Somewhere in New York, sometime in the ‘70s: The fabled first meeting of David Bowie and Iggy Pop
Afraid, alone and suffering from shivering substance withdrawals, Iggy Pop found himself holed up in a Californian mental health institution, desperately unsure what to do with himself. It’s hard to know whether his quaking delirium was intensified or abated when David Bowie and Dennis Hopper snuck into his hospital room, dressed as spacemen, with a special delivery of cocaine.
But what we do know about this manic tale is that it goes some way to defining the very special bond that Iggy and Bowie shared. When they met, they were creative forces caught in the vices of ugly addictions. Together, they would pursue sobriety in some of the strangest manners known to man—absconding to the heroin capital of Europe seemed like a dubious decision, for one—and they would create a slew of masterpieces along the way.
Even a fellow as far out as Iggy Pop could surely never have imagined that when he casually slunk out of a New York loft to meet an up-and-coming British artist at the behest of his friend, in a few years time they would be losing a battle with abstinence in Berlin, with Bowie behind the wheel of a dogeared automobile, repeatedly ramming the car into their dealer’s unmanned vehicle. Perhaps in the dim hope of shaking a bag of drugs free from the locked German hatchback, the way one might wish to rattle free a trapped bag of crisps from a vending machine.
“I met David in New York in 1971,” Iggy recalls. “I was staying at [publicist] Danny Fields’ little funky-ass loft. It was late one night, and Danny went to Max’s Kansas City. I didn’t want to go. I was watching TV—Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Danny rang me: ‘There’s a guy down here. You remember him.’ And I did.”
Iggy’s flagging ego was suddenly titillated. The Stooges’ self-titled debut had charted 106th in the US, and their follow-up, Fun House, had failed to make the charts entirely. So, the promise of a fabled fan was enough to make him think twice about plunging deeper into Mr Smith’s adventures in Washington. “David had said something in Melody Maker about his favourite songs,” the bloodied frontman recalled, “and he said he liked The Stooges, which is something not a lot of people would admit at the time. Danny said, ‘You really gotta get down here.’”
Lord knows how their lives might have panned out if Iggy Pop had never heeded that call. What it did for their sanity is up for debate, but it most certainly didn’t have any adverse effect on their art. Maybe, they were always simply destined to meet. “If it’s wearing a pink hat and a red nose and it plays the guitar upside down,” David Bowie once proclaimed, ”I’ll go and look at it. I love to see people being dangerous.”
Iggy Pop pretty much personified that. He was regularly goading biker gangs. He wound up on stage, out of his mind on drugs, so startled by the presence of Elton John in a gorilla suit that he began attacking him. And if he left the stage with the same amount of blood in his system as he entered it, then had there really been a show at all?
So, with fateful magnetism in the air, he decided to turn off the TV set and trudge on down to Max’s Kansas City. “David was there with his manager, Tony DeFries, and all these other people around him,” he recalled. “My impression was that he was very poised and very friendly, but not as friendly in that setting as when I got to know him in smaller groups. I could see that he had some ideas for me.”
A lot of those ideas, however, were lost to the fervour of conversation that moves so fast you’d have to have the Usain Bolt of minutes-takers to get all the wavering notions noted down. They talked passionately about art. “I learned a lot from him. I first heard the Ramones, Kraftwerk, and Tom Waits from him,” Iggy told Rolling Stone. Little else is recalled from that first night other than the sense of two creative titans sizing each other up in their own quirky ways.
“He also had a certain rigour. If he saw something in another artist he admired, if they didn’t pick up that ball and run with it, he didn’t have any problem saying, ‘Well, if you’re not going to do it, I will. I’ll do this thing you should have done.’ And that was very valid,” he affirmed. Keenly, he saw it as his responsibility to push art forward, and saving Iggy Pop from the depths of drunken despair by summoning him to New York’s booziest spot was something he saw as his duty.
Besides, he also just wanted to meet him. As Iggy said, “More than all of the other rock musicians, David Bowie was interested in people, really interested, especially other people in the arts.“
