Iggy Pop (5 page)

Perhaps it was the sense that he’d secured admission to the upper tier of high school kids that made it easier to turn his back on them, for in his last couple of years at school the boy ‘most likely to succeed’ no longer seemed so painfully reliant on the approval of his peers, and the snobbery of his junior high years seemed to disappear. Ricky Hodges was one of Ann Arbor High’s few black students. On his first day at the new school he was staggered by the wealth on display: ‘At that time the high school had two parking lots - one for the students, and one for the teachers. And if you were to drive into the student parking lot you’d think it was the teachers’ parking lot because the students had all the better cars!’ Hodges assumed that Osterberg - or ‘Ox’, as he called him - was one of the wealthy, ‘ritzy’ kids, but was surprised to find that, in a school where black and white communities co-existed without any interaction, Jim would often come over and chat, ‘and that was unusual. No doubt about it.’

For the first time, there were signs of physical fearlessness, of standing up for people. In Jim’s junior year, there was an end-of-term talent contest in the spacious, wood-lined auditorium. One girl was singing a cappella when an older student started to heckle: ‘Something about it being a stupid, mushy song,’ says Ron Ideson, who was sitting next to Osterberg. ‘Jim swung round and hit the heckler as hard as he could with his fist, three or four times, angrily saying “Shut up!” Jim cared nothing for his own safety, he was standing up for the performer on stage, and I doubt he knew her personally.’

The ex-Tappan kids noticed a change in Jim’s demeanour, the fact he was not quite as consciously trying to join the establishment. He ran once more for student office in 1965, this time shooting for the position of president. His campaign literature listed all of his achievements: participation in the swimming, track and golf teams, membership of the AC math, English and history programmes, his role in the Ann Arbor High debate team and his participation in a recent State Model United Nations assembly. For this election, however, he boasted a new distinction: the fact he played drums in a ‘professional rock ’n’ roll band’, namely the Iguanas, an expanded version of the Megaton Two. Whether it was the fact he was aiming for higher office, or that he was regarded as slightly more left-field than was the case at Tappan, this year his political talents proved inadequate to the task, and he lost the election to David Rea, a tall, handsome, football-playing, valedictorian BMOC - Big Man On Campus.

In a time of conflicting influences, the academic pressure from his parents, the lure of politics and the excitement of The Beatles, whose arrival in 1963 attracted his attention, Jim’s desire to achieve was obvious but still unfocused. Jannie Densmore was Jim’s girlfriend at the time, and she recalls ‘vague memories of his home life not being that great. And he was an overachiever, I remember his devotion to his music and also political things, being a leader. I always thought he would do something larger than just grow up, marry, live and die in Ann Arbor.’

In the months that she went out with Jim, before she left to join her mom’s new husband in New Orleans, Jannie was never invited back to Jim’s trailer. The same applied to his other two or three girlfriends from junior high and high school. For some reason, Jim had been nervous about asking Jannie out in the first place, enlisting Clarence ‘Rusty’ Eldridge as a co-conspirator and raiding the Eldridge family’s drinks cabinet before their first date: ‘We got an empty Miracle Whip jar, poured a little bit from the top of each bottle into the jar, filled it up with orange juice, went over to Jannie’s house and ended up getting plastered,’ remembers Rusty.

One evening, after telling his parents he was going down to the Colonial Lanes bowling alley with his friends, Jim headed instead for a romantic
tête-à-tête
at Jannie’s house. He raided the drinks cabinet, only to be caught as her mother returned early. The half-loaded Osterberg and girlfriend fled for the bowling alley, where they ren dezvoused with their alibi, Jim McLaughlin: ‘He was totally drunk, and he loved it. He was smiling, giggling, off in his own little world. She wouldn’t even look at him or me - she was so mad she couldn’t even sit still!’

With both Jannie and Jim McLaughlin, Jim Osterberg seemed to maintain a certain degree of separation, of control; both were aware of his incredible ability to be different things to different people. It was possibly instinctive and, engagingly, sometimes had no other purpose than to entertain. For in an environment where ‘jocks’ would mock weedy kids in the shower, or a ‘goon squad’ would victimise kids with long hair (sometimes, according to Ann Arbor High pupil Scott Morgan, administering forced haircuts on the spot), Jim Osterberg was increasingly seen around the corridors and classrooms in the guise of ‘Hyacinth’, an alter ego developed from a poem he’d written, in which he had imagined himself as a flower. ‘It would just crack you up,’ laughs classmate Jimmy Wade. ‘He would walk out, have his arms outstretched, and just look at you like he was a flower, bend a little, shake his arms as if there was a slight breeze, do it in a manner that you had to laugh!’ Lynn Klavitter concurs. ‘It was pretty crazy! But that’s the way he was!’ By 1965, the 18-year-old Jim’s hair was just a little bit longer and flopped over his forehead. It wasn’t long enough to identify him as a greaser or rocker, but just enough to mark him out as not purely an aspiring schoolboy politician any more.

