Iggy Pop - The Seven Lives of the Iguana

In 1976, James Jewel Osterberg, better known to everyone as Iggy Pop, is at a dead end. The Stooges adventure was a reckless, euphoric binge, but ultimately a short-lived one. It all burned out over the space of four years, in that lethal trio of albums that detonated America's underground scene at the turn of the '60s and '70s. A deep dive into the heart of darkness of Motor City, Detroit, amid insane bacchanals and Dionysian rites that made even the Velvet Underground look pale by comparison, foreshadowing a nihilistic “no future” avant la lettre.

But what's left now? Sure, as a performer, the Iguana from Ypsilanti, Michigan has few rivals, ever since that legendary Halloween night in 1967 that marked the Stooges' baptism. He's an animal on stage, a lustful satyr who always knows how to set the audience ablaze with his kamikaze theatrics. His fate — retracing the exploits of his idol Jim Morrison, abandoning the certainty of an ordinary middle-class life — seemed already written.

Now, though, it all seems to have ended too soon. No fun. Not even at the legendary Fun House, which has shut its doors for good, flattened to make way for a highway. That's how the monuments of rock end too, sometimes…

In short, Iggy Pop is alone. The flower children reek of rot, and the turn into a new decade is just around the corner. Can a man, at thirty, warmly wave goodbye to his audience and retire into private life? Of course not. Sometimes bipolar depression can produce masterpieces. With a little help from a friend, Beatles-style, you can manage to stay in the game and learn to walk again through the freezing Berlin nights. David Bowie, already behind the scenes in 1973 on a “Raw Power” plagued by excess and line-up reshuffles within the Stooges, is in America on the promotional tour for “Station To Station”, while Iggy Pop keeps messing around, getting high on Quaaludes and having fun provoking people, earning himself beatings, brushes with overdose, and sinking into a form of self-annihilation that is both joyful and desperate.

Standing by the Wall

The outstretched hands always seem a little too eager to suck the marrow out of this listless, divinely overflowing animal, who falls a thousand times and tempts fate a thousand more, alternating bodily and spiritual depravity with a half-hearted macrobiotic diet and some improbable exercise routine, in a schizophrenic tug-of-war between self-destruction and survival instinct. But the White Duke's invitation, after an initial, strategic reluctance, cannot go unanswered, since it hints at the possibility of a relationship between equals, rather than a clash of egos, a duel fought with reciprocal genius.

Iggy sets off on tour with Bowie, who, fascinated by German Expressionism and the Teutonic aesthetics of the Nazi years, decides to move to Berlin. Bowie — impeccably cleaned-up on the outside, lucidly intoxicated within, spectral and essential — is there to soak up the will-o'-the-wisps and decadent transgression of Mitteleuropa, which will form the backdrop to the Berlin Trilogy (in order, Low, “Heroes”, “Lodger”), in which Brian Eno will step in as a dazzling deus ex machina. Iggy is less elegant. More physical. Fast-forwarded. A first-generation punk. A stray dog resistant to any kind of leash. A visionary deliberately incapable of exercising creative control over his drug abuse. A heroin addict by vocation. A desperate warrior, proud of his own unfitness. Two antithetical identities, a clash of yin and yang weaving together Bowie's alleged, Wildean bisexuality with the hustling and the legendary, cheerfully contracted infections Iggy picked up fooling around with Nico.

The White Duke's ability to remain fully in control even in the most perverse of situations is the missing piece that had, until then, eluded Iggy, incapable of any form of self-restraint, a martyr to his own outrageous energy. But the Iggy Pop who arrives in Europe is a man recovering from himself before any substance, a nearly thirty-year-old man illuminated by Bowie's blinding, fascinating, glacial self-control.

The light changes, along with the moods. David Bowie is producer and arranger of “The Idiot”, while the authorship of the lyrics, suspended between provocation, nihilism and the search for a new solo identity for Iggy Pop, remains, to this day, the fascinating mystery that fuels the clash between different accounts (Iggy, as it's usually put? Bowie? Iggy with Bowie? Iggy “through” Bowie? and one could go on using plenty of other formulas). The album was recorded, for half of it, at the glorious Chateau d'Herouville in Languedoc, built in the 18th century and bought in 1962 by composer Michel Magne, who had set up a recording studio there that was frequented, in the following years, by numerous rockstars: Elton John, Pink Floyd, and Bowie himself with “Pinups” in 1973. The second half of the record, instead, was recorded at Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin. What happened during the twilight walks through the city of Christiane F. we'll never know, but perhaps those frenzied demons thin out to slip into a less redundant spleen, colder and measured out with narcotic awareness.

Angela Bowie hurls thunderbolts at the new rock-doll couple, almost as if to validate the pretentiousness of "Velvet Goldmine", a film that plays on the resemblance between the relationship of its two leads and the dynamics between David and Iggy. But reducing it all to a mere, carnal, spur-of-the-moment meeting of amorous minds would truly be reductive. What's certain is that this encounter between Bowie's decadent hedonism and Pop's wildness was not looked upon kindly by Angela, disgusted by this so unexpected and almost improbable symbiosis — so resentful that, years later, she would attribute to her ex-husband a supposed adoration of Nazism, rather than of its striking aesthetics (and only that, it must be added).

