Iggy Pop (42 page)

That afternoon’s show was crazed, as Iggy writhed around and humped the Marshall back-line, determined to steal the limelight from the Sex Pistols’ return to the stage. Finally, spent, Iggy walked off the stage and into the backstage area, right by Glen Matlock, with whom he hadn’t talked in fifteen years or so. Jim Osterberg shot Glen his trademark, slightly goofy grin before asking, ‘Hey? What you all been doing back there? Puking up?’

‘You could tell he understood implicitly how we felt,’ says Glen Matlock, ‘that we were all shitting ourselves about to go on stage in front of 30,000 people. That it was a big deal for us.’ Jim had also, says Matlock, dropped ‘No Fun’ from his set list so the Pistols could save the song for their encore.

By 1996, Iggy was fronting a mostly new band, with Eric Schermerhorn replaced on guitar by Whitey Kirst, who’d played briefly with him for the
Brick By Brick
tour - and, it’s said, turned road manager Henry McGroggan’s hair white in the process - and Pete Marshall joining on second guitar. The sound was thrashier and trashier, with a set-list drawing on the high-energy but woefully predictable new album
Naughty Little Doggie
. Iggy’s new A&R apparently had the bright idea of teaming Iggy with Thom Wilson, who’d produced that year’s big punk band, Offspring. ‘Every record every year Virgin would say, “Oh, we’ll set Iggy up with the latest guy,”’ says Hal Cragin. ‘Thom Wilson knows how to do a meat and potatoes rock production . . . and that’s exactly what we ended up doing.’

Predictably, the eight million purchasers of the last Offspring album remained blissfully ignorant of Iggy’s existence; less predictably, a new generation of fans were instead turned onto his music via the hit movie
Trainspotting
, which was released that July. Based on the debut novel by fervent Iggy fan Irvine Welsh, the film’s exuberant opening sees junkies Ewan McGregor and Ewen Bremner fleeing the cops to the hedonistic swaggering drums of ‘Lust For Life’. Iggy is omnipresent throughout the film, his music a leitmotif for Renton, McGregor’s smackhead antihero, while another key character splits with his girlfriend and becomes a junkie after she tells him, ‘It’s me or Iggy Pop’; the song ‘Lust For Life’ would become a cornerstone of the film’s heavily marketed and hugely successful soundtrack album. Reissued as a single in the UK, ‘Lust For Life’ reached number 28 in the singles charts and inspired a Virgin Best Of compilation,
Nude And Rude
, that featured Gerard Malanga’s 1971 nude, junkie Iggy, judiciously cropped on the sleeve.

The surprise chart status of ‘Lust For Life’ illustrated one benefit of never having achieved long-term mainstream success; it meant there was always an audience for whom Iggy’s music was undiscovered, unmapped territory. And over the next decade, the media that disseminated his music included dozens of movies, from
Basquiat
to
Great Expectations
,
A Life Aquatic
to
School of Rock
, and an increasingly wide variety of TV commercials, most notably Nike’s 1996 ‘Search And Destroy’ commercial, and Caribbean Royal Cruise’s use of ‘Lust For Life’ - voted the most inappropriate use of a rock song in a commercial by NPR listeners in 2005. Many fans savoured the irony of a song written on Chinese rocks being screened in the middle of the Olympics, or of a paean to schnapps and cocaine touting family cruises; blog commentators around the world proclaimed it a sell-out. Iggy justified the licensing on the basis that these were songs that the world had never had a chance to hear.

When one considers the almost unprecedented, almost unbearable ordeals Iggy had survived in pursuit of his music, which had remained ignored in America for decades, it was a plausible defence. Yet not even the most silver-tongued snake-oil salesman could have concocted a reasonable explanation for the ROAR tour, which Iggy and band embarked on in the summer of 1997, bankrolled by US Tobacco, who were hoping to sell Skoal chewing tobacco to disenchanted youth all across the USA. Iggy at one point claimed that the tour offered the opportunity of playing to bigger crowds, rather than the same old mid-sized clubs, but as the tour continued, that justification crumbled into dust. Even if one were not shocked by Iggy’s cynicism in helping hawk nicotine to teenagers, one remains astounded by his naivety in signing up for a venture that was so obviously doomed.

