Iggy Pop (31 page)

For both Bowie and Iggy, the
Lust For Life
sessions were the first project conceived and completed in Berlin, and the city’s ambience would be firmly imprinted in the grooves of the record. The two main protagonists, as well as the Sales brothers, had immersed themselves in the decadence of Los Angeles, but Berlin offered them the chance to turn their excess into art, rather than the rootless confusion they’d all suffered in California; the city offered a better class of decadence, one that focused their energies rather than sapping them. And throughout there was the vision of the Berlin Wall, which was still visible from Tonstudio 3, says Carlos Alomar, with the gunners and their elevated hut now at eye level, ‘and beyond that the desolate nothingness of possible minefields and then in the background the silhouetted skyline of some buildings. Pretty dark, dismal and depressing.’ That image would impose its foreboding presence on David’s next project, “
Heroes”
, giving it a taut, wired edge, but on
Lust For Life
the spectre of the wall would inspire a glorious carnality and celebration, like the explosion of sexuality that had engulfed both London and Berlin in wartime. And in this isolated outpost of the West, Jim in particular found his own, curiously warped peace: ‘I was living on coke, hash, red wine, beer and German sausages, had my own little place and I was sleeping on a cot with cold-water showers.’ Iggy was also, as Tony Sales puts it, ‘on fire’.

By the time the sessions began in June, David had already crafted the bulk of the music, some of it recorded on cassette, some of it played out on electric piano to the band, but every song was radically reworked in the studio, with others assembled from scratch. The album’s title track was one that defined the session; the opening chords of ‘Lust For Life’ were inspired by the staccato parping of a German brass-band theme from the Armed Forces TV network, and, says Jim, written on the ukulele in David’s apartment. The song was instantly seized upon by Hunt Sales, who slammed out the distinctive, exuberant rhythm, pulling the rest of the band in his wake. ‘You can’t play a counter rhythm to that,’ says Alomar. ‘You just had to follow.’ The drum beat sounded like the rhythms that newly freed African Americans had been playing back in the Mississippi hill country since the 1880s, advertising to listeners for miles around that a party was about to start.

For Iggy, the sessions fast became a high-wire act, a test of his ability to improvise lyrics and vocal melodies as quickly as the musicians nailed the backing tracks. And, as Tony Sales observed, he was on fire. The lyrics to ‘Lust For Life’ were, according to most recollections, snatched out of the ether. The narrator is recognisably Iggy, but is namechecked as Johnny Yen, a William Burroughs character from
The Ticket That Exploded
; then a succession of arresting images follows, most of it off the cuff: ‘Who the hell but Iggy would dare say, “I’ve had it in the ear before”?’ asked Alomar. ‘What the hell does he mean? Is he reluctant to say it? No. Is David reluctant to put it on the album? Hell, no.’

Plenty of songs were composed on the spot. Earlier in the year, Ricky Gardiner had enjoyed a moment of Wordsworthian inspiration when he was wandering in the countryside, ‘in the field beside an orchard, on one of those glorious spring days with the trees in full blossom’. A distinctive, circular chord sequence had popped into his mind. When David Bowie asked if Ricky had any song ideas, he remembered the riff, and Iggy seized on it, much as he had the first time he heard Ron Asheton play the ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ chord sequence. The lyrics were, like practically every other song on the album, written in the studio, or overnight, celebrating his journeys on the Berlin buses and U-bahn, where he’d ride and ride, contemplating the stars and the ripped-back signs (the song’s mood and title, he later mentioned, were inspired by a Jim Morrison poem). Like ‘Lust For Life’, ‘The Passenger’ was a simple celebration of life, of the long walks he’d taken soaking in his surroundings ever since he’d grown up in Ypsilanti; a reconciliation with the wide-eyed child Jim Osterberg, and the repudiation of Iggy Pop, the creature who’d sung about a ‘Death Trip’.

