How James Newell Osterberg Jr. became Iggy Pop
The annals of music history are a mind-bending thing to study. There was a point when the musical luminaries of Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Lou Reed were on the brink of destitution. Now, however, it is incredulous to envisage them as anything other than the Gods they are rightfully revered as.
The Stooges may well be a band who changed the course of music, but they scarcely altered the course of Iggy’s life. Having broken up in disarray following 1973’s now-iconic Raw Power, Iggy’s life post-Stooges was docked in the tempestuous bay of bewilderment, booze and substance abuse. Through a caustic combination of excesses and artistic exile, Iggy wound up in a Californian mental institution.
This was, in part, the result of James Newell Osterberg Jr. Becoming Iggy Pop in the first place. At one point – long before he tried to smoke spider webs – he was a mild-mannered and shirted young man. Pop has experienced both soaring highs and crushing lows over his long career as one of the first true rockstars, his old name was a bad fit for such an existence.
He earned the first part of his nickname ‘Iggy’ when performing in the local blues band The Prime Movers, who called him that because he had played in The Iguanas before. Later, when The Psychedelic Stooges, later to be The Stooges, were formed, the other members, Ron and Scott Asheton, and Dave Alexander, gave him the nickname ‘Pop’ after a local character to whom he bore a resemblance.
Essentially, Iggy Pop means that bloke who looks like Pop from The Iguanas. And such is the way in mystic rock ‘n’ roll, even The Iguanas have a place in music history. The band opened up for The Shangri-Las, the all-female band that helped to invent punk.
The future incendiary frontman of the rollicking Stooges recalled: “My cover band… had a professional engagement the summer that we graduated high school at a teen club called The Ponytail in northern Michigan. They served Cokes. And a lot of big acts came through. I got to play drums behind the Shangri-Las, the Crystals, the Four Tops. Learned a lot.”
He then comically adds, regarding the beehive hairdo that group’s spiritual leader sported: “Mary, the lead singer of the Shangri-Las, had a really beautiful head of hair…and I just remember being very happy in the back you know playing ‘ts, ts, ts,’ while she was going, ‘remember, walking in the sand.’”
The path they trailblazed led him towards the vivified frontier of punk. He vacated the drumkit, followed Mary’s lead and went up front. Then his pals gave him a new name and the rest is ancient, shirtless, history.