Any conjecture around The Idiot goes straight to hell from the very first listen, where the temperature is so cold it burns, in an improbable oxymoron made believable by the album's gestation and recording. An album that at no point knows the sin of redundancy, condensed into about forty minutes of inferno in black and white, in which you seem to breathe in the frost, producing rings of vapor, in what is either an ordinary night or a singular sunless morning. The possible continuity with the Berlin trilogy is confirmed by the tensions of “Sister Midnight”, easily comparable to the intro of “Fantastic Voyage”, which would open “Lodger” two years later, while “Nightclubbing” raises the curtain on cold blues, transforming the depraved burlesque staged by Iggy into an utterly cool way of being (“Nightclubbing we’re nightclubbing/ We’re an ice machine/ We see people brand new people”), shortly afterward worthily covered by Grace Jones. And how nervy, suspended between drama and tenderness, is “Baby”, a blurred ballad, a dramatic plea not to plunge into an all-too-familiar abyss (“Baby there’s nothing to see/ I’ve already been/ Down the street of chance). “Little China Girl” (later also performed by Bowie himself in a more ironic version, perhaps softened by the hedonism of the 80s, on “Let's Dance”) is a manifesto of exotic and fascinating sensuality, with a deeply visionary and inspired lyricism (“I’d feel tragic/ Like I was Marlon Brando/ When I’d look at my China Girl/ I could pretend that nothing/ Really meant too much/ When I’d look at my China Girl”).

The Idiot also has the great merit of containing a generational gem, tucked away in the folds of a sonic fabric that grows ever more enchanting: “Dum Dum Boys” is a raw declaration of love to another breed, to a sparse group of misfits looked upon with suspicion and, for that very reason, an object of conflicted attraction for the masses. Iggy Pop's voice turns haughty and cocky, baring that old sense of superiority and indifference to what most people think, before giving in to the play of synthesizers that opens the long, stretched-out close of “Mass Production”, a surreal journey to the end of the night.

The album's natural locus is right there, alongside the trilogy, with only a slight indulgence in the more or less conscious choice to follow a chronological criterion that places it close to “Heroes” and “Low” and before “Lodger”, as a possible missing link in an expanded trilogy, or a quadrilogy that never quite happened, as if Bowie had for a moment revealed a more sordid and feral alter ego.

With a little help from his friend, Iggy Pop is reborn to a remarkable new life, able to mark, without ever needing to raise his voice, a fundamental chapter in the history of music.

Having wrapped up the very brief tour in support of The Idiot, in April 1977 Pop and Bowie are back in the studio, Hansa in West Berlin, working on the songs that would become the next chapter of their collaboration, Lust For Life.

Written, recorded and mixed in just eight days, Lust For Life is a muscular, urgent, aggressive record that best sums up the other side of the “new” Iggy — the instinctive, uninhibited rocker — as opposed to the intellectual, decadent one of his solo debut. If The Idiot, in fact, represented a decisive leap forward in time, a dive into electronic, futuristic sound whose full potential would only unspool starting the following decade, the duo's second opus conceptually captures the zeitgeist of 1977, a proto-punk record released just an instant before that very term would rise into a youth phenomenon, crystallizing among today's legends. And it already looks beyond it.

Produced by Bowie and Pop themselves (assisted by Colin Thurston under the pseudonym “Bewlay Bros”) and splendidly performed by a top-tier band (Ricky Gardiner and Carlos Alomar on guitars, Hunt and Tony Sales, future Tin Machine members, on the rhythm section, plus Bowie himself on keyboards and piano), Lust For Life masterfully juggles post-pubescent garage-rock roots, glam echoes and generous post-punk flashes of insight. On top of that, it gives the Iguana two of the songs that instantly mark him out in the rock pantheon: the title track, the unmistakable, festive, hammering rave-up written by Bowie supposedly inspired by the Morse code that preceded the broadcast of the news bulletin for American armed forces in Berlin, one of the most joyous celebrations of Iggy's perverse imagination, and “The Passenger”, flanerie and existentialism filtered through the eyes of the nocturnal animal that is Iggy, riding a riff (by Gardiner) — almost reggae, scorched with urban dark carbon monoxide — that is an ode to perpetual motion and the most compelling, kicking circularity. Siouxsie Sioux would turn it into a great cover in 1987.

Then, ahead of its time: the prescient synth-pop (not by chance, co-producer Colin Thurston would also become a minor Midas of the genre in the Eighties, working with bands like Human League, Duran Duran and Gary Numan) meets the drawn guitars of “Tonight” (later redone by Bowie on the album of the same name in 1984) with the ethereal, cradling haze of keyboards, Iggy's baritone set in a decidedly Bowie-esque mode and, toward the end, a splendid, healing, razor-sharp micro-solo by Gardiner, and the jittery, distorted, drugged post-punk of “Neighborhood Threat”.

Further in the background, the other tracks still hold their own: both the fetishistic, Chuck Berry-indebted garage'n'roll of “Sweet Sixteen” and the colorful, zany glam of “Success” (with its flashy, hyper-saturated Ronson-esque guitars), as well as the driving, accelerated urgency of “Some Weird Sin”, almost a twin to the title track, and the sprawling soul-rock (about 7 minutes) — a Stones-like relic — of “Turn Blue”, with Iggy, between pauses and restarts, alternating Lou Reed-style spoken-word passages with sharp, raucous howls that seem like a caricature of Mick Jagger, sublimating in a kind of prayer (“Jesus? This Is Iggy…”) his exasperated erotic desire for a Black girl.

Lust For Life sells very well, reaching number 28 on the UK charts and 128 on the American ones (where, however, after a great start, it gets penalized by the concurrent death of Elvis Presley and RCA's resulting decision to focus on reissuing the “King's” catalog, effectively abandoning the album to its own fate), proving in hindsight to be the greatest commercial success of an artist, like Pop, who was never particularly lucky in that department.

And yet, despite the good results achieved up to that point, the Iguana grows ever more restless, fickle, hungry. He wants to give his career a more personal and decisive turn. So, having hastily wrapped up the contract binding him to RCA with the release of the live album Tv Eye in 1978, he signs with the up-and-coming, ambitious Arista. It looks like a good deal for both parties: on one hand Pop gets the chance to step out of Bowie's shadow, to prove he can successfully steer his own musical identity and finally become a front-rank rockstar, on the other the label aims to cash in on the huge popularity that the ex-Stooge — by then known to everyone as “the godfather of punk” — enjoys among the new generation of listeners with leather jackets, torn clothes and spiked hair (or aspiring to be). A move similar to the one made the previous year, snatching, again from RCA, another retro-punk hero: the great Lou Reed.

