IGGY POP (continued)
Iggy looks like a man who likes to kick back at the beach. Now knocking on the door of 60, when he plans to retire, the one-time 'fucked-up godfather of nihilistic horseshit' (his words) is impossibly lean, with long, sunbleached surfer hair and the kind of deep, craggy tan that suggests a tough life, not one of moneyed leisure.
Pop's wayward life is the stuff of legend. With his band of suburban misfits The Stooges, the once-shy kid from a Detroit trailer park invented punk rock while Malcolm McLaren was still swishing around West London in velvet flares.
The Stooges music was harsh, driving, stripped down to primal riffs. The songs were disaffected howls performed with confrontational ferocity. Feral frontman Iggy injected heroin onstage, unfurled his porn star-issue penis at every available opportunity, smeared raw meat onto his naked body, slashed open his chest with broken glass and on one particularly lively evening, immortalized on the bootleg live album Metallic KO, picked a fight with an entire biker gang. He lost.
Offstage his appetite for excitement was equally voracious. Crashing and burning through his twenties and thirties like an oblivion-seeking missile, he blazed through drugs, booze and women (including some very young women. Girls, in fact). Pop was a reckless hero of decadent self-destruction in an industry full of imploding stars.
The Doors' Jim Morrison, one of Pop's early inspirations, believed William Blake's dictum that 'the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom'. In Morrison's case, sadly, it led to a weight problem and a premature death in a Paris bathtub. But by some physiological miracle, Iggy survived, battle-scarred but more or less intact. And perhaps in his case, a palace of wisdom was there waiting for him. Or at least a bungalow of balance.
Today's Iggy Pop is a relaxed, warm, open, inquisitive and intensely charming man who enjoys a glass of wine, a book, a round of golf, his morning 40 minutes of t'ai chi. And "just driving around the 'hood", taking it all in like The Passenger in his song. "Lately I just drive around Miami Beach," he says, "That's about it. A half hour area but lots of cultural changes of pace."
His 'hood is Miami's Little Haiti, where women in African dress speak French on street corners. Iggy loves it: "Everybody looks fuckin cool. You gotta watch it but there's some cool shit back there."
Iggy's 'little cottage' is a modest bungalow crammed with creative clutter, antique furniture and Haitian voodoo art (One of the living room chairs is occupied by a life-sized statue of a blue-skinned pregnant amazon). But he lives a self-imposed double life, divided between the South Beach home he shares with Nina, his girlfriend of six years, and here, where he works and thinks. "My cultural activities and spiritual life take place here," he explains.
Today, the Stooges are over at Iggy's place, working on some music. Drummer Scott Asheton is standing out front when I arrive, quietly checking out Iggy's cars gleaming, freshly-washed cars lined up on the lawn.
Since he moved to the city from New York City ("not a driver's place") eight years ago, Iggy has owned three Rollers, a Bentley and an electric blue 1984 Ferrari 308 previously owned by John Malkovich, "by some weird coincidence".
"I drove the shit outta that car. One day I was driving it, listening to voodoo music. And I got a little too caught up and I'd already gotten two speeding tickets and I was doing triple the speed limit down a divided residential thoroughfare and I ran a red light because I thought it was green. Like a dyslexic person: 'Oh, the light's red, that means I can go.' I coulda killed somebody.
"I made a turn onto the street where I live and a cop pulled me over in my neighbourhood, in my Ferrari with the lights going. Which is kinda uncool if you wanna have another side to your life. I was like 56 at that point. So I thought to myself, the next step is something terrible's going to happen. So I got rid of it. I had my experience of about four years with that car and it was great."
Iggy likes old things and prefers the character and unpredictability of used cars to the sterile reliability of new metal. "But you should always have two. Cause there's gonna be one in the shop all the time," he advises with a goofy snicker. "When I had the Corniche S, I had a Rolls-Royce Wraith for backup But when the Corniche blew up I said: "Fuck it, I'm gettin' some American cars!'