The atmosphere between David and Iggy at the sessions was competitive, slightly manic at least on Iggy’s side; it was also ‘very loving’, according to Alomar and the Sales brothers. David drove Iggy hard, but understood implicitly how to channel the creative flow, ready to drop any other part of the recording whenever Iggy had a vocal idea he wanted to get down on tape. At some points, Iggy insisted on getting his own way; dissatisfied with David’s original melody on ‘Success’ - as heard on the finished version’s guitar counter-melody - which he thought sounded like ‘a damn crooning thing’, he arrived early at Hansa with the Sales brothers to egg him on and reworked the song, adding an optimistic six-note tune, and engagingly simple lyrics: ‘Here comes success . . . here comes my Chinese rug.’ The sentiment was semi-ironic, but it was semi-sincere, too, for Jim had just bought Chinese rugs for his simple cold-water apartment, and was relishing the prospect of, as Jim describes it, being ‘dragged kicking and screaming to a good outcome’. On ‘Success’, and other songs, there is the near-palpable presence of Esther Friedmann - whom Jim had been calling regularly for the last six months, despite the fact she was still living with surgeon boyfriend Norbert. She was the ideal woman and muse: ‘In the last ditch . . . I think of you.’ The infectious enthusiasm was highlighted by Hunt and Tony’s joyous backing vocals, recorded live in one take later that day, and the first time most of them had heard Iggy’s lyrics properly - you can still hear their giddy amusement at repeating lyrics like ‘Here comes my face . . . it’s plain bizarre’. (Bowie would mention later how he would emulate Iggy’s spontaneous approach to lyric writing, noting down a couple of words and improvising the rest, on “
Heroes
”.) The electrifying atmosphere was emphasised by Edu Meyer’s idea of plugging Iggy’s vocal mike into a Music Man guitar amplifier that was sitting outside the control room, which added a glassy, overdriven edge to his voice.

The skeetering, exuberant energy hardly let up throughout the sessions. ‘Some Weird Sin’ and ‘Tonight’, both with music by Bowie and worked up during
The Idiot
tour, and ‘Sixteen’, with music by Iggy, maintained the opener ’s confident swagger, but in retrospect, ‘Turn Blue’, the song that Iggy and Bowie had worked up in May 1975, assisted by Warren Peace, was an unformed mess, the sessions’ only uninspired moment. ‘Fall In Love With Me’, the album’s closer, was again written on the spot, with Hunt picking up a bass, Tony a guitar and Ricky Gardiner on drums. A subdued meditation reflecting the exhaustion each member of the band had reached by the end of the recording, it sounds slight in such overbearing company, but its poignant charm came to the fore later, when it was featured in the 1989 movie
Slaves Of New York
. Again, its loving fascination - ‘the way your eyes are black, the way your hair is black’ - evokes the image of Esther Friedmann, as well as Jim’s excitement that love, as well as success, is just around the corner.

As the sessions rushed to their conclusion, there was an almost religious conviction shared by all its makers that they had achieved something special. For Carlos Alomar, seeing Bowie and Iggy working together was also a unique privilege. ‘Seeing the two of them in partnership, just like when you split an atom and you get a pair of twins.’ David seemed to have unlocked something new in Iggy - his intelligence, his civilised, intellectual, cosmopolitan side. Namely, he’d manage to free Jim Osterberg and bring him to share the limelight with Iggy. The point was underlined with
Lust For Life
’s cover photo, shot by Andrew Kent in a dressing room as Jim waited to work his charm on a BBC interviewer during his UK tour in March. ‘It was a lucky great shot,’ says Kent. ‘This was Jimmy. The nice guy, a guy you’d like to hang out with.’

But Iggy would wreak his revenge.

There are both complex and simple explanations for why Iggy Pop would repeatedly sabotage his own career, for this is what Iggy would go on to do around the end of 1977. The complex explanations are psychological - to do with insecurity, fear of success, or the depression that often afflicts creative individuals just as they’ve completed their best work. But the simple explanation is cocaine. Shortly after receiving a finished copy of
Lust For Life
, Iggy Pop locked himself in a room at the Schlosshotel Gerhus, the fairytale palace built by art collector Walther von Pannwitz, now filled with a motley collection of 1960s furniture and still surrounded by bombed-out houses. He stared and stared at the sleeve, all the while hoovering up a small mountain of cocaine, waiting to see if he’d like the cover photo. Eventually he decided he hated it. He listened over and over to ‘The Passenger’, waiting for it to be faster. It didn’t, and he decided he hated that, too. The whole process was torture, unbearable torture, and he continued to torture himself. Finally there was an intervention: David heard what was happening, and asked Barbara and Tim de Witt to whisk Jim away on holiday to Capri. But Iggy had been unleashed, and it seemed there was no way to put him back in his box and rescue Jim Osterberg.