The “second debut”

Travel companions and chief collaborators of Pop's on this “second debut” are two other veterans of the London incarnation of the Stooges: James Williamson, acting as producer and guitarist, and Scott Thurston (not to be confused with the earlier Colin), a multi-instrumentalist, arranger and co-writer of most of the songs. The former had been one of the architects of “Raw Power”, the latter had taken part in the subsequent, stormy tour. But New Values, as the title already suggests, is not a nostalgic record, or a return to the past tout court, but rather the natural evolution of Lust For Life, in a substantially successful attempt to balance rock/garage revivalism, punk credentials and synth and new wave suggestions (thanks, above all, to Thurston's keyboards and arrangements).

So the basic, direct punk'n'roll of “Girls” (which smacks of the early 70s and of New York Dolls), “Five Foot One” and “I'm Bored” (which wouldn't have looked out of place on the last Stooges records) is counterbalanced by the garage-wave of the jumpy, compulsive “Billy Is A Runaway” and of the title track (handclappin', vocoder, harsh keyboard flourishes). As for the rest, the influence, albeit indirect, of post-glam Bowie is still clearly distinguishable on tracks like “Don't Look Down” (later redone by David himself on “Tonight”), perhaps the best of the bunch, an elegant and tasty hybrid between the glam of “Transformer” and the Thin White Duke's soul, roughly speaking, in the incoming pop-rock of “Tell Me A Story” (wrapped in a chiffon of mischievous backing vocals) and in the unresolved, piano-based ballad with a black-music feel, “Angel”.

The record is rounded out by two strange and mysterious oddities, though by no means lacking in charm: "Endless Sea", a "Morrisonian" spoken word piece declaimed by Iggy over a rippling carpet of murky, subterranean pulsations that comes close to anticipating the dark-dub of Pil, and "African Man", a kind of forerunner of afro-wave contamination in which Pop gives free rein to all his animalistic, primordial showmanship.

Although it's overall a very well-crafted record, New Values fails to achieve the commercial results hoped for (peaking at just number 180 on Billboard), with the sole exception of Australia and New Zealand, where, thanks in part to an extraordinary TV performance in which the Iguana literally sets fire to the studio of "Countdown" - one of the most watched music shows in that part of the world - Pop became, for a time, one of the most celebrated rockstars around.

The winning streak of solo records comes to an abrupt halt, however, with 1980's Soldier. Where on previous records Pop had shown a degree of artistic growth - no longer just a great performer and extraordinary improviser but also an author in fieri, exercising, compared to the past, greater control over himself and his music - here, partly due to a series of mistakes and self-sabotaging production choices, the end result is rather disappointing.

Soldier is a muddled, over-chewed project, passed through too many hands (originally meant to be co-produced by Bowie and Williamson, but after the former bailed out due to musical and personal incompatibility, and the latter got fired, it ended up in the far more anonymous hands of Pat Moran, and was then remixed, very badly, by Thom Panunzio) - a clumsy, badly timed attempt to (re)climb aboard the bandwagon of 1977-style punk (just as it was already running out of steam) and harness it to some more post, evolved, modernist ideas. That much is also clear from the musicians backing him in the studio: Glen Matlock (formerly of the Sex Pistols) on bass and co-writing several tracks, Barry Andrews (formerly of Xtc) on keyboards, Ivan Kral (of Patti Smith's original, historic band) on guitar and keyboards, and Steve New (punk's enfant prodige, already a fixture of the Sex Pistols circle and later of the Rich Kids) on lead guitar.

And it's precisely the absence of electric guitars (bafflingly sidelined and buried in the final mix in favor of an indigestible cocktail of synths, acoustic guitar, piano and the like) that undercuts the power of the more aggressive tracks - that, together with rather flat songwriting and a Pop in shaky vocal shape, is the most glaring flaw in the sound of Soldier (especially on the dismal "Loco Mosquito", "Ambition" and "Take Care Of Me"). Elsewhere, Pop manages to wring a bit of residual Stooges-style energy out of the cartoonish "Dog Food", the hooligan-esque "Knocking 'em Down In The City" and the Pistols-like "I Snub You". But not even the more artsy moments, like "Get Up & Get Out" (languid groove and jazzy horns), "Mr Dynamite" and the synthetic, Bowie-esque "Play It Safe" (with Simple Minds on backing vocals), do much to raise the overall level of a modest, transitional album.

So what keeps Iggy Pop afloat in 1980 is above all the "Nightclubbing Tour", backed by former Patti Smith Group members like Ivan Kral and Richard Sohl, and former Blondie members like Gary Valentine and Clem Burke. Particularly memorable is the Detroit date alongside the Rolling Stones.

With Party (1981), Pop brings his three-year stint with Arista to the worst possible close. Having registered the essential commercial failure of Soldier (only number 125 on Billboard), the label pushes for a commercial turn that might relaunch him up the charts, and Pop, presumably none too thrilled about it, does what he can to oblige them. But Party is an ill-fitting suit, thrown together any old way, that visibly doesn't sit right on the Iguana, who's far more at home in the "nude look". The result: if Soldier was disappointing, Party is an outright disaster.