Fortunately, Hyacinth’s eccentricity was complemented by Jim Osterberg’s position within the school hierarchy, and his role on the executive committee organising the graduation talent show meant that his alter ego was engaged as MC for the event on 10 March 1965. Ricky Hodges (whom Jim describes as ‘a very funny black guy, not unlike a local Chris Rock’) was co-presenter, but he claims his role was simply that of straight man. After a couple of rehearsals at Ricky’s house and at ‘Ox’s’ trailer, Hyacinth and Hodges opened the show. Ricky produced a watering can, and sprinkled imaginary water over his partner, who slowly unfurled and then blossomed into life. Hodges and Hyacinth proceeded to transfix the 2,000 pupils who filled the auditorium, trading jokes and improvising lines; Hodges’s humour was quick-witted, while Hyacinth was simply surreal, prancing around, giggling, skipping across the stage. Today, of course, it sounds quite camp, and Jim Osterberg is slightly defensive of his pioneering alter ego (‘I didn’t even know what a gay person was!’), but it was a hilarious, brave performance that had the high-school audience doubled over with laughter.

One younger boy, soon to become one of Ann Arbor’s hottest singers, was mesmerised by the performance. He enjoyed the couple of numbers that Jim played with his band the Iguanas, who were also on the bill, but he was most impressed by Hyacinth’s prancing, offbeat antics: ‘Nobody expected anything like this,’ says Scott Morgan. ‘Hyacinth was so entertaining, so charismatic. It was like a preview of what he was to become.’

Three years later, Morgan would see Jim Osterberg’s public unveiling of Iggy Stooge at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom. He would remember Hyacinth, and realise he’d seen this all before.

Four decades on from that talent show, the class of ’65 weave their way tentatively through the banked seats filling Ann Arbor High’s huge auditorium. The area is in semi-darkness, thanks to holiday restoration work on the electrical system, but it’s still possible to make out an impressive, beautifully designed performance space, which puts to shame many provincial theatres or arts venues. The night before, Jim Osterberg’s reunited class members had met up at Colonial Lanes bowling alley for their forty-year reunion; tonight there will be a formal reception. Very occasionally you can see flashes of old high-school rivalries, the odd mention of ‘snooty Tappan kids’, but it’s an overwhelmingly warm, textbook friendly event, rich with tales of people happily wed to their high-school sweethearts, or who’ve indulged themselves with early retirement, or who’ve gone on to successful careers in academia, engineering or the law.

Most of Jim’s classmates smile at the mention of his name, and recall his political views or his goofy humour; perhaps two or three recall him as a misguided, eccentric creature whose music could never hold a candle to their favourite Detroit rocker, Bob Seger. Many of the women spontaneously volunteer recollections of his engaging wit and entrancing blue eyes, and maintain that his accounts of being an outcast, or a dork, are quite simply ‘bogus’, as one classmate, Deborah Ward, puts it: ‘Let’s face it, he wasn’t Eminem.’

Mim Streiff is an elegant, ebullient woman who in her high-school senior year dated Sam Swisher, one of the tallest, wealthiest and classiest boys in Jim’s year. She shares her schoolmates’ warm memories of Jim, a ‘super-smart’ boy, ‘a natural, in the top echelon’, who claimed he would one day be President of the United States. But as we walk along the dark, brick-lined hallways, with their impeccable terrazzo floors and art deco signage, Mim smiles, before she dissects Jim’s achievements forensically - almost brutally: ‘I think Jim tried
everything
. He was not quite the best at golf; he wasn’t quite an athlete. He wasn’t quite the best at swimming. He was good, but he wasn’t the top debater. He wasn’t the coolest guy, and he didn’t date the coolest girls. But he still wanted to be the coolest. He kept trying . . . but he never quite made it to the top.’

There was one kid at Ann Arbor High who back in 1965 was undoubtedly aware of this brutal truth; one kid who had a burning belief in himself, and a fierce desire to succeed, and that was Jim Osterberg, the boy who’d finessed his way so often, but only ever to second place. But still he knew that he was special. He would get to first place in something. All he needed to do was find out what it was.

