|
Post by Fuggle on Oct 25, 2004 9:17:41 GMT -5
'I'm the old git with the chick, the Roller and the rock band'
From his trailer-trash childhood to life in Miami, Iggy Pop has come a long way since The Stooges blasted the Sixties with their raw sound and notorious on-stage antics. He just wants to make one more album before he hits 60Miranda Sawyer Sunday October 24, 2004 The ObserverIggy Pop lives in Miami these days, which seems all wrong, until his PA picks you up from chic South Beach and drives you over the bridge, away from the roller-bladers, the hip-hoppers, the glittering sea - to ramshackle Little Haiti, and Iggy's place. We pull up at the end of a cul-de-sac outside a modest bungalow. Modest, except for the soft-top Rolls Royce Corniche nestled under the car port. Iggy is out back, at the bottom of his small garden, sitting by the river in shorts, shirt and flip-flop, singular. He looks amazing, as he always has done. Whippet body burnt to leathery teak, hair blonde and straggly, face like a cartoon: boggle eyes, sunken cheeks, turned up nose, shark grin. A red Indian sun bunny, or, yes, an iguana (in a wig). 'Well, hey!' says Iggy, enthusiastically. 'Come on and look at my river! Isn't it beautiful?' Actually, no: it's brown and sludgy, and on the bank opposite is a rotten old shack and an industrial plant. Still, Iggy seems to like it. He doesn't swim here (no one would), but he sits and looks and thinks, and he works in the house. Iggy, born James Osterberg on 21 April 1947, is now 57 and still not retired; he has brought out no fewer than seven LPs over the past 15 years, the last reuniting him with his original band, The Stooges, alongside more contemporary names such as Green Day and Peaches. This as well as acting in a clutch of films, including Cry Baby, Tank Girl, Dead Man and The Crow II. Plus Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes , released this week. First, though, Iggy takes me on a tour. His place is small but stuffed: Haitian love goddesses battle it out with Mexican madonnas on Italian marble tops and Chinese antique dressers, which cuddle up to cow-skinned chairs, curly mirrors, a cartoon of the serial killer Carl Panzram, a 'cut-up' work by a contemporary of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin. There's an Iggy painting of a Stooges gig on one wall; a Shirelles CD sits like a single on the old record player. The house is dark, except for the kitchen. It's hot and sticky outside; Iggy's place feels voodoo, swampy, Southern. Iggy himself, though, is sunniness personified. What a gent he is: friendly to the point of goofiness, always laughing. This is only shocking if you know his history. On stage: receiving blow-jobs, spiking heroin, brawling with Hell's Angels, rolling around on broken glass, giving his (impressive) dick a regular airing, throwing himself into the crowd, crashing to the floor, losing himself and taking the audience with him like no other rock performer ever has. Offstage: similar. The unstoppable, original Jean Genie. Today, Iggy's booming voice and Come ahn! speech cadences make me think of a motivating corporate speaker. It's just that, instead of 'Believe in yourself! It's all in you!', he's saying: 'With the Stooges' first albums people said, "A monkey could have written that! My five-year-old could have played that!" And now they call 'em classic albums and I'm like, FUUUUCK! Fuuuck yooou!' Which is the same thing, really. Iggy's upbeat nature underpins his part in Coffee and Cigarettes. The film is made up of several short ones joined together, each based around two famous participants meeting up for a fag, a brew and a natter. The result is uneven, to say the least. Tough it out, though, for Cate Blanchett's section (she plays both parts), for Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, the Wu Tang Clan's GZA and RZA plus waiter Bill Murray, and Iggy and Tom Waits. Their bit was filmed in 1992 - I saw it as a short with another Jim Jarmusch movie ages ago - but Iggy remembers it clearly. Jarmusch tagged the film on to the end of a Tom Waits pop video shoot; writing the script himself and giving it to Iggy and Tom the night before the filming. 'Neither of us were thrilled about the content,' grins Iggy. 