The two songs that made Iggy Pop want to become a musician
We all want achievement in life. Even the people who don’t want the achievement of reaching the point where they can be satisfied with not wanting achievement. But that dream comes later; that is a latent ambition, and when Iggy Pop was young, like many people in the Western world, his dreams were notably lofty.
However, they were far from punk. While he currently still bops around a stage, shirtless and with all the bounce of a lemur behind a jackhammer, at an age where he can cash pension cheques, it is hard to imagine his interests as anything other than the most primordial side of music, but that hasn’t always been the case. In fact, the first time he remembers wondering whether music was his future, it came from the most sophisticated source there is.
Mr Pop recalls sitting in his father’s Cadillac and suddenly witnessing the emotional potential of music: “I was in the backseat and Frank Sinatra had the hit ‘Young at Heart’ and my father would sing along.”
He continues: “When people would ask me after that what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, ‘well maybe a singer?!’ I didn’t know why exactly. It wasn’t that I liked the song that much, but I think because it made such an impression on my father.”
So, the dream was now aflame, and while pop would drum in a covers band in his youth, he never found a shoe that quite fit. He was never going to be the next Sinatra, and he had accepted that. So, he headed off to college to study anthropology. Somehow, only a handful of years later, he wasn’t an accountant, as he had once feared, and was actually leaving a punk stage covered in chicken zygote after a biker gang had pelted him with eggs for wearing a leotard.
So, what started all of this madness? How could this have been caused by one solitary song? And it happens to be an instrumental one at that. “There was a guy named Link Wray,” Iggy Pop once said, “I heard this music in the student union at a university. It was called ‘Rumble’ and it sounded baaad.”
Pop’s head was turned, and from then on, this crystalising moment that prognosticated his future in a sonic crystal ball, and, needless to say, that future didn’t involve the university where he sat listening to it with a pencil behind his ear. “I left school emotionally at the moment I heard ‘Rumble’,” he concludes. Thank God for the campus DJ, I suppose.
The two songs that inspried Iggy Pop:
- ‘Young at Heart’ – Frank Sinatra
- ‘Rumble’ – Link Wray
