The most dangerous performance of Iggy Pop’s charmed life
Iggy Pop: say the name and the reputation hits you in an instant as visions and stories of one of the wildest men in music’s career flicker across the mind.
This is a man who, even today, at the age of 78, enters the stage for his shows in a coffin, bursts out of it and then performs like he’s still in his 20s. But in his 20s, the gigs were far more chaotic, sometimes almost lethal.
The key thing here is that I can write that and still, it doesn’t define which show I’m even talking about. Iggy Pop’s carnage brushed up against serious injury or the risk of death several times, so much so that it became part of his brand.
At one point, there was a rumour going around that he’d been paid a million dollars to commit suicide live onstage during his Madison Square Garden show. While absolutely insane, his energy made it so believable that the show was a morbid sell-out, luckily with no death involved.
There’s a long list of stories. How about the time in 1970 when he puked all over the stage, rested his penis on an amp and then wrestled with an audience member in the vomit? How about the time when he repeatedly whipped himself in front of his crowd until he bled? The list goes on of countless tales that range from the disgusting to the downright dangerous, so it’s easy to see why the man was a high-risk artist who struggled to get a team to stick around long, or was nothing but a stress to those who did.
That’s how this story begins: “You expect me to send Iggy to New York?” The Stooges’ manager, Jeff Wald, cried in 1973, “It’s junk city out there!”
The suits were on a mission to get the radio to pay more attention to the band, and so they had to travel around more and play more shows. But when Iggy was involved, that always felt like a treacherous mission, especially when he had to go to one of the buzziest, drugiest cities in the music scene.
But the dates were booked. The band were set to play a residency at Max’s Kansas City, one of the New York crowd’s favourite hangs. They had a new keyboard player in the form of Scott Thurston, and everyone was trying their best to be optimistic that perhaps this might work, and they might get out unscathed. Obviously, they didn’t. Or at least, their leader didn’t.
At first, the issue was all technical. The sound wasn’t coming out right so Pop’s vocals were completely swamped. It was chaos but somehow, it sounded almost good purely because of the crazed energy everyone was playing with.
In the audience, everyone was anticipating something. “There was that element of danger, because everybody had heard about his antics on stage,” Bebe Buell, an audience member, recalled. And it didn’t take long for him to deliver as the singer started climbing across the tables, staring down his crowd and then, inevitably, falling. He landed right on a stack of glasses, which all shattered and sliced right into him.
A few cuts and bruises were nothing new, but this was bad. One of the shards was right in there, puncturing close to his lung, and he was bleeding a lot. The band tried to stop the show, but the singer wouldn’t have it, staggering around the place, still performing.
Then it steps up. On a mission to still put on a show, Pop realised he had a new prop: his own blood. He pulled out the glass and realised that if he moved his arm in a certain way, a jet of blood would squirt out and spray his crowd.
“It was horrible, like a Roman arena,” Wayne County, the DJ at the venue, remembered of the rock and roll blood bath.
Obviously, he survived, his wounds healed, and he was back onstage with more antics soon after, adding to the long list of stories that all raise the same question: Is Iggy Pop immortal?