The atmosphere that gathered around the tour was darkened by the increasingly obvious problems afflicting Jim’s marriage. He loved Suchi, profoundly, but over the years had got into the habit of treating her like a flunkey, sauntering around airports with his hands in his pockets while she struggled with the bags, his musicians observed; when they had arguments he’d often respond like a teenager, humiliating her by flirting with the women who inevitably congregated backstage. By 1996, Jim was surreptitiously inviting other girlfriends onto his tours - guitarist Pete Marshall was given the task of babysitting both Suchi and her new Argentinian love-rival Alejandra that year - and around 1997 Suchi announced she’d finally had enough and moved into an apartment Jim had purchased near 7th Street for a trial separation. Some clues to Suchi’s emotional state can be inferred from her debut novel,
In Broken Wigwag
, which was published that autumn by United Press. It told of the melancholy of Japanese émigrés in New York, fleeing the repression of Tokyo yet achingly vulnerable in their new habitat. At one point her narrator explains how a couple: ‘Never possess equal power. There is the one who tells stories and the one who listens. ’ Suchi would no longer play Jim’s adoring audience, and his grief was so obvious that drummer Larry Mullins moved into an apartment nearer to him to try and keep an eye on his friend. ‘He was spiralling into this very negative, very depressed state. And it started getting a little bit scary.’

The Revelations Of Alternative Rhythms, or ROAR, tour featured a motley line-up of bands which included the Reverend Horton Heat, Bloodhound Gang, Tonic, 60 Ft. Dolls, Sponge and future Pink and Christina Aguilera songwriter Linda Perry, as well as a ‘Lifestyle Entertainment Village’ where kids could challenge their friends to a game of virtual sumo wrestling or bouncy boxing. As soon as the tour was announced in April 1997, anti-tobacco pressure groups started issuing press releases denouncing the conglomerate’s evil efforts. Having initially pumped a huge amount of money into the tour, US Tobacco started to pull back on advertising and before long the bands were playing in huge arenas at which the security personnel outnumbered the crowd; in panic, the organisers switched some venues, thus producing the ludicrous sight of twelve huge tour buses lined up outside a tiny club like the Stone Pony in New Jersey.

As date followed ill-attended date across the USA, Iggy started to become obsessed with the singer of Sponge, a dreadful Detroit covers band who’d belatedly hopped on the grunge bandwagon and lucked into a gold album. Before long, the venerable Godfather of Punk was engaged in a game of oneupmanship with the grunge-by-numbers upstarts. ‘Whatever Jim did one night, the singer from Sponge would do the next night,’ laughs Hal Cragin. ‘One night he climbs up the PA side-fills, so the next night this kid climbs the PA side-fills. And instead of saying, Fucking kid, it just cranks him up.’ Drummer Larry Mullins started to worry that there was something more serious at work: ‘He was really creeping me out. He was doing this increasingly bizarre behaviour every night . . . it felt like he really wanted to kill himself on stage, to do something really crazy, or really violent.’

The duel with Sponge’s singer became an obsession, probably in an attempt to blot out the problems with his marriage and with the obviously doomed tour, in which audiences of one or two hundred turned up at 15,000-seater amphitheatres. Despite his band’s attempts to calm down the feud - ‘We’re saying, just relax, they’re only a fuckin’ covers band!’ says Pete Marshall - Iggy was determined to ‘push the envelope’, until one night he was faced with a tiny crowd at the huge Polaris Amphitheatre in Columbus, Ohio. The band launched into ‘Down On The Street’ to a gaggle of bemused kids who were trying to work out who he was. ‘They look as if they’ve come to see Britney Spears or something, but here’s this little guy with that maniacal look on his face and muscles bulging out everywhere, and he scared the hell out of them,’ says Whitey. Both Whitey and Cragin were studying the tiny crowd, who seemed transfixed with confusion and fear by this bizarre apparition, as Iggy ran straight to the edge of the stage, and launched himself out into space. ‘I was watching their shocked faces as he flew towards them,’ says Cragin, ‘and they just scattered. ’

Iggy hit a bank of chairs, face first, with a sickening impact. ‘It was ugly,’ remembers Whitey. As the musicians kept playing, wondering what had happened, Jos Grain bundled the singer back onto the stage. Blood streamed from his face, and one shoulder hung at a bizarre angle, a few inches below his collarbone. For a few minutes he knelt on the stage, clinging to the mike-stand, ‘His eyes all weird, in some weird place,’ says Whitey. For a while he seemed to be singing some bizarre, unknown song. Hal thought it was maybe Spanish. ‘Whatever it was sounded real cool,’ says Whitey, ‘but it definitely wasn’t “Down On The Street”.’ Finally Jos decided Iggy had sustained serious damage, hoisted him over his shoulder and carted him into the wings. The band played out the song before leaving the stage to a few half-hearted boos.

Eric Benson had joined the tour as his dad’s assistant, and drove Jim back from the doctor’s as Henry McGroggan explained the situation to the band. Jim had suffered a split head and badly dislocated shoulder - there had apparently been some problem with the anaesthetic required to reset it, such was his still-heroic tolerance to opiates - and he would have to wear a sling for the rest of the tour. For his next performance Iggy skipped on stage wearing the sling, which worked loose within seconds, leaving his arm flapping around. Jos the aspiring paramedic appeared with a roll of electrical tape, securing the injured limb to Iggy’s body so he could finish the set.

