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A Teatime Dub Encounter with Iggy Pop & Underworld by Irvine Welsh
07.09.2018
07:40 am
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Photo credit: Rob Baker Ashton

A Teatime Dub Encounter with Iggy Pop & Underworld by Irvine Welsh

You know the drill. I’ve idolised Iggy Pop since the seventies, loved Underworld through the burgeoning dance music scene in the late 80’s. In the 90’s I did a novel, Trainspotting, about being fucked up, practically ghostwritten by Iggy and underscored by the beats of dance music. It was made into a movie. The two iconic tracks of the film, “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” and “Lust For Life” were by Iggy and Underworld. So now, in stormy Miami, they are collaborating on a four track EP and I’m pretty damn thrilled to take a smidgen of indirect credit for that.

Like Iggy, I’m now a resident of Miami, and something of a buddy of his, though to me that still feels a bit like a royal family biographer pretending to be bezzy mates with the Queen. To be fair to him, Iggy never makes me feel like the semi-awkward fanboy I am, but there’s a lot of angsty teen baggage on my part to get through, when Raw Power, Kill City, Funhouse and The Stooges were the soundtrack to youth well-spent misspending. Iggy was the liberator, ossifying a petulant punk sensibility, which has never completely left me: both a personal boon and occasional curse.

Karl Hyde is, like Iggy, an old trailer park resident, in his case in the West Midlands, rather than Michigan. I remember Karl from the 90’s, his flat in Soho was a legendary retreat for casualties stuck in the West End. I haven’t met Rick, before and doing so, is a pleasure. So we chatted all weekend, at a restaurant, a plush hotel over cream tea, and Iggy’s swamp man pad on the river. Here’s a massively summarised version of what we said:

IRVINE
Did you ever smoke on an airplane, Jim?

IGGY
I used to enjoy it when I first just got a little tiny bit of money, just enough to have $50 in my pocket. I had a girlfriend in Cleveland, which was like, what a 48 minute flight from Detroit, and it was 25 bucks, and I was like, “I have enough money to fly to Cleveland, and hit on the girl, and go home!”

IRVINE
And you could light up anytime?

IGGY
Well I was smoking cigarettes constantly at this time, but then in the incident described in the song “Bells & Circles,” I was out with the last gasp, truly derelict desperate Stooges, in ‘74. We were on our way to DC and I did snort a gram.

IRVINE
A gram of cocaine?

IGGY
Yeah I put down the tray table, and snorted the whole gram, and this beautiful tall, very dark stewardess was available, but then I started drinking: I had to take the edge off.

IRVINE
What you do after a gram, yeah…

IGGY
When I got to the hotel I realised I’d forgotten her number, which was terrible, and because I didn’t hook up with her, I got together with a notorious groupie who had a friend who had some angel dust, so I took it before the gig.

IRVINE
They didn’t mind about coke on planes in those days?

IGGY
Well, I didn’t mind!

Iggy and I then swap cocaine stories, before agreeing that it’s terrible drug but you need to test it thoroughly and repeatedly to be absolutely sure.

IRVINE
So what about this 4-track EP, how did it come about? How did you guys get together?

RICK
Danny Boyle, asked me to help with T2 Trainspotting, and we got quite excited how to look at music differently from the first film, because then there was no composer involved. We thought, ‘What if we had an original piece of music from Iggy, that would play in this particular scene’, so my manager chased a connection with Iggy. The timing kind of worked out, and you were in London, about to do some shows?

IGGY
I was on tour doing the Post Pop Depression tour with Josh Homme.
         
RICK
You were at The Savoy and graciously said yeah, because you know, we both felt a strong connection to Trainspotting and I turned up thinking I’ve got one chance here to convince this gentleman that we should work together on a piece of music. So I brought basically half my studio and we hired a hotel room and I set it up and sat waiting.

IGGY
Well yeah the thing was traumatic for me really, the whole thing, the way it came at me was I was on this tour with guys 25 years younger than me doing the rock tour schedule and I get ‘Danny Boyle wants to talk to you about doing something for a movie’. I thought ‘well that sounds great but I’m in the middle of a tour. My performance is a big deal to me, but they had this song “Shotgun Mouthwash” (a track by Underworld collaborator High Contrast that ended up as the opening music in T2 Trainspotting). So I listened to it and I thought ‘well that’s fine, what do they need me for?’ And Danny said ‘well we like that but we wondered if we could get some Iggy Pop into “Shotgun Mouthwash,” and I thought ‘no you can’t fucking get Iggy Pop into the fucking “Shotgun Mouthwash” but I didn’t say that, I said ‘well I could just see what I can do.’

Time for some editorialising from me: the venue for collaboration for this fusion of punk and techno was The Savoy. That’s right, none other that the posh hotel on the Strand where Churchill held cabinet meetings. It does have a rock n roll connection though, Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video was shot in the adjoining alley for that ‘street’ feel. But, uh, how come chaps?

