The last stand
IGGY POP has enjoyed a career like no other in rock’n’roll. On the eve of the release of Post Pop Depression – his swan song, made with JOSH HOMME at the controls – he invites KEITH CAMERON into his home for a candid, heart-baring interview…
“Some people find humour in the fact that i played a vacuum cleaner – i played it well. it Sounded fucking great in my handS.”
T BEGAN IN MARCH 2014 WITH A SIMPLE TExT message: “We should get together and write something sometime – Iggy.” Whatever Iggy Pop expected to occur as a result of sending those nine unambiguous words, standing ankle deep in rainwater at 10am amid the gloom of an underground hotel car park in Miami probably wasn’t high on the list. While Josh Homme, the recipient of that initial text, discusses lighting and camera angles with MOJO’s photographer, Iggy retreats inside his black Rolls-Royce Phantom, turns on the air-conditioning, and is enveloped by the massive car’s deeppile backseat embrace.
Iggy is 68. His back and legs are in pain, from scoliosis, cartilage loss, broken limbs – the cumulative result of heedlessly subjecting his elasticated frame to unparalleled feats of derring-do in the service of rock’n’roll for nigh on 50 years. During the previous photo set-up, he’d raised a hand and stepped out of the group line, walking over to the nearest vehicle, where he leant, hands on knees, grimacing. “Just gimme 30 seconds,” he breathed. Few would argue that Iggy Pop has earned the luxury of being the passenger. In the metaphorical driver’s seat, Josh Homme is a six-foot five-inch-tall pillar of restless energy, an Iggy Pop disciple since his teens, and more than happy to direct operations. The Queens Of The Stone Age leader has produced and co-written Iggy’s new album, Post Pop Depression, for which he put together a band comprising guitarist Dean Fertita from The Dead Weather and QOTSA, and drummer Matt Helders from Arctic Monkeys. Not only does Homme tr ust them as musicians, he had to be sure they could keep a secret. This project has been kept under wraps for more than 18 months. After replying in the affirmative to Iggy’s text, Homme and Iggy determined broad parameters – it should not be a heavy rock record – and traded conceptual possibilities. In late 2014, Homme sent the basic guitar outlines for two songs, which he subsequently worked on with Fertita and Helders at his own studio in Los Angeles, before he and Iggy met in January 2015 to begin work at Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, the fabled birthplace of his Desert Sessions plus albums for QOTSA and the Arctic Monkeys (see Josh’s account, p76). Two days in, they were joined by Fertita and Helders, and work began in earnest.
Weeks later, they had an album. Soaked in eerie primitive atmospherics, end-of-days melancholy, gallows humour and with some of the most poignantly autobiographical lyrics of his career, Post Pop Depression is the most sonically rich, consistent and satisfying Iggy Pop album in almost 40 years. Iggy himself sees it as a matter of unfinished business. “Somebody the other day said to me, ‘You don’t need to do this – you already made it!’ Oh? Nobody told me!” He laughs. “I just had a feeling. I guess it was partly to do with properly fulfilling what I reckoned my potential was. So that I didn’t sit down in the mud when I’m 79 and say, ‘Hey, you didn’t give it a proper shot.’ I have absolutely zero expectations – a couple of people have heard it and they like it, and I like it, so that’s a good start. I tried my best, let’s see what happens.” As for Fertita, Homme and Helders, respectively 45, 42 and 29, this was a case of fantasy made flesh: go and create magic with one of rock’s last true pioneers. It was not an opportunity they undertook lightly. “With everything he’s meant to us as musicians, it’s a chance to give back to that idea,” Fertita says. “Hopefully this is a record that stands up to other things he’s done. How many people can say that at 68 you’re still making relevant rock’n’roll records? That’s what my responsibility is to him.” Homme, meanwhile, seems in a permanent state of wonderment. “It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever been a part of. I’m proud. I am excited. This record was important for my life. It’s helped me. I also feel I’m not the only one it helped.” Photoshoot done, Homme gives MOJO a lift to Iggy’s place, a small bungalow in El Portal, a predominantly Latino enclave north of downtown Miami. It’s by no means the sketchiest locale in town, but then again, none of his neighbours in the cul de sac have a Rolls-Royce parked on their driveway.
