Rock On (17 page)

It's a few weeks later, well after Christina has left the corridors of corporate rock for the wide-open spaces of Utah. The end of another day, and Ben and I are heading out from the editing studio to meet up with his brother Nat at a diner in Times Square to get something to eat. Some tourist place on Broadway with singing waitresses, a smattering of tourists, and three now gainfully employed men, living well inside the law and meeting up for something to eat after work. We take turns complaining about office politics or the workload in our respective places of business. I'm chain-sipping Diet Coke so fast that our singing waitress automatically brings a refill without missing a beat of “Summer Lovin'” from
Grease
and just before she launches into Sinatra's trademark “New York, New York,” which I have to admit takes on a certain poetic undertone when sung by a twenty-six-year-old from the Midwest carrying a basket of cheese fries and a Diet Coke. I pull my head off the straw long enough to think these thoughts in caffeinated succession:

• Odd place for grown men to have dinner after work.

• I would not have guessed I'd wind up like this, a thirty-five-year-old desk-job guy trying not to check out a twenty-six-year-old singing waitress.

But then I remember why were here in the first place: we're going to see Iggy and the Stooges! I don't think it has hit any
of us yet that we're going to see Iggy Pop after dinner, but before long we're walking up Broadway to Roseland, and it's hard not to notice that the pace is one of those paces you recall from when you were maybe seventeen and a brand-new Friday night was unfolding in front of you and you don't want to miss a thing.

We walk into Roseland and there's some terrible situation onstage: Godsmack? I don't know much about this band. I guess, really, I know nothing about this band, but evidently they seem to be a pop metal band of men doing an acoustic unplugged set and singing about their feelings, which is fine and everything and they're probably great guys and everything, but frankly tonight we're confused as to why they're here. Hell,
they're
probably confused as to why they're here, in all fairness. Some guy introducing them keeps saying that he's the new host of the all-new
Headbanger's Ball
on MTV2 and nobody in the crowd seems to know why this is important. And I figure that maybe we should split while we can, wait outside for Iggy to go on, before the shouting MTV2 host and his network promotional skills snuffs the excitement we've felt up to this point.

The guys onstage tune up their acoustic guitars and start another song about emotions and all I'm thinking about are the record executives at work and how they would probably think that somebody was brilliant to put these guys on before Iggy with nothing but acoustic guitars. They would probably say it's “Exposing them to a crossover demographic that may have missed them the first time around in the nineties” and then they'd start into, like, almost a seizure where they're regurgitating two or three dozen marketing maxims at a time about how it made sense for this band to open. It's terrible to
be standing here subjected to the bad marketing and promotion initiatives of middle-aged rich white men in high-rises when you came here for something that rails against that very kind of thing. You came here for Iggy Pop, the last bastion of hope against that kind of thinking and selling. And then something happens that reaffirms faith: I look around and notice that most of the crowd have simply elected to either read a book or hang out and talk in groups of three or four. Then in between songs and MTV announcements, folks near where we're standing simply hold their middle fingers aloft without taking their eyes off their book or conversation they're having. Oh, sweet, sweet New York, how I love you so. Then the MTV guy comes out once more talking again about how he's the host of the all-new
Headbanger's Ball
on MTV2, and how we all have to tune in. The crowd is a mix of laughter, some booing, and another round of middle fingers held high. There is hope! Stagehands eventually start breaking down equipment and moving new guitars out and tuning them. The unplugged so-called alternative metal songs have stopped being played, and the opening band has retreated, maybe even a little earlier than they planned, making me think they're probably decent men on some level. After about twenty minutes, the house lights go down, the stage goes dark, some static and clamor as a guitar is plugged in by a shadowy figure, static for a second, a little feedback, and then the first huge chords ring out and . . .

JEEEEZUS!

The stage lights are up full blast and Iggy Pop hits the stage like he's not going to stop running until he's at the back of the auditorium, grabs the mic, and splits off across the stage to the
side. A shirtless blur, a tornado of living, screaming, chiseled muscle-and-sinew proof that all of what they told you about growing up or aging is bullshit.

