The word on the street is that Iggy Pop–punk pioneer, the original Mr. Self-Destruction, the guy who was crawling across broken glass on stage and spitting insults at his audience light years before it was hardcore-cool–has mellowed considerably of late. The Ig himself isn`t so sure.
”Do I feel mellow?” The singer, whose first major U.S. tour in nearly four years includes a Thursday show at Cabaret Metro, is clearly amused by the idea. ”No, I don`t feel mellow.
”But,” he adds cheerfully, ”I do feel very stable and capable.”
In fact, longtime fans of James Osterberg, better known as Iggy Pop, might be hard-pressed to believe just how stable rock`s prototypical angry young man is these days. His years–decades, really–of drug and alcohol abuse are over. Groupies are but a blurred memory; he`s now a happily married man who does the vaccuuming without having to be asked.
Consider, for instance, a typical day in the life of the 39-year-old punk icon.
”Let`s start at the beginning,” says Iggy, who, when not on the road, wakes up each morning in the small, two-room Manhattan apartment he shares with his wife, Suchi, whom he met while performing in Tokyo and married two years ago.
”I get up early, around 5:30 a.m. The first thing I do is clean up my home a little. Set in order whatever looks messy from the night before. Clean out the ashtrays, take out the garbage, that sort of thing. Straighten out the chairs. If the rug looks dirty, I vacuum it.
”Then I usually get around to cleaning myself, which is hard for me, because I don`t like to bathe a lot. Then I have a cup of tea and take this really big–about 2 feet by 3 feet–brown clipboard I have with my yesterday`s `things to do` list on it and put it on my lap. Everything that didn`t get done yesterday gets put on today`s `do` list. Doing that makes me feel that I`m getting things in order.
”Then I do some stretches to keep limber, and go get the papers and read them. I do some writing–poetry, maybe, or rewriting my own version of the news I`ve just heard (on the radio or TV). By then it`s around 9:30 or 10 a.m. and it`s time to make some calls, take care of business.
”Lunch is at 1 p.m. After that, there might be more business to take care of, but hopefully I could do something creative, like paint or write a song. Later on, I try to get out of the house–go swimming, visit some stores, see what`s in the art galleries. After dinner, I read a book, maybe go to a show or see friends, then go to bed early.”
Just a normal guy, huh? ”It seems like a totally abnormal life to me,”
says Iggy. ”And one that`s been very hard to master. But it`s paid off, because my work has improved.”
After nearly 20 years in the music business, first with the Stooges, a seminal, Ann Arbor, Mich., punk rock band, and then as a solo act, the newly- sober Ig finally seems poised to move from cult status as one of rock`s most original talents (near-legendary cult status, to be sure, but still cult status) into the mainstream. His polished but passionate new album, ”Blah-Blah-Blah” (co-produced by longtime chum and sometimes-collaborator David Bowie) is being hailed as his strongest in years. It already ranks as his most successful; in the few weeks since it hit the stores, ”Blah-Blah-Blah” has already sold more than 150,000 copies, topping the sales totals for any of the Ig`s dozen or so previous efforts. Meanwhile, he can be seen briefly in two new movies, ”Sid and Nancy” and ”The Color of Money,” the result of a growing interest in acting, which dates from the early 1980s–around the time the Ig decided, more or less, to get off dope and grow up. Or, at least, come out of the shadows.
”I never really intended for my work to remain in the shadows, on the periphery of the music scene,” says the singer, who maintains that he never felt bitter about his relative lack of commercial success. ”I did think about it,” he acknowledges, ”but it didn`t make me angry. And maybe, had I been willing to step up on a pedestal and say yes, I am purely punk and this is my attitude, maybe things would have been different. But I wasn`t willing to do that. Manipulation has never been my forte, and besides, there was always another side to me (besides punk).”
But long after he dropped the more self-destructive hardcore bits from his stage act, it was the punk side that seemed to define the Iggy Pop persona offstage.
”I don`t know that I was really all that screwed up. Let`s just say that at times my urge for exploration has led me to take wrong turns,” says the singer with a laugh. ”OK, yeah, I admit it, substance abuse had a lot to do with it. Absolutely. When you abuse (alcohol and drugs), it brings out a personality that`s not your own, and that had been a problem.”
Since his high school days in Michigan, Iggy had been ”the sort of person who would go, well, OK, off into the night and let`s see what we can find.” By the early 1980s, though, he wasn`t finding much of anything.
”It was a question of growth,” he says. ”I was in my mid-30s at the time, and I started getting curious about a lot of things. Like, what would it be like to have a very stable home life? What would it be like to get up in the morning and be sober all day? What would it be like to know exactly how much money I make and how much I spend and where it is.” He laughs. ”Little things like that. The price of a quart of milk, that sort of thing.”
In 1983, with a successful tour of the Far East under his belt and David Bowie`s recording of ”China Girl” (co-written with Iggy) on the charts, rock`s bad boy shifted gears. He began tramping the pavement as an actor on call in New York.
”It was good for me because I had to perform without my armor,” he says. ”I had to work in an unfamiliar format, without an audience that knew all about me. It was real hard, but it was real good, because I got a lot of fresh input from meeting theater and film people. I got a lot of fresh electricity.
”And then I got married, and started leading a `normal` life. It was all done gradually, and it was hard. Things like going to dinner with people or standing in line at the bank made me shaky. I guess that I felt that I might be losing my independence, my uniqueness. It didn`t turn out that way, but I couldn`t be sure of that at first.
”In general, I think, newfound sobriety always has its moments of panic,” he adds. ”You think `This isn`t working, so maybe I should go crazy for 48 hours and write a masterpiece.` I was afraid that I couldn`t write a good song if I was sober. Now I know that`s just bull.”
Teaming up with former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones to write the bulk of songs for ”Blah-Blah-Blah,” Iggy was shopping for a record label when he got a call from Bowie. ”David had heard about what I was up to and wanted to get involved in the project,” says the singer. ”He suggested that he co-produce the album (with original producer Dave Richards). I was a little surprised, but I work well with him and he usually has something fresh to offer.”
Iggy sees ”a lot” of the nine songs on ”Blah-Blah-Blah” as reflecting his recent shifts in attitude and lifestyle. Take ”Shades,” for instance, a Bowie-Pop collaboration about love and sunglasses. ”On that song, there`s an admission of what listening to someone else has profited me,” says Iggy.
”You probably wouldn`t have found anything like that on one of my prior outings, because in the past I didn`t want to listen to anyone else.
”And `Fire Girl`–that`s an expression of warmth that`s different from the way I probably would have approached the subject before,” adds Iggy.
”In general, I would say that there is probably more on this album that comes from inside me and reflects how I feel. And, because I`ve been exposed to a wider cross-section of friendships than I had before, there`s also more that other people can relate to.
”It`s funny,” muses Iggy on the subject of his longtime wildman image.
”It`s paradoxical, really, because I`ve ended up with this monumental image that I never really thought about creating. All along, I thought about my shows, and I thought about the quality of my work, but I never really thought about the way that people perceived me. Do I feel trapped by my image? No. I`m proud to be me. I`m proud of what I`ve done in the past. But I want these days to be different.”
