The inspirations behind Iggy Pop
While New York Dolls’ trash glam serves as a more direct bridge between hard rock and punk, no one gets close to challenging Iggy Pop as the insurrectionary godfather of ‘Year Zero’.
Pop straddled two very different musical and cultural worlds. Born James Osterberg Jr in 1947, his earliest recollections would have been a time long before counterculture or even the dawn of popular music as we understand it today.
Pop has spoken many times over the years of sitting in the back of his parents’ Cadillac, exposed to the crooning swing of Frank Sinatra as a child. Sowing the seeds of singing ambitions as a later high school kid, it was the ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ distinct personality and commanding presence that would guide Pop on a path of eschewing trends, eager to forge a persona as sturdy and eternal as the ‘Rat Pack’ leader.
Sinatra’s influence would stand Pop in good stead as he doggedly pursued a road to rock. Growing up in Michigan’s Ann Arbor, he would ensconce himself in the decade’s garage rock explosion and form regional stars, The Iguanas. Inspiring his lifelong nickname, The Iguanas would cover groups as diverse as The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’ and Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona’, the latter their only pressed single, Pop artfully reimagining their repertoire via his inventive drumming skills.
Handling a diverse array of disparate material would colour Pop’s entire career. While the immediate impression of him is the topless and feral onstage antics that define him now, there was also the version of him giddy over the drum machine that pulsed over The Idiot’s eerie ‘Nightclubbing’. A contrary jump into Préliminaires’ New Orleans jazz after tiring of the chugging punk derivatives he’d inspired, and pouring Edward Gibbon’s 18th century The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into ‘Ceaser’s’ raucous soliloquy. Pop’s years burnished in the 1960s’ eclectic febrility afforded the proto-punk whirlwind a wider hinterland of creativity free of punk’s later clichés and trappings.
In the aftermath of The Iguanas and blues successor, Prime Movers, Pop met the Asheton brothers and formed The Stooges in 1967, eager to tap into the more visceral and violent edge of psychedelia. He knew he wanted to strive for something primal and wildly abandoned as the lead singer. Lifting James Brown’s animated frenzy and Mick Jagger’s unrefined cool, it was witnessing The Doors’ mesmerising show at the University of Michigan, and frontman Jim Morrison presenting Pop with a foundational template to find a performance’s limits that was always the push.
“Part of me was like, ‘Wow, this is great. He’s really pissing people off, and he’s lurching around making these guys angry’,” Pop recalled to Classic Rock Revisited. “People were rushing the stage, and Morrison’s going ‘Fuck you. You blank, blank, blank’. You can fill in your sexual comments yourself. The other half of it was that I thought, ‘If they’ve got a hit record out and they can get away with this, then I have no fucking excuse not to get out on stage with my band’. It was sort of the case of, ‘Hey, I can do that’. There really was some of that in there.”
The Stooges would drop three lauded albums of turbo-charged garage punk years before punk had reared its head, then seemingly crash and burn during their 1974 tour amid an explosion of drugs and infighting. Pop’s career looked finished there and then, yet, the last true inspirational artist in Pop’s story would arrive as much a saviour as a collaborator.
Having assisted with Raw Power’s production during Ziggy Stardust’s peak, David Bowie was facing similar needs to escape rock’s myriad indulgences and seeking a creative and spiritual detox. The two would decamp to Berlin, soak up the foreign sounds cooked up in Germany’s krautrock underground, and reboot Pop’s career with The Idiot’s exorcised haunt and Lust for Life’s jubilant cheer, with Bowie co-writing much of the material and playing keyboards as part of his 1977 backing band.
It was a crucial pivot during those years, a lifeboat Pop jumped into to ride back to rock consciousness and cement himself as an alternative icon who would forever command fascination and mystique from then on. From 1979’s New Values to his collaboration with harpist Kety Fusco’s ‘SHE’, Pop wore his early influences like an invisible suit of armour, forever pulling him inexorably toward the terrain of his artistic intuition and creative curiosities.