'Tom walked in, threw the script on the table and said, 'Hey Jim, why don't you circle the laughs here because I don't see any.' And I was grumping over the whole thing about my name (Iggy offers Tom various options: Call me Jim, Iggy, Ig, Jim), you know, I'm in a scene with Tom Waits, who I look up to, and the stage direction is, Tom will be late, Tom will be surly ... ' The very funny scene plays on Tom's awkward git nature and Iggy's desire to please: 'I thought to myself, well Jim's seen something about me. He'd spent time with us both, had a look and went from there. It's just a more thorough version of what all directors do before they cast. They're like, well, she didn't look fuckable, or he looked like a smart guy, or a guy the average American will follow into battle ...' What Jarmusch saw is what you see when you meet Iggy: a sweet guy vulnerable to criticism. He has seen the film once. He likes the bits where 'I totally forgot to act'; it was the first time in his acting career that he'd dropped his armour and got it right. 'It takes time. It's hard for an old git to learn anything new and the only way you do it is the same way you did it when you were 18. Jump into something where you are painfully inept.' The painful ineptness of The Stooges was a major part of their appeal. They formed in Detroit in the late Sixties, when counter-culture wafted and wore beads; they played raw, heart attack sounds to panic the hippies. Iggy and The Stooges' amateurish industrial discord was genuinely ahead of its time, and it came with other talents: the look, the energy, the ideas, a whole charged being that emerged from their outrageous live performances, from what the journalist Lester Bangs called their 'illiterate chaos'. Ask Iggy, though, and he just says: 'We were interesting and we were cheap. That's pretty much how I've been getting my gigs ever since. Not much has changed - maybe the price is a little less cheap, maybe I'm a little less interesting, but still, that's the basic idea, ha-ha!' Neither The Stooges, nor Iggy solo ever had a proper hit single, except for 1986's 'Real Wild Child'. Still, 'I Wanna Be Your Dog ' (1969), 'The Passenger' (a B side, unbelievably) and 'Lust For Life' are proper pop classics. The latter two we owe to David Bowie, who in the mid-Seventies dragged a burnt-out Iggy from an LA psychiatric ward (Iggy scored coke off him whilst in there) and took him to Berlin. There Bowie produced and Iggy performed two era-defining albums in a single year (1977): Lust For Life and The Idiot . Iggy was by no means a Bowie creation, though: they fed from one another, with the cannier Bowie taking Iggy's outrageous style and parlaying it later into Ziggy Stardust. Perhaps in recompense, in 1982, Bowie covered Iggy's 'China Girl', which earnt Iggy hundreds of thousands. Then, in 1996, Trainspotting 's soundtrack introduced him to a new generation; but it is only recently, mostly through licensing his tracks to adverts, that Iggy has made any money at all.
|
|
|
Post by Fuggle on Oct 25, 2004 9:17:55 GMT -5
This is partly because he was never that interested. Too busy. Iggy's younger years were consumed by consumption - of drink, women, violence, crime, music, experience. And a huge amount of drugs, including those which we think of as modern: 'I had ecstasy when it was called MDA and MDMA. I was homeless, penniless, clothes-less, in poor health, knocking up some crazy woman, wandering round for three and four days ... extremely happy! I had crack when it was called rock cocaine, I had the forerunners of Xanax, I had pretty much anything.' But it was heroin which crocked Iggy - as it does: 'It flips on you pretty quickly.' Why so many drugs? 'Not to boost my confidence about making music: to shut out the negative voices. You don't have next week's rent. Thirty-seven people in important positions think you're no fucking good. You are going to be slammed in your next interview.'
Even now, when his only vices are coffee and wine, Iggy says his work is fuelled by 'what Dali characterised as the paranoid critical method': he is always worrying, trying to push his talent to better things. At the moment he is obsessed with making another LP; he tells me he wants to complete the circle - record, release and tour a final Iggy and The Stooges album before he is 60, when he'll retire. That's why he is spending so much time in this house, even though he's actually got a more conventional South Beach pad, where his girlfriend lives with their three dogs, two cats and a bird. Over there is where he eats and sleeps, over here is where 'I wrestle with some matter of grave importance to the future of art, ha-ha, sitting quietly with bombs going off in my head'.
In a city of show-stopping women, Iggy's girlfriend, Nina, could get a man arrested: a green-eyed, half-Nigerian, half-Irish amazon, who gave up air hostessing to take care of him. They have been together five years. Her looks really tickle Iggy: 'I'm the old git with the chick with the bam-BOW, the Roller convertible, the little old rock band ... the kinds of happiness that eluded me at 14 are mine now!'