So Iggy paid a visit to Miami specialist auto dealer, Ted Vernon, whose 79th Street warehouse is a local landmark and a treasure trove of oddball Americana.
"He puts the cars out front, like candy. I bought that one, a daddy car for cruisin'," says Iggy pointing to a blue 1972 Oldsmobile Delta Royale. "It's like the kinda car an old school blues or R&B kinda guy with an ass pocket of whiskey would drive. Back in the day. This car can take a pretty good soaking and dry out. It's like an old couch. It rains a lot here, we get a lot of torrential downpours. And the top is iffy. Sometimes it stays up, sometimes it stays down...
"And this," he says aiming a bony digit at a screaming yellow 1966 Jeepster with hot rod flames licking up the bonnet, "Is for fun!
"These are like my friends. When I see them I get happy, they do something wrong, I'm angry. Plus it's always exciting wondering what's gonna happen next."
Parked between them is a car too outrageous even for the man who pioneered oral sex and shooting up heroin as stage gimmicks. It's a 1968 Chevrolet Impala customized with a psychedelic Woodstock/Vietnam theme on approval from Ted's. An acid flashback on wheels, it's a full-on visual trip airbrushed with anti-war motifs and boasting a denim and zebra print interior.
"That one's going back," says Iggy, "It's just too much. I'd be afraid I might get my head blown off. It might trigger some guy's war memory or something."
Iggy suggests a nearby beach as a photo location, and minutes later we're on our way aboard the Jeepster, its deep, wuffling exhaust as distinctive as its owner's vocal cords.
"There was a kid, a killer drummer in my high school, called TR and he had a band called TR and the Cobras," says Iggy as we cross a causeway over the sparkling green of Biscayne Bay. "He had one of these and I always thought 'that's so cool'. I liked it too because of the Marc Bolan song, T-Rex. Killer fuckin' tune..."
As Iggy cheerfully launches into a few impromptu acapella bars of 'Jeepster' and a cooling breeze blows in from the sea, it strikes me that becoming a writer might have been one of my better life decisions. I was born the year this quirky little Jeep rolled off a Midwestern production line. Iggy, meanwhile, was starting his career as he meant to go on.
"I was 19, in my High School band the Iguanas and I fell asleep at the wheel of a borrowed Comet convertible," he recalls. "I woke up just in time to see myself driving it through a Christmas tree orchard. It ended up on an embankment. The car stopped, came to and it started again. I got it home and next day when I woke up there were pine needles stickin' outta every possible crevice."
Great days, great days. Does Iggy ever, er, pine for his misspent youth?
"I read something once that men, are happiest when they cue their visual style to the period in their life when they were happiest," he tells me. "I think there's some truth in that I'm afraid. I don't like to look at that too closely but there is some truth in it. I reverted. This is how I wore my hair when I was 19. I never liked to wear shoes...
"And I like cars from the late Sixties, early Seventies. They built 'em with a lot of confidence, a lot of dash. I don't know what's goin' on now. I've yet to drive a new car that had any feel what-fucking-soever and they don't sound right either."
The Jeepster, by contrast, sounds magnificent, emitting a menacing guttural snarl every time Iggy prods the accelerator with his leathery right foot, shod in a thick-soled flip-flop to compensate for having one leg shorter than the other. In early interviews, Iggy used to claim the Stooge's uniquely brutal, industrial sound was inspired by the noise of Detroit's mighty car plants.
"Absolutely," he says, "I didn't realize it then how unusual that was then to live in an environment where really cars were the only things goin' on. When I was little we went on a field trip to River Rouge which was an industrial park of immense size. If I went there now it would probably look nightmarish but to me then it was great. You heard how they pressed the metal, saw the catwalks, and all this was very impressive."
