Iggy Pop’s infamous peanut butter incident
It’s arguably one of the greatest generational clashes caught on American television. Bafflingly selected to present the Midsummer Rock coverage of the 1970 Cincinnati Pop Music Festival, veteran radio host and NBC presenter Jack Lescoulie almost quaintly introduces The Stooges as the next act before cutting to singer Iggy Pop’s sweating, gristly top-half about to break into ‘TV Eye’.
The Stooges were riding high creatively at this point, even though there were internal fractures that would soon spell the band’s implosion, albeit temporarily. Following their 1969 self-titled debut with an even wilder blast of volatile garage rock, Fun House, the addition of saxophonist Steve Mackay pushed them past even the MC5 as the kings of the Detroit proto-punk scene. These were heady days, man. Iggy was taking performative abandon to the nth degree and instilling a sincere sense of danger wherever they played.
The Stooges’ appearance at CPMF was a curious decision. They found themselves surrounded by more ‘traditional’ rock acts that didn’t seek to thrill quite the way The Stooges did. Even Alice Cooper’s billing was in his earlier, psychedelic, pre-chicken decapitation incarnation. Despite some prominent features in leading publications of the time, middle America was still largely none-the-wiser to Iggy’s topless, gyrating shenanigans, and the festival’s organisers inadvertently gifted popular music with one of its most legendary performances.
Gazing like an animal at the audience ahead, primordial energy takes over Iggy’s eyes as he effortlessly imbues the crowd with a uniquely disquieting energy that channels the social upheaval of the era. After returning from an ad break, Lescoulie informs the audience that Iggy has indeed thrown himself among the crowd, a touch of disbelief pervading his commentary. Now, on all fours and skulking into the raucous thrash of ‘1970’, the atmosphere becomes ever more feral and frenzied. Lescoulie looked on, positively unsure how things would unfurl.
It’s long been rumoured that Dead Boys frontman Stiv Bators had brought the tub of peanut butter with him from his hometown in Dayton, Ohio. However, its route and provenance ensured its journey ended with Iggy. Standing poised and alert as if in a trance, Iggy takes the peanut butter and smears it all over his bare, sinewy chest. This gleeful act of self-desecration follows the repeated spits of “I’m still aright” atop Mackay’s discordant sax attack, presenting a gripping spectacle of dysfunctional theatre that few have reached since and none had seen before.
The incident became a paradigm for proto-punk—truly shocking mayhem, clinging to the revolutionary spirit of the era before. Pop might not have known this at the time, but he was making history with that nutty confectionary. The vitality of its lives on in the disbelieving eyes of Lescoulie, a vignette, if you will, of the establishment watching the shackles smash, if only for a moment. Was this the birth of punk?
Not long after, The Stooges crumbled after infighting, scant radio play and the corrosive effects of heroin. While Iggy Pop would forge new creative frontiers and generally survive like a cockroach after a nuclear blast for the next half-century, The Stooges’ CPMF set still towers over him, an eternal document of a band at their most ephemeral and wildly liberated.
