LF: The Survival of Iggy Pop

n late July, in a brief window between professional appointments, Iggy Pop drove to the mouth of Biscayne Bay, so that he could bob in its tropical waters. In 1995, he had bought what he described as “a very seedy condo” in Miami, and he has had a home in the city ever since. The extremity of the place—it is both environmentally tenuous and aesthetically vulgar—seems to suit Pop, who, in the late nineteen-sixties, as a member of the Stooges, helped invent and refine punk rock, a genre of music so menacing and physically savage that it is sometimes shocking that Pop has made it to the age of seventy-two. After he moved to Miami, he started swimming every day. “I didn’t know anybody,” he said. “I’d go to the beach and come home, go to the beach and come home. I tried to build myself back up from twenty years in harness—New York City, the modern American record industry, gruelling economy touring. I quit smoking here.”

From afar, Pop resembles a bronze statuette. He is lithe, sinewy, and deeply tanned, with a torso that, for decades, has appeared so exquisitely and minutely muscled that an onlooker might reasonably assume it was painted on. In recent years, his midsection has relaxed a bit, but he assured me, while patting it, that it remains quite firm. His hair is blond, shoulder length, pin straight, and parted in the middle, and his eyes are an oceanic blue. Though he has had Lasik surgery—“In Colombia, before it was legal here”—his vision is still imperfect, a malady he chalks up to doing too much intravenous cocaine. He has retained a bit of a round, Midwestern accent from his upbringing, outside Detroit. In conversation, he is nearly guileless, and he listens intently and carefully. Periodically, his face will collapse into a benevolent grin.

He kicked a pair of striped Gucci slides onto the sand. One shoe had been customized with a platform sole, to correct for an inch-and-a-half difference in the length of his legs, a condition he attributes to arthritis combined with an old football injury. As he waded in, Pop told me that he’d once stayed at a Holiday Inn in Tallahassee, missing a Merle Haggard performance in the hotel bar by a day. Earlier, he had suggested that he didn’t know very much about country music, but then he spoke thoughtfully and at some length about the careers of Doc Watson, Hank Williams, and Waylon Jennings, before putting his head underwater and starting a vigorous swim—a mixture of freestyle and backstroke—to a buoy about fifty yards offshore.

Pop is a voracious and enthusiastic student of American music, from the Ronettes and Dave Brubeck to Link Wray and Bob Dylan. Earlier in the day, at a small studio in Coral Gables, Pop had recorded two episodes of “Iggy Confidential,” the BBC Radio 6 music program he began hosting in 2015, after finding that he enjoyed the experience of acting, as he put it, as “a kind of atmospheric bartender.” His broadcasting voice is deep, slow, and pleasantly wobbly. “Comparing my patter when I started the thing and my patter now, I sound nearer and nearer to my expiration,” Pop said. “I sound like Shrek.”

Pop’s selections that morning included songs from contemporary acts such as FKA Twigs, Bill Callahan, Cate Le Bon, and Tyler, the Creator, along with “Hot Chile,” a single that James Brown and his band released in 1960, using the pseudonym Nat Kendrick and the Swans. As a d.j., Pop is good at revealing the connective tissue between seemingly incompatible numbers. After cueing up “Dream Baby Dream,” by the experimental punk duo Suicide, he sat up in his chair and adjusted his spectacles. “Alan Vega, he had rock and R. & B. moves,” he said. “He reminds me a little of Bruno Mars and Sal Mineo.” Between shows, Pop emerged from the cool, dark booth, shirtless and looking for sunshine. “Wanna go outside and warm up?” he asked. He discovers new music for his show by taking the recommendations of friends and opening acts, by reading the shortest, most obscure reviews published in the Guardian, or by looking through the upcoming concert listings published each Friday in the Times. It has kept him awake to the moment.

In early August, the eponymous début album from the Stooges, which Pop helped form, in 1967, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. In September, Pop will release “Free,” his eighteenth solo album. “Free” is his most surprising record in decades, and one of his most collaborative. “I began to recoil from guitar riffs in favor of guitarscapes, from twangs in favor of horns, from back beat in favor of space, and, in large part, from the effluent of my own mind and problems, in favor of trying to interpret the poetry of others,” he writes in the liner notes. Two of his writing partners on the album are Leron Thomas, a jazz trumpeter from Houston, and the composer and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate, who records as Noveller.

Thomas wrote lyrics for half of the tracks on “Free,” including “Dirty Sanchez,” a lewd, tense meditation on contemporary sexuality that includes the lines “Just because I like big tits / Doesn’t mean I like big dicks.” “I was thinking, How do I explain to this guy”—Thomas—“that this is career suicide?” Pop told me. “So I wrote him and said, ‘Look, the best thing you can do is put some horn on it.’ That’s my contribution: ‘Put some horn on it!’ So he horned the shit out of it, you know?” Pop went on, “I sang the song once, just for fun, and I thought, you know, Don’t turn into a total fart here. Put that out.” Pop sings the lines with a kind of deranged glee, as if he were trying to get the words out while being dragged off to jail.

