The concert that changed the course of Iggy Pop’s life: “Big, big, big influence”
Iggy Pop has been an unpredictable, sweating lunatic for as long as most of us can remember; the maniacal godfather of punk rock revolution, who has spent a large portion of his life shirtless, writing about onstage in front of stunned crowds. His life leaves a lot of questions unanswered, namely, how does a person like Iggy Pop come to be?
If you dig into the photographic archives of Pop’s life, you will no doubt come across a famous photo of the future Stooges frontman during his high school years. In a preppy shirt, tie, and blazer, with neatly combed blonde hair and an uncharacteristically inoffensive expression, the young Iggy Pop wouldn’t have looked out of place with the future Army generals, bankers, and lawyers of the Omega fraternity in National Lampoon’s Animal House.
So, how does one go from the straight-laced realm of James Daughton to the rock and roll lifestyle of Jim Belushi? In the case of Iggy Pop – then known more often by his birthname, James Osterberg – the answer to his spiritual awakening came in the form of the counterculture rock and roll which burst onto the airwaves during the 1960s.
Although Pop was never going to don daisy-chains or preach the potential of peace and love, he could at least appreciate the deluge of rock and roll revolutionaries that the counterculture age brought. Among them, one particular influence on Pop’s rise to proto-punk prominence was Jim Morrison, whose own famously anarchic life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll immediately appealed to the young Iggy Pop.
During one interview with Classic Rock Revisited, Pop recalled with nostalgia the impact of The Doors and the concert that changed the course of his existence forevermore. “I attended two concerts by The Doors,” he shared. “The first one I attended was early on, and they had not gotten their shit together yet. That show was a big, big, big influence on me. They had just had their big hit, ‘Light My Fire’ and the album had taken off.”
“I had the album first and I really loved the record,” he continued, but it wasn’t just the band’s musical quality that appealed to Pop. Aside from their incredible output, the sheer attitude of The Doors was revolutionary in and of itself.
Morrison never shied away from confrontation, and he never apologised for his attitude. “The Doors played the University of Michigan Homecoming Dance,” Pop remembered. “Which was 5,000 mullet headed jocks and their right-wing girlfriends in a gymnasium.”
It doesn’t take much of a stretch to connect The Doors playing through their wild world of rock and roll psychedelia for a presumably hostile audience, to The Stooges performing their fantastically abrasive, amphetamine-fueled garage rock to equally bewildered audiences only a few years later.
Iggy Pop is often, quite rightly, hailed among the greatest frontmen of all time, but without the pioneering stylings of Jim Morrison, the punk godfather might have resigned himself to the banal, preppy life of James Osterberg instead – and the entire landscape of rock and roll would be a lot worse off.
