Iggy Pop

Well where are you now my

dum dum boys?

Hey, are you alive or dead?

Have you left me the last

Of the dum dum daze?

1976. The Fun House is closed for good, and Iggy Pop is alone. The flower children now reek of rot, and the turn towards a new decade looms ahead. Can a man, at thirty, warmly bid farewell to his audience and retire to private life? Of course not. Sometimes masterpieces can emerge from bipolar depression. With a little help from a friend, Beatles-style, you can manage to stay in the game and learn to walk through the freezing Berlin nights. David Bowie, already behind the scenes in 1973 of a “Raw Power” plagued by excess and line-up reshuffles within the Stooges, is in America during the promotional tour for “Station To Station”, while Iggy Pop keeps drifting, popping Quaaludes and amusing himself by provoking others, earning beatings, brushes with overdose, and sinking into a form of self-annihilation that is both jubilant and desperate.

His outstretched hands seem almost always too eager to suck the marrow from this listless, restless creature overflowing with divine energy, who falls a thousand times and tempts fate a thousand times more, alternating bodily and spiritual depravity with a sham macrobiotic diet and some improbable exercise routine, in a schizophrenic antithesis between self-destruction and survival instinct. But David Bowie's invitation, after an initial, strategic hesitation, cannot go unanswered, because it signals a trust untouched by any contempt for his own Ego, and because it hints at a possible relationship between equals, rather than a clash of vanities, a duel fought with reciprocal, if differently expressed, genius. Iggy sets off on tour with Bowie, who, fascinated by German Expressionism and the Teutonic aesthetic of the Nazi years, decides to move to Berlin for a while.

Bowie, impeccably groomed on the outside and lucidly intoxicated within, spectral and stripped-down, is there absorbing the will-o'-the-wisps and decadent transgression of Mitteleuropa, which will serve as 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. Faster. 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 maladjustment. Two antithetical identities, a clash of yin and yang weaving together Bowie's rumored, Wildean bisexuality with the hustling and the legendary, cheerful bouts of gonorrhea Iggy picked up back in the days of his self-titled debut, while fooling around with Nico.

The Thin White Duke's ability to remain fully aware even in the most perverse of situations is the missing piece that, until then, had eluded Iggy, unsuited to any form of self-restraint, convinced that true grandeur lay in letting oneself be carried away by Chance, in living like a kamikaze, rejecting outright even the slightest self-awareness, a martyr to his own unprecedented energy. But the Iggy Pop who arrives in Europe is a man recovering from himself before recovering from any substance, a nearly thirty-year-old man illuminated by the blinding, fascinating, glacial self-control that is pure Bowie.

The light shifts, 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 by Iggy Pop, remains, to this day, the fascinating mystery fueling the conflict between different sources (Iggy, as it's usually put? Bowie? Iggy with Bowie? Iggy "through" Bowie? and one could go on with many other formulas). The album is recorded, in part, at the glorious Chateau d'Herouville in Languedoc, built in the 18th century and purchased in 1962 by composer Michel Magne, who had set up a recording studio there that in later years was frequented by numerous rock stars: Elton John, Pink Floyd, Bowie himself, with "Pinups" in 1973, and in 1977 Iggy Pop with "The Idiot". The second half of the record, instead, is recorded at Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin. What happened during those twilight walks through the city of Christiane F. we'll never know, but perhaps those frenzied demons thin out and slip into a less overwrought spleen, colder and dosed 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).

Every conjecture surrounding "The Idiot" goes straight out the window from the very first listen, where the temperature is so cold it burns — an unlikely oxymoron made credible by the album's gestation and recording. An album that at no point falls into the sin of redundancy, concentrated into about forty minutes of black-and-white hell, in which you seem to breathe in the frost, producing rings of vapor, on what could be any ordinary night or a peculiar sunless morning. Its potential unity 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, turning the depraved burlesque staged by Iggy into an absolutely cool way of being ("Nightclubbing we're nightclubbing/ We're an ice machine/ We see people brand new people"), later 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").

"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, alluring sensuality, with 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 within the folds of a sonic fabric that grows ever more captivating: "Dum Dum Boys" is a rough declaration of love for a different breed, for a small band of misfits eyed with suspicion and, for that very reason, the object of the masses' conflicted attraction ("People said we were negative/ They said we would take but we would never give/ But we'd sing da-da-da-da-da-da dum dum day/ We'd sing da-da-da-da-da dum/ And hope it would pay/ We'd sing Da-da-da-da/ It's been a dumdumdum day/ Dum dum day"). Iggy Pop's voice turns haughty and defiant, brandishing that old sense of superiority and indifference to what others think, before yielding to the play of synthesizers that opens the long, stretched-out close of "Mass Production", a surreal journey to the end of the night ("Before you go/ Do me a favour/ Give me a number/ Of a girl almost like you/ With legs almost like you/ I'm buried deep in mass production/ You're not nothing new/ I like to drive along the freeways/ See the smokestacks belching/ Breasts turn brown/ So warm and so brown").

Putting "The Idiot" back on the shelf, right after the first listen, becomes a meticulous act, one in which nothing is left to chance, where alphabetical order simply doesn't apply, because its locus naturalis is right there, next to the trilogy, with only a slight indulgence granted to the more or less conscious choice of following chronological order, placing it near "Heroes" and "Low" and before "Lodger", as a possible missing link in an expanded trilogy, or a quadrilogy that never was — as if Bowie had, for a moment, revealed a sordid, feral alter ego.

With a little help from his friend, Iggy Pop is reborn into a remarkable new life, managing, without ever needing to raise his voice, to mark a pivotal five-year stretch in music history, and to offer Ian Curtis, in 1980, the soundtrack to his own suicide, in a chilling exchange of views on the possibility of a future existence.

"The Idiot" thus enters legend as a three-in-one masterpiece, in which the tensions of David, Iggy, and Ian too, converge in a magmatic swirl.

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07/02/2010