Did Iggy Pop turn down an offer to replace Jim Morrison in The Doors?
In the psychedelic year of 1967, Iggy Pop had yet to transform into the godly proto-punk master of disaster. Instead, he was just Jim Osterberg, a small-time drummer from Detroit looking to make it in music. The popular style of the day was a bit too twee and hippie-dippie for Osterberg, who was playing in a garage rock band called The Prime Movers at the time. But when The Doors came to Detroit, Osterberg had a revelation.
“I attended two concerts by the Doors. The first one I attended was early on, and they had not gotten their shit together yet,” Pop recalled in 2011 to Jeb Wright. “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. So, here’s this guy, out of his head on acid, dressed in leather with his hair all oiled and curled. The stage was tiny, and it was really low. It got confrontational. I found it really interesting.”
“I loved the performance. Part of me was like, ‘Wow, this is great. He’s really pissing people off, and he’s lurching around, making these guys angry.’ People were rushing the stage, and Morrison’s going, ‘Fuck you. You blank, blank, blank.’ You can fill in your sexual comments yourself,” he added. “The other half of it was that I thought, ‘If they’ve got a hit record out and they can get away with this, then I have no fucking excuse not to get out on stage with my band.’ It was sort of the case of, ‘Hey, I can do that.’ There really was some of that in there.”
After Jim Morrison’s death in 1971, The Doors’ manager Danny Sugarman befriended Pop. The two became roommates as Sugarman attempted to manage both Pop and keyboardist Ray Manzarek. In a 1998 interview with Marc Allen, Manzarek confirmed that Pop was considered, along with a host of other singers, to replace Morrison in The Doors. However, things didn’t go much farther than that.
“Well, it was talk. It was mostly talk,” Manzarek claimed. “We never got anybody. We talked about a lot of guys. We talked about Iggy, we talked about Mick Jagger. He already had a band. And then we talked about off the wall – Paul McCartney: good singer and a bass player. Hey, we could get a bass player, so, but that didn’t quite work out.”
Eventually, The Doors decided to forge ahead as a trio, with Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger sharing lead vocal duties. That version of the group continued until 1973, releasing two albums with 1971’s Other Voices and 1972’s Full Circle. Reception to the lineup without Morrison was tepid at best, and once their contract with Elektra Records was fulfilled, the remaining members opted to disband The Doors for good.
Meanwhile, Pop and The Stooges were limping along. The group officially disbanded in the summer of 1971, just a few days after Morrison’s death. Pop moved to Los Angeles while dealing with a debilitating heroin addiction before befriending David Bowie in New York. Through the help of Bowie, Pop got a record deal and officially set out to England, squashing any chance of his replacing Morrison in The Doors.
Watch Iggy Pop perform ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ in 1979 down below.
