Between Marc and Richard’s recent posts on old skool local New York TV, I’ve been combing the mulch pile of my memories from back in the day and what popped to mind was Howard Stern interviewing Iggy Pop on his old Channel 9 (“superstation” WWOR) show.

It is… amusing, of course, but what’s particularly interesting is how Iggy just cringes at the mention of Angela Bowie, who in turn shows up with (interestingly enough) David Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Visconti and his wife May Pang, one-time mistress of John Lennon. Iggy plays “I Wanna Be Your Dog” but at the prospect of being “face to face” with Angie, he makes like a banana and splits!

Here ya’ go:
 

 
Also from that very same episode, the regular feature, “Homeless Howiewood Squares,” featuring Underdog Lady, “KKK Guy” (who had a name, but no one really cared) and longtime Match Game host Gene Rayburn, who must’ve been really hard up for work by then… Note how fascinated even the contestants are at hearing KKK Guy’s nearly incomprehensible theories about racial superiority.

If you’re not familiar with Howard’s work, it’s easy to just write him off as a “shock jock.” Hell, you’d be right to do so (obviously this is trying to be offensive and succeeding in a big way. Regular segments like “Guess the Jew” and “Lesbian Dating Game” weren’t subtle either.). BUT, there has always been an almost surreal element to Howard Stern’s shtick and, more importantly, a very “New York” context that caused such bizarre television to follow a sort of odd calculus of humor.
 

 
An Iggy pop clock made by artist and designer Ron Winnick. I like the creative touch as Iggy’s arms move around he smears peanut butter on himself. That’s absolutely brilliant.

Below, this incredible live footage of The Stooges comes from the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival of 1970 (AKA Midsummer Rock Festival) and features the infamous peanut butter smearing incident.

Note the announcer’s reaction: “That’s… peanut butter!” Years later Stiv Bators of The Dead Boys took credit for bringing the tub of peanut butter from his home in Dayton and putting it into the Iggster’s hands.
 

 
One of the most striking and iconic pieces of rock and roll clothing has to be the leopard head jacket worn by Iggy Pop on the back cover of 1973’s Raw Power, in the classic shot taken by photographer Mick Rock (above). The jacket was made by John Dove and Molly White in 1971 and appeared in L’Uomo Vogue. They only ever made five of them. Iggy bought one. Zoot Money bought another. One was a gift to their agent in Paris, Dove kept one and an unknown guy bought the other.

From their Wonder Workshop website:

The saga of IGGY POP’S JACKET returns 18 years later when Iggy’s Jacket turns up on the back of Stan Lee, lead guitarist of the Dickies in the pages of Rolling Stone. Ruby Ray’s picture shows Stan half heartedly assuming the Raw Power stance. The interview starts with Vale’s recognition, “The jacket looks like the one Iggy wore on Raw Power!”

“It IS Iggy’s jacket - I got it in a dope deal a few years ago. He didn’t have the bucks so I took that for collateral. For a while, he couldn’t afford it back, and now he’s a rich bitchin’ Iggy, he tried to buy it back and I said NO!...”

The same story is recounted in We Got the Neutron Bomb : The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen.

Andy Seven: “I remember seeing Iggy at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco after the Stooges broke up when he still had the platinum rinse, with Michael Des Barres, the singer for Silverhead. Stan Lee, who later started the Dickies, used to go there. He was this short, pushy little puffed-out guy with a Marc Bolan poodle shag, and he claimed he had the leopard jacket that Iggy wore on the back cover of Raw Power, he told me he got it from Iggy for dope collateral.”

Ron Asheton: “Oh, yeah, Iggy would trade his possessions all the time for drugs. That’s how he lost some of those great clothes, like that plastic jacket on the back of Raw Power with the Leopard head ... that got traded to somebody for drugs or whatever”.

Stan Lee: “When I was sixteen I used to hang out with Iggy. I got his Raw Power jacket in a drug deal that went down in The Whisky parking lot. It was used as collateral, and thankfully I kept it.”