IGGY
I was at the Savoy just getting ready to play London and met with Rick, whom I liked as he was very polite and that goes a long way with me. We were able to get to know each other a little. He had a number of tracks ready. And then my mind was racing because when you are confronted with somebody who has a whole damn studio there in the hotel room in front of you and 30 finished pieces of very polished music, you don’t want to be the wimp that goes ‘uh uhhh’...

IRVINE
That view of friendship that you have on that track, “I’ll See Big,” is fairly consistent in everything you’ve done and written throughout the years. If you think about it, “I’m Bored” on New Values, “I’m free to bore my robot friends…” So has that been a kind of theme or an issue: that you’re keeping old friendships, but also sort of you being conscious of being successful and that possible tension?

IGGY
I wrestle with the whole concept, about half the time I feel like a chump. And then the other half of the time it’s like ‘well what else am I gonna do, like just be empty all the time’. You know you go back and forth, because there is an extreme to which some people can operate through dominance, acquisition, manipulation. I was able to talk about these things because this was still in my mind, somehow connected to the hapless heroes of Trainspotting. You know like when the war is over the old buddies break up.

Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.09.2018
07:40 am
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Ray Manzarek and Danny Sugerman identify ‘Johnny Yen’ from Iggy’s ‘Lust for Life’
06.29.2018
08:23 am
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In 1995, the Doors’ keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, and biographer, Danny Sugerman, appeared on the Australian music video program rage, smoking cigs on the couch and telling stories about Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop.

In the first clip below, Sugerman describes sharing his home with Iggy in the Seventies (“sort of like staging the Vietnam War at Grauman’s Chinese Theater”) and checking him into the mental hospital after a Quaalude overdose. He credits the quick thematic transition from “Death Trip” to “Lust for Life” to Iggy’s personal growth under the care of Dr. Murray Zucker.  In the second clip, “Iggy’s Homosexual Ballet Dancing Heroin Dealer,” they reminisce about “Gypsy Johnny,” the real-life heroin dealer immortalized as “Johnny Yen” in “Lust for Life.” Sugerman:

His black Porsche said “Gypsy” on it, and he wore a scarf around his head. He used to be a ballerina, and he was homosexual, and very hot for Iggy’s parts—body parts—and “yen” is a term that William Burroughs uses a lot describing the craving for heroin. So in “Lust for Life” there’s a line, “Here comes Johnny Yen again, with liquor and drugs and a sex machine,” and that’s Gypsy Johnny coming up to Wonderland Avenue with his scarves and his drugs and his motorized dildos and whatever else he had, his balloons full of Mexican heroin that was killing all of us.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.29.2018
08:23 am
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Screaming Bloody Murder: Iggy Pop’s most ferocious vocal performances EVER
04.27.2018
08:18 am
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Bloody Iggy
 
A few days prior to their run of shows at Max’s Kansas City in July/August 1973, the Stooges arrived in Manhattan to rehearse. The band’s label provided a practice space in midtown, and tapes were made so Iggy and the boys could hear themselves. Years later, recordings were released, and they were a revelation—Iggy was absolutely on fire during these rehearsals. There are moments when his vocals are even more violent and unhinged than anything heard on the band’s studio LPs or their infamous live album, Metallic KO. Though the practice tapes lack the fidelity of those seminal releases, the intensity comes through all the same.

After a long delay, the Stooges third album, Raw Power was finally released in May 1973. The previous March, after clashes with management came to head, James Williamson was forced out of the group, but after the company dropped Iggy and the Stooges, he was welcomed back into the fold. The band also added a new member, Scott Thurston, to play piano and harmonica.

A number of friends attended the Max’s rehearsals, which were held at a studio owned by CBS Records. Natalie Schlossman, former head of the Stooges fan club, was there, as was original bassist, Dave Alexander, amongst others. With the impending high-profile dates, and as so many were watching, the Stooges gave it their all. At one point, Iggy got on top of the studio’s grand piano to cut a rug.
 
The Stooges
 
Recordings of the Max’s rehearsals appear on a number of archival releases, beginning with Rubber Legs (1987), the first in a string of quasi-legal albums comprised of previously unreleased Stooges tapes that flooded the market in the late ‘80s. In 2005, Easy Action Records put out the Stooges-approved boxed set of outtakes and such, Heavy Liquid (an abridged version was produced for Record Store Day last April). One of the six discs contains a Max’s show, as well as seven recordings from the Max’s rehearsals. All of the songs pulled from the practice tape were, at the time, newly worked-up tunes that, in the end, wouldn’t be formally recorded by the Stooges.
 
