Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover / Joshua J. Cotten

Let’s be real here, if anyone saw a gorilla running towards us at full pelt, among our first thoughts would probably be, “Is this really happening?”

Probably not the first thought you have, mind. The first is probably “well, fuck”, followed swiftly by “this was not how I thought I’d die”.

However, as your last few precious moments of a life spent blissfully unaware of what it’s like to be rugby tackled by King Kong’s great nephew tick by, the thought surely passes that it might not actually be happening? For most of us, it would be a dream. That the undiscovered member of the Kong Dynasty about to throw hands with us is an improperly digested piece of cheese, and that in a moment we’ll wake up and wonder where the fucking hell that little fantasy came from.

However, when a fellow like Iggy Pop looks across the stage at one of his concerts with The Stooges and sees a massive fucking Gorilla there sauntering on casual as you like, that’s a whole different kettle of fish. You see, if you know anything about the man born James Newell Osterberg, the bloke was partial to a mind-altering substance or two. Or three. Or several hundred. Seriously, the fact that he survived the 1970s at all is a miracle of modern science. That he’s still kicking in 2025 at the age of 78 is a miracle, period.

But 1973 was arguably the nadir of it all. It’s easy to laugh at his exploits in hindsight, but at the time, it was seriously touch-and-go. The man was high the vast majority of the time and had almost always combined that high with copious amounts of booze, too. So at a 1973 gig in Atlanta, when Pop looked across the stage and saw a gorilla rocking out to some classic Stooges jams, he had every reason to believe that what he was seeing was a hallucination. However, and I don’t want to blow your mind too much, but drugs don’t make you think straight.

Pop took one look at his new, Simian bandmate and only one thought crossed his mind. “It’s him or me”.

What happened when a gorilla attacked Iggy Pop?

Iggy Pop wasn’t the only one to think this way. As The Stooges’ singer took up his microphone stand and steeled himself for the fight of his life, their guitarist James Williamson did the same with his Gibson Les Paul. The two brothers in arms launched towards their foe before the strangest thing happened. The gorilla took its head off to reveal another, much more recognisable one underneath. One that belonged to a man who, along with David Bowie, was probably the world’s most famous Iggy Pop fan.

The ultimate punchline to it all was that the man whose head poked out of that gorilla costume probably spent as much time off it as Iggy did in the 1970s. He must have done to think his (ironically enough) hare-brained scheme would work without a hitch, but Elton John wasn’t much in the business of thinking straight in the early 1970s. Now, to be fair to him, Elton was at least trying to do something very, very cool at that moment. He was one of the world’s biggest pop stars at the time, and was as keen to champion his favourite artists then as he is now.

Iggy Pop was one of those artists and decided to make an appearance at The Stooges’ Atlanta gig to throw a little publicity their way. The plan could have been really special. Elton wanted to rock up at the show and play a few numbers with The Stooges. His fatal flaw was making this arrangement with Iggy’s management, then swearing them to secrecy and not actually telling Pop himself. Clearly keen to dress down on that particular occasion, he then decided that the gorilla costume was the perfect addition to his cunning plan. No sober man would have thought this was a good idea, but this was The Stooges onstage with Elton John in 1973.

There absolutely wasn’t a single sober man involved here.