With the punk flirtation now filed away, Pop once again changes his backing band: the only survivor from the previous record is Kral, the rest being competent session players, a little-known arranger (Jimmy Whizner) and an even more pointless horn section (The Uptown Horns). The production (handed to Thom Panunzio and Tommy Boyce, the latter a former writer and producer for the notorious Monkees), clumsy, lifeless and plasticky, does its worst to package up the mediocre, hedonistic party-rock'n'roll of tracks like "Pleasure", "Rock'n'Roll Party", "Sincerity" (complete with big-band soul backing) and "Happy Jack" (laced with ska), alongside the premature-retirement synth-rock of "Houston Is Hot Tonight" and "Time Won't Let Me". Amid a contrived, vaguely Cramps-like rockabilly number ("Eggplate") and a saccharine cover of a late-'50s classic ("Sea Of Love"), the only track that survives (barely) is the light, danceable synth-pop of "Bang Bang" (later covered, with very little success, by Bowie a few years on).

Party, besides revealing a Pop in clear identity crisis, repeats the box-office failure of the two previous records and leads to the mutually agreed termination of his contract with Arista.

With the idea of riding the ascendant Eighties by disguising himself as a successful rockstar (like his friend Bowie) now abandoned, Iggy - who in 1980 had published an autobiography tellingly titled "I Need More" (with Andy Warhol saying of him in the preface: "I don't know why he hasn't gotten the success he deserves yet, he's so good") - retreats within the United States and settles, briefly, at Animal, the small label owned by Chris Stein of Blondie. The first and only record released there (Animal itself wouldn't fare much better, shutting down after just two years, in 1984) is Zombie Birdhouse. Produced by Stein - fronting a band featuring himself on bass, Rob Duprey (a minor legend of the New York underground via Mumps) on guitar and keyboards (and co-writer of nearly all the songs with Iggy), and fellow Blondie member Clem Burke on drums - Iggy Pop's fifth solo record is a bizarre dark/horror pastiche with comic-book atmospheres (which, especially in the lyrics, seem to nod to the Gun Club, whose contemporaneous "Miami" was, not by chance, produced by the very same Stein), musically defined by a mild blend of synth-wave, electronics and horror-punk.

Zombie Birdhouse is an ambitious, unfinished record, more fun to "imagine" or talk about than to actually listen to, either irritating or fascinating depending on your point of view - or maybe your mood. A jumble of ideas that are often good when taken individually, but frequently assembled in a rather sloppy, confused way. While the mix of synths and garage/punk lands effectively on a track like "Eat Or Be Eaten", elsewhere everything sounds decidedly more limp, grand guignol-ish, repetitive ("Bulldozer", "Run Like A Villain", "The Villagers", "Angry Hills").

Some experiments are interesting, or at least curious: the chanting electro-rock in the vein of Public Image Limited on "Street Crazies", almost a tribal zombie dance; the semi-industrial "Watching The News", a saturated ambient collage of sampled voices, jittery beats and off-key Iggy-esque declamations; and the mechanical, Kraftwerk-like "Life Of Work". But more often Pop's voice seems completely detached from the context, to the point where it's hard to tell whether he genuinely believes in what he's doing or is deliberately playing it as parody (as on the synthetic country of "The Ballad Of The Cookie Mc Bride" or the saccharine "Platonic", which sounds like a novelty number from Bowie's "new romantic" period).

Beyond its undeniable camp charm, Zombie Birdhouse strikes us today, more than anything, as a document of an Iggy Pop on a downward arc, confusedly searching for himself.

All the ingredients are there for the record to be an even bigger commercial flop than its predecessors. And so it is.

Success Talk

Once again, David Bowie steps in providentially to turn around Iguana's fortunes, by now also in the IRS's crosshairs over tax issues: in 1983 Bowie includes a new version of "China Girl" (co-written with Pop and already featured on The Idiot) on his brand-new bestseller "Let's Dance". The royalties from the song give Pop some breathing room, allowing him to settle his troubles with the tax authorities and take a three-year break during which he finally beats his heroin addiction, takes acting lessons, and even gets married (to the young Japanese woman Suchi Asano).

To witness Pop's return to the scene, once again under the care of the former Thin White Duke, we'll have to wait until 1986, with Blah, Blah, Blah.

If with the artsy fascinations of The Idiot Bowie had offered Pop a kind of "fourth chapter" of his Berlin trilogy, with Blah, Blah, Blah he hands him his own "Let's Dance", even co-writing some of the tracks with him. It's a record that sounds decidedly more mainstream and radio-friendly than most of its predecessors, over-produced and wrapped in its glossy (and today undeniably dated) Eighties packaging. A sophisticated sound, though not without a few of the era's naiveties (the drum echo, the plasticky keyboards, the occasional dull beat). Still, as with "Let's Dance", there's no shortage of sharply focused songs, split almost evenly between airy ballads and jittery pop-rock bursts.

What really sends Blah, Blah, Blah up the charts are three hits above all: "Real Wild Child (Wild One)", which turns the classic 1950s tune by Australian rocker Johnny O'Keefe into a full-throttle electro-rockabilly number; the romantic, aching "Cry For Love" (“In searching for/ A meaningful embrace/ Sometimes my self-respect/ Took second place”), co-written with ex-Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and branded by his searing guitar slashes; and the equally brooding "Shades", a ballad with a wistful mood and a half-serious lyric where, amid a thicket of riffs and synthetic percussion, Iggy really does seem to be chasing his English friend's aristocratic crooning, with a smooth, melodramatic baritone.

In short, there's a lot of Bowie here (arguably the best of his — admittedly none-too-inspired — Eighties output, considering that a year later came that mess "Never Let Me Down") and little of the Stooges, but what little there is has been kept intact, as in the depraved anthem "Winners And Losers", where Iggy once again sings like a caged beast, backed by Kevin Armstrong's scratchy guitar and broad strokes of strings.

The furious title track, meanwhile, reshapes the blueprint of "Lust For Life" into a hip-hop stomp, stripped down to the bone, while "Baby It Can't Fall" veers openly into synth-pop, with its catchy chorus and Bowie himself contributing backing vocals.