CHAPTER 13

Missing in Action

‘We just need David Bowie.’ It was a phrase that had popped up many times over the marketing and A&R meetings where Arista boss Charles Levison had discussed Jim’s recording career. Charles liked Jim, even enjoyed the 3am phone conversations when the bored or worried singer would call up to discuss some minor point, but unflappable as he was, the pressure was mounting. Clive Davis, Charles’s boss, creative powerhouse, disco freak and tough motherfucker - his nickname at the record company was ‘the Godfather’ - was breathing down his neck, and although Charles had kept his cool, near-panic was starting to spread around the office. Davis was convinced that the singer was a loser, a deadbeat who’d had several shots at the bigtime and pissed all of them away. Charles and his team had set out to prove him wrong. So far they’d failed. Now the endless stories and rumours that snaked back to Arista’s headquarters near Grosvenor Square were mostly negative. There were interminable technical problems, tales of guns being brandished in the studio and, worst of all, Iggy seemed to have lost his nerve. He was scared to sing. If anyone could coax him out of this funk, Charles was convinced, it was David.

The call, when it came, was not at three in the morning. It was a sensible hour, maybe lunchtime, when Charles got the news that David Bowie had dropped by at the isolated farm in Wales in response to a call for help. But as Julie Hooker, who’d been sent down to oversee the sessions, ran through what had happened, a cold realisation began to dawn. There had obviously been a disaster. Yet however often Julie ran over the story, Charles could not work out what the hell had gone on. The tales of cocaine abuse and paranoia were familiar in the record industry. Likewise the account of how all the musicians were at one another ’s throats was hardly a new one. Even the stories of musicians being threatened with a gun he’d heard before. But how in the hell could these sessions, the ones that were to make or break Jim’s career, have been derailed by David Bowie in a Scarlet Pimpernel outfit, Princess Margaret, and an East End gangster with a huge cock?

It’s hard to disentangle the reasons why Iggy Pop’s promising career at RCA ended in disenchantment. Many of the label’s staff were truly enthused by Jim Osterberg; he seemed the perfect artist, obliging, ebullient, perhaps even more charming than his friend David. Few of them, however, understood his music, while Iggy’s own erratic behaviour exacerbated the mutual incomprehension between artist and label. Yet it seems that the ultimate responsibility lies with Iggy’s fellow RCA artist: Elvis Presley.

Ironically, David Bowie had been signed by RCA so that the company could banish the spectre of Elvis Presley, the musician who ensured that for RCA, the 1960s never happened. For nearly two decades, Elvis had made the label uncool - so uncool, Tony Defries liked to joke, that it was better known for its washing machines than its records. But on 16 August 1977, Elvis passed away, his great heart finally succumbing to the twin depradations of cheeseburgers and codeine, atop his toilet at Graceland. Suddenly, the King once again became RCA’s most important artist, and the company’s pressing plants started to work overtime meeting demand for his back catalogue. And somewhere in the rush,
Lust For Life
disappeared. The album had been pressed up in respectable quantities well before its release on 7 September, and reached number 28 in the UK charts, a decent-sized hit. But once the first pressing had sold out, there were no stocks to replace it: ‘
Lust For Life
just disappeared from the shelves,’ remembers Tony Sales, ‘and that was it.’

Whereas
The Idiot
had received generous coverage in the press,
Lust For Life
, the most overtly commercial album of Iggy Pop’s career, and his joyous return to health and happiness, was relatively starved of column inches. And then during one press day for the album there was a rumpus when Iggy, in a fit of megalomania, told one journalist, ‘That’s too bad [that Elvis died], I’m the new Elvis!’ before pissing in the wastebasket under the desk of the office he’d borrowed for the interview.

With a general lack of press reaction, there was only one way to promote the album: the road. The Sales brothers once again made up the nucleus of the band, with Stacey Heydon joining on guitar, and one-time Stooge Scottie Thurston drafted in on keyboards to replace David, who spent most of the autumn promoting “
Heroes
”; Esther came too, persuaded to join up in a professional role as the tour photographer, and the shows, which came at a gruelling pace - forty dates in just over eight weeks - were generally regarded as terrific.