CHAPTER 2

Night of the Iguana

The most respected guru of Chicago’s blues and jazz scene hadn’t expected this cold winter evening would turn out to be such an ordeal. A champion of black music, the patron of fast-rising young blues turks like Magic Sam and Junior Wells and the owner of Chicago’s hippest record store, Bob Koester generally found that even the most ornery musicians would treat him with affection, or at least respect. But tonight, one of the most engaging, intelligent musicians he’d ever encountered was out to torture him, and soon he would find the limits of his endurance.

From the moment Koester had met Iggy Osterberg, he had been charmed by the young drummer’s intelligence and enthusiasm. He was sufficiently enthused by the aspiring blues drummer to hire him for a gig with bluesman Big Walter Horton, who was playing a demonstration set at Oak’s Park swanky Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Unitarian Temple, to accompany a talk by Koester on the blues in front of an admiring, middle-class audience. Iggy had acquitted himself well musically, while his tact and intelligence were demonstrated by the way he’d charmed some of Chicago’s toughest bluesmen. But on this cold evening, at Koester ’s apartment on the ground floor of 530 North Wabash, in the winter of 1966, that charm had disappeared. In its place was malevolence.

It had all started when Iggy had asked Koester, who’d been putting him up for a week or so, if some of his friends could drop by. His friends were what Koester termed ‘psychedelic dudes’, but there was little peace and love in the vibe they brought. Of the five of them, Vivian Shevitz was OK, but now she’d disappeared in search of her friend Sam Lay, who was in hospital after accidentally shooting himself in the scrotum. The Asheton brothers, Ron and Scott, were a nasty pair; Ron’s party-piece was a Gestapo interrogation routine, where he’d shine a light into Koester’s face while sneering, ‘Ve haf vays of making you talk.’ Scott was more physically intimidating, a handsome, broody youth who resembled a young Elvis Presley and seemed to enjoy playing frisbee with Koester’s precious blues 78s. The fourth psychedelic dude, Scott Richardson, was a Jagger-lookalike singer who professed to like Howlin’ Wolf, but he was equally indifferent to Koester’s blues guru status. He joined the others in taunting him, wrestling with each other, walking round the apartment shouting, mocking Koester or laughing at Iggy - or Ego, as Koester had started to nickname him - as the drummer danced naked with his dick folded back between his legs, shouting, ‘I’m a girl, I’m a girl!’

By now, the headache that had been coming on over the evening made Koester feel like his skull was clamped in a vice, and his young charges were cranking up the pressure. Cradling his head in his hands, he asked Iggy if he could pour him a glass of water. For once, Iggy seemed sympathetic, and headed for the bathroom with a glass. Reappearing, he passed the full glass to Koester, who raised it to his lips before the warmth and retch-inducing reek of its contents alerted him. The little shit was trying to get Koester to drink a glass of piss! Enraged, Koester threw the glass at Osterberg, who held up his hand to protect himself as the glass shattered, cutting his finger and splattering its contents over the apartment. Incandescent with rage, Koester screamed at the young fucks to get out, bundling all of them out of the door and into the freezing Chicago night.

As they walked round the Loop in search of an all-night cinema, Iggy seemed strangely unconcerned. Teeth chattering, he confided to Ron Asheton that he’d abandoned his ambition of being a blues drummer. He wanted to form a band. And he wanted Ron and Scott to join him. He had an idea that they could come up with something different.

It was the drums that called James Osterberg away from politics. Trained in the school marching band, he later graduated to the orchestra proper, and right around the time the first stirrings of rock ’n’ roll reached Michigan, he enrolled in a school summer camp and brought his marching-band side drum with him. One morning the seventh and eighth graders were being called from their dormitories to the assembly area, and Jim took it upon himself to lead them through the tree-lined paths, like a paradiddling Pied Piper: ‘Jim was playing really, really well, and the kids just lined up and started marching,’ says Denny Olmsted. ‘He didn’t have a shirt on and looked really healthy and fit; he had a flat-top haircut, like all of us. It sounded great, and everyone just followed him in formation and marched down the path.’

It became a ritual that was repeated over several consecutive days. And whatever his ambitions of emulating John F. Kennedy via his ample gift for public speaking, it was with this basic, primal beat that Jim Osterberg first became a leader.

Over subsequent months, visitors to the Osterbergs’ trailer, like Brad Jones, noticed he had acquired a drum practice pad - modest circles glued to a piece of plywood - but it wasn’t until 1961 that Osterberg, then fifteen, had his first brush with rock ’n’ roll, after he met up with, he says, a ‘not particularly popular, not particularly anything, but nice’ kid called Jim McLaughlin, in the school marching band. McLaughlin’s dad was a radio tinkerer, like a local Leo Fender, whose house on Hermitage, near Tappan, was always littered with microphones and amplification equipment, and it was there that Osterberg first heard Duane Eddy, Ray Charles and Chuck Berry. ‘And I was like, Holy Christ, this is some serious shit.’