Showing more maturity as a vocalist, Iguana also indulges in intricate, dreamy rock ballads such as "Hideway" and "Little Miss Emperor", where it's hard to recognize the "street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm" celebrated in "Search And Destroy" (from "Raw Power").

This Iggy Pop "in a suit and tie", maybe with a touch of 80s electro-glamour scent, will make early fans turn up their noses, but Blah, Blah, Blah would remain the biggest commercial success of his career, climbing the top ten in many countries and even going "gold" in Canada. Paradoxically so, since deep down it's one of his least "felt" albums: biographer David Buckley would later recount an unhappy Iggy, who went so far as to all but disown the record, calling it "a Bowie album in everything but name".

Fully relaunched by the success of Blah, Blah, Blah, yet no less moody or jealous of his own independence, Iggy Pop decides once again to break away from Bowie's musical guidance and head in a completely different direction. But this time, the sudden U-turn sends him careening off the road.

Hastily hailed as a liberating return to the "instinctive" rock of his early days, Istinct (1988) is an empty, monotonous, disappointing record that winks at the glossy hard-rock and pop-metal sounds in vogue in the second half of the 80s. But there's no grit, no viciousness, no edge, no transgression here — just ten bare, repetitive songs that all sound the same, with a metronomic, skeletal drum sound, a bass that's practically nonexistent, and Steve Jones's stale riffs (which, Sex Pistols aside, have never amounted to much), all bloated with reverb and synthetic layers by the flabby production of Bill Laswell, an otherwise versatile and usually gifted musician.

Amid this near-total lack of taste and inspiration, only the grinding, strained "Cold Metal", the Detroit-style "Squarehead" and the leather-and-studs biker tune "Easy Rider" manage to send out a faint distress signal.

Driven by the single "Cold Metal" (nominated for a 1989 Grammy for "Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance"), Istinct proves, despite the sheer mediocrity of its content, to be a fair success (reaching 110 on Billboard), which spurs Iguana to press on with renewed enthusiasm down the road of FM radio and, more broadly, of a more classic, traditional brand of rock.

Dropped by A&M, precisely over disagreements about the musical direction he'd taken, the unpredictable Pop signs with Virgin, for whom he records Brick By Brick in 1990.

With the polished, meticulous, radio-ready production of a refined mainstream craftsman like Don Was, and backed by an impressive army of musicians (top-shelf session players like Waddy Wachtel, Chuck Domanico, Kenny Aronoff and David Lindley, alongside icons of the era's youthful rock revisionism like Slash and Duff McKagan of Guns N' Roses), Iggy makes the most American, most streamlined and most carefully calculated record of his career. For better and for worse: because while it's true that Iguana, by then 43 years old, finally seems to have found a musical persona better suited to him, free of both flights of fancy and nostalgic returns to his glorious youth, it must be said that, aside from a few flashes of genuine, furious class, the rest settles into a pleasant but predictable FM-radio-and-thereabouts register.

Riding on its two most outgoing, commercial singles — the pop duet with another post-punk-era survivor, Kate Pierson of the B-52's, on "Candy", and the cinematic power ballad "Living On The Edge Of The Town" (written by Jay Rifkin for Ridley Scott's film "Black Rain") — Brick By Brick effectively alternates between tough, gut-level tracks like the mighty "My Baby Wants Rock'n'Roll", which nods to Guns N' Roses (Slash's guitar was an unmistakable trademark in those years) and to the LA street-rock scene in general, as well as the hard-glam caricatures "Pussy Power" and "Butt Town", and the blazing Southern boogie of "Neon Forest"; and more or less successful ballads such as the Western-style square dance of "Starry Night", the syrupy serenade "Moonlight Lady" and the epic "The Undefeated". Far better are the punk singer-songwriter moments: the roaring, abrasive "I Won't Crap Out", the introspective "Mainstreet's Eye" (which vaguely recalls the Lou Reed of "New York"), and the touching, solitary "Brick By Brick" for voice and acoustic guitar (an instrument Iggy had learned to play around that time).

That Pop's life and career found, starting precisely with Brick By Brick, a center of gravity that was, as much as possible, permanent, and a decisive turning point after the excesses and the aesthetic and existential contortions of the past, can also be gathered from the lyrics, more careful and reflective than usual: “I wanna build a house where an ad don’t scream/ I wanna live in peace-quietly/ I wanna have a place of love and safety” he says in the title track, aware of being a survivor (as he also claims in "The Undefeated") of self-destruction, and that it's now time to find a balance between the wild (and never fully dormant) appetites of youth and the need to plan for his own future; thus, if in "Neon Forest" he distances himself from nearly thirty years of toxic adventures, in the self-critical yet proud "Mainstreet's Eye" he declares: "You and I are not huge mainstream stars/ But, unlike them, we're really what we are".

Either you die young, or you live long enough to become what you always hated: Iggy chose a third way for himself, the middle one, and the result is what can be heard on Brick By Brick: one of his most positive recorded efforts since the end of the Seventies.

With Brick By Brick, the unsinkable Pop, besides receiving enthusiastic (and, in most cases, exaggerated) reviews, somehow manages to (re)tune in to the tastes of a younger audience and win over the hearts of yet another generation of fans of more traditional, direct, purist rock. Energized by the album's success (which sold well especially in America, where it went gold, placing the singles "Candy", "Living On The Edge Of The Night" and "Home" near the top of their respective charts) and by the subsequent tour, in 1991 the Iguana returned to causing a scandal with the video for "Kiss My Blood", in which he performs in his birthday suit as in the old days, while the following year he contributed to the soundtrack of "Arizona Dream", the American film by Emir Kusturica, lending his vocal charisma to four gems written for him by Goran Bregovic ("Tv Screen", "In The Deathcar", "This Is A Film" and "Get The Money").

