Iggy Pop: Blowtorch in Bondage

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.

Article on Ron Asheton guitar player of The Stooges.