A few years later, art and toy collector extraordinare, Long Gone John, boss of the Sympathy for the Record Industry label (where the White Stripes, Hole and many others got their start) bought the jacket from Stan Lee. He picks up the story now in an email sent to John Dove and Molly White:

John and Molly

I wrote this for you while flying home from no. California… let me know if you need anything else ... want an updated photo of the jacket ?? all the best as ever…like that, john xx

“I remember Stan Lee from the Dickies wearing the Iggy jacket every time I saw him and remember thinking he’s gonna wear it till it falls apart…he was obviously really really proud of owning it…when you see photos of him wearing it you can see it was still in very good condition at the time…about 5 years before I bought it from Stan, a friend of mine, Tim Warren who ran the label Crypt Records who was living in Germany came to LA. and apart from whatever else he had to do he had intentions of buying the jacket from Stan for his cute french girlfriend ...Tim offered Stan $5000.00 which seemed an enormous amount of money…seems Stan was pretty flush at the time or at least he didn’t currently have a severe drug habit which he often did have throughout the years…anyway, Tim’s offer was turned down and his girlfriend was considerably heartbroken, but still very cute…

I didn’t think about the jacket for a long time until one day a friend called and said Stan wanted to sell the jacket and asked if I was interested…he said he thought Stan wanted $3000.00…I thought that the jacket was so important and would one day belong in a museum and figured it was well worth the money…I drove out to the Valley to meet him at the converted garage he lived in…the jacket was pretty worn, but it was also obvious it was made out of really cheap fake leather material to begin with…the cheetah head on the back was a bit rubbed off, but to me that was inevitable with age and gave it a air of authenticity considering it was at least 25 years old at the time…best as I can remember this was about 1998…being the bargaining fool that I am I offered stan $2000.00 and after considerable haggling he finally agreed to accept it…the jacket was tiny Iggy is 5’ 1” as documented in the song with the same name Stan was also short, but not that short…i’m 5’ 11” so of course it didn’t fit me, but my interest in it wasn’t to wear it anyway…to me that jacket was so iconic I thought of it as The Shroud of Turin of Rock ‘n’ Roll…

I was about 21 yrs old when Raw Power came out and very impressionable…it was one of my favourite albums and r was completely mesmerized by both the front and back cover photos…that record was amazing and I never got tired of listening to it and never got the image of the jacket out of my mind…I have always felt extremely honored to own the jacket and will protect it’s legacy until the next caretaker happens along…”

 

 
Below, the trailer for the documentary, Treasures of Long Gone John. Truly he is a man after my own heart:
 

(via The Look)

 
This Jim Osterberg fellow looks like a nice, clean-cut, fine upstanding young man.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Amazing photos of Iggy & the Stooges playing at a Michigan high school, 1970

 
Iggy and The Stooges at their most primal proto-punk prime, filmed at the Goose Lake music festival in Michigan in 1970.

If the Stooges sound a bit “thin” here, this performance was done without original bassist Dave Alexander, who arrived at the gig too fucked up to stand, let alone play.

Alexander was promptly fired. A heavy drinker, he died at the age of 27 in 1975. He was name-checked a few years later in Iggy’s spoken-word intro to The Idiot’s “Dum Dum Boys”:

“How about Dave? OD’d on alcohol.”
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Raw Power: Iggy Pop invents stage diving in 1970 and smears himself in peanut butter

Thank you kindly, PJ Dorsey!

 
Iggy Pop performing “Dog Food,” “Real Cool Time” and “Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell” at The Longhorn Saloon in Minneapolis, Minnesota on November 20, 1979. From a program called Wild Tyme (where that vintage tattoo convention clip I posted earlier today also came from).

Some great interview footage with Iggy explaining why he HATES rock music (he’d rather buy drugs than records) and the self-financed New Values tour he was engaged in at the time. There’s also a record signing for fans.

This is primo Iggy. Only 68 views on YouTube? What’s that about?

Below, the actual handbill from the gig, a part of the Minnesota Historical Society’s collection:
 

 

The more things change, the more they stay the same
 
The picture above is from a book called The Moment After the Show, a coffee table volume from photographer Matthias Willi and journalist Olivier Joliat, specializing solely in the sweaty, post-coital afterglow of musicians.

The photography feels almost invasive—and not just because we’re a centimeter from James Osterberg’s junk. The little details like unzipped flies, running make-up, and visible sweat-spots are so akin to pulling the curtain back. Looking at them offstage at a moment when they’re supposed to be human again, feels almost invasive.

 
Promo video for Nico’s “Evening of Light” (actually the alternate version, as heard on the Frozen Borderline set) directed by François De Menil in 1969, but probably finished much later. There was a tantalizingly brief clip of this in the Nico: Icon documentary and ever since the invention of YouTube, I’ve been hoping to find the complete piece online.

The story is told in Richard Witts’ (fantastic) Nico biography, Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, that De Menil, heir to the Schlumberger Limited oil-equipment fortune via his mother’s family, who knew Nico via Warhol associate Fred Hughes, had become besotted by the Teutonic ice queen and proposed making a film with her.

