The Stooges song Iggy Pop wrote inspired by his penis: “You write about things of importance”
On March 5th, 2007, proto-punk pioneers The Stooges released their first album since 1973’s Raw Power. Some 35 years earlier, the Iggy Pop-fronted group had exploded audience assumptions about what a rock band could and should be, delivering three albums of stark, furious material before burning out and calling it quits.
The Stooges’ return so many years later came as a surprise, not least because Iggy Pop – well into his 60s by that point – had spent the bulk of the 1960s and ’70s doing everything in his power to destroy his body and mind.
The Stooges were simply too ahead of their time to be a success in the late ’60s. As he recalled during a conversation with Rolling Stone back in 2007, after a memorable Stooges concert, Pop “walked out to the middle of the floor, in my shorts with these welts on my body, to talk to the talent agent Frank Barselona about possibly booking the group. He said, ‘Iggy, I think in 20 years or so, you’re going to be a very important guy. But for now, no thanks.’”
By the early 2000s, however, The Stooges were widely regarded as the godfathers of punk, a genre that, rather ironically, exploded shortly after their initial demise. The band had set up the powder, the tinder and even a gentle wind, ready for the right kind of firestarters to grab a match and set up an almighty bonfire of the classic rock genres. Punk has a lot of different originators, but nobody can deny that The Stooges were one of them.
The Stooges’ bacchanalian brand of brown noise thrived on the playfulness of Iggy Pop, whose complete disregard for self-preservation earned the Stooges a reputation as live-fast nihilists with an appetite for destruction. In reality, Pop was simply demonstrating what any Lecoq-trained clown knows innately: that the greatest performers are those without a shred of ego.
Pop was a clown in every sense of the word. Apart from his remarkable physicality, he always blurred the divisions between high and low art, weaving his own intellectual musings and literary passions with a knowingly unpalatable – by hippy standards, anyway – brand of rock ‘n’ roll. It seems strange looking back through gthe very serious and equally annoying run of holier than thou rock stars who seem to litter current airwaves.
Bands used to be built on the premise of entertainment and expression alone. Pop removed the very part of himself that seems to permeate so many lead singers and was all the better for it. He didn;t care if you laughed, you cried or you spat at him, as long as you felt something.
His desire to make himself the object of fun didn’t weaken with age. Speaking in that same 2007 interview, Pop was asked if he really thought ‘Trollin’, a song which includes the line “my dick is turning into a tree”, was really appropriate for a 60-year-old frontman.
“You write about things of importance to you,” Pop said of The Weirdness track. “And it’s gotta be for real. Do I think about my dick? Oh, yeah, all the time. If I think about it all the time, I got a right to sing about it. If I wasn’t thinking about it all the time but thought, ‘It’s time to write a rock song, I’d better mention my dick,’ then I wouldn’t even be able to say ‘dick’ right. Besides, it’s an ecological line. It’s not, ‘My dick is all bad, motherfucker, wickety wackety woo.’ It’s nature-oriented.” Pop paused for a moment, looking serious, and then burst into laughter. “It is!”
We’ll let you decide that for yourself. Check out ‘Trollin’ below.