“Iggy said to me once, ‘I like to drive through the ghetto with the roof down!’” Josh laughs as we arrive. Inside, Iggy offers tea – Harrods Christmas blend or herbal – and accompanies MOJO on a tour of the house. It’s cosily cluttered with books, musical instruments, photographs and artworks, though in lesser numbers than previously: “We had a break-in here a few years ago, and then they tried again this year, so I took all the good stuff out,” Iggy explains. He rarely stays overnight here now: as a rule, unless he’s touring, by 9pm he’ll be tucked up with wife Nina in his other Miami abode. Amid some striking examples of the ’80s New York art new wave, notably the voluptuously blue Princess Pamela, a life-size doll by Greer Lankton, Iggy is particularly fond of “Norman”: a medieval throne chair purchased from Sotheby’s for $12,000, the proceeds from an otherwise disastrous “cynical corporate tour” in 1997 sponsored by the United States Tobacco Company, from which Iggy escaped after dislocating his arm. “All I got out of the tour was that chair! It’s a beautiful piece.” He rubs the carved pine lovingly. “What I liked about it was that it looks like it’s been through the war and it’s still going.” The house is effectively a boy’s den, stuffed with mementoes of a life in music, during which Iggy Pop has been both the instigator of greatness and an agent of disaster, sometimes simultaneously. He points to a photograph of himself with artist and sound poet Brion Gysin – “I’m extremely drunk and stoned, and Brion’s egging me on because he’s a naughty boy” – taken in Paris in 1977: at the peak of his European renaissance period, immediately after releasing The Idiot and shortly before Lust For Life, the extraordinary albums he made with David Bowie which continue to reverberate through today’s future-pop blueprints. Nearby there’s a poignant group shot from 2007, Iggy on his 60th birthday surrounded by the touring entourage for The Stooges, including the now deceased Ron and Scott Asheton, the streetwise brothers who turned James Osterberg Jr into Iggy Stooge, the definitive rock’n’roll animal and Ur-punk rock totem. It came more than 30 years later than they’d hoped, but the success of The Stooges’ reunion finally saw the band receiving real-time adulation and financial recompense when it had seemed posthumous legend was their only guaranteed legacy. Finally, Iggy leads MOJO past a 1925 Jules Leleu walnut settee and gestures towards the next room: “I’ll show you my parents.” And indeed, beneath two photographs on a sideboard, surrounded by religious artefacts and family heirlooms, sit the remains of Louella and James Osterberg Sr. Iggy’s voice fal-
His imperial majesty: Iggy Pop, February 26, 1970, shortly before the recording of The Stooges’ masterpiece, Fun House.
ters. “Very nice people. Their families were both entirely impoverished by the Depression, they never got over that. So all their lives, they were very careful.” Iggy laughs. “Not me! Well, you know… ” He looks down. “They were wonderful, I miss them very much, I really do.” We walk through the back garden to a tiki hut that would normally offer shade from the sun, but today is a shelter from the still simmering rain-clouds. Iggy points out the muddy creek beyond the back fence and says an iguana lives nearby. Mentioning this reminds him that a member of his first band, The Iguanas, recently reconnected via Facebook. “The name was Sam Swisher, we did our rehearsals in his basement. He was a little bit haughty – the whole family was, they were tall, successful people. He wanted to play instrumentals like Perfidia or Tequila, but I wanted to do Ray Charles. When I’d play too much drums he’d say, ‘That’s kitchenware. Cut down on that’.” But it was thanks to Swisher’s business savvy and family connections that in 1965 The Iguanas broke out of playing frat parties around Ann Arbor and became the house band at a teen dance club, the Ponytail, on Lake Michigan, thereby giving the 18-yearold drummer Jim Osterberg his first addictive taste of stardust, from whence he graduated to The Prime Movers and then The Stooges. “The Iguanas backed up The Shangri-Las, and The Four Tops, all these people,” Iggy says. “We opened for The Kingsmen. You learn a lot that way. I was into it – I had shoulder-length blonde hair by the end of the summer. I went back to college and tried for one semester. I was miserable. So I said, Fuck it.” Whatever past contretemps occurred between him and Sam Swisher seem to have receded from memory. “I might try to hook up with him. He was a nice boy, kinda.” Iggy looks tired. He was up at an unusually wee hour last night, after filming an promotional video for the new album with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain – a friend of Homme’s – inevitably led to late dinner. He says that Post Pop Depression will be his last album – certainly the last he’ll make via mainstream industry channels, the last time he’ll undertake all this show-and-tell. “I’m getting near the end of being able to handle stuff at that level, without having some sort of gastric attack!” Iggy laughs, pointing MOJO towards a chair and a mug of peppermint tea. “I like music. I love my DJ gig for the BBC. The rest of this exhausts me. It’s too much work. I’ll do another advert or something!” Despite that, for the next two hours in conversation, he reveals an appetite for selfanalysis that age cannot wither. You’re an only child – how do you think that affected your subsequent journey?
