Iggy Pop (14 page)

It was this bizarre mix of disconnected, enigmatic themes (no other band had ever sung about wanting to be a dog), simple, monolithic riffs and unconventional tonalities that ensured the Stooges’ debut album would become revered in many different quarters. Yet while the album was underpinned, to a far greater extent than is normally realised, with an intellectual thesis, much of its dumb, bewildered confusion was genuine. It was this lack of worldliness that would soon tear the Stooges apart.

It’s a sparkling-clear night, with the Milky Way crowding in from dark horizon to dark horizon, and the wind rustles gently through the trees that shade the modest, middle-class houses on the west side of Ann Arbor. Outside one, a neat wood-clad two-storey building, a Chevrolet El Dorado rusts in the drive, in forlorn hope of eventual restoration.

Inside, Ron Asheton watches TV into the early hours, devouring an eclectic cultural diet that encompasses serial killers, the design of battleships, the Third Reich and alien visitations. On warm nights he ventures out on vigilante patrols, hunting for aliens with his Chinese AK-47 (‘The greys, with the big eyes, are cool, but don’t mess with the insect ones’). It is 1996, and Ron still lives with mother Ann Asheton, his lifestyle hardly changed from the golden days when the Stooges were planning their assault on the world. Today, though, the Stooges are a bittersweet memory. Every couple of weeks, he drives down to the Party Store on Packard Avenue, opposite where the Fun House used to stand, to pick up his favourite Canadian cigarettes. On occasion he sits in the car, remembering the old days, when he’d wait for Jim, Dave Alexander or his brother to emerge carrying boxes of Miller High Life beer.

Bouncing around enthusiastically, apologetic that our meetings took so many months to set up, Ron is chubbier but still instantly recognisable as the arrogant young punk staring out of the cover of the Stooges’ debut album. He is, by turns, lovable and scary. He ministers after you caringly, making coffees, doling out generous supplies of grass and cocaine, then brings out the first of a disconcertingly comprehensive collection of automatic weapons. He lovingly tends a collection of ageing, incontinent cats, then remarks how the SS General Reinhard Heydrich was his hero. He boasts of his youthful looks, then stares deadpan at the wall as a brochure for a toupée supplier falls out of a photo album.

Of all the people who’ve been ascribed a pivotal role in Iggy’s career, Ron is the most fascinating and the most crucial. He co-founded the band that made Iggy famous, wrote many of their best-known songs, and was co-conspirator in many of the Stooges’ triumphs. But, most crucially, Ron was also the co-creator of Iggy Pop, along with his friends Jim Osterberg, Dave Alexander and his brother Scotty. In a brief aside, Ron claims Iggy is ‘the channeler of what we all are. Iggy is what he has absorbed and taken from Dave Alexander, my brother . . . our personality and our feelings and our outlook on life and our contempt for establishment and bullshit. ’

At times, his voice rises in anger, as he contemplates the predicament of his brother Scotty, who has made failed overtures to the Stooges’ one-time singer, and is being, Ron feels, unjustly ignored. ‘Scotty was Marlon Brando - and Iggy wanted to be Marlon Brando and James Dean. The closest he could be was my bro’ and Dave Alexander. He took, like David Bowie took from Iggy. Psychic vampires.’ Meanwhile, he laments, people like Dave Alexander remain forgotten footnotes. ‘He was the catalyst for so much of the Stooges, he was so ahead of his time . . . Iggy was a straight-laced puppy-dog frat high-school regular dude when Dave Alexander was a fuckin’ true rebel, man. Dave Alexander was a big fuckin’ part of . . . I was gonna say perverting us, maybe that’s true too.’

Then, at other times, his voice softens, as he recalls a recent encounter and remembers, ‘Wow, it was great to see Jim again,’ before reflecting on how ‘people believe in Iggy and not Jim. It is hard for him.’ Talking about Jim Osterberg, there is love and empathy; discussing Iggy Pop, there is a consistent thread of bitterness that ‘when [Jim] believed in Iggy Pop then there was no more group’. At times, there’s a palpable grief that Jim Osterberg, like his dead fellow Stooge Dave Alexander, seems irretrievably lost. But there’s no possibility of closure while the spectre of Iggy Pop is there to taunt him. And, as we speak, through the night and into the dawn, when Ann Asheton rises to attend a collectors’ fair in Illinois, the possibility of reconciliation seems more and more remote.

Although Ron is likeable, funny, warm, slightly deranged, it’s a rather depressing encounter: that sense of loss, that claustrophobia. The knowledge that, while Ron helped capture the frustration of another year with nothing to do in his music, it’s a predicament that he hasn’t managed to escape. Although there has been talk of a Stooges reunion, escaping the wreckage of their personal relationships seems like an impossible prospect.

