Iggy Pop’s favourite albums of the 1960s
The 1970s may well stand as his classic era, but Iggy Pop was shaped by the previous decade’s chaotic musical weather.
In many ways, Mr James Osterberg Jr sits as a key centre pivot of popular music’s storied tapestry. He was to pave the path for punk’s wrecking ball, smashing open the new wave by the 1970s’ close.
Fronting The Stooges, the Detroit garage rockers unleashed a feral volatility yet unseen, screeching to a burnt-out husk by 1974 and in need of a life jacket to pull Pop’s career back from the brink. In came David Bowie. Whisking Pop to Germany, the pair cut the lauded The Idiot and Lust for Life Berlin efforts, the former setting the stage for post-punk’s taste for electronic textures and terser moodscapes.
Yet, it was the tumultuous 1960s and its blooming myriad of genres that stuck a hook and pointed the way to the stage. The Doors’ Jim Morrison proved the most foundational, with his violent psychedelia on-stage provocations unveiling performance boundaries begging to be pushed further by the eager Pop. But elsewhere in Pop’s psyche was the British invasion, folk rock behemoths, R&B soul electricity, lysergic rock attack, and pop’s upwards expanse to loftier artistic realms that all formed the Godfather of Punk’s essential soundtrack.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2005, Pop revealed some of his favourite albums of the 1960s, offering key clues to his formative burnishing. First up was a band most rock roads lead to. Jumping back to 1964, Pop lifted The Rolling Stones’ 12 x 5 as one of his choice cuts, the second album in the US but an expansion of the original Five by Five EP issued in the UK.
“It’s got a picture of them looking really unhealthy on the front,” Pop recalled. “I found out later it was taken by David Bailey, this really sophisticated photographer/image-maker”.
A sorry-looking Stones LP held an affinity with one of the towering songsmiths of the 20th century for a nostalgic Pop. “I spent the summer of my 18th year studying this and a Stones album,” he stated, picking out Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home from the following year.
It’s likely the first exposure to Dylan outside the Greenwich Village purists, Dylan shaking off the folk straightjacket and plugging in his song book for a rawer and more contemporary flourish. While boasting canonical numbers like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, the folkies turned their back on his heresy from then on, not that Pop cared. “Great cover, amazing songwriting. The inspiring lack of vocal skills gave me hope”.
Eight months later, The Beatles would drop Rubber Soul, a transformational LP that began the process of extricating themselves from the trappings of Beatlemania and step into the wildly eclectic terrain that would ‘pepper’ later LP efforts. It’s also the album from Liverpool’s finest Pop selected for his personal collated canon.
“This is just after they’d written their cute hits and a little more sadness was creeping in,” Pop said. “But they hadn’t yet gone into the this-song-is-gonna-be-12-minutes-long-and-I’m-depressed-so-put-up-with-it phase”.
Fab Four fanatics may be unclear what chapter of The Beatles’ oeuvre Pop’s referring to with the said quip. Moving on, however, Pop stepped into the vanguard of psychedelic rock two years later with Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced debut, confessing Hendrix’s impact was of gobsmacking endurance. “When it came out, nothing else had ever sounded like this,” he claimed. “Super special”.
Cheating a little, but Pop finally plumps for James Brown’s and John Coltrane’s respective Star Time and The Heavyweight Champion boxsets, both encompassing a wealth of material from the 1960s. While Mr Dynamite held as much frontman influence as The Doors’ enigmatic Lizard King, Pop bestowed especially high praise on the spiritual jazz bandleader behind A Love Supreme, “Probably more than any other single artist, I listen to him”.
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