Photo by Esther Friedman

I’m just a few months shy of two years as an excavator here at Dangerous Minds, and in that short a span, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been asked “How do you FIND all this stuff?” —even by people who’ve known me forever and should know damn well. In truth, I can’t answer that, I just find all this stuff because it’s what I’m into doing, and I don’t think any of my colleagues at DM, or my counterparts at other sites that burrow through the internet for mutant cultural produce would say anything terribly different. I’ve always been into digging for weirdness, so the question of “how I find all this stuff” is kind of beside the point, and sometimes even actually annoying, because I hear it so often and there really is no concise answer besides, “I dunno.”

AND YET, If I ever get to meet the people who run Network Awesome, I will surely break down and ask them where the hell they find all their stuff. On a daily basis, they post well thought out thematic programming for which someone has clearly dug DEEP. Some of the stuff they find completely blows me away, and I’ve been an obsessive collector/curator type my entire life. I applaud and bow to those people. So recently, in the course of indulging myself in a day of surfing around that site, I came across a program of theirs that collected commercials starring Iggy Pop. Each of them is a great watch, because Iggy Pop is Iggy Pop, and I already knew a fair few of them, but one jumped out at me, both for its awesomeness and its howdidinotknowaboutthisness.
 

 
Just a couple of years ago, an ad agency in Madrid did a Schweppes lemon soda poster campaign with Pop. It got around—even DM did a piece. What I did not know about, and what Network Awesome had posted, was the television commercial that went with it, which starred the 65ish-year-old proto-punk legend out on the town with his father, Mr. James Newell Osterberg Sr., the very pop whom Pop credited with his choice to become a singer, in a 2007 Esquire interview:

Driving down a nice two-lane highway, summer day, Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’m in the backseat of a ‘49 Cadillac. Always had a good car, my dad. Frank Sinatra’s singing: “Fairy tales can come true/It can happen to you/If you’re young at heart.” My dad’s singing along. From that moment on, when people asked me what I wanted to be, I would say, “A singer.” As I got older, I realized that might not be realistic. So then I thought, I’ll become a politician.

All I can say to that is right fuckin’ on. Here’s the commercial. It’s been uploaded to YouTube by a fair few users, but every single upload has a ridiculously low view count, which seems to me absurd for such a gem.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
‘Knockin’ ‘Em Down in the City’: Iggy Pop on Cleveland local news, 1979
Iggy Pop was on ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’
Iggy & the Stooges playing at a high school gym in Michigan, 1970