Sunshine, Stooges, and proto-punk depravity: The night Iggy Pop knocked a fan out with a watermelon
Detroit, 1973: The streets of this once-prosperous industrial city are littered with all the signs of economic decline. A little further north from the city, in Lake St Clair, Michigan’s finest, Iggy Pop and The Stooges, offer an alternative to this depressing state of affairs. On a blistering hot day, audiences pack the Ice Arena to catch a glimpse of the pioneering proto-punk outfit and their endless energetic frontman, only for one sweat-drenched fan to be knocked clean out by a flying watermelon hurled by a half-naked garage rock icon.
It was during that period that Iggy Pop was at his most demented and unpredictable, thanks to his daily cocktail of drugs and alcohol, along with the effects of living an archetypal rock and roll life. The Stooges had formed six years prior, finding a cult audience for their defiant garage rock distortion and proto-punk attitude, but it was the wild antics of Iggy Pop that formed the main appeal of their spectacular live performances. This particular show in Lake St Clair was the band’s first with keyboardist Scott Thurston.
Thurston boasts an incredible history within rock and roll music, having performed with everybody from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to Hokus Pocus, but it is fair to assume that his stint with The Stooges was among his most energetic, unpredictable and, at some points, frightening. After all, the Detroit garage rockers represented the pinnacle of amphetamine-fueled blitzkrieg rock and roll, and that lifestyle encapsulated every aspect of the band’s existence, not just their studio sessions.
That fact was laid bare to Thurston upon his first show with the band. Pop, as he was known to do, appeared before the crowd wearing only knee-high boots and his underwear, either in an effort to combat the high temperatures in Lake St Clair, or because his intake of speed had rendered his ability to dress himself defunct.
This colliding of sunshine and mind-altering substances also meant the band were tucking into some watermelons backstage before the show, and when the band erupted into the opening chords of ‘Raw Power’, Pop burst onto the stage and hurled a piece of watermelon into the crowd.
The flying fruit reportedly knocked a fan unconscious, per a biography by Paul Trynka, but it seems unlikely that the show stopped to accommodate this medical emergency. Once an amped-up Iggy Pop had started the show, there was no way of stopping the freight-train frontman. Still, being knocked out would at least save the concertgoer from witnessing the depravity and destruction of the band’s set.
After only a few tracks, Pop was overcome with the urge to expel some excrement – a rare occurrence for somebody with such fondness for heroin. Rather than rushing to a bathroom offstage, temporarily halting the show, or simply holding it in, the frontman chose a space behind some Marshall amps as his ideal bathroom. To make matters worse, he then reemerged onto the stage to throw various unidentified ‘objects’ into the crowd.
Pop seemed rather keen to continue blasting the audience with ammunition, and so he found a cup of ice, poured it down his briefs, and then threw the ice cubes into the crowd after sucking a few retrieved from his undies. As far as the band’s newly recruited keyboardist, the phrase ‘baptism of fire’ doesn’t begin to describe the anarchic experience of performing with The Stooges at that chaotic show in Lake St Clair.