“You get tired of judging Yourself, You get tired of being judged by others.”
It made me lonesome and selfish, and both are potentially good for a writer and a performer respectively. Lonesome for the writer, selfish for the performer. It’s a shame being so selfish, and it’s a shame being so lonesome sometimes.
You grew up in a Michigan trailer park, but it was a solid household – your father was a teacher, your mother worked in an office – and you went to a good school in Ann Arbor alongside the children of America’s industrial elite. Did pressure to live up to a middle-class ideal send you in an alternative direction?
I think I intuited the only way I was going to beat those kids was to wiggle out of my position. I saw how things were set up in America. I saw their
houses, I saw the way they acted, the way their parents acted. My father had made a passing comment – heh, you’re going to love this one – when I was at high school. We’d just seen a singer and an actress on television, and he said, “These entertainers are the new aristocracy”. I think that made an impression on me. All of a sudden I had a format through band life. Before that, I’d been interested in politics, public speaking, debating – I was pretty decent at that. I was on the debate team for a while, I wasn’t bad. But I was not happy – when [John F.] Kennedy got shot, that was not a great day for me. I looked around and the high school building was like a prison. I realised, “If I join the system I’m gonna be here forever. I don’t want to be here. I want to be free.”
How might your life have turned out if you had played within the system?
I would imagine that by 50 I would have been somebody with some sort of jagged legal career, at least one ex-wife, and probably two or three internal health issues. One of those guys. Not without wherewithal, but I don’t think it would have been quite right for me.
IRONICALLY, BY THE TIME HE TURNED 50, in 1997, Iggy Pop did have one ex-wife, would shortly have two, and heaven knows how his mind and body had survived the ravages of drug addiction. Such was the handto-hand combat reality of The Stooges and dealing with the aftermath of the band’s second, fatal, collapse, in 1974. Iggy stumbled around Los Angeles, strung out, homeless and broke, careering from one abortive career reboot to the next, interspersed by rehab in a psychiatric clinic. With hindsight, such turbulence was inevitable from the day charming, personable Jim Osterberg, the “boy most likely to succeed” according to his junior high school peers, began inveigling his way into the orbit of the surly, reprobate Asheton brothers by repeatedly showing up at their house with marijuana. “They tolerated me, they were just nice enough. It was not like, ‘Hey Jim! Good morning!’ But they did tolerate me.” His courtship of the Ashetons was driven by a potent cocktail of romance and pragmatism. Scott Asheton wanted to be a drummer but Iggy saw the younger brother’s smouldering Hollywood bad-boy beauty as the natural front for their putative band. Ron, meanwhile, had an aptitude for the crude dynamics of rock guitar – and delinquency. He briefly got a gig playing bass in The Prime Movers, but was fired for persistently showing up late. “Ron was a rock kid,” says Iggy. “They weren’t having that.” Although Iggy enjoyed playing blues with The Prime
Movers, he felt constricted by their leader Michael Erlewhine’s severe demeanour and the band’s rather academic approach, which although suited to the intellectual pretensions of their collegiate audiences, lacked the fire and brimstone that Iggy heard on records by Magic Sam or Little Walter. A stint playing clubs on Chicago’s West Side in the winter of 1966 under the auspices of his hero, blues drummer Sam Lay, was educational, not least because it taught him that for all the benefits of pedagogic rigour, his future lay in harnessing more instinctive energies. “I realised I was not a double-fisted handful of man with black power, but I thought, We could take what they’re doing and try to combine it with a free-thinking approach.” As first configured, The Psychedelic Stooges were a pretty far-out prospect even by the standards of 1967: a druggy noise-installation comprising a food blender, a vacuum cleaner, Iggy’s golf shoes, a Hawaiian steel guitar with all the strings tuned to E, Dave Alexander battering Ron Asheton’s bass amp and Scott Asheton playing mikedup 55-gallon oil drums with mallets. According to Iggy, “We had two or three very depressive droning numbers, not unlike some of what later became known as death metal. We did a robotic flamenco piece that cleared the room pretty quickly.” But only once Iggy’s art attack was subsumed by Ron Asheton’s stuporifically effective guitar riffs would The Stooges’ sound that history now venerates develop. Even today, Iggy feels his avant-garde chops never got their due credit. “Some people find humour in the fact that I played a vacuum cleaner – I played it well. It sounded fucking great in my hands. I didn’t wake up one day and say, Hahaha – I’ll play a vacuum cleaner… No. We had a simple piece of music that Ron played a certain way and I thought, If only we could get the sound of a howling wind here… Little by little we became more rockist. And yes, a lot of that was because I was hanging out with these rock boys.”
