Listen to Iggy Pop in his high school band ‘The Iguanas’
It doesn’t get much more rock ‘n’ roll than Iggy Pop standing topless, shrieking over a wild audience as he works his way into a state of frenzy. He first rose to global attention in the late 1960s, fronting The Stooges, a group characterised by their raw and primitive rock sound, strikingly precursory to the ‘70s punk movement. The Stooges’ live performances became notorious for wild antics, including indecent exposure, self-mutilation, destruction of property, assault, and on a couple of occasions, the wearing of Nazi uniforms.
Iggy would later be derailed by hedonistic tendencies before joining David Bowie in Berlin for pastures new over the late ‘70s. These solo endeavours reinvented Iggy as a comparatively clean rocker with more refined music to match. Long before the climax of this rollercoaster decade, however, young James Newell Osterberg Jr., as his passport name reads, joined his formative group, The Iguanas.
While Iggy made fame and fortune as a provocative vocalist, he began his musical journey as a drummer in his middle-school marching band in Michigan. Iggy’s schoolmate Jim McLaughlin was a fellow marching band member and received his first guitar around the same time as Iggy got his first drum kit. Iggy’s supportive parents, James Osterberg and Louella Christensen, kindly cleared their master bedroom to create a practice area for their son. The pair’s first band at school was Megaton Two, which offered classic R&B vibrations with hints of surf-rock.
In 1965, Iggy and McLaughlin teamed up with a more aspirational group of musicians, The Iguanas. The group of high school students earned $55 a night supporting gigs for popular groups, including The Four Tops, The Guess Who, and the Shangri-Las.
The Iguanas weren’t prolific in the studio but recorded a few covers, including Bo Diddley’s 1957 single ‘Mona’ and The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’, which heard Iggy on vocals for the first time. They also laid down an original single written by Iggy called ‘Again and Again’.
While drumming for The Iguanas, Iggy landed a day job at Discount Records, a cheap record shop which offered a trove of musical inspiration. “I got my name, my musical education, and my personality all from working at a record store during my tender years,” Iggy once said of his day job. “In the ’50s and ’60s, the teen kids used to gather after school at these places to listen free to the latest singles and see if they liked the beat.”
By the end of 1965, Iggy began to wear his hair long, dying it platinum blonde. The shift in appearance coincided with increased flirtations on the wrong side of the law, leading to his banishment from Club Ponytail, The Iguanas’ gigging haunt. Iggy soon left The Iguanas to join Prime Movers.
In 2016, Norton Records released a collection of eighteen demos recorded by The Iguanas between 1963 and 1964. Hear Iggy in his formative band below.
