This We Dug: Iggy Pop

(Wallflower Dave Rinck explains how an Iguana bested the Lizard King.)

Look, let’s talk about five words that loom large in the history of the Che Underground … Or OK, well … To be more precise, five words that loom enormous in the history of all underground: Iggy Pop and the Stooges.

I guess everyone knows this story, but it apparently goes something like this: Sometime in the late ’60s (as the legend goes), in some gritty-poor Detroit neighborhood, a bunch of really bad-ass white-trash dudes left their trailer-park homes one night and went down to the University of Michigan gym and caught a show by the Doors, who happened to be on tour at the time.

Well, as fate would have it, Jim Morrison was drunk, and most of the crowd didn’t get it, and they ended up pissing him off, and he ended up getting into a bit of a shouting match with the audience, and you know how those college jocks are. But apparently one guy in the audience did get it — one of those trailer-park bad asses — an upstart little punk by the name of James Osterberg.

Well, he couldn’t afford a fancy leather jacket like the one Morrison wore, so got a cheap and nasty old fake-leather jacket and wore that. And he thought that Morrison’s on-stage audaciousness was pretty appropriate given the circumstances (rock ‘n’ roll), so when his turn came to climb up on stage with his band the Stooges, he rolled around in glass and peanut butter. And, well … Not surprisingly given his background, when he sang about love and flowers on a Saturday night, it came out more like the demented orations of some sort of sonic sex offender from America’s hidden underground.

Years later, when the Stooges finally made it to Morrison’s neighborhood in LA and played the Whisky a Go Go, they say Jim declined to go see them. What a wimp. Anyway, it didn’t matter, because the Stooges had already recorded two definitive albums that would set the gold standard for statements of teen alienation set to distortion for years to come. Or in their words:

Well, it’s 1969 okaaaaay
All across the USA
Another year for me and you
Another year with nothin’ to do…

Later Iggy met David Bowie and recorded “Raw Power,” and then the Stooges broke up and Iggy was hospitalized or something, but when he got out he met Bowie again and recorded more great songs. One of these was an ode to the Stooges called “Dum Dum Boys,” in which Iggy admitted that “the walls close in and I neeeeed some noise.”

Okay, well fast-forward to the present. Jim Morrison’s dead; there’s still nothing to do; and, dammit, we all neeeeed some noise from time to time. Iggy and the Stooges re-formed and are still out there impressing America with just what the risks are of letting your kids play with guitars.

I only saw Iggy live once. It was the “Zombie Birdhouse” tour; I saw him at San Diego’s Adams Avenue Theater. He was great (obviously).

— David Rinck