Mike Watt, from the Minutemen and fIREHOSE, is playing bass and looks as amazed as anyone in the crowd. His eyes are absolutely glued to Iggy, and Iggy is everywhere at once. He flies like a computer-animated god-beast deity in an unhinged and hijacked Lucas film. You suddenly realize every punk band you thought was blowing your mind back when you were sixteen was simply a cute little messenger delivering a wadded note to you from this man, wherever he might have been that night. In retrospect, the punk shows you went to when you were growing up all seem like long-distance calls on a speakerphone from a place only somewhat near the storm you're witnessing firsthand now.

Ron Asheton plays guitar like he's seen it all before, but the rest of us . . . Jesus! Iggy has sprinted across the stage for the eighth time since a minute ago and, in the blink of an eye, with one simple jump and a lightning-fast pull-up, this fifty-six-year-old life force has launched his frame up onto an eight-foot stack of amp cabinets. He stands up on top and is on the mic again in a flash, face-to-face with the industry suits up in the balcony at the side of the stage. “Betcha wish you weren't fat!” he wails at them, like a perfect storm of wiseass howl, fire, and cat-call taunt. He's singing like his life depends on it, even more than any frontman thirty years younger than he is; like he knows it's been a could-end-any-minute ride since he was seventeen and he wants to have one last laugh at those who chose the safe and staid path just in case tonight's the last time he gets to show them what life is like when you're
living it. “Jump down here you fat fucks! I dare you to jump! You won't jump because you're scared!” all of this grin-and-scream lasting about three and one-eighth seconds before he's airborne back down to the stage. I stand slack-jawed on the verge of crying like one of those girls in the black-and-white footage of the Beatles on
Ed Sullivan.
Iggy Pop is screaming, writhing, running, grinning, howling, singing, posing like a man-god returned from the volcano, and then lurching back into a tornado of fuel and fever and guess-what-I've-been-up-here-since-before-your-heroes-were-born-and-they-said-it-wouldn't-last-another-minute-in-1976-fuckers!

The experience is nearing religious if you're one of the legions who have spent a lifetime so far rudderless. I am trying to reason, the way you maybe try to reason when a UFO is coming down in front of the family station wagon on Interstate 10 somewhere just outside of New Mexico or wherever they land. Try to figure out how you're seeing what you're seeing, but for Christ's sake, don't miss a detail. The Da Vinci drawing with the punk rock head on top of it, every muscle impossibly etched, is now swinging the microphone over his head by its cable, in maybe a fifteen-foot circle. Guitarist casually ducks it, Watt plays his bass backing up a bit, still looking as awestruck as the rest of us. Doesn't even look out to the crowd until about the fifth song and even then it feels as if he's just looking to make sure there are going to be other witnesses. Iggy is screaming for everybody to come up on stage! Um, unfortunately, Mr. Pop, I am paralyzed and almost crying like a goddamned housewife in the front row of Tom Jones at Caesar's Palace, so I'm not gonna be able to get up there with the others. Suddenly maybe two hundred people are climbing over the barricade and crashing security, who resist the
flood at first, then decide quickly to step aside as Iggy, still hitting every lyric, manages between lines and breaths to scream things like, “Don't fucking listen to them! I said get up onstage! It's my fucking show and you're the one who paid! Get up here! Have fun, goddammit!”

The stage fills up fast, Iggy disappears into the mass, invisible with his anti-status-quo wrath but still making sure you hear every word at nine million decibels plus whatever the mic and sound system add to it. And you fight to explain all of this in your head, this feeling that you're witnessing something biblical in an age not known for miracles. Your brain races to explain it before giving in to the music again. You tell yourself he is simply controlled by dead Indians, like Ouija boards and fortune-tellers. You apologize inside for every single solitary moment of life you have ever wasted sitting still.