Iggy grew up an only child in a rural trailer park in Ann Arbor, Michegan. His dad, Newell, was a teacher, his mum Louella, who died in 1996, a secretary. Iggy looks just like his dad. A clever boy surrounded by kids who were less well-educated - 'economically and socially I was in a funny spot' - Iggy never fitted in. When he went to a posh junior high and was put into a class with kids whose parents were architects, lawyers, ran technical companies, Iggy freaked. Plus, as he points out, 'most kids with successful parents are indulged and given freedom. I was not'; Mr Osterberg, an ex-military man, was a very strict disciplinarian. It wasn't until Iggy played drums in a talent show that he began to enjoy himself; when he finally left school, he lasted one term at university before rebelling utterly and forming The Stooges. At first sight, he seems to have spent the rest of his years in total rejection of his childhood, to the extent of taking his only son, Eric, born when Iggy was in his early twenties, out with him to clubs and gigs when Eric was barely in his teens. (Eric himself ended up with addiction problems, and the two have had 'a rocky few years', says Iggy; he has not met his baby granddaughter as yet). However, Iggy is close to his own dad, and I suspect that Newell's discipline has stood him in good stead. He is still work-driven, still studious.
There are a lot of books in his house. 'Though I'm not sure I bring my intelligence to bear on my music. I know some clever people in this business that make successful music, but they're not my favourites. I think, OK, but that's just clever, you know?' Cleverness is not enough for Iggy; he's too smart for that. Which makes me wonder which way he's going to vote in the US elections. He has only voted once before, and he was forced into that. Virgin records, who had just given him a record deal, were promoting Rock the Vote, and he made a few ads for them. A journalist spotted that Iggy wasn't even registered to vote, so he did, and voted Clinton - 'even though I knew he was a crook'. He is registered this time, but won't say directly who he's going to vote for; it sounds as though he's a natural Kerry sympathiser, but is disappointed. 'I wish Kerry would just come out and say, 'You know what, if I'm President, I'll just get us the fuck out of Iraq'. Something positive. But he won't. And people see Bush like they see a class bully: I don't really like this guy, but it's impressive how he throws his weight around.' And of course, this is Florida. Election results aren't exactly reliable.
'No. The way Bush talks, I think he could use the same rhetoric that he used to justify an illegal intervention, to stop losing an election. You know: "OK, we made a mistake in the voting process, but the country really needs us to save it."' Why do you think everyone loves you, Iggy? 'I dunno. They say I'm not a sell-out, but maybe I just wasn't sold to the people who don't think I sold out. Dudes come up to me, totally harnessed-in dudes, you know the type, and say, 'Hey, I like your stuff', and they walk away and I think, you ain't got a mother-fucking album!' And he laughs his manic laugh, smart, sweet, free-thinking, hard-working, caring but not caring, tough but vulnerable. The world needs Iggy Pop to save it, not stupid politicians. I think we can persuade him to carry on. Let's all buy his next record, and keep him around. Who'd want an Ig-free world?
|
|
|
Post by Fuggle on Jan 26, 2006 22:12:00 GMT -5
Raw resurrectionJanuary 27, 2006Iggy Pop on stage at the Gold Coast Big Day Out.
Iggy Pop and the Stooges are back, but, asks Patrick Donovan, can lightning strike twice? GET 'EM up on stage. Come on up!" calls Iggy Pop, with the lunatic grin of a child deliberately being naughty, from the main stage at the Gold Coast Big Day Out last Sunday. It is a bouncer's worst nightmare but it happens at most Iggy Pop concerts. Inspired by the thunderous rhythms and raw, primal energy of his band the Stooges, Pop is having a party - and everyone's invited. "No fun, my babe, ya no fun," he sings with his new pals, in the direction of security. James Jewel Osterberg, aka Iggy Pop, or the godfather of punk rock, is 58 years old and appears to have aged a little since his last trip to Australia in 1998. He no longer indulges in the masochistic self-abuse that marked the early Iggy and the Stooges shows but he's still the best frontman on the planet. With his taut, tanned, sinewy body squashed into a pair of skin-tight, low-slung jeans, he flails around like he has ants in his pants, his blond-brown hair flapping in the breeze. During I Wanna be Your Dog, he climbs onto a speaker stack and starts howling in the direction of his punk-rock apprentices Henry Rollins and Jack White, who stand mesmerised side-stage. Pop's body appears to have taken the reptilian form of an iguana; at any moment it looks as though a long purple tongue will shoot out and lick up members of the mosh pit like ants. He is making good on a promise made earlier to EG, that compared to his tours of the 1990s, performed with a variety of itinerant