The ugly moment Iggy Pop accidentally snorted PCP: “It was ugly to see”
The mythologised adage of ‘sex, drugs and rock n roll’ didn’t just appear from thin air. Before modern rockstars feasted off a healthy balance of their medically prescribed five-a-day, these were the three pillars of sustenance. And no artist dined out on it more than Iggy Pop, who is etched into the history books of hedonism.
During his time with The Stooges, he was a performative wrecking ball. Scantily clad and dripping with blood, his antics quickly became the stuff of debaucherous legend. While his live shows quickly became the headquarters for degeneracy, its seed was sewn during the recording process of The Stooges’ 1973 album Raw Power.
Produced by long-time collaborator David Bowie, it was a record that laid the foundations for punk rock. Wild vocal takes, and relentless guitar riffs acted as a sonic handshake into the warped mind of an unstoppable Iggy Pop. In an appropriately messy description of the record, Josh Homme once said: “It’s like, go! Hit the switch! It’s dick-swinging, cutting yourself, let’s fuck, I’m high, yeah! It is what rock n’ roll sounds like when it comes off the tap. If you take the craziest band you’ve ever heard, and you play Raw Power first, your ‘Craziest Band Ever’ will sound like a bunch of pussies.”
It was a record that set a debaucherous precedent and one Iggy would gladly follow. In the following months, Raw Power‘s live performances trounced through America’s live venues, destroying anything in their wake.
On July 31st, 1973, The Stooges were on a four-night run at New York’s Max’s Kansas City. As Pop was climbing through the crowd, a chair slipped underneath him, and he sent a full table of glasses smashing to the floor. As the crowd gasped in horror at the head-to-toe wounds he was sporting, he turned his body at an angle that spurted blood towards the audience.
It was clear that absolutely nothing would interrupt the performative trance Iggy would put himself in, not even the mistaken consumption of PCP. A month after the blood-spurting incident, Iggy Pop and The Stooges were about to play at The Kennedy Centre. A friend of supermodel Bebe Buell gave Iggy a line of white powder before his set, which Pop thought was cocaine, only to be later told that it was ‘angel dust’, more commonly known as PCP.
Despite being “immobilised by the drug, he pressed on and insisted the show would go on. What followed was 15 minutes of an Iggy-less Stooges playing Raw Power on stage, before the enigmatic frontman finally appeared, stumbling about the stage and singing what crowd members described as gibberish.
After walking out to the appalled audience, Iggy attempted to return to the stage, but his altered state proved impossible. Keyboardist Scott Thurston helped him up but recoiled at the state he found his band member in. “I saw his chest, it looked like he’d cut himself up really bad, there were bits of flesh hanging on him, it was ugly to see,” he later told Paul Trynka in The Guardian. But in a twist of appropriate irreverence, Thurston was pleased to later find out that what dressed Iggy’s skin was simply the remains of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Iggy Pop achieved feats of hedonism that are quite frankly unrepeatable in the modern day, and for good reason. But through the dark cloud of debauchery burst Iggy’s undeniable talent. Overshadowing his legacy of topless tormenter, his work with The Stooges and several collaborators thereafter has cemented his legacy as one of the all-time greats.
