twelve-date tour of Australia and Europe,
starting with two sold-out shows at the
Sydney Opera House. He wore dark
pants, thick boots, and a leopard-print
jacket with no shirt. He charged the
edge of the stage, waggled his arms,
and galloped in circles. A critic from
the Guardian called the performance
“superhuman.”
L
ate in the day, Pop and I walked
down a short stone path and sat
in a pair of sea-foam-green Adiron-
dack chairs by the edge of the Little
River. He had changed into a pair of
“Three Stooges”-themed pajama pants,
a gift from Ron Asheton. He was not
wearing a shirt. A large iguana fell from
a tree, splashing into the water. Pop
laughed when I yelped. A few minutes
later, he spotted a manatee swimming
by, and erupted from his chair, point-
ing excitedly. He and his assistant,
Spencer, planted most of the trees on
the property: Dade County pines, royal
palms, coconut palms.
The Stooges released three studio
albums: they followed up “The Stooges”
with “Fun House,” in 1970, and “Raw
Power,” in 1973. The first two albums
are chaotic, desperate, and bold. “The
Stooges,” which was produced by John
Cale, of the Velvet Underground, is the
band at its most economic. By the time
that they made “Raw Power,” James
Williamson was playing lead guitar and
Ron Asheton was on bass, and they had
rebranded themselves as Iggy and the
Stooges. Dave Alexander had been
fired in 1970, for showing up too drunk
to perform. (He died in 1975, at age
twenty-seven, from complications from
pancreatitis.) “Raw Power” was mixed
by David Bowie, and it contains two
songs, “Gimme Danger” and “I Need
Somebody,” that might reasonably be
described as ballads.
The Stooges fell apart shortly there-
after, for all the usual reasons: drugs,
clashing agendas, poor sales. The band’s
final performance of the nineteen-sev-
enties was at the Michigan Palace, in
Detroit, in 1974. Pop was antagonizing
the room, and being pelted with beer,
whiskey bottles, bras, and shoes. In 1976,
a recording of the show was released, ti-
tled “Metallic K.O.” In 1977, Lester Bangs
wrote about the record for the Village
Voice: “Nobody gets killed, but ‘Metallic
K.O.’ is the only rock album I know
where you can actually hear hurled beer
bottles breaking against guitar strings.”
Pop was strung out. The drugs, he
said, “make you larger and weaker. They
water down a person’s ego.” In 1974, he
began trying to quit. “I didn’t really use
drugs for the next couple of years, ex-
cept for the normal amounts of coke
that everybody did at that time.” But
he credits his addictions—heroin, co-
caine, pills, psychedelics, booze—with
permitting him, for a time, to be stranger
and more flamboyant onstage. “I al-
lowed the humor to come in where a
lot of people wouldn’t have,” he said.
He was rebelling against a certain type
of self-seriousness. “You know, ‘I’m a
blues guitarist, and what I want to get
over in this hour is that I can play the
blues and you’re going to believe it and
make me rich. And, by the way, I’ve got
a fringe jacket that you can’t get,’” Po p
said. “That wasn’t me.”
In early 1976, Pop went to see David
Bowie at his hotel in San Diego, where
Bowie asked if he might want to record
“Sister Midnight,” a slinking, funky song
he’d been writing with his guitarist, Car-
los Alomar. A few months later, Pop
and Bowie travelled together to the
Château d’Hérouville, an eighteenth-
century estate outside of Paris, to make
what became “The Idiot,” Pop’s solo
début. Afterward, they moved into an
apartment on a tree-lined street in West
Berlin. This was the beginning of a
fruitful and largely drug-free period for
both artists. Bowie released “Low” in
January, 1977, the first album in his cel-
ebrated Berlin trilogy. Pop released “Lust
for Life,” co-produced by Bowie, in Au-
gust of that year. “I think Bowie saw in
Iggy a kind of weird doppelgänger,” the
writer and guitarist Lenny Kaye told
me. “The records they made in Berlin
pulled them both out of this pit that
they’d dug themselves into.”
While we sat by the canal, I made
an offhand comment about how Pop
is now the last man standing, which I
meant in a general sense. But he pre-
sumed that I was referring to a photo-
graph of him, Bowie, and Lou Reed,
taken by Mick Rock at the Dorches-
ter Hotel, in London, in 1972. (Reed
died in 2013, from liver disease; Bowie
died in 2016, from cancer.) Pop is in the
middle, wearing a T. Rex shirt and hold-
ing a pack of Lucky Strikes between
his teeth. “I had crashed that party, in-
nocently, and there I was, so uncool that
I was grinning,” Pop said. “You have
the two pillars of the new alt industry
there, and in the middle you have this
sort of shaky proposition.”
Some of Pop’s most interesting and
idiosyncratic work has been made in
the past decade, including two rec-
ords—“Préliminaires,” from 2009, and
“Après,” from 2012—inspired by Dix-
ieland jazz, French chanson, mid-cen-
tury American standards, and the books
of Michel Houellebecq, Pop’s favorite
David Bowie, Pop, and Lou Reed at the Dorchester Hotel, in London, in 1972.
36 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
MICK ROCK