McLaughlin became Osterberg’s closest friend, and the two spent long hours after school at the trailer in Ypsilanti, McLaughlin working out boogie riffs on guitar and Osterberg accompanying him on his tiny three-piece drum kit. An intelligent, unassuming man who now works in trade exhibitions, to this day McLaughlin is impressed by his childhood friend’s confidence and his ‘utter fearlessness’. He was also taken aback by the fierce rivalry between the Osterberg males: ‘They had the most incredibly adversarial relationship in the world, they were at each other’s throats every second - oneupmanship, who could cut the other person down, who had a quicker wit. They would take golf trips down to North Carolina, play every day and just go to war. It was such a paradox, because the guy also inherited this literary interest from his father and obviously the golf and the athletics, too.’

McLaughlin was nervous about the rock ’n’ roll duo’s public debut, but his new bandmate talked him into playing at a Tappan Talent Show in March 1962; they played two numbers, Sandy Nelson’s ‘Let There Be Drums’, and then a self-written 12-bar using a bunch of Duane Eddy and Chuck Berry cast-off riffs. Introduced as the Megaton Two by Osterberg’s friend Brad Jones, they took to the stage, and their rendition of Nelson’s drum showcase aroused a decent spattering of applause. By the second number, ‘People went nuts, they were dancing in the aisle, the teachers were running round telling ’em to sit down,’ says McLaughlin. After the show, one of the high-school jocks went up to the drummer and gruffly congratulated him. ‘“Hey, Osterberg, that sounded good, your band’s pretty cool,” sorta thing. And girls liked us a little bit. And that was how it started off.’

As casual as it was, that jock’s comment, the first modest acclaim, together with the subtle approval of Tappan’s schoolgirls, would launch a fateful career - one in which future audiences’ responses would veer from rapture to violence. It would be another two years before Osterberg’s musical ambitions took obvious priority over his status as a classroom politician, but there was a good reason for the switch. As a politician, Osterberg relied on his verbal facility, his reading of audiences and his sheer audacity. Every one of those skills was also vital to his musical career, which demanded sustained hard work too, but music would become the one pastime he loved for itself, rather than for its ability to impress others.

From now on, he would practise incessantly with McLaughlin after school, and when the pair moved up to Ann Arbor High the work intensified as the line-up was augmented with sax-player Sam Swisher, the son of an Ann Arbor real-estate agent who lived over the road from the McLaughlins, and, in 1964, bassist Don Swickerath and guitarist Nick Kolokithas, who knew McLaughlin via a local guitar teacher, Bob Richter. Osterberg named the band the Iguanas, after what he claimed was the ‘coolest’ animal, and over the following two years, as they played the local high schools and frat parties at the University of Michigan, their set changed in tune with Michigan’s musical vibe, with frat-band sax-led songs like ‘Wild Weekend’ or ‘Walk, Don’t Run’ being supplanted by numbers from The Beatles, the Stones and the Kinks, as their stripy surf-band shirts made way for matching sharkskin suits.

McLaughlin and Swickerath were regular visitors to the Osterbergs’ trailer, in contrast to Jim’s girlfriends, Jannie Densmore and then Lynn Klavitter, who never got to see his home or meet his parents. From Swickerath’s viewpoint, Osterberg had ‘a lonely life. Before school his mom and dad would just sort of shake his foot, say, Jim, get up, and it was up to Jim to get up, get breakfast and get himself to school, as his parents took off for work.’ What was unusual then is of course conventional today. But Osterberg’s upbringing, and only-child status, undeniably contributed to an independent - solitary, even - streak. And a persona that, even in those innocent times, was being noticeably affected by the advent of drugs and rock ’n’ roll. It was towards the end of his time at Ann Arbor High that girlfriend Lynn Klavitter noticed when he ‘started taking overdoses of his asthma medicine. I remember one place we went with the Iguanas, some resort, where he bleached his hair, and I knew something was changing about him. He was doing extravagant things that he normally didn’t do.’

Over those high school years, Jim’s preferred social setting moved from the golf course to Ann Arbor ’s Discount Records. The store’s manager was Jeep Holland, a well-known svengali on the local scene. He steered blue-eyed soulsters the Rationals to chart success, and built up a thriving booking agency based from a payphone, scaring off other potential users with his scary speed-freak glare. Holland took a liking to young Osterberg, even though the Iguanas were rivals to his own charges. Holland eventually hired him to work in the store after school, checking in and out Discount’s stock of Stax and Volt 45s: ‘But he was always late, never on time. Then I noticed that so many girls were hanging around him that nothing was getting done. So in the end I had him do all the stock work in the basement.’ An expert in soul and R&B, in which he schooled all his charges, Holland enjoyed mocking Jim’s Beatles-loving band - and over that year got into the habit of shouting ‘Iguana Alert!’ whenever Jim emerged from the basement.