Ave Cesare

In 1993 it's time for American Caesar, which shows itself to be menacingly self-ironic right from the cover, emblazoned with the words: "Parental Warning: this is a record by Iggy Pop". The Iguana's tenth studio album represents an evolution of the previous one, introducing, within a framework of substantial continuity, a few significant variations. In particular, Pop once again proves receptive to certain trends in vogue in rock music. A partial updating, a keeping up with the times, so to speak, which in this writer's opinion stems not so much, or not only, from mere opportunistic calculation, but from a kind of genuine, and at times naive, desire to bask musically in that eternally adolescent fire that has never stopped burning in him. So if on Brick By Brick it had been more traditional rock and the street/glam scene of Los Angeles that fired the Iguana's imagination, on American Caesar it's the turn of grunge, alternative rock and the last, resilient pockets of Californian hardcore. Especially as regards the record's overall tone: darker, more sarcastic, angrier, tinged with social critique. Malcolm Burn's production, geometric and efficient, while recovering the guidelines set by Was, also tries to scratch up the sound, making it dirtier and more aggressive.

It's a shame, though, that despite the good intentions and Pop's always remarkable mimetic and interpretive gifts, 17 songs are decidedly too many for his songwriting abilities. So much so that the record sounds, in several spots, long-winded, unfocused, decidedly pretentious: "Girls Of N.Y.", the singer-songwriter-ish "It's Our Love" and "Jealousy", the punk'a'billy of "Highway Song" where he ventures into an improbable mix of Johnny Cash and Jeffrey Lee Pierce, or the radio-friendly pop-rock of "Beside You", with which he presumably tries to repeat the trick of "Candy" and, worse still, wastes in a rather banal way the chance to duet with (believe it or not!) a certain Lisa Germano.

Keeping it well above water is a handful of tracks (some co-written with guitarist Eric Schermerhorn) that rank among the best things the middle-aged Iggy ever did: starting with the grunge-metal of the anecdotal, Bukowski-esque "Wild America" (featuring a vocal cameo by Henry Rollins), then the raw, alternative rock of the long, declamatory "Hate", the neo-punk of "Sickness", the epileptic funk-core of "Plastic & Concrete", which almost recalls the very earliest Red Hot Chili Peppers, the enjoyable remake of the classic "Louie, Louie", its lyrics reworked for the occasion into a commentary on early-90s current affairs, right through to the near avant-rock of "Caesar", a monologue recited by Pop over a noisy, theatrical soundscape.

In the 90s Pop could still deliver vital performances and records built on good, workmanlike rock. But the overall quality of his music declined considerably. By now a living icon of rock, the former Stooge also turned successfully to cinema, as shown by his appearances in John Waters's "Cry Baby", Martin Scorsese's "The Color Of Money", Alex Cox's "Sid And Nancy", Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee And Cigarettes" and "Dead Man", Rachel Talalay's "Tank Girl" and Tim Pope's "The Crow: City Of Angels".

Further burnishing his legend was the soundtrack of Danny Boyle's cult movie "Trainspotting" (1996), which dusted off some of his classics, such as "Lust For Life" and "Nightclubbing".

In 1996 came Naughty Little Doggie, in which the attempt to reconnect with the rock'n'roll roots of his early days is evident, stripping down the sound of some of his more recent productions. Even the cover image, with Iggy naked except for a helmet, seems almost to suggest the image of a veteran in the trenches, a survivor unable to adapt to new times. But the quality of the songwriting leaves something to be desired: many tracks come across as sloppy and rushed, if not outright leftovers from the sessions of the previous album.

The production by Thom Wilson, a Los Angeles punk veteran, aims to emphasize the rougher sides of Iggy's repertoire, with blunt, straight-ahead hard-rock numbers like "I Wanna Live", "Heart Is Saved" and, above all, "Innocent World", which delivers perhaps the catchiest chorus of the bunch. There's no shortage, though, of calmer, more reflective moments, in which Iggy seems to reveal an unexpected intimate, nostalgic side, from the ballads "Outta My Head" and "Shoeshine Girl" to the elegy for Johnny Thunders (New York Dolls) "Look Away", a poignant confession about "days gone by" (“I went straight/ And serious too/ There wasn’t much else/ That I could do”). And there's always room for the unrepentant satyr, with his dirty-old-man perversions on the Cramps-like "Pussy Walk", complete with hip-swing rhythm and a demented chorus to match.

On the whole, though, it's an album that goes by without leaving much of a mark.

That same year also saw the release of the anthology Nude And Rude – The Best Of Iggy Pop, which collects many of his hits, including those with the Stooges.

The intimate streak already perceptible in the more restrained moments of Naughty Little Doggie fully emerges three years later on Avenue B, marking a new turning point in the Iguana's output. Past fifty now, the former Stooge comes to terms with himself and with an existence that is now less turbulent but just as unstable, one that registers the end of his marriage to Suchi and his move from New York to Miami (Florida), to the Hispanic quarter. A bitter divorce that leaves its mark on the lyrics and music (the two acoustic ballads "Nazi Girlfriend", on the theme of love's elusiveness, and "Miss Argentina", dedicated to his new partner Alejandra).

The more subdued tone, almost in the style of Lou Reed's "New York", is matched by the production of his friend Don Was and by the instrumentation, with acoustic guitars and Hammond organ prominently on display. Backed by the jazz trio Medeski, Martin and Wood, the former street-cheetah even dons the guise of a seasoned nightclub crooner (the talkin' of "I Felt The Luxury", the bossa nova of "Avenue B") and opens up with rare sincerity ("No Shit"), even taking refuge in the Spanish language amid the rolling drums and dissonant guitars of "Español". Rediscovering his old rock fire is essentially left to "Corruption" alone, one of his typical full-throttle romps, alongside the cover of Johnny Kidd & the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over".

