weeks, the money was gone, and the band was being paid in drugs: instead of their weekly $50 in cash, Mackay and Zettner were given $15, plus a bag of weed and a dime bag of China White heroin. Mackay was not so stoned, however, to ignore that he, like Dave, was being ousted. But when the call came from Pop, it was a merciful release. ‘There was never a job I ever wanted to be fired from more than that one. I’d got to snorting smack every day for maybe two weeks, then when I got frozen out of the band I lost my connection. For about two months I couldn’t sleep through the night, I had these pains in my arms, so I went through a minor withdrawal. If they’d sacked me two months later, I’d have had a full-blown habit.’ As it was, Mackay managed to persuade Discount Records boss Dale Watermolder to give him his old job back.

With Mackay gone, the Fun House was becoming a charnel house. Ron would turn up for rehearsals and sit there, alone and brooding. Sometimes on their mostly weekend gigs the band would get paid in heroin; occasionally the singer would flirt with danger by openly snorting heroin on plane flights. But Iggy was a good actor. When he got on the phone to Danny Fields, who was still attempting to oversee the Stooges while holding down a publicity job at Atlantic Records, he could always convince him that he was straight, and change the subject to the new songs he was writing. And there were new songs, for as Iggy maintains, ‘Even as we were falling apart we were coming up with great riffs.’ One such song - an anthem of dumb defiance - was ‘I Got A Right’: ‘Any time I want I got a right to sing.’ It was one of Jim’s first entirely solo compositions - that’s if you don’t count Doc, his incontinent parakeet, who sat on his shoulder as Jim worked out the tune. For a variety of reasons, most fundamentally that one of them was a junkie, and the other wasn’t, Ron and Jim’s songwriting partnership was at an end. And some time in November 1970, the man who would take Ron’s place arrived on the scene.

When you talk to the dozens of people who knew the Stooges in late 1970, the word ‘dark’ appears again and again. Often it describes the general atmosphere. Often it describes a person: James Williamson, the hotshot guitarist who joined the Stooges just as they headed for self-destruction. There is a striking unanimity to how some people describe him.

Natalie Schlossman: ‘James accelerated the drug use, he accelerated the craziness, he accelerated the make-up and just all the bizarro. The Stooges were in the Bizarro Zone.’

Danny Fields: ‘I didn’t like him. I didn’t understand why he was there. He was such a contrast to the sweetness of the Asheton brothers that he seemed like a malevolent presence there to me.’

Scott Asheton: ‘I told James to come on over to the house and set up in the practice room and jam. It was my fault. Damn my eyes for doing it, damn my soul, damn me for ever . . .’

James Williamson was intense, intelligent, talented and troubled. Born in Casterville, Texas on 29 October 1949, James had lost his father at the age of four; his mom remarried an army colonel, who hated long hair and rock ’n’ roll. After moving to Detroit, James had briefly joined Scott Richardson’s band, the Chosen Few, but then the colonel gave him an ultimatum: ‘Cut your hair or go to a juvenile home.’ A big fan of Bob Dylan, James did what he figured Bob would have done in the same situation, and told the colonel to get lost. At the juvenile home they cut all his hair off on the first day. James had been schooled in guitar by Oklahoma country musician Rusty Sparks, who’d invited him on his TV show. At the juvenile home, he was schooled in rebellion, and when he finally joined the Stooges, according to Scott, he was ‘a wild, on the street speed-shooting guitar-playing maniac’.

In fairness, by the time James Williamson replaced Bill Cheatham, who reverted to his role as roadie, every one of the participants in the Stooges’ psychodrama had a whole zoo-full of monkeys on their back. For, as Williamson points out, few of the people who found him so threatening ever got to know him properly, ‘and with respect to the heroin usage, I got in the middle of this situation - I certainly wasn’t leading it.’ Williamson accepts that he was an ‘intense person, who focuses on what he is doing at the time. To that degree, I was always pushing the band to do better, play better, be better. So if that makes me a villain, then so be it . . . I don’t see it that way.’ And it was Iggy, desperate to find any way forward, who engineered Williamson’s ascension to notoriety, spotting that the young Texan’s psychotically intense guitar-playing represented a new direction, and inviting Williamson into the band to play alongside Ron on guitar. Iggy had become frustrated with what he saw as Ron’s laziness, he would say later, but there were undoubtedly simpler, pharmacological reasons for their growing estrangement. Yet even in his narcotic fog, Iggy kept pushing, encouraging Williamson to work on a stuttering, vicious guitar riff that became the song ‘Penetration’. That Christmas, Iggy took a brief trip to Jamaica with a tape recorder, Framus bass and a Mosrite guitar in an attempt to clean up and write an entire new repertoire.

By the beginning of 1971, Ron Asheton’s alienation from the rest of the Stooges was increased when Scotty, Iggy and James moved to University Tower, a newly built high-rise in the centre of Ann Arbor which made a more convenient stop-off for the band’s dealers. Ron says he was ‘an outcast. Because I was not going along on the death trip.’ Zeke Zettner had now been sacked, replaced by Jimmy Recca, who’d played with James in the Chosen Few. Leo Beattie and Dave Dunlap had left back in December, when no paychecks had materialised for Christmas presents, and roadies with better drugs connections were recruited to replace them. While a penniless Ron and Jimmy Recca lived on vegetables grown in the Stooge Hall garden, his brother and the other band members lived out their rock ’n’ roll druggie fantasies. Scott and James were now close buddies and shared a room on the seventh floor; Iggy was on the top floor. ‘And it was cool,’ says Scott. ‘We had a great time. We had two maids that came in once a week, both of them foxes, to clean the apartments and we had great wild sex with them. It was happening, man, we were on top of the world. Well, we weren’t on top, but we were . . . on the seventh floor, bro, it was cool. And we were both supporting habits.’