The young Jim Osterberg grew up in a trailer park, the son of the only college educated couple on the site; high school English teacher Newell and housewife Louella. A new Ford or GM car was always parked outside their shiny, Jetsonesque trailer.
"Every year he would trade up and always had a spankin' new beautiful, well-painted, bitchin' car," remembers Iggy. "Finally by the time I was in High School he'd moved up to Cadillacs and my classmates used to tease me 'Your car is big as you house, uhuh-huh-huh!' Cause it almost was, you know."
Pop's early life and career are about to be made into a feature film, currently in development, called The Passenger. Former Hobbit Elijah Wood will play the youthful Ig; an unusual choice perhaps but one Iggy is happy with. I ask if he has any control over his portrayal.
"You never do," he shrugs, "You can think you will and get involved and then have a lot of tears later. And I've done enough film work myself to know how that works and I just stay clear. But I'll be happy to coach the actor off set, if he wants to come down. Because that's a professional courtesy, I can see that."
To be the subject of a biopic, good or bad, is rare for a living performer; an acknowledgement within their own lifetime of some kind of 'legend' status. Yet Iggy insists he never consciously created his own myth.
"I never noticed," he says. "It was more 'What else can I do? I can't do any of that other shit. I can't do that. You know, all that stuff you're supposed to do'. So what the fuck was I gonna do? And then later I kinda realised 'This is a bit colourful here, you know'."
And despite the Rollers, the Bentley and John Malkovich's Ferrari, he seems remarkably unimpressed by wealth, perhaps because for long tracts of his career, he remained untroubled by commercial success. When the money finally came, were nice cars a high priority?
"No," he replies after a thoughtful pause. "People. I've got a fairly large group of people past present and future that kinda are living better because of me. Then the main thing I do with it is I say no. That's my great luxury. To be in showbusiness and to be able to say: 'No. I don't need to say yes to you. I've got some money so you can just kiss my fuckin' ass!'"
©Richard Fleury. All Rights Reserved. A version of this story appeared in Automobile and GQ magazines.
©AlexP
Iggy looks like a man who likes to kick back at the beach. Now knocking on the door of 60, when he plans to retire, the one-time 'fucked-up godfather of nihilistic horseshit' (his words) is impossibly lean, with long, sunbleached surfer hair and the kind of deep, craggy tan that suggests a tough life, not one of moneyed leisure.
Pop's wayward life is the stuff of legend. With his band of suburban misfits The Stooges, the once-shy kid from a Detroit trailer park invented punk rock while Malcolm McLaren was still swishing around West London in velvet flares.
The Stooges music was harsh, driving, stripped down to primal riffs. The songs were disaffected howls performed with confrontational ferocity. Feral frontman Iggy injected heroin onstage, unfurled his porn star-issue penis at every available opportunity, smeared raw meat onto his naked body, slashed open his chest with broken glass and on one particularly lively evening, immortalized on the bootleg live album Metallic KO, picked a fight with an entire biker gang. He lost.
Offstage his appetite for excitement was equally voracious. Crashing and burning through his twenties and thirties like an oblivion-seeking missile, he blazed through drugs, booze and women (including some very young women. Girls, in fact). Pop was a reckless hero of decadent self-destruction in an industry full of imploding stars.
The Doors' Jim Morrison, one of Pop's early inspirations, believed William Blake's dictum that 'the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom'. In Morrison's case, sadly, it led to a weight problem and a premature death in a Paris bathtub. But by some physiological miracle, Iggy survived, battle-scarred but more or less intact. And perhaps in his case, a palace of wisdom was there waiting for him. Or at least a bungalow of balance.
Today's Iggy Pop is a relaxed, warm, open, inquisitive and intensely charming man who enjoys a glass of wine, a book, a round of golf, his morning 40 minutes of t'ai chi. And "just driving around the 'hood", taking it all in like The Passenger in his song. "Lately I just drive around Miami Beach," he says, "That's about it. A half hour area but lots of cultural changes of pace."
