Iggy at home, Miami
It must be fate. A couple of weeks after I’ve agreed on a deal for an Iggy biography with both US and UK publishers, I get a call from MOJO to interview him at his home in Miami.
I’ve interviewed Iggy - I’m presumptuous and call him Jim - three times now. The first time was around 1991 - he still looked like Andrew Kent’s cover photo from Lust For Life, all doe-eyed and cheeky, very seductive. A few years later I interviewed him just after he’d made American Caesar; he was markedly different. The first interview had been Jim , but this was Iggy, all springy and muscular, still with that broad, resonant laugh, but with an intense, mad stare. When young girls walked past the Lower East Side café where we were eating, he’d fix them with a laser-beam glare, trying to attract their attention. It was simultaneously impressive and rather pathetic - he was immune to embarrassment, but for 15-year old girls who’d obviously never heard of him, it must have been disturbing to be hit on by this seeming old hobo.
Today was just as big a contrast. I met him at his new home, to which he moved recently, in Miami. It's a one-bedroom, one-storey house, a shack almost, at the edge of town, in a mostly black and Cuban area. There's a big lawn at the front, a small garage which houses his girlfriend's Rolls Royce Corniche, and a small garden at the back, with a palm-covered 'Tiki Hit, which overlooks a slow-moving river.
He showed me proudly round the house. It's tiny, and although there are a fair number of artworks - naive Haitian paintings, Russian icons, a Brion Gysin drawing, an old French Gothic throne - he has very few possessions. Just one box of records, which sit in a tiny room where he writes lyrics at a toy piano. In a cupboard nearby there's a toy, Woodstock drumkit, about 18 inches tall. It's at this drumkit that the looming, 6-feet-tall Scott Asheton - 'Rock Action' to his fans - sits, when the reformed Stooges rehearse at Iggy's place. I can think of few things more bizarre than this vision of three 60-year old men, childhood friends who've reunited, crouched over toy instruments.
Iggy has changed, quite drastically, since I met him last. He now looks like a little old man; he has a bad limp; one leg is shorter than the other after an injury sustained on stage a few years ago (it makes the fact that he's still an uncontained, feral blast of energy in performance even more impressive). He has a child-like, seemingly naive pleasure in the things that surround him, and the view out of the back. Occasionally manatees swim slowly down the river, he tells me, as he points out a turtle, or a crane - he jumps up in pure, simple excitement as he searches for other wildlife. He'll often come out at three in the morning to listen to Dean, a Hells Angel who lives on the other side of the small river, working on his cars. Sometimes trains pass by the other side of the road early in the morning "and you hear a blues whistle." A five foot iguana lives in a tree at the edge of Dean's plot.
On a table inside the house there's photos of his mom, his dad (in his Airforce uniform), next to photos of Iggy with his new girlfriend: a statuesque Cuban woman with huge fake breasts, which jut out proudly on a level with Iggy's beaming face. Nearby, there's the celebrated Gerard Malanga photo of a naked Iggy in his prime - another small photo is carefully positioned to obscure his impressive penis, for decency's sake, he tells me.
Why did this interview give me a beginning and an end to the book? Well, his presence, watching the wildlife, seemingly having renounced all (or most) earthly vanities, was spookily reminiscent of that of Candide, at the end of his epic life journey when, with just one buttock left, he renounced his quest and instead tended his garden. As for the beginning, I quizzed him about his early alter-ego, Hyacinth, which is developing into a new strand that I can follow up. This would allow me to devote an early chapter to his childhood, pre-rock'n'roll, closing with the creation of this character, who is rather different (!) from Iggy, and might represent the way Jim Osterberg's life would have gone had he not been 'corrupted' by the Stooges.
As for the interview itself, it was good, superb even, but pretty much what I expected, whereas his presence, and his demeanour, was not at all what I expected. He denied sleeping with Bowie by saying 'Bowie is NOT homosexual!", but left plenty of room for inference, and when I asked him briefly about, for example, his awful treatment of Bob Koester, as described in the pitch, he lied and lied again, blaming others - rewriting history in the way that old folk sometimes do. Yet even as I caught him out in this lie, and others, my respect for him increased immensely - the more you investigate, the more epic, heroic even, his life seems. I got great information on his time in the mental asylum - what he'd do each day (incidentally, I've since tracked down his psychiatrist, too), his day-to-day life with Bowie in Berlin, more about his childhood, in fact every aspect of his life, over roughly two and a half hours of sometimes intense questioning.
We closed, taking about the Stooges. Both times I’d interviewed him before, he’d mocked Ron and Scott Asheton. Around 1996 I’d sat down for a couple of evenings with Ron for an early, abortive version of this book; it was an enthralling, slightly surreal evening, and I’d been very affected by Ron’s feelings of betrayal by his singer. It was equally enthralling hearing Iggy talk about their reunion; cold-hearted & reptilian in some ways, emotional in others...
How did that feel, that first one back together at Coachella?
It fucking felt great. We weren’t nearly as tight as we are now, and the execution, none of us had our execution together, but it felt really good, and had moments of execution.
Can you go back? Go back to that place you were?
It feels good. And it sounds good. It sounds better than it did in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, because of where I’m standing, and there were no monitors in those days so I could never hear anything, I never knew what it sounded like. Now I can hear it. And that helps. It’s fun!
What about emotionally? Being back with the guys with whom you created this stuff?
Very intense. All the problems surface and resurface. History surfaces and resurfaces and, um, difficulties have to be faced and lived through. But then there’s something about guys who went to the same high school. Something that keeps cropping up in the form of the music. Like U2 were all in the same bible class or something, or The Everlys, there’s a lot of that.
With hindsight, is there anything you could have changed... to make that journey easier?
How could you? Really, how could you? Sometimes I feel, had I had a little more detachment or been willing to be a bigger prick about things very early on, the band might have had a smoother ascent. That’s as much as I’m willing to say. If I had stood my ground within the organisation as well as I stood it with the public, I could have been of more benefit to my band. I do that now, better.
So now you and the Stooges are playing to big crowds who universally love you. Do you ever think, Why did it take so long?
No. I feel lucky it took so long. Really blessed. Because how many people at my point, age, whatever, can say that there’s still that ascension?
So it means you can have a happy ending?
Well, this too. Yes. It’s a nice thing. But there’s still plenty of..
Baggage?
Oh yeah. And new baggage too. Plenty of friction, plenty of, so many days when I’m going what? He did what? Ai ai aieee! And it comes back at me too, plenty. It’s not easy being in a band. But I have some detachment. And I maintain that.
Sunday, 24 April 2005
