When Iggy Pop goaded bikers with a 45-minute cover of ‘Louie Louie’
Michigan, 1974: A bruised and battered Iggy Pop looks up at the lights in a cramped dressing room within the sleepy suburban city of Warren. Sweating out a cocktail of drugs and alcohol, The Stooges’ frontman recalls broken memories – flashes of leather, distorted guitars, and repeated blows from blokes who stink of oil and cheap booze. It is a world away from the modern image of Pop as a punk rock godfather, but as he lay there, slipping in and out of consciousness on the floor of a Michigan venue, Iggy Pop’s reputation as the anarchic madman of rock and roll was forever cemented.
It was in the midst of ‘peace and love’ hippiedom that The Stooges first made their mark back in 1967. Adopting the DIY ethos and adrenaline-fueled delivery of the garage rock scene dominating college towns across the nation, Iggy Pop’s group offered an abrasive and infectious alternative to the rock mainstream of the time. Inevitably, though, that meant that mainstream audiences were less than receptive to the sounds being put out by the band.
Although records like Fun House and Raw Power found their way into the hands of countless pioneering punk artists in the years that followed, The Stooges were never a particularly popular group during their initial tenure, particularly by the standards of other rock outfits of that time. It was during the band’s live shows that this unpopularity often manifested itself, spurred on by the peak of Iggy Pop’s drug-fueled violence and unpredictability.
Audiences had never encountered a performer like Pop before: a shirtless lunatic in eyeliner pouring with sweat and existing only on a mixture of speed, LSD, and heroin. As you can imagine, this image didn’t fit particularly well with the popular image of full-blooded American masculinity at the time, which landed Pop in some pretty sticky situations at multiple points throughout his performing career. One of the most notable examples of this occurred in Warren, Michigan, back in 1974, when The Stooges were approaching their final shows.
The band had already split up once in 1971, only to regroup the following year. By the time 1974 rolled around, they were no closer to achieving a widespread degree of success, and Pop’s addiction to heroin was only making things worse. The final nail in the coffin came on that fateful day in Michigan, when the band performed to a crowd largely composed of an antagonistic biker gang – although, thinking about it, the word ‘antagonistic’ is pretty superfluous when followed by ‘biker gang’.
Either way, the bikers were not at all receptive to the pioneering proto-punk mastery of The Stooges, and they made sure that fact was known. For much of the set, Pop and the gang gainfully tried to get through their repertoire, but halfway through a song, something inside the frontman snapped. “All right, you assholes wanna hear ‘Louie Louie’,” Pop declared to the braying audience, “we’ll give you ‘Louie Louie.’”
What followed was a bizarre 45-minute, largely improvised, rendition of the garage rock anthem ‘Louie Louie’ popularised by The Kingsmen in 1963. Countless different rock outfits have covered the song over the years, from Joy Division to Toots and the Maytals, but this particular rendition was a little different. Aside from the fact that the typically two-minute track lasted for an unbelievable 45 minutes, Pop also altered the lyrics to goad the crowd, “You can suck my ass, you biker f****t sissies,” he sang to an increasingly angry crowd of leather clad hooligans.
Eventually, the tension in the room was broken by Pop, offering to fight one of the bikers who had been heckling him. This, to the shock of absolutely nobody, resulted in the frontman being beaten to a pulp by a gang of angry bikers who had just endured a 45-minute version of ‘Louie Louie’ tailored specifically to insult them. Following the show, the biker gang–reportedly called The Scorpions–publicly threatened to murder Pop and The Stooges.
The Stooges managed to evade the murderous threats of the biker gang, but they didn’t last much longer as a band. A few nights later, they performed their final show in Detroit and went their separate ways. Pop, undeterred by his near-death experience, would remain an anarchic, drug-addled frontman for a few more years before finally kicking his heroin habit and mellowing out a little over the decades.