His 'hood is Miami's Little Haiti, where women in African dress speak French on street corners. Iggy loves it: "Everybody looks fuckin cool. You gotta watch it but there's some cool shit back there."
Iggy's 'little cottage' is a modest bungalow crammed with creative clutter, antique furniture and Haitian voodoo art (One of the living room chairs is occupied by a life-sized statue of a blue-skinned pregnant amazon). But he lives a self-imposed double life, divided between the South Beach home he shares with Nina, his girlfriend of six years, and here, where he works and thinks. "My cultural activities and spiritual life take place here," he explains.
Today, the Stooges are over at Iggy's place, working on some music. Drummer Scott Asheton is standing out front when I arrive, quietly checking out Iggy's cars gleaming, freshly-washed cars lined up on the lawn.
Since he moved to the city from New York City ("not a driver's place") eight years ago, Iggy has owned three Rollers, a Bentley and an electric blue 1984 Ferrari 308 previously owned by John Malkovich, "by some weird coincidence".
"I drove the shit outta that car. One day I was driving it, listening to voodoo music. And I got a little too caught up and I'd already gotten two speeding tickets and I was doing triple the speed limit down a divided residential thoroughfare and I ran a red light because I thought it was green. Like a dyslexic person: 'Oh, the light's red, that means I can go.' I coulda killed somebody.
"I made a turn onto the street where I live and a cop pulled me over in my neighbourhood, in my Ferrari with the lights going. Which is kinda uncool if you wanna have another side to your life. I was like 56 at that point. So I thought to myself, the next step is something terrible's going to happen. So I got rid of it. I had my experience of about four years with that car and it was great."
Iggy likes old things and prefers the character and unpredictability of used cars to the sterile reliability of new metal. "But you should always have two. Cause there's gonna be one in the shop all the time," he advises with a goofy snicker. "When I had the Corniche S, I had a Rolls-Royce Wraith for backup But when the Corniche blew up I said: "Fuck it, I'm gettin' some American cars!'
So Iggy paid a visit to Miami specialist auto dealer, Ted Vernon, whose 79th Street warehouse is a local landmark and a treasure trove of oddball Americana.
"He puts the cars out front, like candy. I bought that one, a daddy car for cruisin'," says Iggy pointing to a blue 1972 Oldsmobile Delta Royale. "It's like the kinda car an old school blues or R&B kinda guy with an ass pocket of whiskey would drive. Back in the day. This car can take a pretty good soaking and dry out. It's like an old couch. It rains a lot here, we get a lot of torrential downpours. And the top is iffy. Sometimes it stays up, sometimes it stays down...
"And this," he says aiming a bony digit at a screaming yellow 1966 Jeepster with hot rod flames licking up the bonnet, "Is for fun!
"These are like my friends. When I see them I get happy, they do something wrong, I'm angry. Plus it's always exciting wondering what's gonna happen next."
Parked between them is a car too outrageous even for the man who pioneered oral sex and shooting up heroin as stage gimmicks. It's a 1968 Chevrolet Impala customized with a psychedelic Woodstock/Vietnam theme on approval from Ted's. An acid flashback on wheels, it's a full-on visual trip airbrushed with anti-war motifs and boasting a denim and zebra print interior.
"That one's going back," says Iggy, "It's just too much. I'd be afraid I might get my head blown off. It might trigger some guy's war memory or something."
Iggy suggests a nearby beach as a photo location, and minutes later we're on our way aboard the Jeepster, its deep, wuffling exhaust as distinctive as its owner's vocal cords.
"There was a kid, a killer drummer in my high school, called TR and he had a band called TR and the Cobras," says Iggy as we cross a causeway over the sparkling green of Biscayne Bay. "He had one of these and I always thought 'that's so cool'. I liked it too because of the Marc Bolan song, T-Rex. Killer fuckin' tune..."