CHAPTER 5

Fun House Part I: I Feel Alright

Iggy was the most beautiful thing many women, and men, had seen. Now it seemed he was making love to all of them. With guitarists Ron Asheton and Bill Cheatham shooting out high-energy riffs like machinegun bullets behind him, he was high on the electrifying music and his own sexual energy. Again and again he threw himself into the crowd and let them close over him, gave himself up. No one could work out what was going on while he disappeared but many observers were sure it was sexual, that he was being interfered with.

Then he rose up out of the crowd, squirming, dozens of hands grasping and lifting him, and stood straight up, on their hands. He pointed, striking poses like a bronze of a Greek athlete, defying gravity, and never looking down for a second. In the wings of the Cincinnati stage, as the TV cameras captured the moment at which Iggy Stooge ascended into the pantheon, the Stooges’ roadies and fans were transfixed with a beatific feeling. This was the moment: ‘The zenith,’ Leo Beattie confided to Dave Dunlap, who knew that the album they’d just watched the Stooges make would assure their immortality. This was why they’d left their previous jobs to join up as the band’s roadies. This was why they had their pick of the most beautiful groupies in Michigan. This is what an English rock star named David Bowie would attempt to emulate, only to tumble to the ground. And this is what Jim Osterberg was born to do: ‘I know I’m at the beginning,’ he would tell people, with almost religious intensity, ‘but I know I will always be involved with this beautiful thing.’

That beautiful feeling would last for just two blissful months. Eight weeks later, Iggy would look down. And then he would jump. It would be six years or more before he stopped falling.

At the beginning of 1970, the Stooges were the people everyone had to hang with. Many local musicians mocked the band, whom they still saw as hopelessly incompetent, but the girls of Ann Arbor knew who they liked best. As Kathy Asheton points out: ‘There was an envy of the band, because there were musicians who thought they couldn’t play, yet they created all this excitement. They got the attention, they got the girls, they were cool guys, people wanted to be around them.’ Soon two of the SRC’s road crew - Zeke Zettner and Eric Haddix - came over to the Stooges camp, while roadie Leo Beattie’s defection to the Stooges from the MC5 signalled that the Stooges were on the point of overtaking their big brother band. The Stooges were less conventional, and simply more fun. There was the band’s shared humour, their self-parody and the way they all collaborated in brilliant deadpan mockery of those who didn’t get them. Then there was the nightly entertainment of seeing which of his nine different Nazi uniforms Ron Asheton would decide to wear for the evening. ‘The Stooges always seemed to have better-looking, more exotic women around than the ’5,’ Leo Beattie remembers fondly. ‘Models, interesting, intelligent women. Iggy was a sex symbol and brought them in, and Ron would also have these beautiful women around. It was a great atmosphere. We all felt that we were gonna go bigger than the MC5. Everything was in place, Ron was coming up with great riffs, Iggy had that sex appeal. We were sure it was gonna happen.’

Jim’s 14-year-old girlfriend, Betsy Mickelsen, somehow epitomised the optimistic, almost innocent atmosphere. Betsy was blonde, intelligent, street-smart and literate. In her company, Jim always seemed child-like and sincere - so sincere, in fact, that he’d managed to win the consent of Betsy’s family to the relationship. The approval of Dr Mickelsen, who lived in a large house five minutes away on Adare Road, was essential, and not just for cosy family reasons; for if Jim were to take Betsy out of the state of Michigan he risked being charged under the Mann Act for transportation of an underage girl. As one member of the Stooges household points out, this meant that ‘if you [don’t want] to get arrested, then you’re gonna have to sit around with the family and play cards with the old man - and they’re gonna have to decide you’re OK’. As far as most of the onlookers could see, Dr Mickelsen seemed to be charmed by the young singer, although it’s likely he felt he had little choice, and consequently elected to have the relationship between his 14-year-old daughter and a man eight years her senior go on in plain view, rather than behind his back.

Despite the age difference, in many respects Betsy seemed more mature than Jim. ‘She ruled the relationship in a lot of ways, and he enjoyed that,’ thought Ron Asheton. Within the band, Jim was the one in control; with Betsy, he was free of responsibility and seemed to enjoy behaving in a naive, childlike manner, as they walked around holding hands, talking in almost baby language. When he was faced with Betsy’s wrath - which was signalled by her calling him Iggy, rather than Jim - he would be genuinely disturbed, and when Betsy disappeared to her parents after a particularly bad falling-out, his distress was apparent to everyone around the house.

