`There wasn’t a hell of a lot of time left . . . (to) find a balance between joy and dignity on my way out.”
Say it ain’t so, Iggy. What’s with the acoustic guitar, the bongos, the midlife crisis? Here’s the last rocker on Earth we figured to be moaning in baritone horror about what it means to be 50 and alone. And yet there he was on his knees Thursday at Metro, strumming his pain with his fingers, the original rock ‘n’ roll animal transformed into a coffeehouse crooner.
It couldn’t last, and it didn’t.
Beneath even the mellow contours of his new album, “Avenue B,” Pop still burns with the existential fever that has always made him more than just a caricature of rock libido run amok. So when he rose to his full American primitive stature — hair trailing down his back, naked torso bursting with mutant masses of muscle and sinew, black jeans slung tan-line low — the mood was still dark and more than a touch disturbed. The coffeehouse was going up in flames beneath a barrage of electric guitars and drums, and Pop was not exactly celebrating the moment so much as raging in it.
First he throttled the microphone stand then threw it with shocking impunity, first nearly clobbering his drummer. Then he did it again, winging his bassist. Now the band looked worried, the guitarists shuffling backward until they were backed against their amplifiers, their stage now a fire zone patrolled by an enraged predator. Then the singer threw a shoulder into a speaker cabinet, knocking it atop a security guard, who staggered from his post waving an angry fist at the stage. Pop suddenly saw things were going too far and — unlike his early days, when his own blood regularly splattered the stage — the singer seemed to pull back from the brink.
Instead, he threw himself into the music with increasing ferocity. He danced, spun, writhed and leaped not with joy or sexiness or an exhibitionist’s abandon, but with a vein-bursting desperation, as if fighting to break free of an unseen straitjacket. The contortions mirrored the words in the songs, dating back to the trailer-park blues-metal of the Stooges: “I’m the world’s forgotten boy, the one who searches and destroys.”
Pop’s current lineup of musicians is no match for the long-lost Stooges, whose deceptively simple proto-punk sound is oft-imitated but seldom duplicated. The singer’s backing quartet relied too heavily on bar-band crutches such as playing louder and faster, missing the essential ingredient in the Stooges’ stew: the funky rhythm oil that greased Pop’s death-trip rants. But on post-Stooges material, such as the new “Corruption,” the boys with the headbanger tresses dug in till the dirt was in their fingernails. Alex Kirst’s drum volleys were brutishly on the money, and the guitars were thick with grime.
With only pauses for the creepily low-key “I Felt the Luxury” and the almost pretty “Avenue B,” Pop stuck with grinding uptempo material the rest of the way and took the encore up another notch with a stage full of dancers on “The Passenger,” a rampaging “TV Eye” and the very apt and brutally succinct “No Fun.” Pop smiled like an assassin as he twisted the night away.
