Iggy Pop names The Stooges’ most “memorable number”
Sat musing on what lyrics could match Ron Ashton’s gloomy, fuzzed-out riff on The Stooges’ latest venture, Iggy Pop, the mercurial force behind biting lyrics like “I’m a street-walking cheetah / With a heart full of napalm”, thought to himself: What do you get when you spell god backwards? The answer, naturally, was dog, and that epiphany led to the sleigh-belled sludge of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’.
Infamous not only for its sonic drudgery but its sexually servile lyrics, Pop explained to Howard Stern quite plainly that the material was about wanting a woman so badly that she does almost become god-like, in the sense you’d be led by her anywhere. The obvious gist, he said, is: “I don’t wanna talk about literature with you or judge you as a person. I wanna dog you.”
It’s a classic Stooges track almost eclipsed by the frenzied performance Pop supplemented it with. In a nice parallel to the bodily sacrifice hinted at in the song, he was known for cutting himself, flinging himself around at will in a manner so wild it defied self-harm and seemed almost confrontational to his bewildered audiences. On that, Pop explained he was massively influenced by watching Jim Morrison careening around at an early Doors show. He said: “Part of me was like, ‘Wow, this is great. He’s really pissing people off, and he’s lurching around making these guys angry’.”
Reflecting on his antics to Classic Rock Revisited while well into his 60s, Pop revealed the song still ignites the urge to stage dive. “We have one particular song that we do, it’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, and because it is our oldest and most very, very memorable number, I do it,” he explained. “I also do it on that song because I push so hard on the first two verses that I can’t think of anything to do by the time the guitar solo comes around. When the guitar solo comes, I tend to do a stage dive to go with the solo.”
On the other practicalities of choosing when to stage dive, he did share that sometimes, guitar solo or not, he just feels moved to do them. That said, his penchant for self-injury seemed to have faded with age. Gone are the days he’d slash himself on the chest, so he has to be a bit more selective.
“Some of them I just do by the moment because I just want to do it right then and there,” he said, but with a crucial caveat. “If I am on a twelve-foot stage, and the barrier is eight feet away and has spikes on it, and the people on the other side are all crazy, then I don’t stage dive at all.”
