Iggy Pop

As I was driving through the beautiful Rocky Mountains, I wondered what the perfect music would be. Mozart? Vivaldi? Aaron Copland? Well, I didn't have those CDs on me. I listened to Nude and Rude: The Best of Iggy Pop.

Iggy Pop came late to me. He and his band The Stooges were one of the forerunners of the proto-punk movement, along with the MC5. Inspired by Jim Morrison, he did many outrageous things on stage, including rolling around on broken glass, vomiting, and masturbating. He was also the first rock singer to stage-dive.

The music was raw and heartfelt and dangerous. The first Stooges album is something of a classic of its kind. "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is the first of the chronologically-sequenced cuts on The Best of, and we also get songs like "I'm Sick of You" and "Nightclubbing," which despite it's jet-set title, sounds like a major drag (probably because of the drugs ingested).

But in the early '70s I was listening to top 40 radio, where Iggy Pop was definitely not played. To people who didn't know his stuff, he has ironically become a kind of cuddly figure, your punk great-uncle who somehow didn't die of heroin. Yeah, his stuff was never on commercial radio, but ended up being used in commercials. "Lust for Life" and "Real Wild Child" have been heard in advertisements, and "The Passenger" was featured in the film Up in the Air. At 67, Iggy Pop is now respectable.

I was interested to read about his association with David Bowie. Some of the big hits, including "Lust for Life," were co-written by Bowie, as was "China Girl," which Bowie later turned into a hit. The two seem very different and very similar at the same time. Both have that wavering kind of voice, and both have not shied away from androgyny. But Bowie always seemed unearthly (no wonder he was cast to play an alien) while Iggy is definitely of this Earth, a kid from Michigan who probably joined a band to pick up chicks.

"Lust for Life" has one of the best grooves ever put on vinyl, while "The Passenger" has a thoughtful lyric:

I am the passenger and I ride and I ride
I ride through the city's backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, the bright and hollow sky
You know it looks so good tonight

Of the stuff I was unfamiliar with, I particularly liked a recent Iggy song, "Candy," recorded in 1990 and featuring Kate Pierson on vocals.

So here's to Iggy Pop, born James Osterberg, a rock and roll legend and survivor. You made the Rockies even more interesting for me.