Sincere and workmanlike at the same time, this mature Iggy doesn't lose his appeal, even though he's left with few arrows in his quiver.

Having recruited Whitey Kirst's Trolls and Wayne "Mooseman", the Body Count bassist (who would be killed in a shooting not long after), Pop went back to self-producing in 2001, releasing the mammoth Beat 'em Up. Seventy-two minutes of music for an album that recharges with energy, starting with the deafening incipit of "The Mask", where Iggy howls like in the golden days: “You've got a mask on!” The overall tone is hard and metallic (the pounding "L.O.S.T.", the crossover of the title track, the hardcore vocals of "Drink New Blood", the insolent spoken word of "V.I.P."), and the old proto-punk spirit rages again on the abrasive "Football". But at times, more than the Stooges, what comes to mind are the hard-rock clichés of Alice Cooper or some nu-metal echoes à-la Korn.

Sure, Pop hasn't forgotten the reptile bites of "Raw Power", its animal screams and deadly spasms ("Go For The Throat", "Howl"), and he can still cut a dignified figure when he returns to the garage-rock riffs that suit him best ("Jerk", "Weasels", "Ugliness", "V.I.P.") or basks in the aching electric ballads of the Bowie era ("Talking Snake", "Savior"). But it's certainly a little saddening to watch the deity of an entire generation of rockers, godfather of punk and idol even of the grunge era, in the (vain) attempt to chase the latest heavy trends of the moment.

Two years later comes Skull Ring. A sort of rock kaleidoscope in which the best and worst of Iggy Pop's music mix together, in a series of leaps between past and present, mediocrity and unreachable highs, sloppiness and precision, originality and embarrassment.

The past, first of all, which in this case has a very specific name: the Stooges, with whom, after years of denying it would ever happen, Iggy went back to playing and recording (with the illustrious Mike Watt replacing the late Dave Alexander on bass live), with more than good results: the trio of Pop-Asheton-Asheton need only lay out their rock'n'roll know-how, intact over the years, to land four direct hits: "Little Electric Chair", which sounds like it came straight out of "Funhouse", the devastating riff (lifted from the Peter Gunn Theme) of "Skullring", also worthy of the old days, "Loser", built on the usual impeccable big riff, and the sharp, self-mocking "Dead Rock Star". It's no flop, and that's more than enough for a trio who literally invented a certain way of playing rock music.

James Osterberg's 2003 has plenty of names attached, a few sure things and a handful of weak points, which nonetheless exist. Among the sure things, his new band, the Trolls, who take him back through the same hard, scuzzy territory he himself discovered from 1969 onward (with the frantic "Perverts In The Sun", the relentless "Blood On My Cool", or the glam-like anthem "Superbabe", with Bowie-esque verses and a T-Rex-style chorus, one of the album's high points, along with other moments for which we'd all be ready to glorify any random Northern European band), or back him up in the moments when his tone turns almost crooner-like (on "Inferiority Complex"), before leaving him alone in the one moment where he becomes a kind of sharp-tongued bluesman (“I heard the radio say/ some piece of shit/ was the music of today”, on "Till Wrong Feels Right"). Among the disappointments, instead, a couple of "prestigious collaborations" to which Iggy may have been fed by some crafty executive: the one with Green Day is banal, summed up in "Private Hell" and the pop-punk of "Supermarket", watery stuff fit for kids; and then there's the horrible emo-power-pop-rock anthem attempt of "Little Know It All", chosen as the first single and made together with Sum 41.

Luckily, great news comes from another collaboration, this one with Peaches. The first of the two tracks on which the Iguana and the statuesque singer team up is a revisiting of "Rock Show", taken from her debut album, which fits perfectly on an Iggy Pop record, full as it is of clichés and dead-serious caricatures of the rock world; the second is the brutal, sinful romp of "Motor Inn", where Iggy and Peaches let loose over a two-note riff in a porno-duet that is the very essence of the exaggerated, foul-mouthed, irreverent poses that have always belonged to rock's image.

The reconciliation with the Asheton brothers, fueled also by a few live shows, goes even further, giving birth to the unthinkable: a sensational Stooges reunion, with a new album, The Weirdness (2007), produced under the aegis of a guru of contemporary rock like Steve Albini. But the weight of the decades is too much, and the operation ends up looking halfway between harmless fun and a mockery of themselves and the paying audience. On January 6, 2009, news of Ron Asheton's sudden death, felled by a heart attack, once again puts an end to the glorious saga of the Stooges.

Preliminaries, Troubadour-Style

Six years after his last solo album and two after the Stooges reunion, Iggy Pop releases Preliminaires, a prestige production that casts him as a mysterious figure, part literary troubadour, part "chansonnier d'Amerique", part crooner of old.

Born as a sonic transposition of Michel Houellebecq's novel "The Possibility Of An Island" for a documentary conceived by Marjane Satrapi, of whose contribution only the beautiful cover artwork remains, the album drifts away from the concept's original intent, ending up instead indulging the vocal ambitions of an Iggy who plays the part of the measured, mature interpreter. More a chameleon than an iguana. One who can afford to exhume a classic of intimate French song like Kosma/Prevert's "Les Feuilles Mortes" and bring it back not once but twice, as opener and closer, with a few nods to cool jazz and some timid electro intrusions. A trick he repeats in the double version of "Je Sais Que Tu Sais/She's A Business", a masculin/feminin duet close to certain things by Mark Lanegan in its use of electronic backing over an essentially sharp classic-rock core.