bands, this one with the Stooges, with whom he first rose to fame in the mid-1960s, would reach a new level of intensity. "It's a big, big difference this tour - and that's not a slight on (his recent band) the Trolls. This is fine arts as opposed to fine darts or something - the Trolls are more like a pint and a game of darts, then a couple of shots of whiskey, then some balls-out rock'n'roll. The Stooges have a much finer edge. And these are four musicians worth listening to." Pop, who hasn't released a great album since 1993's American Caesar, obviously considers himself a mere cog in the Stooges machine. "Working with them does wonders for the confidence. It's a really strong band - it's right up there, one of the very very best that exists. I'm real pleased to be in it, and there's a heck of a high attention level to do our best. The guys are really hungry every time we go out, and it's showing in the work. "My style remains my style and I try and tone it down in certain ways when I work with the Stooges because there is more to listen to, so I tend to try to remember that I don't have to carry the group." Erupting out of Detroit in the mid-'60s and managing three albums and only a couple of dozen shows, drug addictions, pawned gear and bus crashes conspired to dismantle the Stooges in 1974. Soft music with hippie leanings was the sound du jour so the Stooges' malevolent noise was appreciated by a precious few. But fours years later, the first wave of English bands would use the Stooges' sound, style and attitude as the blueprint for punk. A young John Lydon was said to have seen the band's only show outside the US, picking up tips for his future crew, the Sex Pistols. As punk emerged in Britain, Pop teamed with David Bowie in Berlin to become a solo artist while his Stooges band-mates Ron and Scott Asheton continued as relatively obscure musicians; and bassist Dave Alexander died in 1975. Scott Asheton tried for 20 years to persuade Pop to reform the band - even for just one show. But it wasn't to be - until fate intervened. Mike Watt, bassist for pre-grunge Californian band the Minutemen, got sick and lost the ability to play, after being misdiagnosed with a life-threatening illness. He re-learned the bass playing along to Stooges songs and, once recovered, joined a series of Stooges tribute bands with musicians such as Mudhoney singer Mark Arm, Sonic Youth leader Thurston Moore, and Dinosaur Jr boss J. Mascis. Finally, the Asheton brothers were roped in. Pop was scouting for musicians to be on his solo Skull Ring album in 2002 when he heard his former band-mates were now playing Stooges songs in a cover band - albeit one with a stellar line-up. He invited the Ashetons to play on four songs on the record. The rest of the story has an air of inevitability: they introduced him to Watt, and the Stooges were officially back. The new line-up debuted at the Coachella Music Festival in Palm Springs in 2003 and joined the international festival circuit, along the way writing material for a new album. Watt, 49, has toured Australia three times and remembers having many lively discussions about the Stooges here. "Last time I was with J. Mascis at Cherry Bar (in AC/DC Lane), and outside someone had written 'F---en Stooges' in the cement. Little did I know back then that I would actually be playing with them." In his online tour diary, Watt described the band's first show in Spain, where he put his head next to the speakers at the beginning of the song 1970 "to get that rush I got when I was a boy and first hearing this tune on the record". "When I first heard Fun House (released in 1970), I thought the first three songs were the same song done different ways," he tells EG. "It was more like a vibe than individual songs - more like a living organism - which was much different from a lot of music we were hearing. And man, that album still sounds fresh - it could have been recorded next week. Everybody who does punk owes so much to this band. So much stuff is third- and fourth-hand, but here I get to go to the source." Watt says his is an out-of-body experience, being on stage with the band he idolised as a teen. "I try to stay as focused as I can, but there's the little-boy part of me that's going crazy." After a 32-year hiatus, the Stooges are receiving more critical acclaim than they did in their heyday. Their albums have been remastered and re-issued, and they are name-checked by the coolest bands. For the Asheton brothers it is a chance to complete some unfinished business. "It was very frustrating that the band ended so quickly. It was Iggy who put a halt to it," says the affable guitarist Ron Asheton, who has continued to play in bands for the past three decades. "This is very satisfying, to be able to pick up where we left off and play to better responses than back then. I'm waiting for the day when you walk into a department store or hotel and you hear a muzak version of I Wanna be Your Dog," (from the band's 1969 debut album) he says with a laugh. Asheton never thought they would be so revered three decades on. "I thought that towards