As Iggy cheerfully launches into a few impromptu acapella bars of 'Jeepster' and a cooling breeze blows in from the sea, it strikes me that becoming a writer might have been one of my better life decisions. I was born the year this quirky little Jeep rolled off a Midwestern production line. Iggy, meanwhile, was starting his career as he meant to go on.
"I was 19, in my High School band the Iguanas and I fell asleep at the wheel of a borrowed Comet convertible," he recalls. "I woke up just in time to see myself driving it through a Christmas tree orchard. It ended up on an embankment. The car stopped, came to and it started again. I got it home and next day when I woke up there were pine needles stickin' outta every possible crevice."
Great days, great days. Does Iggy ever, er, pine for his misspent youth?
"I read something once that men, are happiest when they cue their visual style to the period in their life when they were happiest," he tells me. "I think there's some truth in that I'm afraid. I don't like to look at that too closely but there is some truth in it. I reverted. This is how I wore my hair when I was 19. I never liked to wear shoes...
"And I like cars from the late Sixties, early Seventies. They built 'em with a lot of confidence, a lot of dash. I don't know what's goin' on now. I've yet to drive a new car that had any feel what-fucking-soever and they don't sound right either."
The Jeepster, by contrast, sounds magnificent, emitting a menacing guttural snarl every time Iggy prods the accelerator with his leathery right foot, shod in a thick-soled flip-flop to compensate for having one leg shorter than the other. In early interviews, Iggy used to claim the Stooge's uniquely brutal, industrial sound was inspired by the noise of Detroit's mighty car plants.
"Absolutely," he says, "I didn't realize it then how unusual that was then to live in an environment where really cars were the only things goin' on. When I was little we went on a field trip to River Rouge which was an industrial park of immense size. If I went there now it would probably look nightmarish but to me then it was great. You heard how they pressed the metal, saw the catwalks, and all this was very impressive."
The young Jim Osterberg grew up in a trailer park, the son of the only college educated couple on the site; high school English teacher Newell and housewife Louella. A new Ford or GM car was always parked outside their shiny, Jetsonesque trailer.
"Every year he would trade up and always had a spankin' new beautiful, well-painted, bitchin' car," remembers Iggy. "Finally by the time I was in High School he'd moved up to Cadillacs and my classmates used to tease me 'Your car is big as you house, uhuh-huh-huh!' Cause it almost was, you know."
Pop's early life and career are about to be made into a feature film, currently in development, called The Passenger. Former Hobbit Elijah Wood will play the youthful Ig; an unusual choice perhaps but one Iggy is happy with. I ask if he has any control over his portrayal.
"You never do," he shrugs, "You can think you will and get involved and then have a lot of tears later. And I've done enough film work myself to know how that works and I just stay clear. But I'll be happy to coach the actor off set, if he wants to come down. Because that's a professional courtesy, I can see that."
To be the subject of a biopic, good or bad, is rare for a living performer; an acknowledgement within their own lifetime of some kind of 'legend' status. Yet Iggy insists he never consciously created his own myth.
"I never noticed," he says. "It was more 'What else can I do? I can't do any of that other shit. I can't do that. You know, all that stuff you're supposed to do'. So what the fuck was I gonna do? And then later I kinda realised 'This is a bit colourful here, you know'."
And despite the Rollers, the Bentley and John Malkovich's Ferrari, he seems remarkably unimpressed by wealth, perhaps because for long tracts of his career, he remained untroubled by commercial success. When the money finally came, were nice cars a high priority?
"No," he replies after a thoughtful pause. "People. I've got a fairly large group of people past present and future that kinda are living better because of me. Then the main thing I do with it is I say no. That's my great luxury. To be in showbusiness and to be able to say: 'No. I don't need to say yes to you. I've got some money so you can just kiss my fuckin' ass!'"
©Richard Fleury. All Rights Reserved. A version of this story appeared in Automobile and GQ magazines.