“Running down his torso”: Iggy Pop’s fascination with blood
Blood, for lack of a more delicate way of putting it, is death. It’s a sign that a great deal of harm has begotten someone. More than that, it symbolises that if an unsuspecting person keeps looking where they’ve found some, theirs might be the next to be spilt. It’s not just a symbol. It’s a threat. With that in mind, it stands to reason that the blood of Iggy Pop, maker of some of the most dangerous music ever, seems to have spattered over every stage in rock.
The man has done some truly mental things to himself in the name of rock ‘n’ roll. Smearing himself in peanut butter, jumping into the audience, attacking his bandmates or, yes, indulging in his career-long obsession with blood. He first cut himself open before even the release of his band’s debut single ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ in May 1969. So, at least, you can say the man started as he intended to go on.
Ben Edmonds, later an editor of Creem Magazine, booked the gig and recalled that Iggy “picked up a drumstick shard and began absent-mindedly running it across his bare chest. He apparently increased the pressure with each stroke because red welt lines soon became visible, which then discharged trickles of blood running down his torso.”
While no record of his actually sold much, Iggy Pop did do enough mental shit that there would always be people turning up to his gigs. The problem was that in the haze of his drug addiction and, perhaps because of the pressure to get eyes on the product, Pop and the Stooges kept upping the stunts to levels that, even today, are still genuinely unsettling.
How did Iggy Pop top this?
The nadir came in 1973 and 1974, with two legendary shows. The first was at the iconic New York City nightclub Max’s Kansas City where, on a regularly scheduled trip through the audience, Pop slipped and landed on a table full of glasses. Pop emerged, and while his skin was more perforated than a machine-gunned teabag, the hopelessly heroin-addicted Iggy was used to putting holes in himself, so he headed straight back onstage.
He then proceeded to flick his own blood into the audience until Alice Cooper (of all people) bundled him offstage and off to the nearest emergency room. It has nothing on the 1974 show, though, which is a genuinely depressing thing to hear about in this era. After spending the rest of 1973 dining out on rumours he was going to kill himself on stage, a 1974 concert in LA was the closest he came to doing just that.
To mark Iggy’s first true solo concert without the Stooges, Iggy Pop spent most of the show forcing a steak knife into a black audience member’s hand and goading him to stab him. When he wouldn’t do it, Pop first resorted to screaming racial epithets at the man before taking the knife himself, carving an X into his own body, and then was dragged offstage by guitarist Ron Asheton. Asheton, for full disclosure, was dressed as a Nazi.
Even from a present-day perspective, it’s some pretty disturbing shit. Unforgivable if it wasn’t so clear that this was a man in the throes of an unimaginable drug addiction who felt like the only thing he could do with his fame was memorably end his life. As we can see today, though, there is always a way out of the darkness and into the second life that Iggy leads today as a true rock and roll icon.
After all, for all that blood signifying gore and death, it also symbolises life and vitality. Today, so does Iggy Pop, something which the drug-fuelled madman he was in the 1970s could never have comprehended.
