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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Sunday, November 30, 2003

The pop odyssey of punker Iggy Pop

By Evelyn McDonnell
Knight Ridder News Service

Iggy Pop has been on the music scene since the '60s. But at 56, pop stardom still eludes him.

Gannett News Service

Four years ago, Iggy Pop continued his singular odyssey — from Michigan trailer park to L.A. mental hospital to Cold-War-era Berlin to New York's East Village — and landed in one of southern Florida's mansion rows. The notorious godfather of punk says his eventual destination was sealed back in the '70s by a visit to Coconut Grove.

"I spent a night or two as the couch guest of a young neo-hippie, in a house that had roof tiles and stucco, and the cement was cracking and lizards and snakes were coming and going and vines were in the kitchen," the 56-year-old tan, lean rock veteran with saucer eyes and creased face recalls from his Miami Beach home. "The inside was going out and the outside was going in. I thought, 'This is the place for me.' "

That view of the subtropics may not have the composer of such classics as "Search and Destroy" and "I Wanna Be Your Dog" penning jingles for the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau any time soon. But "Perverts in the Sun," a track from his new "Skull Ring" CD, released last week, is a suitably debauched postcard from a modern "poete maudite": "Gang fights all night / Garbage can's got a tan / Rich men and hungry chicks / Stick 'em in the blender — hey big spender."

Beginning with the Stooges, his late-'60s/early-'70s group, Pop has been a bad-boy Baudelaire of garage rock, pushing the behavioral envelope.

And yet Pop has never quite been a pop star. Icon? Legend?

Pioneer? Yes. But as a lover of American culture, he still lusts for mainstream acceptance. That's why on a recent October day, he was shooting a video with Sum 41, a punk-by-numbers Canadian band 30 years younger than Pop. The next night found him performing at MTV's Video Music Awards Latin America.

"I've been trying to do everything to spread those songs up, down and sideways," Pop says.

"I said I'm going to play those (expletive) songs until they're hits. And they became hits of a type. They're known, they're memorable, they're covered like crazy. But you can't be 21 and an art-phenom icebreaker twice. You do that once, then you've got to do something else."

Long before Eminem and the White Stripes came along, the man born James Jewel Osterberg was making art out of the trashy white underside of the Motor City. His parents were educated people who wound up in an Ann Arbor mobile home because his dad, a teacher, "didn't like Ozzy and Harriett. I was basically raised as a very rich kid with no money. I had a lot of attention from my parents. I could bull---- like a college graduate by the time I was in fifth grade. That stood me in good stead when I tried to get people in charge of record companies to put out punk music before there was a name for it."

The Stooges' eponymous 1969 debut served up greaseball psychedelia from the heartland. Frontman Iggy Stooge (as he called himself then) was a hippie's nightmare, rubbing peanut butter and broken glass across his bare chest, leaping and twisting like he had stuck his foot in an electric socket.

The Stooges appropriately called one of their albums "Raw Power." But Iggy's interest in primal expression did not make him a primitive.

"There are writers like Jean Genet that are most fascinated by delinquents, thieves, pimps, pervs, murderers," Pop says. "I have some of that fascination for the raw energy of the lower proletariat in my oeuvre. Some people get it, and some people don't."

The Stooges broke up, in part because of Pop's heroin abuse. David Bowie became Pop's champion and collaborator; their relationship produced such landmark recordings as "Lust for Life" and the Bowie hit "China Girl" and provided fantasy fodder for Todd Haynes' film "Velvet Goldmine."

Despite being famous for excess, Pop has actually had a fairly steady career, releasing albums every few years. "Skull Ring" ranges from the four grungy songs Pop recorded with the Stooges to two numbers with underground rapper Peaches, MTV-aimed Green Day and Sum 41 collaborations, and tracks with his usual band, the Trolls.

Says Deryck Whibley, the 23-year-old frontman for Sum 41, "It's cool to see someone still this into it and relevant, and credited and respected after this many years."

But Pop is dismissive of what punk has become. " 'I Wanna Be Your Dog,' besides having distorted guitar and three chords, also has sleigh bells, which is a jazz percussion instrument that you did not find as punk coalesced to be basically pub rock with Beach Boy melodies," he says. "That's pretty much what all punk since the Sex Pistols and Ramones period, on through Blink-182, is. It is not adventurous music."

Pop's reunion with brothers Ron and Scott Asheton happened basically because Pop thought it was time. (Original Stooges bassist Dave Alexander no longer plays music, Pop says.) The band recorded for the first time since '73 at Miami studios in January.

"I was ready to try some things in my life," Pop says. "I made a list of other people I would work with besides the band I tour with. I was trying to make an album diverse enough that nobody could come in and control me. That was part of my strategy, rather than hand myself over to a producer. I thought, well, if I just dazzle the record company with a bunch of names, they'll leave me alone. I looked at the list and I thought, none are as cool as the Stooges."

Neil Strauss wrote in the New York Times after the Stooges' first reunion gig, at the Coachella festival in Southern California: "As Mr. Pop yowled through a fierce, rumbling version of 'TV Eye,' it was more than clear that in the 33 years since the song was recorded, the genre has largely been variations on a theme. And the first two Stooges albums are the theme."

"Ron and Scott came down here and it was just instant vibe ... I had been adamant that we not do a reunion gig, because I didn't want to be a museum piece. But having recorded, we then became, live, a loaded gun ... We were a real band, not just 'My lawyer will call your lawyer and figure out how much money we can make playing our old songs.' "