Your bond with the Ashetons seems more like sibling rivalry than friendship.
I was very much pursuing a brotherhood with them. I never did get that close with Ron, but I will always credit him with being my best friend simply because this is showbiz, and he’s the first person that got behind me, and invested in me when I was nobody. So he gets the star. Scotty’s like a cat. He’ll hang out, but he’ll play you. We did become friends very late in his life, and he was always very decent to me. He was fascinated by me in an offhand way.
Yet surely they offered something that no one else had?
Really, they were just incorrigible – anyone but me would throw up their hands. That’s all I can say. They tried my patience for many years. That’s the truth! But they had core talent and charm, and that’s what you need. I sensed they were not going to make fatal errors in judgement that other local musicians were going to make. They were not going to try to play something that sounded like a Jeff Beck solo, they were never going to do something uncool. Ron came up with these two riffs, No Fun and I Wanna Be Your Dog, and I thought, “Now we have something
going on.” It wasn’t the Bible, it wasn’t The Velvet Underground, it wasn’t The Who – but it was better than everything else. We went from there. By the time of Fun House, I could do that myself, and Ron’s big contribution was the riff to TV Eye. The three of them played the shit out of that material; [saxophonist Steve] Mackay too. That was that – I popped a lot of acid to write those songs and that’s hard on your nervous system, so I ended up with a junk problem, an idealism problem, a money problem.”
SHUNNED, RIDICULED, SOMETIMES violently assaulted during their lifetime, the creation of The Stooges’ legend in memoriam rivals even that of The Velvet Underground. But while punk conferred godhead status upon Iggy Pop, the recurring patronage of David Bowie ensured his influence would transcend genre. Indeed, it was the albums Iggy and Bowie recorded together in mid’70s Berlin that most impacted upon the teenage Josh Homme [see panel p77]. In mid-2014, while they were still discussing what record they might make, and how, Iggy Pop extended to Josh Homme a typically old-fashioned courtesy by way of affirming his intentions were serious and honourable: he sent a song-by-song breakdown of The Idiot and Lust For Life. “When that arrived, my wife cried because she knew how much that meant to me,” Homme says. The dossier contained technical details, authorial attributions and personal anecdotes. “He had expressed an interest in those albums,” says Iggy, “so as well as what kind of saxophone was used on Tiny Girls, I included details that most people wouldn’t consider. I explained who wrote what bit – like, ‘Actually on this one I had the chord progression and David Bowie gave me a title and then I came up with the lyric but then he came up with a chorus’, et cetera – and also that Dennis Davis, George Murray and Carlos Alomar were very good natured and would tease me all the time by singing ‘Iggy is a punk rocker’ whenever they saw me. You know, things like that.” Recorded in France, Munich and West Berlin, The Idiot’s dystopic cabaret has been as influential as anything by The Stooges, and certainly more financially rewarding for Iggy: its songs have been covered by Grace Jones and R.E.M., among many others, plus most famously by David Bowie himself, whose version of China Girl is considerably better known than the original. That it was followed so soon by the ebullient Lust For Life confirms the exalted speed of Iggy’s rollercoaster existence. Just 18 months prior to the latter album’s August 1977 release, he had been living like a derelict, with his most recent recordings, the Kill City album, languishing unreleased in apparent confirmation of his pariah status. Iggy’s Berlin diptych was less reinvention or comeback, but a resurrection. “Because I’m open-minded,” he explains.