Backstage, things seemed very different. Now thirty, Jim appeared a sensible, almost collegiate-looking character, with black hair in a side parting, and he wore glasses for reading. It was a good ‘look’; it seemed to symbolise the long-subdued intelligence and wit that his schoolfriends could remember. Esther liked it a lot. Iggy Pop, too, looked terrific, wearing white face for some shows, which gave him the air of an evil European mime artist, together with leather pants and a horse’s tail attached by a wide leather belt. This was the first time he’d toured Europe, and there was an obvious pent-up demand from the kids who’d discovered his music via fanzines, the conventional music press, or even via David Bowie. Most of the performances were fiercely tough and professional, the band finely honed, even if their obvious musicianship and skewed cowboy cool didn’t conform to the regulation punk aesthetic.

It was all a long way from the
Metallic KO
days, one would have thought. But to Scottie Thurston - whose last shows with Iggy were during one of the most legendarily disastrous tours of all time - it appeared that things hadn’t changed that much. The organisation was more professional than in the Stooges days, the shows were consistently good and Iggy always made it on stage. The Sales brothers struck him as ‘real talented. And pretty mad. Especially together.’ This time around there was no smack, no Quaaludes, no singer passing out. But ‘it was the age of cocaine,’ says Thurston, ‘which is not a very together drug for a singer.’ Scottie had a deep affection for Jim; he was ‘very charming, a sweet guy - a pleasure to be around’. He’d seen Iggy suffer, and there was a profound pleasure in seeing him achieve some success. But during much of the next year, Thurston observed, Jim was ‘kind of boorish and childlike. Not a lot of fun.’ Back in the days of the Stooges, Jim had shown no self-pity, no bitterness about his lack of success. Now that Jim had hit his thirties, that resilience seemed to have diminished and he often, thought Scottie - who is a fair, non-judgemental man - seemed ‘needy and wanty. And when he was like that, you avoided him.’

It was a cruel irony. For years, Iggy had suffered a harsh fate - being too original, too ahead of his time, and being mocked for it. Yet he’d emerged unbowed. Now just at the point when success beckoned, when his influence was finally being acknowledged - indeed, over that autumn, the honorific ‘the godfather of punk’ started being regularly attached to his name - he seemed to succumb to the bitterness he’d avoided for so long. Esther Friedmann finally moved out of Norbert’s apartment early in 1978 - she’d packed her stuff for the tour, told Norbert she’d be back in two weeks and returned seven years later. Esther loved Jim; ‘Thinking back, I wonder whether he was the love of my life,’ she says. He was sensitive, funny, intelligent - ‘a thinker’. But often, says Esther, ‘he drove himself nuts, just thinking.’

The two would enjoy many insane, good times together, as well as quiet evenings in their Hinterhof apartment, which Esther moved into later in the year. But for much of the time Jim seemed, quite simply, sad. It was a big deal to make him laugh, ‘and that’s what I tried to do,’ says Esther. ‘I tried to amuse him and put on little skits for him to make him laugh. Because he did seem a little sad.’ Much of this was down to drugs, as alcohol followed cocaine, and lows followed the highs. Much of it was due to money, too, or rather lack of it. Jim was never good with cash, but even as larger amounts flowed in, larger amounts flowed out, most of it on professional expenses. Over the first quarter of 1978, he earned £71,436 in record-company advances and live receipts, his English accountant informed him. His expenses, mostly for musicians’ salaries and studio bills, were £75,892.

To make things worse, there was David’s conspicuous success to deal with. Jim was happy for David; David was consistently kind and considerate, but sometimes that kindness made Jim feel like even more of a failure. ‘I don’t think David was ever any more famous than at that period and he was still a sweet, regular guy to Jim,’ says Esther, ‘but sometimes when people are good to you it’s worse.’ Jim would be invited along for holidays, and David would pay; and for a singer with a skyscraper ego, this generosity was difficult to accept. Mixed into this complex cocktail of emotions was Jim’s conviction that his music was simply better than David’s.

Undoubtedly, underneath the mutual respect between Jim and David lay a streak of mutual envy; David admired Iggy’s intuition, his electricity and lack of self-consciousness; Jim realised David had a whole raft of professional abilities which he himself needed to master. Yet while David incorporated some of Iggy’s skills to magnificent effect, most notably on the gloriously untrammelled singing on ‘Heroes’ - six inspiring minutes which finally banished the notion that David’s music was clever, rather than deep - Iggy still seemed a hopeless novice at acquiring David’s prime skill, that of self-sufficiency, let alone another crucial ability - that of making money. The two would remain very close over the subsequent years, although an idyllic Christmas dinner, with a huge goose baked by Coco, at David’s apartment, where many Berlin acquaintances, including Edu Meyer, were invited, was the last big get-together in the city, for Bowie was on tour throughout nearly all of 1978, and finally left the Hauptstrasse in the spring of 1979 to base himself in Switzerland, New York and London.

