By Lester Bangs from Psychotic
Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Iggy Pop: Blowtorch in Bondage
By any normal
standards, Iggy pop’s gig at the Palladium last Friday night was a triumph.
Iggy himself was in ferociously fine form, and the crowd was ravenously enthusiastic-he
could have had as many encores as he wanted.
But normal standards have never seemed relevant to Iggy—from the
earliest days, when The Stooges went onstage not even knowing how to play their
instruments, to the present, when he finally seems to be on the verge of
becoming one of the strangest stars we’ve ever seen. What kind of person tries, for his third and
crucial attempt, to make it big-time rock ’n’ roll with an album called The Idiot? The kind, I suppose, who at one time
regularly made a practice of literally diving headfirst from the lip of the
stage into the middle of his audience and who on Friday night repeatedly
twisted his face and body up into masks and gestures symbolic of “idiocy,”
torment, and, most of all, bondage.
More than anyone else
in the seemingly endless parade of professionally anomic rockers, Iggy really
is isolated, and this isolation manifests itself in lightning-stricken
desperation. He’s the most intense
performer I’ve ever seen, and that intensity comes from a murderous drivenness
that has in the past also made him the most dangerous performer alive: the
plunges into the third row, cutting himself and rolling in broken glass
onstage, getting into verbal and occasionally physical brawls with his
audiences. When Iggy sang, “I’m losing
all my feelings / And I’m runnin’ out of friends” in “I Need Somebody” on Raw Power, he was describing,
succinctly, as usual, the problem, the anomie.
That there is no solution but death is why all the rest of it
happens. This is a person who feels
profoundly unalive, or, conversely, so rawly alive, and so imprisoned by it,
that all feeling is perceived as pain.
But feeling is still courted, in the most apocalyptic terms, which are
really the only terms the performer can even understand, and the performance
begins to look more and more like a seizure every time he hurls himself across
the stage.
It’s not minimizing
all this to say that what it means for Iggy is ambivalence. “I’m dying in a story / I’m only living to
sing this song,” another line from “I Need Somebody,” conveys the powerful
ambivalence he feels toward his audience, his art itself. An apocalypse isn’t supposed to be
manageable, and when the carnage is done it ain’t the audience that’s gonna be
bleeding. But manage the apocalypse is
exactly what Iggy is now trying to do, because this idiot is no fool, and he
knows the lie of a manageable Armageddon is the only way to make it in the rock
‘n’ roll end of showbiz and survive.
That’s why David Bowie is twerping around, trimming the dementia here
and there with neat little clips, and that’s why The Idiot, Iggy’s new album
(produced and influenced in every respect by Bowie, who also plays piano in
Iggy’s current touring band), rings to false.
A far more powerful
documentation of the Iggy holocaust at its most nihilistically out of control
is available on Metallic K.O., a
bootleg import (on Skydog) of the last concert the Stooges ever played, at the
Michigan Palace in Detroit January of 1974.
I was at the gig immediately preceding it, at a little club in Warren,
Michigan, two nights before, where the love-hate affair the Stooges had been
carrying on with their audience for so long finally careened to its inevitable
consequences. The audience, which
consisted largely of bikers, was unusually hostile, and Iggy, as usual, fed on
that hostility, soaked it up and gave it back and absorbed it all over again in
an eerie, frightening symbiosis. “All
right,” he finally said, stopping a song in the middle, “you assholes wanta
hear ‘Louie Louie,’ we’ll give you “Louie Louie,” including new lyrics
improvised by the Pop on the spot consisting of “You can suck my ass / You
biker faggot sissies,” etc.
By now the hatred in
the room is one huge livid wave, and Iggy singles out one heckler who has been
particularly abusive: “Listen, asshole, you heckle one more time and I’m gonna
come down there and kick your ass.”
“Fuck you, you little punk,” responds the biker. So Iggy jumps off the stage, runs through the
middle of the crowd, and the guy beats the shit out of him, ending the
evening’s musical festivities by sending the lead singer back to the motel room
and a doctor. I walk into the dressing
room, where I encounter the manager of the club offering to punch out anybody
in the band who will take him on. The
next day the bike gang, who call themselves the Scorpions, will phone WABX-FM
and promise to kill Iggy and the Stooges if they play the Michigan Palace on
Thursday night. They do (play, that is),
and 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.
On one level I suppose
all of this is very funny, but if you look past the surface violence and simple
abusiveness to the person at the center it’s not funny at all. The reason it’s not is the aforementioned
ambivalence. Jungle war with bike gangs
is one thing, but it gets a little more complicated when those of us who love
being around that war (at least vicariously) have to stop to consider why and
what we’re loving. Because one of the
things we’re loving is self-hate, and another may well be a human being
committing suicide. Here’s a quote from
a review of Iggy’s new live show in the British rock weekly Sounds: “Iggy’s a dancer and more, a hyper-active
packet of muscle and sinew straight out of Michelangelo’s wet dreams …who leaps
and claws at the air, audience and mike stand in an unsurpassable display that
spells one thing—MEAT.” Ignoring the
florid prose, I’d like to ask the guy who wrote that how he would like to be
thought of as a piece of meat, how he thinks the meat feels. Or if he thinks it feels at all. Yeah, Iggy’s got a fantastic body; it’s so
fantastic he’s crying in every nerve to explode out of it into some
unimaginable freedom. It’s as if someone
writhing in torment has made that writhing into a kind of poetry, and we watch
in awe of such beautiful writhing, so impressed that we perhaps forget what
inspired it in the first place.
As for the performer
himself, he carries that hurt like spikes in his heart, but there is
simultaneously a strong element of unconsciousness in his art, which is one of
the main reasons why it’s so beautiful and so intense. During Iggy’s second encore Friday night, as
he sang a song called “China Girl” with a stagehand holding a light under him
for dramatic Fu Manchu effect, he pulled his face taut with his hands to make
slits of his eyes and began to hop in a bizarre imitation of some bound
coolie. It was at once grotesque and
lovely, conveying in a few simple gestures a pathos so immense that I’m sure if
Iggy himself could have seen what he looked like at that moment he would have
been mortified. Because there was a
vulnerability so naked it wrenched the heart.
At that moment I realized that this man did not know what he was doing,
and maybe precisely because of that it was one of the most alive things I’ve ever witnessed, just as the performance on Metallic K.O. is a wrigglingly,
obscenely alive, and the person singing on The
Idiot sounds like a dead man. Iggy
may finally become the superstar we always knew he could be, and he’s already
transcended the punk-rock he almost singlehandedly birthed, but there are
questions unanswered, and a life hanging on the answers, and I’m not even sure
that those answers exist.
Village Voice, 28 March 1977
Three sweet Lester
Bangs books
Bangs, Lester, and
Greil Marcus. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. New York: Anchor,
2003. Print
Bangs, Lester, and
John Morthland. Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs
Reader. New York: Anchor, 2003. Print.
DeRogatis, Jim. Let
It Blurt: The Life and times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic.
New York: Broadway, 2000. Print.
