“Never supposed to be a song”: the 1977 anthem Iggy Pop wrote by accident
Different artists believe different things about how much effort it should take to create something great. If you ask Nick Cave, a good song must be laboured over like a statue slowly carved from stone. But if you ask Iggy Pop, some of his greatest work came from barely thinking about it at all.
This school of thinking was born that way because, at the time, in the mid-1970s, Pop didn’t have the capacity to think all that much. After The Stooges blew up in 1971, unable to keep going due to the singer’s overwhelming drug problem and insane, wild behaviour, he only spiralled further.
It’s a wonder he managed to get anything done or write any songs at all. His solo debut, The Idiot, feels completely miraculous, as in the years following the band’s split, when he was writing those tracks, Pop’s problem got so bad that even the singer, previously more laissez-faire about his own antics, got scared.
In 1977, he decided he needed some help. Unable to get clean on his own, Pop checked himself into a mental hospital, locking himself away at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute in California to finally try and shift the habit. This wasn’t his first stint in rehab, but this time, he made David Bowie promise not to be sneaking him drugs inside. He was taking it seriously.
With a brain buzzing from withdrawals and long days spent doing little to nothing, you wouldn’t have thought there was far for the artist’s mind to wander during his routine of group therapy and the occasional walk.
In Los Angeles, though, you never know what you might see on a stroll. “They used to let me go walkies with the group for an hour in the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Westwood, and I saw Antonioni’s The Passenger was playing at the Westwood Theatre,” Pop said as he merely wandered past a cinema. Stretching his hour’s outing into two, he stopped to hide in the theatre, saying of the film, “It made a big impression on me.”
With the first inspiration he’d had in a long time, and the first time his mind was coming close to being at all clear, other things started to spark up. “‘The Passenger’ was derived from the Antonioni film, the [Jim] Morrison poem, and a lick that I was doodling in the studio,” he said, all just random things he was musing when there was nothing else to muse about.
Reflecting on days outside of the rehab back when he was busy driving around with Bowie on tour, quite literally being the passenger in his car because god knows no one was giving Iggy Pop his own license, quickly those notepad doodles and loose thoughts became something, though he said, “It was never supposed to be a song.”
Once he was freed from the rehab, ‘The Passenger’ was one of the first tracks he got to work on when he and Bowie ran away to Berlin, still on a mission to get and stay clean. Obviously, that didn’t work. But Pop did get his very first solo hit, at least granting him some focus and purpose amongst it all.
