One crucial interviewee I’d drawn a blank on in LA was Jimmy Silver, the Stooges manager from late 1967 to the summer of 1970. I knew that he’d gone to work for the Erewhon wholefood company, but after more than 20 phone calls to various parts of the organisation I’d drawn only blanks. Old friends like the Ashetons and John Sinclair had lost touch with Jimmy and his wife Susan, too. Increasingly desperate, I started calling other health food organisations and trade bodies, as I had heard from John Sinclair, who’d last met Jimmy 10 or 15 years ago, that he was still in the business. Eventually Holly Givens of the Organic Trade Association answered my pleas, looked through her records and found Jimmy’s details.
Jimmy is a delightful man with a good memory, and he’s enabled me to fit the last few pieces of the Stooges 1968-70 jigsaw into place. He patiently submitted to over four hours of detailed interviewing, over successive days, plus dozens of email queries.
Jimmy’s memories were vital in many respects. He’s an intelligent, pretty objective observer, and although most of our time was spent discussing specific events, a crucial part of our discussion about Jim Osterberg was along the lines of, What Is He Like?
This, alongside What Did He Do?, is surely a crucial part of any biography; detailing Iggy’s escapades is one thing, but without working out why he did all this, and what drives him, a tale of his life and crimes cannot be that illuminating.
Jimmy was Jim’s confidant over a period when Iggy was brought into being, an alterego that helped defend its inventor from the audience’s abuse and rejection. And Jimmy was a close observer of what, for shorthand’s sake, we can call the behaviour of Jim and the antics of Iggy. What interested me was that, under the influence of his fellow Stooges, drugs and, spookily, the full moon, Iggy was already a slightly scary beast. Yet, in parallel with this, Jim Osterberg was still the same incisive character with that mastery of reading social situations, and knowledge of what buttons to push with the diverse people he needed to further his career., that he’d been in his youth.
Denny Olmsted, a fellow pupil at Tappan, had described Jim Osterberg’s intuitive ability to read and manipulate people. Jimmy Silver’s account of Osterberg, almost seven years on, seemed to indicate that these powers had improved. Jimmy was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, studying for his doctorate in the school of public health, while Jimmy’s father was a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health in the Johndson administration. He was an intellectually impressive figure, whom the Stooges needed to advance their cause - yet, in some respects, Silver concedes that he was the one being managed.
PT: Tell me about how Jim charmed people, in order to bring them on-board his operation.
JS: “He used to do it to me. He, I think, went out of his way periodically to come and give me quality time, to bond with me or allow me to feel like I was bonding with him. We’d go out and walk. We were all living in the same house by then. We’d go out and walk sometimes late at night. This was true especially when he would get so asthmatic that he wouldn’t be able to perform or even practise and then he would come down and Susan would take care of him for a couple of days. We found some macrobiotic and traditional Japanese treatments for asthma that were effective with him, like Lotus Root Tea. Susan would feed him. He would eat all his meals with us for a couple of days. He would stop smoking and drinking alcohol. He wouldn’t take drugs. He would drink Lotus Root Tea a couple of times a day and eat our food. He would get better and he’d be strong enough to be ok for a couple of weeks. He would get to the point where even the asthma medications that he would take didn’t have any effect. Then he would give up and we would take care of him so during those times we’d spend a lot of time together and talk a lot.
“One time I remember realising what a sharp and brilliant analytical mind he had about people, just like you were describing. A social awareness about them. He knew what would be acceptable to them, what they would like, what would charm them, what they wanted to hear and he had an ability to identify in people what attracted them and what would make them want to do what to do what he needed or wanted. But I felt, for me, part of the charm was his frankness with me about the whole thing – about the band, about his relationship with me, although maybe that’s what he wanted me to believe. Maybe he saw what I wanted and so he gave me reality or apparent reality of it. I always felt that he gave me the reality of it.
“At the time I looked on it as sharing with me, but in retrospect I look on it that you’re description of it is accurate and fair. Like he was teaching the band to play, he was teaching me to play my instrument and my instrument was business. Even then I realised that he was a professional and I was an amateur. [Later on ] he enlightened me as to how he looked on the people that we dealt with, to give me some insight into how I could manipulate them better.”
This impressive insight adds an extra piquance to the Iggy/Jim story when one knows what a pathetic, lost figure Iggy Pop cut around 1974, when he was being laughed at every night at the Roxy or the Rainbow. Yet for the sake of balance, one should point out that, as well a recalling this remarkable intelligence, Jimmy remembers countless examples of Iggy’s childish, truculent, self-destructive behaviour even in the early days. More intriguing still, Jimmy recalls that this duality, of astounding insight and impressive stupidity, applied to the music of the Stooges, too:
“One of the things they would do is play these joke songs that they would make up on the spot. And they had the ability to perfectly mimic the style of all the bands that were popular around Ann Arbor at that time. They could sound like Bob Seger, they could sound like the SRC, they could sound like the Rationals, Amboy Dukes, Ted Nugent, but even better than those bands could sound themselves in their own style! They could epitomise the style these bands had – as a joke! I used to go down and go and have these almost arguments, like, You should write these songs down or flesh them out and demo them and we should give them to these guys, they would like these songs better than what they’re writing! I would tell them Lennon & McCartney would make a fortune from all these songs they wrote for other people... and they’re, ‘oh man, come on, get out of here’. They couldn’t be bothered with it. It was really remarkable to me – I could hear this thru the floor, is Scott Morgan down there playing with them?”