Iggy Pop continues at the exact same level of intensity that he sprinted to the stage with for what has added up to at least two solid hours, and then he screams goodnight, contorts his body into a combination of major-league fastball windup and yoga stretch, then tilts focus totally downward, and releases the pitch, hurling the microphone down with all his strength, straight into the stage. As the smash of the mic's high-speed encounter with the stage still rings in the speakers, the Stooges continue to play the song out. Iggy Pop is walking offstage and something starts going crazy down left in the crowd. A fight? A knife? What? Wait! In another split-second blur, it becomes clear that Iggy Pop is making his way through the crowd with the weird, unexplained, and improbable speed of some kind of snake you've heard about humans not being able to outrun. The only evidence of his path is a parting wake of fans that cuts and zags a sudden swath, with outfoxed security
guys trailing behind, and within about three seconds flat you see Iggy Pop
scaling the wall up to the VIP mezzanine!
A long rope of sinewy muscle with hair and eyes on top, Iggy hangs from the ledge with the fastest of the huge security guys hanging on to his foot — but Iggy wriggles it free in the blink of an eye and pulls himself quickly up above the crowd. In what feels like less than five seconds he has flown from the stage to the ledge of the auditorium's mezzanine. The idle rich hipsters and industry VIP crowd up there are shocked and wide-eyed with
“Holy shit, the gargoyle flew up here! Hold on to your complimentary Skyy vodka and cranberry, you guys!”
written on their faces.

Iggy runs the length of the elevated former safe harbor of the privileged, turning over tables, heaving them up and over and grinning maniacally, explosions of sprayed and flung alcohol flagging his eastbound advance through them. Chairs are flying, tables are sailing over, he moves fast with almost casual fury in this ultimately harmless but overdue, inspired, urgent, and precision reconnaissance mission. And as quickly as he came, he is gone, and the well-dressed and shocked stand amongst the debris looking at each other and down at their clothes covered in champagne or booze mixed with juice. He reappears at the edge of the mezzanine, jumps back down into the crowd, cuts and swerves invisibly and springs back on stage, screaming his final good-byes two hours after this all started. And this time when he leaves, the band wraps up the song, walks off, and the house lights are up fast like nothing ever happened. Like the authorities are telling you it couldn't have been a UFO that crushed your station wagon's hood when you found yourself blinded and transported, then set back down with an unexplained lapse of two hours.

Every single one of us makes our way to the doors dazed and calm while a tiny digital facsimile of music from a CD plays through the house speakers. We are a mass of people maybe finally repaired, just back from our Lourdes, borne through wide double doors and out into the night of Times Square, and it feels like every single excuse you were ever planning to use has been stripped away by what you just saw happen. Like you're going out into the world to try again, apologizing to God and yourself for any moment of blood coursing through your veins that you ever took for granted.

On the way home we walk east and pass by the office. I stand there at the base of the building looking up and thinking, I go there every day and sit in one square of that glass grid and I keep my mouth shut in meetings. I count the stories up to twenty-four and try to figure out exactly which office is mine. Ben says that the way the building is flanked by two shorter buildings one could argue that it looks like a middle finger extended, and therefore spending all day there could essentially pass for a rebellious gesture. Ben is laughing at the thought of this. I think I see the tiny square where I sit way up off the street.

After good-bye, Ben heads downtown, and I split to the F subway through the plaza at Rockefeller Center where they're setting up for MTV Video Music Awards, which happen tomorrow night. It's maybe one-thirty in the morning and the red carpet is already rolled out and lit by eighteen million watts of halogen, even though there's nobody on it. They have already barricaded two long paparazzi pits that run up either side, the entire length of it — from Fifth Avenue, through the plaza, and into a celebrity entrance covered by white tents. I walk down the red carpet very uncelebrated, toward my usual
shortcut to the subway on Forty-ninth, while a night watchman sits at the edge of the carpet reading a newspaper, watching nothing. Tomorrow this well-lit ghost town will come alive — a petri dish of lip-synch teen sensations arriving with moms for managers, moguls for agents, and silently stewing best friends for personal assistants; a bright red, fifty-yard, narrow, fecund swamp of pop flavors of the month, diamond-encrusted hip-hop braggarts with bejeweled hangers-on, and cute boys who decided to play pop-punk instead of model or star in a sitcom. I walk along the carpet, hands in my pockets, Iggy Pop forever screaming in my head.