Heavy Liquid
 
“Johanna” (later documented for the Kill City project) is particularly powerful. Said to be about a former girlfriend that got her kicks by playing mind games on the Stooges singer, the tape captures Iggy totally tortured, screaming his head off over a love he knows is toxic, but can’t quit.
 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Bart Bealmear
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04.27.2018
08:18 am
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When Bowie got busted: Local news reports from his & Iggy’s 1976 arrest for nearly a pound of weed
04.03.2018
09:30 am
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On March 21, 1976, David Bowie was on his “Isolar” trek around America (aka “The Thin White Duke tour”) and “Golden Years” was high on the US pop singles charts. But when the tour pulled into Rochester, NY for a concert at the War Memorial Arena his golden years could have been derailed when the singer and Iggy Pop were arrested on marijuana charges for an impressive amount of herb, about half a pound. Under the harsh Rockefeller drug laws, that could have resulted in fifteen years in prison, but ultimately resulted in nothing other than a minor inconvenience for Bowie, and one of the very best celeb mug shots of all time.

John Stewart reporting in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle of March 26 1976:

After silently walking through a crush of fans, police and reporters, English rock star David Bowie pleaded innocent to a felony drug charge yesterday in Rochester City Court. Bowie, 28, entered the Public Safety Building through the Plymouth Avenue doorway at 9:25 a.m., just five minutes before court convened, with an entourage of about seven persons, including his attorneys and the three other persons charged with him.

He was ushered into a side corridor by police and was arraigned within 10 minutes, as a crowd of about 200 police, fans and reporters looked on. Bowie and his group ignored reporters’ shouted questions and fans’ yells as he walked in — except for one teenager who got his autograph as he stepped off the escalator.

His biggest greeting was the screams of about a half-dozen suspected prostitutes awaiting arraignment in the rear of the corridor outside the courtroom.

Asked for a plea by City Court Judge Alphonse Cassetti to the charge of fifth-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance, Bowie said, “not guilty, sir.” The court used his real name — David Jones. He stood demurely in front of the bench with his attorneys. He wore a gray three-piece leisure suit and a pale brown shirt. He was holding a matching hat. His two companions were arraigned on the same charge. Bowie was represented by Rochester lawyer Anthony F. Leonardo, who also represented his companions, James J. Osterberg, 28 of Ypsilanti, Mich., and Dwain A. Vaughs, 22, of Brooklyn. Osterberg, described as a friend and Vaughs, described as a bodyguard, also pleaded innocent to the drug charge.

Osterberg also is a rock musician and performs under the name of Iggy Stooge. Bowie has produced at least one of Osterberg’s album in the past. Judge Cassetti set April 20 for he preliminary hearing for the three men. He also agreed to set the same date for the Rochester woman charged with the same offence, Chiwah Soo, 20, of 9 Owen St., who was also in the courtroom. Cassetti allowed Bowie to remain free on $2,000 bail, as well as continuing the $2,000 bond on the other three persons charged. Bowie and the other three were arrested by city vice squad detectives and state police Sunday in the Americana Rochester hotel, charged with possession of 182 grams, about half a pound, of marijuana in his room there. Bowie was in Rochester of a concert Saturday night.

 

 

Bowie’s arrangement was witnessed by his fans, some of whom had waited two hours to catch a glimpse of him. All remained quiet in the courtroom and scrambled after his arraignment to watch his exit from the building. But fans and reporters were disappointed as city uniformed and plain-clothes police slipped him out unnoticed. Using a maze of elevators and stairwells, police took Bowie and his entourage out a side exit, across the Civic Center Plaza and into Leonardo’s office on the Times Square building’s seventh floor.

Only about 30 fans were on had to yell goodbye as Bowe and his friends left from Leonardo’s office at 12.30pm. Bowie, for the first time, waved to the crowd as his limousine pulled out from a parking space on West Broad Street, made a U-turn and headed for the expressway and the drive back to New York City. The blue-and-black Lincoln Continental limousine had been ticketed for overtime parking, but a plainclothes policeman took the ticket, and put it in his pocket.

Bowie had remained silent throughout the morning but granted a five-minute interview to newspaper reporters in Leonardo’s office. Leonardo, however, wouldn’t allow any questions directly concerning the arrest, saying it was the first criminal charge he’d ever faced. He complimented city police, though, for the protection they provided him yesterday.

“They (city police) were very courteous and very gentle,” Bowie said. “They’ve been just super.” Quiet and reserved, Bowie answered most of the reporters’ questions with short answers, shaking hands with them when they entered and left. Asked if the arrest would sour him on returning to Rochester, Bowie said “certainly not, absolutely not.” He also said he was “very flattered” by the fans who turned out for this arraignment. “I felt very honored,” he said.