“Who could have imagined I’m gonna do something like Sister Midnight or China Girl? But I’m an emotional person so I’m reactive to music, it doesn’t matter what kind it is. I like Sinatra. I like Ravel. I like Charlie Parker and I like Prefuse 73. If you put some of it in front of me I’m gonna want to touch it. Sometimes you bump into gifts, because there are gifts all around you. Damn, listen to what Dennis Davis is playing on Sister Midnight, it’s a triple-time on the cymbal and a half-time on the ‘whack’ – it’s insane! The atmosphere was so creative.” MOJO’s inter view takes place on December 5, 2015: a month before David Bowie’s death. Iggy would subsequently reflect fondly on his friendship with the man whose apartment at 155 Hauptstrasse in Berlin he shared during 1976-77. “[Bowie] salvaged me from certain professional and maybe personal annihilation… He did a good thing.” The most tantalising aspect of Iggy’s Berlin Bowie albums is how the energy dissipated almost as quickly as it had arrived. Such intense alchemy was probably unsustainable, but within months Iggy had been dropped by RCA, beginning another period of personal struggle and artistic pinballing, as successive albums – New Values, Soldier, Party and Zombie Birdhouse – saw him paired with various combinations of musicians and producers (James Williamson, Glen Matlock, Ivan
“I NEVER DID GET THAT CLOSE WITH RON ASHETON, BUT I WILL ALWAYS CREDIT HIM WITH BEING MY BEST FRIEND SIMPLY BECAUSE HE’S THE FIRST PERSON THAT GOT BEHIND ME, AND INVESTED IN ME WHEN I WAS NOBODY.”
Escape from the reptile house: (clockwise from above) Iggy and Roller chez Miami, 2005; Iggy joins the Neurotic Outsiders (featuring Duff McKagan, Steve Jones and John Taylor) at the Viper Room, West Hollywood, September 1995; James Osterberg in his senior year at Ann Arbor High School, 1965; David Bowie and Iggy go all Andy Capp for The Idiot UK Tour, March 1977; Iggy and Debbie Harry looking swell for Chris Stein’s camera at Stein’s New York exhibition, May 1982; The Iguanas ready to rip it up (from left) Don Swickerath, Sam Swisher, Jim McLoughlin, Jim Osterberg, Nick Kolokithas; The Stooges in their prime, May 23, 1970, at Elektra Sound Recorders, Los Angeles, during the making of Fun House (clockwise from left) Dave Alexander, Scott Asheton, Ron Asheton, Iggy Pop; Jim Osterberg playing with The Prime Movers but dreaming of Rock Action, in a front garden on State Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1966.
Kral, Chris Stein) who struggled to reconfigure his mercurial qualities for the new wave-fixated mainstream. The results were mixed. Today, Iggy is philosophical. “One thing I’ve learned is a group of people making music is an occasion–asocial occasion, always. It’s where you were, who you were with and where ever ybody was at in their lives at that moment. What happens inevitably is that people drift off to other areas of their possible personality. In my case, I often have a tendency to sink into vulgarity – heheheh! Sorry! But at least I know that about myself and I’m not even 70 yet! I’m getting somewhere here!” Jim Kerr once said that when Simple Minds were at Rockfield in Wales recording their second album, they were very excited because you were also there, making Soldier. They knew you were having a bad time
because you kept coming into their studio, as opposed to them trying to get into yours.
That’s a good point. That wasn’t the best. Sometimes I think there are secret protocols that the corporate record structure never shared with me, that would lead them to want another record really quickly, even though you’d just had a flop! In that case I was making ’em too fast for what I was and my energies were flagging because of too much drink on the one hand and stimulants on the other, and that shrinks the size of the middle path when you can actually function. Did you ever see the movie Cat Ballou? If Lee Marvin doesn’t have a drink he can’t do anything. If he has one or two drinks he can out-shoot and out-ride anyone. But if he has that third drink then off he falls! Like that, y’know?
Why do you think people like David Bowie and Josh Homme want to work with you?