It’s surprising that Pop would worry, even for a moment, about the propriety of a lyric. In the early nineteen-seventies, he was notorious for subverting cultural standards; a concert by the Stooges often included bloodshed, along with the triumphant celebration of one or more perversions. Pop was brutal onstage—barfing, taking his clothes off, dragging furniture or bodies around, slicing his chest with shards of broken glass. In San Francisco, in 1974, he was stomping through the crowd when a fan yanked his briefs down and appeared to perform oral sex on him. Stories about Pop’s misbehavior are lewd, captivating, and plentiful.

But Pop’s work has grown more interior in recent years. The most personal piece on “Free” is “Loves Missing,” a propulsive song about the value of companionship and loyalty. Pop wrote the lyrics. His voice sounds rich and heavy, with a depth and fragility reminiscent of Jacques Brel’s. “Loves absent,” he sings. “The center won’t hold the ends.”

“He doesn’t want to re-tread ground that he’s covered before,” Wayne Kramer, the guitarist and co-founder of the Detroit rock band the MC5, told me. “A lifetime of creativity is a hard job, and he’s a soldier.”

Iggy Pop was born James Osterberg, Jr., in 1947, and brought up in Ypsilanti, about forty miles west of Detroit. He is an only child, and was brought up by his mother, Louella, who worked for Bendix, a manufacturer of automobile and airplane parts, and his father, James, who taught English at Fordson High School, in Dearborn. For most of Pop’s childhood, the three of them lived in a three-hundred-and-sixty-square-foot trailer in a mobile-home park, surrounded by a gravel quarry, vegetable fields, and Pat’s Par Three golf course. He began playing drums in fifth grade. At night, he banged on a couple of rubber pads glued to a piece of plywood, until his parents bought him a three-piece drum kit and let him set it up in the trailer’s master bedroom.

In “Please Kill Me,” Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s oral history of punk, his classmate Ron Asheton describes a teen-age Pop as fairly conventional: “He hung out with the popular kids that wore chinos, cashmere sweaters, and penny loafers. Iggy didn’t smoke cigarettes, didn’t get high, didn’t drink.” Every few years, Pop’s high-school-yearbook photograph circulates on the Internet: looking dewy and handsome, wearing a jacket and a tie, he gazes at the camera with a curious mixture of eagerness and apathy.

In 1963, Pop started a band called the Iguanas, which played surf rock and covers of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks. Already, Pop had an instinct for theatrics. He built a rickety seven-foot riser for his drum kit, so that he towered over his bandmates like some sort of magnificent despot. Eventually, Pop got bored doing British Invasion covers. He enrolled at the University of Michigan, and, soon after, he left the Iguanas for a blues band called the Prime Movers. The group was led by Michael Erlewine, an aspiring intellectual who read the major poets, knew a bit about philosophy, and had experimented with psychedelic drugs. “He was the guy around campus who had the best record collection, knew how to wear boots, had reportedly hitchhiked with Dylan,” Pop said. Pop’s tastes began expanding toward the fringes.

Pop had come of age as Elvis Presley was ascending the charts, and was moved by Presley’s magnetism. “I started listening and watching, especially the stuff he took from minstrel shows,” he said. “The footwork, the tongue-in-cheek humor.” Meanwhile, he told me, “Charlotte Moorman did this thing where she was naked—I don’t think she was really naked, maybe she was topless—and played the cello.” There are elements of both traditions in Pop’s music: longing, rage, depravity, dissonance, showmanship, charisma, a little bit of old-fashioned song and dance.

Pop had a job at Discount Records, near the central campus. Ron Asheton, his brother, Scott, and their buddy Dave Alexander used to loiter out front, spitting on cars. Jeep Holland, the manager of Discount Records, would holler “Iguana alert!” whenever Pop emerged from the stockroom in the basement of the store. The nickname shrank to Iggy, and stuck. (“Pop” was borrowed from an acquaintance named Jimmy Popp.)

In 1966, Pop left Ann Arbor for Chicago, and, through Erlewine’s connections, got a gig playing with Big Walter Horton, a harmonica virtuoso who had moved to Chicago from Memphis in the nineteen-fifties. Chicago blues is rowdy and licentious, but it carries some of the lonesomeness of the genre’s country forebears: J. B. Smith singing “No More Good Time in the World for Me,” Robert Johnson worrying over the hellhound on his trail. It seemed as if Pop had learned something about how to sublimate despair through song, but, he said, “I realized I wasn’t going to be Howlin’ Wolf’s drummer.”

Pop returned to Ann Arbor just as many of his classmates and neighbors were being shipped off to war. He managed to avoid being inducted by appearing deranged at his draft examination (“I did some creative acting,” he said), and he sublet a small house on campus with Ron and Scott Asheton and Dave Alexander. They formed a band called the Psychedelic Stooges, and began developing their sound in the basement. “You can’t believe how dirty and destructive and lazy and just untenable these people were,” Pop said. “Meanwhile, I was crazy as a loon myself.”

