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 propri-
ety of a lyric. In the early nineteen-sev-
enties, he was notorious for subvert-
ing cultural standards; a concert by the
Stooges often included bloodshed, along
with the triumphant celebration of one
or more perversions. Pop was brutal on-
stage—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 in-
terior in recent years. The most personal
piece on “Free” is “Loves Missing,” a
propulsive song about the value of com-
panionship 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 De-
troit rock band the MC5, told me. “A
lifetime of creativity is a hard job, and
he’s a soldier.”I
ggy Pop was born James Osterberg,
Jr., in 1947, and brought up in Ypsi-
lanti, 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 automo-
bile 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, sur-
rounded 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 rub-
ber 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 curi-
ous 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 band-
mates 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 philos-
ophy, and had experimented with psy-
chedelic drugs. “He was the guy around
campus who had the best record col-
lection, knew how to wear boots, had
reportedly hitchhiked with Dylan,” Pop
said. Pop’s tastes began expanding to-
ward the fringes.
Pop had come of age as Elvis Pres-
ley 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, disso-
nance, 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, spit-
ting 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 Chi-
cago, and, through Erlewine’s connec-
tions, got a gig playing with Big Wal-
ter 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 coun-
try forebears: J. B. Smith singing “No
More Good Time in the World for