Bowie and his entourage arrived in Rochester about 4am after performing a concert in the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island Wednesday night, Leonardo said, he will appear tonight at Madison Square Garden, his final concert of his America tour, Pat Gibbons, said.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.03.2018
09:30 am
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‘Love You So Bad’: New video from Iggy Pop-endorsed singer Ezra Furman
12.15.2017
08:28 am
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Praise from Caesar is praise indeed, and when a lesser-known artist earns the enthusiastic endorsement of a hero, it’s validating to the core, whether it greases any real-world wheels or not. Singer-songwriter Ezra Furman has been making marvelous pop albums that teeter between eccentricity and classicism for ten years, but a couple of years ago he scored one of the most enviable rock-star affirmations one can score—the admiration of Iggy Pop. Pop does a weekly radio show for the BBC called “Iggy Confidential,” and on September 18, 2015, he played three consecutive songs from Furman’s early LPs Banging Down the Doors and Inside the Human Body, saying “I really like Ezra Furman. I think the guy’s got something. He’s got a lot of wit and nerve.”
 

 

 
Furman is back with a new album, Transangelic Exodus, with his band The Visions (exact same membership as his previous band The Boy-Friends, it’s really just a name change), and it’s pretty great—I’ve been enjoying it more with each repeat listen. Furman here gets more ambitious and experimental with production, channeling influences from the scattershot cut-up ethos expressed by the Dust Brothers on Beck’s Odelay, to the cosmic garage primitivism of Clinic, to the more baroque-pop moments to be heard in Vampire Weekend’s work. Lyrically, the album expresses a unified theme, which Furman describes thusly:

The narrative thread is I’m in love with an angel, and a government is after us, and we have to leave home because angels are illegal, as is harbouring angels. The term “transangelic” refers to the fact people become angels because they grow wings. They have an operation, and they’re transformed. And it causes panic because some people think it’s contagious, or it should just be outlawed. The album still works without the back story, though. What’s essential is the mood—paranoid, authoritarian, the way certain people are stigmatised. It’s a theme in American life right now, and other so-called democracies.

 
Videos after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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12.15.2017
08:28 am
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Rare concert photos of Blondie, Zappa, Iggy, Fugazi and more, from the Smithsonian’s new collection
09.18.2017
11:00 am
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In December 2015, the Smithsonian Institution began an ambitious crowdsourced history of rock ’n’ roll photography, calling on music fans to contribute their amateur and pro photos, launching the web site rockandroll.si.edu as a one-stop for accepting and displaying shooters’ submissions. One of the project’s organizers, Bill Bentley, was quoted in Billboard:

We talked about how it could be completely far-reaching in terms of those allowed to contribute, and hopefully help expose all kinds of musicians and periods. There really are no boundaries in the possibilities. I’d like to help spread all styles of music to those who visit the site, and show just how all-encompassing the history of what all these incredible artists have created over the years. What better way than for people to share their visual experiences, no matter on what level, to the world at large.

The project, sadly, is now closed to new submissions, but it’s reached a milestone in the publication of Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen, authored by Bentley. The book is a pretty great cull of the best the collection had to offer, full of photos rarely or never seen by the public, chronologically arranged, and dating back to the dawn of the rock era. Some of them are real jaw-droppers, like the concert shot of Richie Valens taken hours before his death, Otis Redding drenched in sweat at the Whiskey a Go Go, Sly Stone looking like a goddamn superhero at the Aragon Ballroom in 1974. From Bentley’s introduction:

Although the sheer breadth of the offerings was overwhelming, that fact only underlined the importance of an organizational strategy. The publisher sorted through the submissions, categorizing them by performer and date to create a complete historical timeline of rock and roll. Approximately three hundred photographs are included in the following narrative, many of them by amateurs whose enthusiasm and passion for their subjects are here presented to the public for the first time. The balance of the photos were taken by professional “lens whisperers,” whose shots were selected to flesh out this overview of rock and roll. The results, spanning six decades, aim for neither encyclopedic authority nor comprehensive finality, but rather an index of supreme influence.

Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen isn’t due until late in October, but the Smithsonian have been very kind in allowing Dangerous Minds to share some of these images with you today. Clicking an image will spawn an enlargement.
 

Blondie at CBGB, New York City, 1976. Photo Roberta Bayley /Smithsonian Books
 

The Clash at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston, September 19, 1979. Photo Catherine Vanaria /Smithsonian Books
 

Frank Zappa at Maple Pavilion, Stanford University, CA, November 19, 1977. Photo Gary Kieth Morgan /Smithsonian Books
 
Many more after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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09.18.2017
11:00 am
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David Bowie, Dennis Hopper and/or Dean Stockwell bring blow to Iggy Pop in a psych ward, 1975
09.13.2017
10:05 am
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Iggy Pop and Dennis Hopper talking shop back in the day.
 

“By 1975, I was totally into drugs, and my willpower had been vastly depleted. But still, I had the brains to commit myself to a hospital, and I survived with willpower and a lot of help from David Bowie. I survived because I wanted to.”

—Iggy Pop on how he got by with a little help from his friend David Bowie while locked up in the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital .

If you suddenly broke into an off-key chorus of “That’s What Friends Are For” while reading through this post about Iggy Pop’s stay at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital, I’d understand. Let’s face it—when the cards are stacked against you, and your life takes a giant nosedive into a pile of shit (or cocaine, booze or other bad shit, or shit in general really), you get to find out who your real friends are. In this case, Iggy Pop found out that none other than Dennis Hopper, that suave motherfucker himself Dean Stockwell, and of course his BFF, David Bowie, were his. However, this was back in 1975, and Iggy’s trio of pals at the time routinely consumed cocaine and all kinds of other drugs at alarming rates just like he did—which was one of the reasons Pop had voluntarily checked himself into the UCLA psych ward. 1975 was a tough year for Iggy after he found himself in Los Angeles with virtually no money and mostly no Stooges after the band disbanded, due in part due to Iggy’s heavy heroin problem which culminated in Iggy and the Stooges falling apart onstage at a gig in Michigan in 1974. Here’s rock journalist Lester Bangs’ account of what went down the night Iggy and the Stooges imploded:

“The audience, which consisted largely of bikers, was unusually hostile, and Iggy, as usual, fed on that hostility, soaked it up and gave it back and absorbed it all over again in an eerie, frightening symbiosis. “All right,” he finally said, stopping a song in the middle, “you assholes wanta hear ‘Louie, Louie,’ we’ll give you ‘Louie, Louie.’” So the Stooges played a forty-five-minute version of “Louie Louie,” including new lyrics improvised by the Pop on the spot consisting of “You can suck my ass / You biker faggot sissies,” etc. By now the hatred in the room is one huge livid wave, and Iggy singles out one heckler who has been particularly abusive: “Listen, asshole, you heckle me one more time, and I’m gonna come down there and kick your ass.” “Fuck you, you little punk,” responds the biker. So Iggy jumps off the stage, runs through the middle of the crowd, and the guy beats the shit out of him, ending the evening’s musical festivities by sending the lead singer back to his motel room and a doctor. I walk into the dressing room, where I encounter the manager of the club offering to punch out anybody in the band who will take him on. The next day the bike gang, who call themselves the Scorpions, will phone WABX-FM and promise to kill Iggy and the Stooges if they play the Michigan Palace on Thursday night. They do (play, that is), and nobody gets killed, but Metallic K.O. is the only rock album I know where you can actually hear hurled beer bottles breaking against guitar strings.”

 

Iggy and Stooges guitarist James Williamson.
 
Following that act, Iggy went back to LA and as Stooges guitarist James Williamson recalls Pop was living in a small apartment on Sunset Strip where he spent his days completely blotto on any substance he could put in his body to get high. Pop would eventually lose his digs and stayed with Williamson for a short time before he ending up romancing the streets of Los Angeles where he apparently got arrested several times for various infractions. Upon his last appearance in court, he was given two options—prison or he could voluntarily check himself into a psychiatric hospital. While in treatment at UCLA under the care of Dr. Murray Zucker he went through detox and was diagnosed with a condition known as hypomania. Though it was likely no fun, it was probably a lot better than being in prison. Besides, as the title of this post indicates, he had lots of friends coming by to visit him. And that’s where this story gets a whole lot weirder.

According to the 2012 book David Bowie: The Golden Years, actor Dean Stockwell visited Pop at UCLA along with Bowie allegedly dressed up in space suits (though perhaps just Bowie was in disguise), completely stoned politely demanding “We want to see Jimmy. Let us in.” According to Pop’s account of the event, they actually let Bowie and Stockwell see him because they were “star struck” by their presence, despite the fact that they were clearly high as fuck. Once inside Iggy’s room, Bowie broke out some blow to share with Pop which he took, but in Iggy’s own words, he only indulged “a little.” David Bowie has also spoken about his clandestine visits to Pop recalling that it was Dennis Hopper who he came calling on Iggy with while the former Stooge was trying to maintain his sobriety and mental health. Here’s the Thin White Duke on how that went:

“If I remember it right, it was me and Dennis Hopper. We trooped into the hospital with a load of drugs for (Iggy) him. This was very much a leave-your-drugs-at-the-door hospital. We were out of our minds, all of us. He wasn’t well; that’s all we knew. We thought we should bring him some drugs because he probably hadn’t had any for days!”

I’ve always believed that only a real friend would smuggle drugs for you, and David Bowie (and Dennis or was it Dean?) proved that point for me.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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09.13.2017
10:05 am
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When David Bowie was in Iggy Pop’s band: Their final concert
08.18.2017
10:17 am
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Moscow, 1976
 
Iggy Pop’s The Idiot LP wasn’t just his solo debut; the 1977 album marked his return after three years of laying low. Though credited solely to Pop, The Idiot was a collaboration between Iggy and his friend, David Bowie. Iggy has attributed his rebirth to Bowie, who he’s said “resurrected” him. He’s spoken many times over the years of his appreciation for Bowie’s faith in him, and for his kindness.