Ron Richardson, a friend of Ron Asheton’s who later became the Stooges’ first manager, was involved in psychedelics experiments at the University of Michigan, and the band often partook of his supplies. LSD wasn’t criminalized in the United States until the end of 1968, and drugs more generally were not particularly difficult to come by on campus. “This guy came over one night and gave us all DMT in a bong,” Pop said.

The Stooges played their first public show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, in March, 1968. Pop had shaved his eyebrows and slathered his face with white paint. He wore golf shoes, a rubber swim cap decorated with several dozen strips of aluminum foil, and a frock that Ron Asheton described as “an old white nightshirt from the eighteen-hundreds.” The Stooges were not yet interested in melody, preferring to generate a caustic, demented drone, using a blender, a vacuum cleaner, several fifty-gallon oil drums, and a hammer. The P.A. was cranked to inhumane levels.

Wayne Kramer recalled the show as feeling instantaneous and electric. “I was expecting a band. It was way more than a band. It was primal,” he said. “Simple is not easy. It was the first time I ever saw someone dance and interpret the music to the degree he was able to, live onstage.” He added, “The music wasn’t pop, it wasn’t rock, it was something else. It was dark and foreboding and powerful and hypnotic.” In 1969, the band lost the “Psychedelic” at the start of its name, and released its début album. Pop and Ron Asheton wrote most of the tracks. “I didn’t have his riffage, but I could write something simple,” Pop said.

Those first few years were dangerous. Not in a vague, something-explosive-is-starting-here way but in a spilled-blood way. Pop once stage-dived into an empty room, cracking his front teeth. In 1970, in Cincinnati, he got his hands on a jar of peanut butter, smeared it all over himself, and began chucking gobs of it at the crowd. (There is a famous photograph of Pop taken that night, wearing tight jeans, a studded dog collar, and a silver lamé glove, walking upright on the audience’s raised hands, as if the crowd were a floor made of people.) He would deliberately provoke the most unsavory character in the club, in search of a reaction. He was often zonked on heroin.

Most of Pop’s bandmates were as stoned and as disobedient as he was. In 1971, Scott Asheton, who played drums in the group, got blitzed on the sedative secobarbital and drove a tall truck full of rented gear under a low bridge. The top of the truck peeled off, Scott was tossed fifteen yards, and everything inside was destroyed. The story gets told now as a metaphor: the Stooges simply refused to acknowledge the laws of physics.

“Iggy and the Stooges were a giant opening to me,” the singer and writer Richard Hell told me. In downtown New York, in the mid-seventies, Hell developed a counterpart to the Detroit sound, performing with the punk bands Television and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. “He was talking about things as they are, rather than in pop conventions,” Hell said. “He took all the monotony and frustration and made it great.” In the eighties and nineties, young and discordant indie-rock bands were equally shaped by the Stooges’ music. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon described it to me as “dark, sexy, dangerous, radical music. Those words hardly describe any music in rock today, but that’s what the Stooges gave us—perfect, seemingly effortless rock songs.”

At the time, however, critics and listeners mostly found the band insane—four angry young men brazenly wrecking themselves in service of who knows what. Even Rolling Stone, a bullhorn for the counterculture, didn’t entirely dig it: “Their music is loud, boring, tasteless, unimaginative and childish. I kind of like it.” The rock critic Lester Bangs—a fan—wrote, in Creem, in 1970, “Antisocial art simply don’t fit in, brothers and sisters. Who wants to be depressed, anyway?”

Yet the band’s tumult accurately reflected the tensions of the time, including the escalation of the Vietnam War. The Stooges were neither hippies nor pacifists. “Peace and love wasn’t a big part of it,” Scott Asheton said, in “Please Kill Me.” Whatever was happening in Michigan felt markedly distant from scenes elsewhere. “What I noticed about the West Coast bands was that they had awful rhythm sections,” Kramer told me. “The bassist was just the guy who couldn’t play guitar as well as the other guy. In Detroit, the bar was very high—it was the home of Motown.” He added, “We were informed by unionism, and having an organized voice against corporate power. It seemed to me that on the West Coast everything was diluted with a kind of Pollyannaish, utopian vision of the future.”

In 1967, the year the Stooges formed, Detroit had been flattened by race riots, in which forty-three people were killed, hundreds were injured, and nearly fourteen hundred buildings were burned, mostly in black neighborhoods. “Iggy and the Stooges were making a deeper political statement that had to do with disenfranchisement and disconnection from the mainstream,” Kramer said. Certainly, a song like the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” didn’t share much DNA with a moony anthem like the 5th Dimension’s “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” one of the best-selling singles of 1969, or even with most of the lineup at Woodstock; the Stooges weren’t coastal, arty, or conciliatory. Pop’s lyrics were blunt. “No fun, my babe / No fun,” he sang, his voice flat and clipped.

It's long overdue for Iggy to be found dead with a hypodermic sticking out of his arm. Nobody wants to hear about some badass rocker collecting SS & Medicare, driving a Prius to shuffleboard at the community center. Sad, really.