I offer something different. When a person becomes both very good and very popular they need to keep doing it all the time, they get
nervous if they’re not. But they don’t want to do the same thing over and over. They need a break, but they don’t want to go fishing. That’s where I come in. You get something different with this odd guy. Also, I’m willing to exchange.
It’s always a creative two-way street?
Yeah. I hardly ever shoot down an idea and I will diligently work, and sometimes I come up with something interesting without ’em.
Why did you want to work with Josh?
I was looking for someone to make one last, good, formalist album with – meaning completely realised, with production and musical values that might have a chance of anybody hearing it in the ‘music scene’. Someone mentioned him and I listened to [QOTSA’s 2013 LP] …Like Clockwork. I thought, Ooh dear, this is very fine work. I thought it was the type of writing and arranging that could work for a vocalist other than himself. I started listening to the Desert Sessions and really enjoyed the range of it – biker blues to English pop… There was one [song] called Sheperds Pie that I thought was funny!
You’d met Josh once before, but Dean only for a quick backstage ‘hello’ and never Matt. How did you all click?
I clicked real good with Dean because he’s from Michigan, and he’s very personable. I did great with Matt because Matt doesn’t really waste a lot of chitter-chatter. He reminds me of other people I know from that part of England. He’s always listening and always available. The commentary is very crisp. Honestly, I could just listen to him play a basic beat all by himself, all day. And Josh knows the ins and outs of what’s gonna make a song work. Rancho was definitely close quarters and we also recorded at Josh’s studio, Pink Duck, in Los Angeles. It’s nice there. Copies of Viz in the loo. I love Viz. Especially Johnny Fartpants!
“THE IGUANAS BACKED UP THE SHANGRI-LAS, AND THE FOUR TOPS. WE OPENED FOR THE KINGSMEN. YOU LEARN A LOT THAT WAY.”
Do you still feel compelled to seek ‘music scene’ recognition?
Yeah, for about another six months! (Laughs) Then I’m giving up!
ON A SHELF IN HIS MIAMI BOLTHOLE sits the first award Iggy Pop ever received. It looks like a brick. “It is a brick,” Iggy giggles. “In 1990 I made Brick By Brick, and at the same time the National Bricks were having a crisis, nobody was using bricks to build. So they said, ‘Right, we’ll have a brick awards,’ and had this stupid ceremony in a B-list hotel in Times Square and maybe 25 people showed up. They nominated me for best use of brick in a video…” Brick By Brick was significant, not least because it gave Iggy his first ever US hit single – Candy, a duet with The B-52’s’ Kate Pierson – and first US gold-certified album. As well as guest slots from Guns N’Roses’ Duff McKagan and Slash, it also prominently featured Jim Osterberg, who emerged after many years in Iggy’s shadow, offering wry, often tender observations on the lot of his fellow regular American citizen. “The life we lead is tricky, tricky/I love my home and my family,” he stated in Home, while the title track was Jim’s plain-spoken admonishment of Iggy: “I wanna live in peace, quietly/I wanna have a place of love and safety… So get off my dick/I’m building it brick by brick.” I interviewed Iggy around the release of the album. Wearing glasses, dressed-down in T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, and with his au naturel hair short, he admitted that this domesticated husband still struggled to shake off naughty little Iggy. “I’m like Top Cat!”