Here’s an anecdote from Iggy’s 1982 book, I need more: The Stooges and other stories, that took place during the recording of The Idiot:

One day we were in Chateau d’Herouville in France, outside Paris, taking a ping-pong break. Never in my life had I been able to play ping-pong. I never had the coordination—literally couldn’t play.

David said, “Come on, give me a game.”

“I can’t. I can’t play.”

But I tried it, and suddenly that I day I could play, and I’m playing and were about tied and I said, “You know, man, this is weird. Really weird. I always failed at this game and now I can play it.”

He said, “Well, Jim, it’s probably because you’re feeling better about yourself.” In the most gentlest way he said that, because usually, you know, nobody wants to be anybody’s teacher or leaner. You know what I mean? In the very gentlest way he said that. I just thought that was a nice answer. Three games later, I beat him and he never played me again. I got good REAL fast.

 
March 1, 1977 poster
 
Bowie continued to support Iggy during The Idiot era, becoming a member of Pop’s band for the six-week jaunt promoting the album. The outing began on March 1 in Aylesbury for a run of dates in England, before coming to North America mid-month. The famed Dinah! appearance was on April 15, with the final show of the tour happening the following evening.
 
Mantra
‘Mantra Studios Broadcast 1977.’ Chicago, March 28, 1977 (radio broadcast).

Bowie kept a low profile during this period, both on and off stage. Up until the Dinah! taping, he refused all interview requests, and during the shows he rarely looked at the audience, most of whom had no prior knowledge that he was part of Iggy’s group. Bowie played piano and keyboards, and the band also included guitarist Ricky Gardiner, as well as bassist Tony Sales, and drummer Hunt Sales. The Sales brothers also contributed backing vocals, as did Bowie.
 
Cleveland
‘Live In Concert – Cleveland 1977.’ Agora Ballroom, March 22, 1977.

The last date took place at the San Diego Civic Auditorium on April 16.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Bart Bealmear
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08.18.2017
10:17 am
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Gavin Evans’ magnificent portraits of Bowie, Björk, Iggy, and Nick Cave
07.10.2017
11:18 am
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03davidbowiegavinevans.jpg
David Bowie.
 
The Monday morning mailbag arrived with its usual gifts of bills, party invites, ransom demands (which I really must get around to paying), and “Dear John” letters. I was about to tip all this largesse into the bin when I noticed a postcard from a dear friend Christopher. It was the usual greetings of “Having a lovely time” and “Wish you were here” kind of thing but what saved it from the trash was the front photograph of David Bowie by Gavin Evans.

Now we all have favorite photographers and one of mine is certainly Mr. Evans who has taken some of the most magnificent, gorgeous, and iconic images of the past two decades. The photograph of Bowie shushing with a finger to his lips like he did in the promo for “China Girl” has been used on numerous magazine covers, photospreads, TV documentaries, and pirated for Internet memes, urban graffiti, and even tattoos. Its ubiquity one would hope should have made Mr. Evans a very rich man—but somehow (sadly) I very much doubt that.

Another of Evans’ Bowie photographs—a color portrait in which he wore blue contact lenses—captured a vulnerability that I’d never seen before (see picture above). It was as if Bowie allowed his guard down for just a moment and had unknowingly (or perhaps willingly) revealed a more vulnerable and intimate side. The picture was taken in 1995 for a Time Out cover. A couple of years later, Bowie contacted Evans and asked for a print of this picture to hang in his office. Bowie explained to Evans that this was his favorite portrait.

That’s the thing I like about Evans’ work—he has an uncanny talent for capturing the very essence of his subject matter. His photographs make the gods flesh. Look at his portraits of Nick Cave which reveal something of the man behind the public persona or his series of photographs of Björk which capture a tender and humorous side sometimes lacking from more traditional photo shoots. Or just look at his portrait of John Hurt where you can see the pores of the actor’s skin and peer right into his soul.

Christopher’s Bowie postcard is now pinned to the wall. I browsed for more of Evans work and was happily surprised to find a selection of his most powerful and iconic work is currently on tour. Then something even better, a selection of Evans’ beautiful prints are availble to buy. Now every home can have a Gavin Evans on their wall.
 
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David Bowie.
 
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See more of Gavin Evans majestic photographs, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.10.2017
11:18 am
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Finally, you can watch David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s daytime TV appearance on ‘Dinah!’ in full
05.03.2017
11:07 am
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The August 1990 issue of SPIN—which came out closer to the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show than to Lorde’s appearance on SNL a few weeks back—was dedicated to “35 Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” The issue contained a feature that purported to list “35 Greatest Moments in Rock ‘n’ Roll Television.” Here is a sample entry from the list:
 

April 15, 1977: Iggy Pop and David Bowie were guests on Dinah’s Place. Promoting Lust for Life, Iggy and David, along with Tony Sales on bass and Hunt Sales on drums, performed “Sister Midnight” and “Fun Time.” During the interview segment, Bowie was shown in tears from trying to stifle his laughter when Dinah Shore asked Iggy what it felt like to crawl around on broken glass.