The tour limped on for another nine performances, half of them in tiny venues like the House of Blues. On 5 July, the tour was finally cancelled, with Iggy’s dislocated shoulder cited as the reason for why the planned forty dates had been cut back to half that number. Although Henry McGroggan managed to negotiate a substantial pay-off from US Tobacco, it was obvious that Iggy Pop’s attempted sell-out had met its usual fate.

Some time after the initial injury, Jim had consulted a doctor who told him, ‘Because your arm was all wrapped up, you’ve got a lot of nerve damage and the circulation cut off . . . I don’t know if that arm will ever work again.’ Once the tour was over Jim returned to the Christadora, still without use of the afflicted limb. It was not until several weeks later, when he was reading a newspaper, instinctively reached out and picked up a coffee with the damaged arm, that he could be sure there was no lasting damage.

However cynical Iggy’s acceptance of US Tobacco’s dollar had appeared to the American media, the fact that his dedication to duty had resulted in serious injury seemed to help him emerge with credibility intact. That credibility was enhanced by his only album release of 1997, a remixed version of
Raw Power
. The master tapes had apparently surfaced in Europe, where a fan had given them to the Henry Rollins Band - Rollins apparently wanted to collaborate on the new version, but Iggy elected to remix the album solo. This time around, Iggy was polite about Bowie’s mix, with no mentions of sabotage by ‘that fuckin’ carrot-top’; instead, he claimed the new version unleashed the sound of ‘a rip-snortin’ super-heavy nitro-burnin’ fuel-injected rock band that nobody in this world could touch’. The new mix was more coherent, if more one-dimensional, with a cranked-up sound that often bleeds into distortion, its original glammy edge totally excised. Once Columbia released the remixed version, they deleted the original Bowie mix, meaning that the version of
Raw Power
that had inspired a generation of punk bands was unobtainable, an act of historical revisionism that prompted Ron Asheton to observe, ‘Now, when everyone hears [the remix] they say the same thing - I really love that original David Bowie mix!’

There was a further flurry of interest in the
Raw Power
era in the run-up to the launch of Todd Haynes’
Velvet Goldmine
movie, which was based loosely on the relationship between Bowie and Iggy; despite a media onslaught, the movie disappeared without making much of an impact and was mocked by most of those who were there, with the exception of Angie Bowie, who pronounced it an accurate portrayal of the era. The movie marked the public return of Ron Asheton, who’d recently occupied most of his time acting in B-movies; joined by Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Minutemen bassist Mike Watt, he recorded ‘TV Eye’ and other songs for the soundtrack, playing back-up band for Ewan McGregor’s Iggy Pop-Lou Reed composite, Curt Wild. With Ron playing Stooges material once more, there were rumours he and Iggy might finally settle their differences, which became more persistent once it transpired that the über-producer Rick Rubin had discussed producing the reformed band. But when the subject was mentioned, Iggy would make the same old jibes about Ron still living with his mom and tell interviewers he had no interest in playing the old hits: ‘And, furthermore, I don’t have to.’

Rather than reunite with the Stooges, Iggy’s new musical project was, he told everyone, to cover ‘some standards’. It was nearly thirty years since he’d first sung ‘Shadow Of Your Smile’ to unappreciative live audiences, and he’d introduced Sinatra’s classic Johnny Mercer torch song, ‘One For My Baby’, to his set back in 1978. Furthermore, he was now going steady with a new girlfriend, who had a taste for bossa nova. Jim had first noticed Alejandra when she’d met his son, Eric, during the
American Caesar
tour in Buenos Aires, and looked her up during a subsequent visit. She taught him Spanish - he was a quick learner - and he’d croon versions of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘How Insensitive’, or the Mercer/Kosma classic ‘Autumn Leaves’, to an acoustic backing at Hal Cragin’s home studio. The kind of songs that the broken-hearted Frank Sinatra would intone as he was in the process of splitting from Ava Gardner seemed appropriate for a period in which Jim was negotiating a divorce settlement with Suchi. The split ‘really, really hurt him,’ says Larry Mullins. ‘Although much of it was his own fault, it was very hard on him, one of the most dedicated long-term things he’d ever been involved in. It represented a huge loss.’ Ultimately, it seems, the divorce from Suchi was reasonably amicable, for she visited him on tour later, but Suchi’s well-documented role in Jim’s professional rehabilitation meant that she was entitled to a hefty divorce settlement.