he winked. “I could live anywhere!” This afternoon in his Miami day-house, with the rain now splashing steamily on the roof of the tiki hut, Jim confirms “that Top Cat guy” is still sniffing around. “He keeps coming back! Y’know, Iggy’s a bad guy! Natural and life-affirming, and dangerous and threatening always to spoil the value of the artefact that I have become – and need to continue becoming if I want to survive comfortably in the world.” Perhaps Iggy’s most impressive act of reinvention came in 2003, when he reformed The Stooges. Whatever the calibre of his bands at any given point during the previous 25 years, they were doomed to be judged on their performances of No Fun, 1969, I Wanna Be Your Dog, Loose, Search And Destroy – songs which in the wake of punk’s posthumous deification of The Stooges had attained the status of holy texts. In the ’80s, Iggy’s latest David Bowie-assisted commercial retune with 1986’s Blah Blah Blah was paralleled by The Stooges’ status attaining critical mass amid indie rock circles. That it should be Mike Watt who took the late Dave Alexander’s place in the reformed Stooges made perfect sense: with the Minutemen, Watt had been a catalyst for a new wave of visceral rock performers who worshipped The Stooges’ blend of minimalist cool and primal fervour, a phenomenon that culminated with Nirvana. The end of the ’90s saw Ron Asheton recording with Mudhoney’s Mark Arm and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, then touring in a Stooges tribute band with Watt and J Mascis. The momentum was unstoppable. “I found the Ashetons again because Mike Watt and his crowd unearthed them,” Iggy says. “And they unearthed them because they realised there were a certain crowd of people who needed a touchstone to something rocking and cool, but that had no taint of heavy metal. No taint of the virtuoso or macho. And there were the Ashetons: perfect.” It could be argued that The Stooges tainted their own legacy by recording two further albums: 2007’s The Weirdness, and then after Ron Asheton’s death in 2009 saw the revival of the Mark II Stooges with James Williamson on guitar, 2013’s Ready To Die. But an alternative thesis holds that those records were necessary vessels for Jim Osterberg to safely transport the spirit of Iggy Stooge out of harm’s way. Just look at the two albums he made after The Weirdness: PrŽliminaires, a set of mostly jazz-tinged vignettes based on a novel by Michel Houellebecq, and Apr•s, where Iggy turned the lights down even lower and crooned French pop standards by Piaf and Brassens. “Those records are me,” he says. “The Weirdness was whatever Ron Asheton wanted me to do. Both times the group reformed, it was very simple. Ron, and later Williamson, were determined that this time they were going to express themselves and that I wasn’t going to get in their way. I was fine, I said I will do my best to sing to what you give me, I will not put you in a situation that you don’t want. So Ron chose the situation with Steve-the-nonproducer-Albini, and James chose to self-produce. I was not very comfortable in either situation but I did my duty. That doesn’t mean that, after all the errors I saw other people making in those records, I didn’t make errors that were equally as glaring. Because the thing is: you can’t go home. Simple as that. Meanwhile, I am who I am. So I made PrŽliminaires, Apr•s. And then I sought out this situation…” Iggy waves at Josh Homme, who is now outside, FaceTiming his two young children. “I tried to find somebody, somebody at a unique level of compositional and instrumental skill, who might have wanted to have an exchange. That’s what I was after. (Pauses) I think there’s a fuck of a lot of Osterberg on this new record.”
IGGY SAYS THERE HAVE ONLY been three times this centur y when he’s sat alone with an acoustic guitar, “and something came that was natural and moved me”. The first was ’Til Wrong Feels Right, a solo blues about the industrial grind of the record business, featured on Skull Ring, the 2003 collaborations album that marked The Stooges’ return. Secondly, I Want To Go To The Beach, from PrŽliminaires, was written amidst the blood and thunder of the reformed Stooges’ tour machine, and is a plaintive cri de coeur: “I wanna go to the deep/’Cos there’s nowhere I want to be/And nobody I want to see.” And the third is Paraguay, the final song on what Iggy Pop states will be the final Iggy Pop album. The protagonist dreams of escaping the rat-race, and although he realises he’ll never actually get to Paraguay, his sentiment is plain: “I’m going where sore losers go/To hide my face and spend my dough/Though it’s a dream it’s not a lie/And I won’t stop to say goodbye.”
It’s feeling that way. Sometimes you feel the page turning and you’re not sure how you feel about it. You’re not even sure what’s happening to you. But yeah, I think Josh must have picked up on that. I had written the verse and chorus for Paraguay about a year before we started making this record and that represented my emotional state. I didn’t feel as well as I thought maybe I could. But you get tired of judging yourself, you get tired of being judged by others. The general intercourse of life that maybe gets a bit heightened depending how public your life gets. It’s not just me .
So now, if the end is near, can we state for the record that you did it your way?
When I could. And when you can’t, you serve your time then you get out and you’re loose again! Everybody gets nailed once in a while and the gig’s up.
Regrets?
Is this really your valedictory moment?
Lots of personal regrets, but because they’re personal. Lots of songs, but nothing worth dwelling on. I mean, at some point, I think it’s good to have dinner, uncork a bottle of wine and just forget about it all.
Iggy laughs his last laugh and gives MOJO a little hug. Outside, Josh Homme is behind the wheel of a black 4x4. The post-Pop depression era is almost upon us.