At this time Nico was having a brief affair with a then 21-year-old Iggy Pop, who she met through John Cale, then producing the first Stooges album in New York. (Iggy once revealed to a French interviewer that Nico taught him how to “eat pussy.”) Nico told De Menil that he had to follow them to Ann Arbor, Michigan if he wanted to do it. De Menil obliged, shooting the film behind the house where the band lived.

The way Witts tells the tale is that De Menil seemed to want to get revenge on Iggy because he was Nico’s boyfriend, making the Stooges singer wear white mime make-up and frolic around in a field to embarrass him, but to my mind, this film is absolutely stunning.

Turn it up loud for the full effect!
 

 
A Christmas standard sung by Mr. Pop.
 

 
Your pretty face is going to hell…

Just in time for Halloween: UK company Funky Bunky is selling an Iggy Pop paper mask—made from heavy card stock and elastic band—for £3.20 (around $5.00).

If Iggy ain’t your thing, perhaps Limahl of Kajagoogoo would be better suited for your never-ending Halloween story…

Via Cherrybombed

Edward Colver’s photo of Stiv
 
When I think of Iggy and Stiv together, I might think of their mutual penchant for self-mutilation and animalistic performances. That it was supposed to have been Stiv who passed Iggy that famous jar of Skippy. Or maybe I think of midwestern punk and my heart swells with vulgar, snotty pride. At the very least, I think of their unbelievable drug stories I read about in Cheetah Chrome’s book. What I tend to forget is that they were friends and colleagues. It’s an unsettlingly earnest moment to watch, but when you get past the creeping threat of voyeurism one tends to feel at such a naked display of emotion, the warmth and sincerity of the eulogy is one of the most loving moments in punk rock.
 

 
Written by Iggy Pop and Ivan Kral and produced by Tommy Boyce, “Bang Bang” was in heavy rotation in dance clubs when it was released in 1981 but failed to cross-over to mainstream success at a time when Pop was under a lot of record company pressure to create some hits.

David Bowie later covered the tune on his less-than-stellar 1987 release Never Let Me Down, an album Bowie claimed “had good songs that I mistreated.”

Did Bowie mistreat “Bang Bang”? Or did he blow Iggy out of the water? Or neither?

Welcome to the battle of the “Bang Bangs.”
 

 
I miss Tony Wilson. I miss the idea of Tony Wilson. Someone who had an enquiring mind and was full of intelligent enthusiasms, like Tony Wilson. And who also didn’t mind making a prat of himself when he got things wrong. Or, even right.

I met him in 2005 for a TV interview. He arrived on a summer’s day at a small studio in West London. He wore a linen suit, sandals, carried a briefcase, and his toenails were painted a rich plum color - his wife had painted them the night before, he said.

Wilson was clever, inspired and passionate about music. He talked about his latest signing, a rap band, and his plans for In the City music festival before we moved onto the Q&A in front of a camera. He could talk for England, but he was always interested in what other people were doing, what they thought, and was always always encouraging others to be their best. That’s what I miss.

You get more than an idea of that Tony Wilson in this compilation of the best of his regional tea-time TV series So It Goes. Wilson (along with Janet Street-Porter) championed Punk Rock on TV, and here he picks a Premier Division of talent:

Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, Iggy Pop, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, Penetration, Blondie, Fall, Jam, Jordan, Devo, Tom Robinson Band, Johnny Thunder, Elvis Costello, XTC, Jonathan Richman, Nick Lowe, Siouxie & the Banshees, Cherry Vanilla & Magazine….. The tape fails there!

The uploader ConcreteBarge has left in the adverts “for historical reference” that include - “TSB, Once, Cluster, Coke is it, Roger Daltery in American Express, Ulay, Swan, Our Price, Gastrils, Cluster & Prestige”.

So, let’s get in the time machine and travel back for an hour of TV fun.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

The Best of ‘So It Goes’: Clash, Sex Pistols, Iggy The Fall, Joy Division and more

 
With thanks to Daniel Ceci
 

 
I’m having an “I did not know this” moment right now. Apparently Iggy Pop guest-starred on an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 1998 as a Vorta overseer named “Yelgrun” from the planet Kurill Prime.

Again, I shall repeat, “I did not know this.”

Below, a video montage of Iggy’s most memorable scenes as “Yelgrun” from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “The Magnificent Ferengi.”
 

 
With thanks to Dee Rollins for this gem!

 
Via EOMS/The Quietus