The bizarre moment Iggy Pop beat up Elton John in a gorilla suit
Iggy Pop’s live shows were renowned for their mayhem. One notable Stooges concert involved a battle with the Hell’s Angels over their distaste for his dress. The next morning, bloodied and bruised, the brave/stupid frontman, took to a radio station to invite them to their next gig for a second round. However, the biker gang weren’t Iggy Pop’s only onstage run-in.
One of the more luidcours tales in his storied list of rock ‘n’ roll madness involves the shirtless punk pioneering having a harrowing onstage brush with a certain rocketman who was, for reasons attributed only to the mysterious manners the god of rock ‘n’ roll moves, dressed as a gorilla. Naturally, this startled a drugged-up Iggy Pop.
The finer details of this utter madness are as follows: The Stooges were in Atlanta when a curious crossover of talent was set to go down, and the shining pop star got himself all covered in muck. Iggy’s band were looking to catch a little attention from David Bowie’s glam rock rival and the current hottest prospect from Britain, so his management team (with a little help from the Detroit magazine Creem) asked Elton to take part in a publicity stunt.
He would jump on stage in a full gorilla suit and party with the band. The trouble is, Iggy had already been partying before the show kicked off. Seemingly, he had been partying quite heavily.
The proto-punk pioneer had spent the previous night enjoying himself and a particularly strong batch of quaaludes had come into his possession. These dainty little pills had not only left him slumped in the bushes next to his hotel—his bed for the evening—but also rendered him wholly incapable of performing live. There was only one thing for it: more drugs.
“The preparation for the gig was just [giving me] enough things to get me up to where I could open my mouth and form a word, but I still couldn’t phrase on a beat,” Iggy said in an interview with the legendary Legs McNeil for the book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Yet somehow, ths singer’s unstable disposition wasn’t enough for those around him to think twice about the planned prank.
So, Elton John suited up patiently, plonked his furry arse backstage, and waited for an ooportune moment to burst out and utterly bewilder the endangered frontman in a frenzy that he could not possible comprehend. Panic ensued. “I was like, ‘Oh my god! What can I do? I couldn’t fight him. I could barely stand.”
In Gimme Danger: The Story of Iggy Pop, Iggy expanded further and told Joe Ambrose of the infamous story, “A doctor had to shoot me full of methedrine just so I could talk,” he said. “I was seeing triple and had to hold on to the microphone stand to support myself. Suddenly this gorilla walks out from backstage and holds me up in the air while I’m still singing. I was out of my mind with fear. I thought it was a real gorilla.”
Still, as lacerations to his chest and violent biker gangs in the audience can attest to, not much can keep Iggy Pop off the stage, and he continued his performance, gorilla and all, battling his way to the mic and fighting off the curious pop primate. Rocket Kong got a rattling as Pop held the tiny primate as closely as he could.
Elton John remembered the incident when speaking with Yahoo! Entertainment, “In Richard’s Club, in Atlanta. I saw him the first night. He was so great; I wanted to go back the second night. I thought, ‘I know what. I’ll dress as a gorilla!’ I jumped on stage — and he freaked out. Years later, he told me he was tripping on acid when I did it. … It was the stinkiest gorilla’s outfit you could have possibly have. … I thought it would be great, but it kind of backfired.”
How any of this was unforeseen is an oddity only explainable through adage, ‘those were different times’. Elton John, the squat and balding pop star writhing around in a festering old gorilla suit from god knows where woud predictably startle any one, let alone a man on the brink of sedation who had recently been released from a sanitarium.
As Elton John concludes: “At the end, they said, ‘Oh, by the way, that was Elton John in the gorilla suit.’ Everyone said, ‘Oh, yeah. Sure it was.’ It was one of my mad things. Those were the days, you know. Those were the days.” They truly were.