It was during those after-school hours working at Discount that Osterberg first noticed two kids, fellow students at Ann Arbor High, hanging around on Liberty Street outside the store. Ron Asheton was a wannabe rock star with a Brian Jones haircut, who’d first met Jim in the Ann Arbor High school choir; Scott Asheton, Ron’s younger, taller brother, was a charismatic young hood with a dark, glowering air. The pair had moved to Ann Arbor with sister Kathy and their mother, Ann, soon after the death of their father on 31 December 1963. Today, Iggy still recalls Scott Asheton looking ‘magnetic, like a cross between a young Sonny Liston and Elvis Presley’. Many years after their first meeting, he commemorated that first sighting in his song ‘The Dum Dum Boys’, remembering the way ‘they used to stare at the ground’. But over the next few months their conversations would be limited to muttered hellos in the corridors of Ann Arbor High.

It was with by now typical Osterberg bluster that the lead Iguana described himself as a ‘professional drummer’ in flyers for his unsuccessful presidential campaign of 1965 - his instinct for self aggrandisement had reached new heights. Literally - in that spring’s talent contest he overshadowed his fellow Iguanas by appearing on top of a ludicrous, seven-foot-tall drum riser. (Fellow student and fan, Dale Withers, one of the school’s taller pupils, pondered if this was a classic ‘Napoleon complex’.) But in July 1965, after Osterberg, Swisher and McLaughlin’s graduation from high school, that exalted ‘professional’ claim became true, when the band secured a residency at Harbor Spring’s Club Ponytail, in what several of them would recall as the most idyllic summer of their lives.

An elegant resort nestling close to Little Traverse Bay on Lake Michigan, Harbor Springs was studded with beautiful, sprawling Victorian mansions that were owned or rented as summer homes by the Midwest’s wealthiest industrial magnates - many of whom had daughters who were keen to party the night away. Recognising the opportunity, local businessman Jim Douglas opened a teenage nightclub at the Club Ponytail, a Victorian mansion that had reputedly once served as a base for Detroit bootleggers during Prohibition. The Iguanas would be the bait for these society debutantes - and before long, it became obvious that Jim Osterberg was their biggest attraction. Located down a two-lane road, and advertised by a huge wooden cut-out of a blonde with a pert turned-up nose and a ponytail, the Club Ponytail’s two dance floors soon became the hottest spot in town.

For five nights a week, the Iguanas would belt out a set that included several Beatles songs - ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘Eight Days A Week’, ‘Slow Down’ and more - plus the Stones’ ‘Tell Me’, Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona’ and, several times a night, that summer’s smash hit, ‘Satisfaction’, most of the numbers sung by McLaughlin or Kolokithas. By now, Osterberg had decreed that Sam Swisher’s saxophone was superfluous, and the real-estate agent’s son was relegated to bashing on a tambourine (invariably on the on-beat) and looking after the band’s money. According to Sam’s girlfriend, Mim Streiff, Sam compensated for his humiliation by exerting financial control over his bandmates, advancing them money from the next week’s earnings and deducting a lucrative 20 per cent. Naturally this earned the further resentment of his drummer, who glowers at the mention of his name to this day.

Honed by their two-sets-a-night, five-nights-a-week routine, the Iguanas became a tough little outfit, their voices roughened and funky from constant wear. Cub Koda, later the leader of Brownsville Station, saw the Iguanas many times over that summer, and describes them as ‘a great, greasy little rock ’n’ roll band’. Jim was a good drummer, who’d lie back on the beat and slash away at his ride cymbal, which was studded with rivets for a sleazier sound. ‘And, man, you’d watch those rivets dance,’ says Koda, who was also struck by the Iguanas’ low-down versions of ‘Wild Weekend’ and ‘Louie Louie’; Osterberg would customise them with his own dirty lyrics, which Detroit bands loved trading with each other. Michigan teen band the Fugitives claimed to have introduced the word ‘fuck’ to Richard Berry’s garage-band classic ‘Louie Louie’ back in 1963 but, after dire warnings from Douglas, McLaughlin learned to hover by the microphone’s volume control during the offending song, ready to protect the vulnerable teens of Harbor Springs from lines such as ‘Girl, I’d like to lay you again’, or ‘Her ass is black and her tits are bare’.