 
This was Iggy‘s first appearance on television—if you don’t count Midsummer Rock a television program based on the infamous Cincinnati Pop Festival of 1970—as he says during the lead-in to “Sister Midnight.” As is well known (and as Iggy mentions), the father of the Sales brothers was none other the children’s TV personality Soupy Sales. Ricky Gardiner played guitar that day, Bowie was on the keyboards.

In the pre-Wikipedia days of 1990, it would have been hard to know that Dinah’s Place ended in 1974 and that the show Iggy and Bowie appeared on was called Dinah! Also, Iggy was promoting The Idiot—both of the songs he played are on The Idiot. Lust for Life didn’t come out until August (it was a good year for Iggy, indubitably).

Seated on the panel alongside Dinah is Rosemary Clooney, aunt to George and a successful singer in her own right. It’s hard not to notice that the interface of Dinah/Rosemary on the one side and Bowie/Iggy on the other is a very unusual transmission of the punk/glam ethos to a mostly unsuspecting audience. Iggy is super likeable here, but then again he is usually very likeable.

Dinah asks if Iggy has ever influenced anybody, and he retorts that he “helped wipe out the ‘60s.” This gets a huge laugh, most notably from Bowie himself. Later on Bowie beats himself up for adopting an “American accent.”

SPIN’s account notwithstanding, the moment when Bowie really loses it is during the standing interview segment before “Sister Midnight” when Iggy describes losing his teeth because of “getting too violent onstage” (Iggy’s parents helped pay for the replacements). Dinah wonders whether Iggy’s parents mind that he performs without a shirt—he says they’re OK with it.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.03.2017
11:07 am
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Many years later, Iggy Pop explains his bonkers 1979 appearance on Australian TV
04.27.2017
04:05 pm
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The fabulous Iggy Pop recently turned 70 years old. Quite a milestone, really, when you think about how often he flirted with his own mortality back in the day. On his birthday last year, we told you about Mr. Pop’s loopy 1979 appearance on the Australian TV program, Countdown. If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and read/watch that first here.
 
I'm Bored
 
In March 2013, the Stooges were about to tour Australia, and Iggy was interviewed on 7.30 Report, a news program brought to you by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the country’s government-funded network. ABC is the same network that aired Countdown, which, in case you didn’t know, was a very popular Australian music show that ran from 1974 to 1987.
 
Countdown
 
For the 7.30 Report segment, Iggy is asked about being labeled “The Godfather of Punk,” what he was like as a kid, and his legendary reputation as a live performer, before the reporter says she has a video she wants to show him. Iggy guesses correctly what he’s in store for: “Oh, no, let me guess: Would it be Countdown?” But Ig is amused and game to watch footage of himself from decades past.
 
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Pop cracks up as he views the interview segment, and once the video gets to the part where he’s miming “I’m Bored,” he begins watching intently, seeming to have forgotten all about it. At one point, the clip makes him giggle! That’s right, we get to watch Iggy Pop giggle.
 
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Here’s what he had to say about his demeanor, as well as his attire:

Pretty tight pants…It was the first time in my life that I’d been thrown out on a promotional tour. I had a pretty successful attempt to allude to the fact that I thought I was on a silly show and without being a grump about it. And I could’ve gone on there and spat at the guy or whatever. I didn’t do that.

 
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On “I’m Bored” and the studio audience:

That’s a pretty rocking song and it’s hard to deliver a rock song solo like that. Harder when it’s an audience that doesn’t know what planet you landed in from, and wishes you’d go away, and wants their daddy to get rid of you or whatever. (laughs)

 
Watch Iggy react to the infamous ‘Countdown’ clip after the jump…

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Posted by Bart Bealmear
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04.27.2017
04:05 pm
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Iggy Bop? New music from the godfather of punk on his 70th birthday—with a jazz trio!
04.21.2017
07:39 am
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James “Iggy Pop” Osterberg is one of a handful of figures who need zero introduction to Dangerous Minds’ readers. Not just a godfather of punk rock in his capacity as vocalist for the Stooges, but a far greater champion and exponent of its aesthetic and ethos than fellow proto-punk figures like Reed, Tyner, and Bowie. His influence was and remains incalculable—TRY to imagine David Johansen, Nick Cave, Johnny Rotten, or Stiv Bators without elements of Iggy’s bratty, combative, and entirely unhinged stage persona to draw from. He’s settled into a marvelous and once-improbable-seeming afterlife as one of music’s great coolest-guy-ever figures, holding a similar status in rock ’n’ roll as Bill Murray does in the film world. But sorry not sorry, Iggy’s cooler.

