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"Yeah, I know, I look like a fucking freak," he says, in that gravel-pit-deep voice of his.
a must-read treat from Rolling Stone's 2003 archives.
With a heart full of napalm, he terrorized and revolutionized the world of rock & roll
By Erik Hedegaard | December 11, 2003
Nothing makes sense unless you know who Iggy pop was. Back then, right around 1969, while the rest of the world was going psychedelic, he presided over quite some reign of perverted rock & roll terror. He would slather his body in peanut butter; barf on his audience; cut himself up with broken glass; wear silver-lamé evening gloves onstage; shoot heroin; make frequent use of his big, beautiful penis; crash his car into trees; beg horrified record-label executives for drug money; pass out in bathrooms with the spike still in his arm; check himself in to a mental institution and score coke off David Bowie while there. Just in general, he lived the totally messed-up life and wrote the totally messed-up songs without which there could have been no angry punk-music explosion of the 1970s, much less anything that has evolved since, angry-punk-music-related.
He is fifty-six years old now, has recently released a new CD (Skull Ring, featuring songs recorded with Sum 41, Green Day, the Trolls – his latest backup band – and the reunited Stooges) and lives quietly among doddering blue-hairs and faggy hipsters in Miami Beach. Today, he's cruising along coolly in his 1981 Rolls-Royce Corniche, with the top down, long hair fluttering. He looks grizzled and cheerful, his long face gaunt and weathered, wearing jeans and a tattered pullover shirt (by Versace, costing maybe $500, a massive extravagance that started to shred within days. It really pissed him off, so he has vowed to "wear the thing to death, because that's the way I am"
. Oddly enough, he's also wearing a thin-soled loafer on his left foot and a thick-soled boot on his right foot. "Yeah, I know, I look like a fucking freak," he says, in that gravel-pit-deep voice of his. "But one of my legs is shorter than the other and I was recently told to start evening things out or I'm going to be fucked up later in life."
By implication, of course, this suggests that he is not fucked up now, and he says that this is in fact true. It's been twenty years since he last did heroin, four since he smoked dope or snorted coke, five since he enjoyed a cigarette. Except for a nightly glass of red wine and too much strong Cuban coffee, he's clean and leading a very regular kind of life. For love, he's got his statuesque, extra-buxom, super-sweet girlfriend, Nina Alu, who is half Nigerian, half Irish and twenty-five years his junior; for extra warmth at night, he's got their fluffy little dog Lucky. He eats bacon and two eggs sunny side up for breakfast almost every day, eats a steak or two for dinner, is fascinated by what appears nightly on the History Channel, the Discovery Channel and C-Span ("I just love C-Span!" . He goes to the beach often, which has left him with a tan the color of a baseball mitt. Among those past and present who have been influenced by him: the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones, Boy George, Nirvana, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Snoop Dogg, Mudhoney, Good Charlotte, the White Stripes, the Hives, the Vines and David Bowie. But he lives almost in isolation. He doesn't have friends here, he says, only acquaintances, like Lamar, his gardener, Harry at the gas station and the guy at the car wash. He's removed. And that's how he likes it.
But then, all of a sudden, it's promote-a-record time and he's back in our midst once again, reunited with the Stooges – brothers Ron (guitar) and Scott (drums) Asheton; a miracle in itself, given that he has often publicly said they're a couple of pretty dim bulbs – playing dates around the country and presenting an award at the recent MTV Video Music Awards, and opening up his Miami bungalow to Nosy Parker lowbrows intent on learning what age has done to the original punk monster, what knowledge he's gained, what it means that he's survived as long as he has and how often he and Nina have sex.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/iggy-pops-trail-of-destruction-20031211
By Erik Hedegaard | December 11, 2003
Nothing makes sense unless you know who Iggy pop was. Back then, right around 1969, while the rest of the world was going psychedelic, he presided over quite some reign of perverted rock & roll terror. He would slather his body in peanut butter; barf on his audience; cut himself up with broken glass; wear silver-lamé evening gloves onstage; shoot heroin; make frequent use of his big, beautiful penis; crash his car into trees; beg horrified record-label executives for drug money; pass out in bathrooms with the spike still in his arm; check himself in to a mental institution and score coke off David Bowie while there. Just in general, he lived the totally messed-up life and wrote the totally messed-up songs without which there could have been no angry punk-music explosion of the 1970s, much less anything that has evolved since, angry-punk-music-related.
He is fifty-six years old now, has recently released a new CD (Skull Ring, featuring songs recorded with Sum 41, Green Day, the Trolls – his latest backup band – and the reunited Stooges) and lives quietly among doddering blue-hairs and faggy hipsters in Miami Beach. Today, he's cruising along coolly in his 1981 Rolls-Royce Corniche, with the top down, long hair fluttering. He looks grizzled and cheerful, his long face gaunt and weathered, wearing jeans and a tattered pullover shirt (by Versace, costing maybe $500, a massive extravagance that started to shred within days. It really pissed him off, so he has vowed to "wear the thing to death, because that's the way I am"
. Oddly enough, he's also wearing a thin-soled loafer on his left foot and a thick-soled boot on his right foot. "Yeah, I know, I look like a fucking freak," he says, in that gravel-pit-deep voice of his. "But one of my legs is shorter than the other and I was recently told to start evening things out or I'm going to be fucked up later in life."
By implication, of course, this suggests that he is not fucked up now, and he says that this is in fact true. It's been twenty years since he last did heroin, four since he smoked dope or snorted coke, five since he enjoyed a cigarette. Except for a nightly glass of red wine and too much strong Cuban coffee, he's clean and leading a very regular kind of life. For love, he's got his statuesque, extra-buxom, super-sweet girlfriend, Nina Alu, who is half Nigerian, half Irish and twenty-five years his junior; for extra warmth at night, he's got their fluffy little dog Lucky. He eats bacon and two eggs sunny side up for breakfast almost every day, eats a steak or two for dinner, is fascinated by what appears nightly on the History Channel, the Discovery Channel and C-Span ("I just love C-Span!"
. He goes to the beach often, which has left him with a tan the color of a baseball mitt. Among those past and present who have been influenced by him: the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones, Boy George, Nirvana, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Snoop Dogg, Mudhoney, Good Charlotte, the White Stripes, the Hives, the Vines and David Bowie. But he lives almost in isolation. He doesn't have friends here, he says, only acquaintances, like Lamar, his gardener, Harry at the gas station and the guy at the car wash. He's removed. And that's how he likes it.
But then, all of a sudden, it's promote-a-record time and he's back in our midst once again, reunited with the Stooges – brothers Ron (guitar) and Scott (drums) Asheton; a miracle in itself, given that he has often publicly said they're a couple of pretty dim bulbs – playing dates around the country and presenting an award at the recent MTV Video Music Awards, and opening up his Miami bungalow to Nosy Parker lowbrows intent on learning what age has done to the original punk monster, what knowledge he's gained, what it means that he's survived as long as he has and how often he and Nina have sex.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/iggy-pops-trail-of-destruction-20031211