For most of the time, Jim and Betsy’s relationship seemed to be an idyllic one, and the general happiness was shared around the Fun House. There were no factions within the household - unusual for a rock band - although the roadies were, as custom dictated, seen as belonging to a lower caste. John Adams, aka the Fellow, was head of the ‘below stairs’ contingent - in an English country house he would have doubtless been a butler - and the Fellow became responsible for more direct supervision once Jimmy, Susan and Rachel Silver moved out of their small apartment on the second floor into a house on Brookwood late in 1969, to make more room for the band (and to escape the deafening rehearsals). Within the main household, Jim - or Pop, to use his band title - was seen as the titular head, with Ron, whose nickname was Cummings, an autonomous lieutenant, who would often call practices independently of Jim. Scotty, aka Rock Action, and Dave Alexander, aka Dude Arnet, were less visible, and as time went on, Alexander, who had always been shy, seemed to retire more and more. Even Dave’s girlfriend, Esther Korinsky, considered Dave ‘very, very withdrawn’ - he liked to keep an aura of mystery around him, and forbade Esther from looking at any of his books on the occult. But Dave’s musical contributions were valuable, most notably the riff to a song that would become ‘Dirt’, as well as a circular, repetitive bass melody that would eventually underpin the song ‘Fun House’.

Indeed, where the Stooges had struggled to come up with enough material for their debut album, the new songs came thick and fast. The object, says Jim, was ‘to forge ahead. We realised we had another album to do and I wrote them all, one by one.’ ‘Down On The Beach’, written as a love song for Wendy, was reworked after her departure into ‘Down On The Street’, while the savage guitar riff of ‘1970’ was written by Ron, as was ‘Loose’. Although in his more megalomaniac moments, Iggy would claim to have written every single note of the band’s set, he later described the material as all essentially ‘variations on a theme by Ron’. But over this period the band’s compositions, like their lifestyle, were totally communal. Even roadie Bill Cheatham was drawn into the musical mix, recruited as a kind of apprentice to Ron. The two would practise on guitar together up in Ron’s first-floor apartment, which had been inherited from the Silvers and given an Asheton makeover with display cases housing Ron’s Nazi uniforms, helmets and bayonets. Surrounded by artefacts of the Third Reich, the two worked on intricate guitar voicings which allowed Ron to perfect his overdub parts for the imminent second Stooges album.

Although Elektra had taken their sweet time arranging the band’s debut, with the MC5 gone Jac Holzman and Bill Harvey paid a little more attention to the little brother band, and the sessions for a follow-up were being planned by January 1970. The choice of producer was critical - in typical Stooge fashion, the band, Iggy in particular, were already badmouthing John Cale’s work on their debut - and Elektra’s first two suggestions, Jackson Browne and Steve Miller-keyboard player Jim Peterman, were rejected after cursory consideration. The third contender, who’d recently been recruited by Jac Holzman as a producer based in the label’s West Coast office, was Don Gallucci, who’d just racked up his first production hit with Crabby Appleton. A charming, diminutive Italian-American guy, Don’s expensive suits and impressive vocabulary were both a surprise considering his first musical break was playing keyboards on the Kingsmen’s proto-punk classic, ‘Louie Louie’.

In February 1970, the Stooges were booked for a two-night run at Ungano’s, a hip club on West 70th Street named after its founders, Arni and Nick Ungano. It was the band’s first New York gig since an August 1969 showcase at the State Pavilion with the MC5, at which the Stooges had been overshadowed by their ‘big brothers’. Jac Holzman sent Gallucci a plane ticket just a few days before the show, and told him there was a band he needed to check out. No more information was forthcoming.

Neither Gallucci, nor most of the audience, had any clue what would hit them. Many of the Max’s Kansas City crew were present, to see the boy they’d met in the back room. Every one of them, boy and girl, wanted to know what it would be like to fuck this exotic creature: ‘Isn’t it great that so many of them got to find out!’ laughs Leee ‘Black’ Childers.

As the Stooges hit the stage, Gallucci was mesmerised by the sheer wall of noise. Up to now, every band he’d ever seen had decorated their music with lots of chords, or flash solos. But he thought this sounded like ‘machine music’ - a deconstructed, minimalist slab of sound. For the past four months the Stooges’ skills had been honed by an intensive performance schedule booked by their new agency, Detroit’s DMA, and their playing was at a peak: the momentum of Ron, Dave and Scott’s instrumental onslaught did not let up for a moment.