The date of this posting is Pop’s 70th birthday (happy birthday, sir, and thanks for all the awesome shit), and even at this age, he continues to explore new territory. Today, it’s Dangerous Minds’ pleasure to premiere a new track featuring Pop singing with Jamie Saft, Steve Swallow, and Bobby Previte, the jazz trio behind 2014’s acclaimed album The New Standard, a title they used as a band name for a spell, but it didn’t stick. A traditional piano/bass/drums trio, Saft, Swallow and Previte have earned justified praise for straddling trad and transformative, jumping genres and modalities effortlessly while preserving the ineffably cool feeling of mid-century instrumental jazz, never becoming precious or NPRishly slick—Swallow’s bass playing is brawny and fiercely eclectic, and pianist Saft and drummer Previte are both former Zorn collaborators, so preciousness is likely not part of their vocabularies. Their forthcoming album Loneliness Road features Iggy Pop’s vocal contributions on three tracks, the title track, “Don’t Lose Yourself,” and “Everyday.” It’s the title track we’re sharing today.

Listen after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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04.21.2017
07:39 am
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Of broken teeth & David ‘Boo-wie’: Iggy Pop’s endearing first Letterman appearance, 1982
03.31.2017
11:09 am
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I’m very terrified of this country, the USA…some of the values are so foul and so wicked… It’s very wicked the way people are restrained, and I’m in favor of something else.

—Iggy Pop predicting our current reality in his 1982 book I Need More: The Stooges and Other Stories

I make no apologies for looking for any opportunity to write about Iggy Pop. He is as close to a god walking among us and the only deity I’d be likely to bow down to if the situation ever presented itself. Today’s deep-dive into Iggy’s illustrious past involves his very first appearance on Late Night with David Letterman in December of 1982.

Iggy had just penned his book I Need More: The Stooges and Other Stories and was on the show to promote the book as well as his latest album, Zombie Birdhouse. After being introduced by Dave, Iggy jangles out onto the stage wearing bright red boots, turquoise blue eyeshadow, fierce black cat eyeliner, and blush. He spazzes brilliantly through the frenetic single “Eat or be Eaten” and then heads to the couch for the interview segment with Dave. And that’s when we get to the really good stuff.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.31.2017
11:09 am
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Perpetually shirtless Iggy Pop annihilates an acoustic version of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ on UK TV
03.06.2017
10:34 am
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About a month ago I posted about a sweet grouping of appearances by Jane’s Addiction, Sonic Youth, Screaming Trees and a few other notable 90s bands performing live sets on the BBC television show, The Late Show. While that was all good fun I’ve got something even better for you today from the same source—Iggy Pop’s shirtless, acoustic performance of The Stooges 1969 anthemic sucker punch, “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”

Before Igg and his insane abs launch into the song, he talks a little bit about its conception and Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton. Referring to the band’s early days in Ann Arbor Michigan, Iggy reminisces about the group calling them a “far-fetched group of dreamers” who liked to “get stoked on hash and grass.” Which sounds about right. While I usually like to say as many words about Iggy as possible whenever I get the opportunity, I’m going to leave this one to him and let this performance speak for itself.

Watch after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.06.2017
10:34 am
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Iggy Pop and Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider go shopping for asparagus in the 1970s
03.01.2017
12:18 pm
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Kraftwerk was the most important and influential German musical act of the 1970s, and David Bowie and Iggy Pop spent a few years in Berlin in the late 1970s in one of their most productive phases. The two camps never actually worked together, and there’s been no shortage of speculation about that.

For his part, Bowie insisted that Kraftwerk was not a significant influence on his Berlin output. In an interview for Uncut in 1999, Bowie did credit Kraftwerk for directing his attention to Europe, but felt that their methods and aims were sharply different:
 

My attention had been swung back to Europe with the release of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn in 1974. The preponderance of electronic instruments convinced me that this was an area that I had to investigate a little further.

Much has been made of Kraftwerk’s influence on our Berlin albums. Most of it lazy analyses, I believe. Kraftwerk’s approach to music had in itself little place in my scheme. Theirs was a controlled, robotic, extremely measured series of compositions, almost a parody of minimalism. One had the feeling that Florian and Ralf were completely in charge of their environment, and that their compositions were well prepared and honed before entering the studio. My work tended to expressionist mood pieces, the protagonist (myself) abandoning himself to the zeitgeist (a popular word at the time), with little or no control over his life. The music was spontaneous for the most part and created in the studio.

 
As David Buckley put it in Publikation, his book on Kraftwerk, “What is known is that the Bowie camp and the Kraftwerk camp were on friendly terms.”

Further evidence of that claim popped up in the well-regarded 2009 documentary on German prog music from the ‘70s, Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany. Iggy Pop is featured telling a story of going shopping with Florian Schneider and one other member of Kraftwerk. According to Pop, Schneider indicated that it was “asparagus season,” and so he would be visiting the market to “select some asparagus.” Pop responded that he would be happy to join Schneider and told the interviewer that they ended up “having a very nice time.”
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.01.2017
12:18 pm
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