All the way through the recording of
The Idiot
and
Lust For Life
, says Jim, he had been troubled by fantasies of ‘revenge. Every night I would go to bed dreaming: as soon as I get a chance I’m gonna take some of this, take some of that, do this to her, do that to him.’ And it was probably fantasies of revenge that inspired a cheap, counterproductive shot that lost him all of the career momentum he’d worked so hard to generate: namely a live album, recorded for a pittance, which would get him out of his deal with RCA and net him a quick influx of cash.

From the moment he’d been signed by RCA, Iggy had been regarded as something of a curiosity. RCA treated David Bowie with respect, because he was a proven money-earner, and because Bowie’s formidable organisation intimidated the company. But RCA regarded the punk explosion as an aberration, ignoring it completely in favour of AOR bands like Sad Café, the label’s major signing for 1977.
The Idiot
had been treated to a certain amount of support, but when Iggy’s press officer Robin Eggar first heard a white label of
Lust For Life
and pushed the company to release ‘The Passenger’ as a single, guaranteeing it would be a hit, he was ignored. ‘I think Iggy knew RCA didn’t have a clue,’ he remembers, ‘and I suspect he had a lot of fun torturing them.’ A live album, which would fulfil his contract and net him a full album advance, seemed like the perfect way of getting revenge. Assembled from soundboard tapes of
The Idiot
and
Lust For Life
tours, which were given a sonic brush-up by Edu Meyer at Hansa,
TV Eye Live
was released in May 1978, and was Iggy’s swansong for RCA; shortly after, he’d brag in print how the album had cost him $5,000 to make, but had netted him $90,000 (the figure sounds like an exaggeration). The previous November, Iggy had publicly complained about the ‘sub-standard’
Kill City
album, released by Bomp Records in the US and Radar in the UK from tapes sold to them by James Williamson. Yet it was
TV Eye Live
that looked like a cheap rip-off; although the performances were good, the obvious contract-filler seemed to signal Iggy had run out of creative steam.

Earlier in 1978, Jim had decided to fire the Sales brothers; they were aggressively assertive, and although they were inspirational musicians they were ‘trouble on a stick,’ says Esther Friedmann. According to Tony, Iggy broke the news in a wantonly brutal fashion. ‘Iggy called me at the end of the tour. This is after hundreds of shows, all kinds of shit, after we had been together for two years. He said, “I don’t need you!” I said, “I hope you’re kidding, man!” He said, “You Sales brothers are like heroin, and I don’t need you.”’

Hunt, too, was traumatised. ‘He fucked over everybody. I was walking down Sunset Strip and saw a record in the window,
TV Eye
. I hadn’t been told anything about it and I hadn’t been paid for it. It’s quite surprising for somebody who has had it really rough like Iggy to turn round and not consider other people.’

Esther Friedmann, in particular, points out that Jim was generous to a fault with his money during his Berlin period and always seemed scrupulous about paying his musicians; in fact, he’d seized on the idea of
TV Eye Live
to get out of a hopeless predicament. Yet it seems some of the spite directed at the Sales brothers was motivated by what seemed a typical act of self-sabotage. If so, his masochism was rewarded with the treatment he’d receive at the hands of his next musicians, the Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, or SRB. Formed by MC5 guitarist Fred Smith with Rationals singer Scott Morgan, Dum Dum Boy Scotty Asheton on drums and Gary Rasmussen - who’d played with the Up - on bass, the SRB would become Detroit’s lost supergroup, issuing just one legendary single, ‘City Slang’, in their lifetime. Iggy had jammed with the band in Detroit during his 1977 tour, and later asked them to come over to Europe to help promote
TV Eye Live
; they agreed, leaving Scott Morgan to kick his heels in Ann Arbor for the summer. Hiring SRB seemed a perfect way of revisiting Iggy’s guitar-heavy Detroit rock; but Fred Smith - a fiendishly talented guitarist, but a proud, taciturn character - refused to listen to any of Iggy’s records, insisting on working the songs out again from scratch. ‘There was a standoff, ’ says Scottie Thurston, who was supposedly directing the rehearsals in a freezing-cold studio in Battersea, South London. ‘With a proper meeting it could have been a viable band . . . but it wasn’t set up that way.’