Why David Bowie brought Iggy Pop drugs in the psych ward in 1975
The relationship that David Bowie and Iggy Pop shared in the 1970s brought out the best and the worst in each other.
Both of them would have fought to be the first to tell you that they were out of control in their ’70s heyday. They had each been hopeless drug addicts, with Bowie only slightly coming out of it better due to the sheer luck of the draw. It turns out that he was one of those high-functioning drug addicts who could drink the entire Berlin BDSM scene under the table, chase it with enough cocaine to kill an elephant, then arrive back in the studio and make Station to Station a few days later.
Very few people are like that, and Iggy Pop, bless his cottons, certainly wasn’t. By 1975, it was becoming abundantly clear that the rocker, born James Osterberg, had something profoundly wrong with him. Even his Stooges bandmates had canned him for his erratic behaviour, and any attempt at getting a solo career off the ground was also falling apart in the face of his worsening antics.
To make matters worse, the law was beginning to get involved, and it soon became clear that he had two options: prison or getting clean.
Reasoning that he’d be going drug-free either way and that it might as well be done in a safer environment than prison, Iggy chose rehab. Except rehab wasn’t where they sent him first. A psychiatric evaluation conducted by the LAPD showed Iggy that his issues were deeper than just drug addiction. He was also quite severely bipolar, and thus, before any rehabilitation could take place, he was checked into the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital.
He was trying to get help, which is always a good sign. However, Iggy had burned bridges with everyone in his life except for Bowie, who was the only one willing to give the former Stooges frontman a chance. An admirable thing, yet it probably looked like a match made in hell the first time that Bowie went to visit Pop in the hospital.
There are several versions of the story going around (one can imagine that memories of the occasion are hazy at best), but the fundamentals are Bowie rocking up to the hospital with an actor friend in tow. In some tellings, it’s Dennis Hopper, in others, it’s Dean Stockwell. Both are dressed in spacesuits, and both of them get waylaid at reception. Yet they managed to big league their way through by not taking no for an answer and visiting Pop while he was at his lowest.
Again, another admirable thing to do. Save for the fact that the spacesuits weren’t just worn for the hell of it. It was to smuggle cocaine in for Iggy Pop. After all, he hadn’t had any drugs for a while, and they thought he might like some. How thoughtful of them. Whether they were successful or not changes with every telling, but the point still stands: this must have looked like the worst possible combination of people to bond at the time.
Yet, against all odds, it worked. Rather than feeding each other’s worst impulses, Iggy Pop instead looked up to Bowie’s work ethic and creativity, wanting to emulate his mentor with solo albums like The Idiot and Lust For Life. Of course, this isn’t to say that they spent the entire rest of the decade sober as judges, going on runs together and riding tandem bicycles through the Tiergarten on brisk spring mornings, but they both survived the decade. Something that was uncertain for Bowie, but an outright impossibility for Iggy Pop at times.
Instead, we got decades of both afterwards, and we were all the luckier for it, no matter what you think of Tin Machine.