Although I’ve got a head start on this book, with around 50 interviews done before I even wrote the pitch, one area where I felt I was light was Jim’s girlfriends. They’re vital for the obvious reasons: the salacious ones, and for an insight into his psyche. (In general, I don’t think Iggy’s musicians ever thought about where his head was at. They just went along with the flow.) Somewhere at the back of my mind, I remembered I knew someone who’d had a fling with Iggy in the ‘80s; dredging my memory banks, I remembered it was Margaret Moser, a music writer who’d written an excellent piece on Stevie Ray Vaughan for me in MOJO, around 1999. Today I interviewed her. Turns out he’d accosted her in a Texas dressing room in 1983, stuck his crotch in her face and invited her back to his hotel room.
“I was so struck, I remember walking down the hall to the hotel with him and he changed the subject of something we were talking about, and I remember right then looking at him and thinking THIS is a smart guy. I didn’t know anything about his background. He was just talking intelligently about stuff. As I recall we spent most of the time just talking. I didn’t have a sense of him at the time. I wasn’t intimidated by him or anything, this was a period of time in which he was considered really to be the godfather of punk...
“He didn’t seem to be very cognisant of time. He seemed to be more... confused by what was going on with everything. We did not talk at length about his music or much like that, to my regret, but he struck me as extremely well-read and just a little manic. But he was.. as I remember him he was talking talk talk talk the whole time. This was around the Zombie Birdhouse period.. he may have been touring it... he came through two or three times in a short period of time, the Opera House one time, Club Foot one time. He just wasn’t talking very much about the music. I didn’t get any sense of how he felt about his career or anything. He was making lots of jokes and stuff like that and talking nonsense. Telling me about an eight year old friend of his, and how they went to a place called Pearland. This came ‘cause I’d mentioned some friend in a band, from a place called Pearland. And Iggy was like, Pearland? That’s an imaginary place I made up with my friend.
“The kinds of things Iggy said, really to me made him very multidimensional - he wasn’t just a drugged out has-been whose career was in flux at the time. In terms of career, he was in a tailspin but he knew he was worthy of something better than that. He struck me as somebody with a great deal of pride. I don’t think he was going to let it get to him. And so his resilience.. [was obviously] very much part of his personality.”
The interview with Margaret gave me a key insight which in retrospect is obvious. At first, I’d thought the interview was intriguing mainly because of the fairly detailed description of their sexual encounter, and some of his behaviour around it, as well as the evidence of his heavy drinking. But there was a more crucial observation, namely Margaret’s view that he was “solitary by choice... he struck me as somebody who has accepted the solitary way of life, and is making the best of it, and that’s why he’s picked up somebody like me and I’d be his friend for the evening. It was as much so he could have someone to talk to, as for sex.”
Of course, in hindsight, Jim’s solitary, self-contained psyche is obvious. Jim Osterberg was an only child who liked to go for long walks around Ypsilanti on his own, he had no single best friend at Elementary or High School, and while close to his bandmates he always maintained a certain separation from them. Despite knowing all of this, I’d made the classic mistake of assuming Jim was like me, someone who needs the company of other people. When you realise he doesn’t, a lot of things fall into place.