‘The Jean Genie’: the song David Bowie wrote as a tribute to Iggy Pop
The friendship between David Bowie and Iggy Pop was one of the most endearing in all of rock music. Bowie had been an admirer from afar in the early 1970s, taking in records from The Stooges and hearing wild stories about Pop’s madcap live performances. When Bowie heard that Pop was in a psychiatric ward during the middle part of the decade, he took it upon himself to break Pop out.
“By 1975, I was totally into drugs, and my willpower had been vastly depleted,” Pop later observed. “But still, I had the brains to commit myself to a hospital, and I survived with willpower and a lot of help from David Bowie. I survived because I wanted to.”
Even before they became close friends, Bowie was influenced by Pop. The name of Bowie’s most famous creation, Ziggy Stardust, was a bastardisation of Pop’s first name. Elements of Pop’s erratic style made their way into the character, but even after Bowie had killed off Ziggy, he was still channelling the unique style that Pop had pioneered.
“‘The Jean Genie’ was an ode to Iggy, I guess, or the ‘Iggy-type’ person – white trash, trailer-park kid thing – the closet intellectual who wouldn’t want the world to know that he reads,” Bowie claimed in 2002. “I think it’s a really good song, and I actually enjoy playing it and singing it. It’s one of the few that I can keep going back to. I guess it’s because it is essentially rooted in straight old-fashioned blues. I mean, it’s basically Muddy Waters’ ‘I’m A Man’, isn’t it?”
“Starting out as a lightweight riff thing I had written one evening in NY for Cyrinda’s enjoyment, I developed the lyric to the otherwise wordless pumper, and it ultimately turned into a bit of a smorgasbord of imagined Americana,” Bowie added. ”Its central character was based on an Iggy-type persona, and the setting was inspired by Max’s Kansas City. The title, of course, was a clumsy pun upon Jean Genet.”
The Spiders From Mars bassist Woody Woodmansey would later recall how the band helped create the song. “On the way to Memphis, during an impromptu guitar jam at the back of the bus, the seeds for what would become ‘The Jean Genie’ were sown. I think George Underwood was playing around with chords that were very similar to the Yardbirds’ cover of Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m A Man’. Mick [Ronson] was also playing guitar. The whole bus was singing ‘We’re bus, bussing, bussing along’, something banal like that, and it kind of summed up the general feeling. The melody and phrasing was not too dissimilar to the part of the chorus in ‘The Jean Genie’.”
After taking inspiration from Pop for a number of years, Bowie eventually recruited the former Stooges singer into his ranks. With Bowie’s help, The Stooges recorded one final record, Raw Power, before splitting for good. Bowie helped Pop create his first two solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life, and even toured as Pop’s keyboard player for a brief spell. Their direct collaborations would end after the 1970s, but Pop gave Bowie one final gift: ‘China Girl’, the song that originally appeared on The Idiot before Bowie covered it and took it to the top ten in both the US and the UK.
