The one tour that Iggy Pop hated performing: “Some sort of major disaster”
The touring lifestyle isn’t always for everybody. Even though many people like living the life of a pirate and going to every single town in search of the latest thrill, there’s a point where things either start getting ridiculous or moments when your body physically won’t let you go on for another show. Although Iggy Pop has done more to his body than most rockers have done throughout their tenure, there were times when even his road dog spirit got stifled a little bit.
Then again, Pop was the kind of frontman who was born to be onstage. Despite many people being repulsed by The Stooges when they debuted in Detroit, Pop was looking to do more than simply play music. He was at war with his audience, and in the age of hippie idealism, he was one of the few people waking people up to what was really going on on the ground floor of rock and roll.
Because think about the time and place here for a second. The Vietnam War around this time cast a dark shadow on the entire country, but while a lot of people were practising peace and claiming that everything was going to be okay, songs like ‘1969’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ were primal enough to know what was really going on. Fans might have elected to believe in Flower Power, but outside of sunny California, ‘Search and Destroy’ made a lot more sense to people.
At the same time, The Stooges weren’t exactly the kind of band that would be told what to do. They had their own agenda, and that normally meant causing as much mayhem as possible, even if it was at their own expense. They had no time for what the bigwigs of the industry had to say, and more often than not, that included the people who were helping them book their gigs.
Everyone liked the idea of watching a madman go crazy for an hour onstage, but a lot of them didn’t have any idea how far it would go. As much as Alice Cooper was willing to bring theatrics into his sound, watching someone cut themselves up and leave the stage as a bloody mess by the end of the night wasn’t really on any club’s agenda when they looking for any entertainment. It may have seemed idiotic, but what was beyond delusional was thinking that they could take that on the road.
According to Pop, the tour that took them around the country was the reason why the band fell apart, saying, “Stooges tours didn’t exist. Nobody wanted to tour The Stooges. Then we did one actual tour, which was our death tour, which Metallic KO was recorded from. Everywhere we went there was some sort of major disaster. Clubs closed, theatres would arrest us. We played Memphis, and the front page of the newspaper was a big picture of me, and it said, ‘Vice squad to attend concert.’”
That didn’t stop their legacy from being firmly intact. The whole point behind the band’s records was to make something chaotic, and by the time other eccentric weirdos like David Bowie were coming up, they were taking the basis of what Pop had done and amping it up to the nth degree like with ‘Ziggy Stardust’.
The Stooges were the musical embodiment of a firecracker, but even though they went out with a bang doesn’t mean that they should be forgotten. If anything, the fact that they were conforming to what “normal” bands do by going on an actual tour was all fans needed to know about where their career was heading.
