The singer who “electrified” Iggy Pop’s entire life in a high school auditorium
The year was 1973, and the mood in New York City was outrageously tense, thanks to one Iggy Pop, as rumours were circulating around that The Stooges frontman was set to commit suicide onstage.
Fans feared that his performance style, which so far had consisted of onstage vomiting and in-crowd punch-ups, had gone a step too far, and he was set to plunge rock and roll into irreparable darkness.
Thankfully, the rumours proved to be just that, rumours, but as the people took a deep breath and left the show safe in the knowledge that he hadn’t plummeted to such dark depths, many critics wondered, how did rock get to this point?
Sure, rebellious punk spirit was on the rise, and so should it have been in ‘70s New York, particularly, because the socio-economic picture was so dire that music fans needed a vehicle for resistance.
But many wondered what drove Iggy to take it to such extreme and offensive levels? He was the ultimate case of nature vs nurture in music, with some arguing that his penchant for chaos was predisposed and others arguing it was nothing more than a symptom of this wild punk renaissance.
But a certain anecdote from Iggy himself makes the possibility of it being the latter all the more plausible. Because before one fateful gig that took place in his high school, Iggy was just another music-loving Detroit native, figuring out how his own voice might fit in this exciting new landscape. But then a rockstar came to town and put it in his lap, starting a chaotic domino effect that would end in the creation of rock and roll’s wildest child.
Iggy took to the Broken Record podcast to remember Bob Seger, who he described as “the guy who really put the nail in any chance of my straight life when he came to my high school. And he had a band called The Decibels at the time. They were what people called a greaser band. They’d grease their hair back, wear matching suits, and they played mostly instrumentals beautifully. And I heard them in my high school auditorium, and the way it sounded coming out of those amps. It just did something to me, electrified me.”
But the rock and roll spirit that oozed out of those speakers grew into something else by the time Iggy had the chance to develop his own career. The noise from the rhythm section and the experimentalism from the melodies were but a vehicle for his wild performance style to be set free from its shackles.
So, ultimately, we have our answer. Iggy’s lust for life was nurtured by Seger and what came thereafter. The counterculture resistance was in full swing by the time he had a chance to first step behind a microphone as The Stooges’ frontman, and so absorbing the mood around him, while building on what he saw from Seger during that fateful Detroit high school show, he went on to become one of the most enigmatic performers of all time.