Iggy, sporting his new customary outfit of threadbare Levi’s, black boots and elbow-length silver lamé gloves, confronted his audience from his first moment on stage. As the band broke into ‘Loose’, inviting them to take a ride ‘on the pretty music’, most of the audience were transfixed by the lascivious lyrics - ‘I’ll stick it deep inside’. The sexual tension was heightened as Iggy danced with his back to the audience;
East Village Other
writer Karin Berg speculated how one could enjoy a performance solely on the basis of watching his muscles move under his skin. Some rival critics were not as impressed. One beer-bellied, suited, bespectacled
Billboard
writer sat stage-front, impassive; Iggy walked up, tickled him under the chin, then sat in his lap, head resting intimately on his shoulder. Moments later he slowly pulled a girl out of the audience by her leg, then grabbed her by the head, before dancing off again over the tables, swinging off electrical piping on the low-slung ceiling, backflipping off a table and jumping back onto the stage. At some points the music stopped, at another it morphed into a backing for Iggy’s improvised ‘I am you’ chant. One moment the atmosphere could be intimidating, at others intensely erotic, the next it could turn to farce, as Iggy would accidentally split his lip with a microphone and sing, laughing, ‘My pretty face is going to hell.’

The New York audiences were divided by this spectacle. Some were disgusted by the ‘hype’. Others were besotted, like Berg, inspired by how the band broke through the ‘ennui and boredom’ of white America; Rita Redd and Jackie Curtis printed an awed conversation recollecting the show in
Gay Power
, and concluded, ‘Rock is gone . . . Iggy’s performance is proof of it.’ Gallucci was both impressed and shaken by the spectacle of the band playing live, but when Holzman called him the next day to see if he’d produce their album, he turned the assignment down with a typical record-company cliché: ‘Great act, but you’ll never get it on tape.’

Holzman’s response was simply, ‘Let’s do it.’ As Gallucci was a full-time employee of Elektra records, that meant he had the assignment whether he liked it or not. Fortunately the Stooges, TV addicts as they were, were enthusiastic because they’d seen Gallucci on the Dick Clark afternoon show,
Where The Action Is
, with his band, Don And The Good Times. By March, with each new song being slotted into the set one by one, the Stooges had enough material for a complete album. ‘Then finally,’ says Jim, ‘we played the Armoury in Jackson [Michigan], and they were all in. We fucked up a couple but it was starting to string together.’

Jim in particular seemed to be approaching the imminent recording with almost messianic fervour, a fervour that was intensified by some of the Stooges’ most powerful performances to date. In Cincinnati, on 26 March, the band shared an impressive bill with Joe Cocker, Mountain and others, and were forced to follow the MC5 on stage. Fellow Detroit musician Cub Koda chatted with them before they went on, and sensed their nervousness, but then watched as they walked on and ‘tore the place apart’. For the first time, Iggy plunged into the enthralled audience, was lifted up and walked on their hands.

Dave Marsh spent several days with the Stooges for a
Creem
story; he was struck by how driven the band’s singer seemed. At times there was seemingly intense mental manipulation, as Iggy turned the interview back on Marsh and started asking him questions. The confrontation seemed a set piece of how Jim Osterberg could use his mental agility and mastery of reading social situations. At times he was sensitive and vulnerable, detailing how his life had lacked any meaning until he’d teamed up with the Stooges and his very existence had ‘flowered’; at others he was frighteningly focused, loftily dismissing those who didn’t understand his vaunting ambition. Marsh was, from moment to moment, moved, impressed and totally disorientated - sensations heightened by the supply of hash they were both smoking. There is little doubt that Iggy was also mythologising his own history - ‘but the thing about all those interviews, is I never had a sense that he was telling me anything but the truth, or that it mattered,’ Marsh points out. ‘At some level or other it was true enough.’

Over March 1970, when Marsh was staying at the Fun House, a new Ann Arbor musician was pulled into Osterberg’s orbit. Steve Mackay was the most in-demand sax player in the city, playing with Bill Kirchen and Commander Cody, Vivian Shevitz’s Charging Rhinoceros of Soul, as well as leading his own avant-garde duo Carnal Kitchen - which occasionally featured ex-Prime Mover and future Stooge Bob Sheff. One night he looked up from a Carnal Kitchen performance at a Beaux Arts Ball to see the Stooges’ singer in the audience. A few weeks later Jim walked into Discount Records, where Mackay worked, and invited him out for a coffee: ‘He’s already got
Fun House
written in his head,’ says Mackay, ‘he knows there’s gonna be sax on it, and he already knows he wants to take me to Los Angeles to record - but I was the last one to know.’