A composed Iggy, at ease in his ever-shifting stage clothes, as confirmed by the excellent vocal performance on "I Want To Go To The Beach", 50s-style crooning for piano, double bass, streaks of electric guitar and electronic finishing touches, or the languid orchestral harmony of "Spanish Coast", which almost sounds like a tribute to the late-60s Scott Walker. Then there's room for a relaxed downtempo-style remake of Antonio Carlos Jobim on "How Insensitive", the more heated, howled garage tones of "Nice To Be Dead", the vaguely Waits-like New Orleans jazz of "King Of The Dogs", "Party Time", which sounds almost like a wildly belated self-quotation of his "Berlin period", the raw, dirty stomp-blues of "He's Dead/She's Alive", and the evocative spoken-western piece lifted literally from the pages of Houellebecq on "A Machine For Loving", all of which round off, more than respectably, a divertissement that is also one of the most successful scripts of latter-day Iggy.

After the negligible covers collection Après, the Iguana puts himself in the hands of the ever-present Joshua Homme (Kyuss/Queens Of The Stone Age and various other projects) to be guided through the writing of what, to quote Iggy Pop himself, would be remembered as his farewell album. Homme, galvanized by the idea of breathing new life into his artistic mentor, gladly accepts the invitation and takes Iggy with him to record a handful of tracks in total secrecy out in the California desert.

Backed by multi-instrumentalist Dean Fertita and Matt Helders (Arctic Monkeys) on drums, the makeshift session band puts together Post Pop Depression (2016), an album that carries the flavor of the environment surrounding it: 9 tracks, few frills and plenty of stoner-rock atmosphere and desolate wastelands. Epic yet grounded, unfolding through consistently purposeful riffs, formidable basslines that in some episodes ("American Valhalla") recall the four-string lines à-la Rage Against The Machine, and Helders' drumming, which edges close to hip-hop rhythms, the album frames an Iggy in dazzling form.

"Sunday", a gem of modern rock embellished by a hugely impactful orchestral coda, is the most fitting example. On the elegant "Chocolate Drops", a voice veiled in melancholy accompanies the tolling of bells. Bowie's echo surfaces clearly on "Gardenia", while the acoustic lo-fi of "Vulture" lets the Iguana's voice roam through Waits-like territory. "Wild animals they do never wonder why, just they do what they goddamn do", chants the backing funky band while Iggy spells out why he's had it up to here with the Western world and would rather head off to "Paraguay" to enjoy his retirement. The point would seem to lie exactly in that refrain: James Osterberg Jr. has never asked himself too many questions. Since the late Sixties he's taken the stage charged with that "raw power" that cemented his legend, and that's more than enough.

On the verge of turning seventy, his hair eternally windswept, his torso bare, a bundle of nerves, wrinkles and muscle, this rock wrestler – much like the one embodied by Mickey Rourke in Aronofsky's film – confirms his everlasting energy. An Iguana with seven lives, in short, as his devastating live shows keep proving. An old school rocker, who struggles to relate to the neat, somewhat pathetic frontmen crowding today's stages: "These young guys nowadays..." he will grumble disconsolately "...know the sheet music perfectly, but they don't even know what it means to throw up!"

The hope is that, contrary to his stated intentions, Iggy Pop will give us another piece of this fascinating path he started alongside Josh Homme. If not, then let him enjoy a well-earned rest; he leaves us with a touch of post-Iggy depression and, more importantly, one last album to listen to at full volume, in one sitting, without asking why. A breath of fresh air.

And yet, in the torridly epochal summer of 2019, the former Mr. Osterberg begins to resurface, first with one song, then with a second. His classic delivery, marked by a prose that leans toward the rhythmic repetition of words, seems to be preserved ("James Bond"), but the atmosphere around it has suddenly turned dark, at times leaden, at others almost at peace. Word starts going around that the new album could be his Blackstar, and the suspicion that this might be a reflective statement begins to take hold. Free confounds expectations and paints nocturnal, noir, mysterious scenes, with that baritone voice pushed right to the front, as if he wanted to whisper to you, confess his torments in your ear, especially in the second half, dominated by spoken songs and a subdued, funereal mood that is nonetheless tremendously cool and sensual, thanks in part to Leron Thomas's trumpet and guitarist Noveller, an ambient presence here but also the one unleashing rock-edged jolts in the few flashes of anger. A short record, barely over half an hour, a journey into the night of the soul.

2023 begins, and on January 6th Iggy drops the year's first "major" album: Every Loser, made with the help of an imposing lineup of rock stars (more or less classic ones). Starting from a core quartet made up of Andrew Watt (also acting as producer), Chad Smith and Duff McKagan (the first four tracks, the album's best, are almost exclusively their doing), the line up gradually welcomes a couple of the most beloved guitar heroes of the Nineties (Stone Gossard and Dave Navarro) plus other musicians of unquestionable value: Eric Avery, Chris Chaney, Travis Barker and Josh Klinghoffer. The end result alternates bursts of wholesome energy ("Frenzy", "Modern Day Ripoff", the unpredictable garage/hardcore detour of "Neo Punk") with glossier moments that show intact class and great taste in the arrangements ("New Atlantis", "Morning Show").

Toward the end of the run there's room for "Comets" and "The Regency", recorded during one of the last sessions to feature Taylor Hawkins, the much-loved Foo Fighters drummer who recently passed away. Another spine-tingling moment arrives with "Strung Out Johnny", when Iggy decides to step back into the shoes of his friend David Bowie, while on the brief "The News For Andy" it's a ragged, Tom Waits-style crooning mode that takes center stage. A final mention goes to the artwork, courtesy of Raymond Pettibon, the illustrator famous for designing many of Black Flag's and Minutemen's classic covers, but above all for the iconic artwork of Sonic Youth's "Goo".

Contributions by Luca Fusari ("Skull Ring"), Davide Sechi ("Free") and Claudio Lancia ("Every Loser")

Biographical references

Paul Trynka – Iggy Pop – Lust For Life (Arcana)

Federico Guglielmi – Cuore Selvaggio (Mucchio Extra, 2009)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google