For 30 years or so, the music of Iggy Pop has been misunderstood and under-appreciated, as everyone concentrates on the broken glass and the peanut butter. In a couple of days, the heavy thud of cuttings arriving on my doormat will carry much the same message. For just about all all of the extensive press coverage of Open Up and Bleed homes in on the debauchery and doesn’t mention the music. So I become another person who perpetuates that misconception.
I didn’t mean to, honest. When I was interviewing, I felt a momentary shock when I heard that Iggy had hidden razor blades behind his girlfriend’s mirrors in a fit of jealousy, and maybe a kind of pity and the odd snigger when discover ing some of the grizzly details of his lows in the 70s. And the 80s. But I still remember my wonderment hearing how he’d play onlookers songs from what would become Kill City in the Coronet, transforming his own sufferings into art, or the moving story of how he and Bowie worked together on The Idiot, crafting this masterpiece from found sounds, found musicians, in Paris, Munich and Berlin, always at night, working vampire hours. For me, these moments are what made the life transcend the chaos that always threatened to engulf Iggy.
If I’ve failed to communicate the importance of the music, then that’s a major shortcoming, but it’s not the first time. One of the saddest aspects of the Stooges’ tragi-comedy was that, even as onlookers giggled at the disaster played out in front of them, the Stooges were devoted to the music that no one cared about, compelled to record even when no-one bothered to listen to them. And hardly anyone noticed. One of the few was Nite Bob, who roadie’d for them at the Max’s shows in July 1973: “[The Stooges] wanted it. They wanted to play beyond their ability; they were trying to make some statement musically. And they were kind of pure. It was all about the music and it wasn’t about business. Most probably to their detriment.”