the end that there was some interest," he says. "When you're young, there's always the dream that, 'This band will make it'. Because it's a tough road; not many people get to see their dream come true and follow it to the end. I didn't expect this, and everyone's really enjoying it. Iggy says to us 'You make me crazy up here' - which is a good thing. Sometimes I laugh so hard at some of the things he does, and I look in the faces of the crowd, and they give back that energy. He is as - or more - intense on stage now than he ever was. It's not like deja vu, but it doesn't seem like a lot of time has passed. It feels right." Like the best punk rockers, the Stooges created the kind of raw, primal music that can only be made by a gang of angry, broke young men who are being pushed into a corner and denied their freedom. It is the sound of frustration, rebellion and breaking out. Now the Stooges are aged in their 50s and their songs are used in Nike ads. Can they really re-create the sense of urgency and alienation just because to want to re-live past glories? Watt agrees with the sentiment but says the Stooges are redeemed by timeless tunes and a strong work ethic. "A lot of retreads are lame, but we have Iggy's work ethic - he's not going to sleepwalk and just connect the dots. He really works these gigs hard. I don't know if you can re-create your 20s, but you can play timeless tunes in the moment you are in with a strong work ethic. That all gives it an integrity." "The late '60s was an amazing time," says Ron Asheton. "There was a lot of friction back then between the kids and the police, and Jim (Iggy) would sometimes get arrested after shows. But this is better because we can have all that fun without getting hassled or arrested." Iggy and the Stooges play the Big Day Out at Princes Park, Carlton, on Sunday.
|
|
|
Post by Fuggle on Mar 5, 2007 16:39:54 GMT -5
The Stooges, "The Weirdness" (Virgin)
The sad but undeniable truth about the overwhelming majority of rock reunions is that they invariably disappoint, often detracting from the glories of the band the first time around. The most notable exceptions have been in the energy-uber-alles genre of punk, though even there, there have been as many artistically successful comebacks (Mission of Burma, Wire, the Buzzcocks) as there have been dismal failures (the Sex Pistols, Television, X). So it really could have gone either way for proto-punk legends the Stooges, who gave us three raw-powerful masterpieces before imploding in the mid-'70s.
The album was recorded in Chicago by punk purist Steve Albini in his always-potent audio-verite style. Guitarist Ron Asheton still packs a mighty wallop -- which will come as no surprise to anyone who followed post-Stooges combos such as the (non-British) New Order or Destroy All Monsters -- and Iggy Pop is, as always, one of the best and most primal vocalists in rock, building upon the rhythmic, guttural growls that James Brown brought to R&B and doing more with a wordless exclamation or monosyllabic chant than many singers do with an entire libretto. The first shortcoming you notice on "The Weirdness" is that Ron's brother, drummer Scott, and ringer Mike Watt on bass seem to be phoning it in.
One of the most gripping things about the original Stooges' self-titled debut was the high-octane fury of the reworked Bo Diddley groove on "1969," "No Fun" and "I Wanna Be Your Dog." On 1970's "Fun House," the rhythms were even more remarkable, finding a middle ground between free jazz and a cave stomp. And if 1973's "Raw Power" was all about James Williamson's guitar (which is the reason why the reunited Stooges skip those songs in concert), that disc's re-jiggered rhythm section of Ron and Scott still mixed punk intensity with a sexy fluidity that came from growing up in Detroit and listening to Motown.
In contrast, "The Weirdness" zooms along in a high-speed frenzy that lacks finesse and seems as generic rhythmically as anything from a major-label pop-punk band like Good Charlotte. On its own, that wouldn't be enough to mitigate the joys of Iggy's barking and yelping and Ron's amphetamine guitar, but there's also the fact that Iggy has nothing to say. No, the man has never been a lyrical genius, but with the Stooges Mach I, he was an idiot savant, as opposed to the first half of that equation heard here or during the lamer moments of his solo career ("Loco Mosquito," anyone?).
When it's enough just to listen to him howl "I feel all right!," name-checking his band and complaining about cash machines ("ATM"), pushing buttons for easy outrage in the realms of sex and race ("Trollin'," "Mexican Guy") or bragging about living fast and dying young when he's weeks away from his 60th birthday doesn't seem weird at all -- it's just tired, contrived, hollow and ultimately rather pathetic.
Jim DeRogatis
|
|
|
Post by Fuggle on Apr 18, 2007 19:24:38 GMT -5
Poppin' FreshWed Apr 18, 2007When proto-punk and original-era punk acts were in their prime, I was either too young or too far from the various scenes to catch them in action. As a result, my only chance to see such groups perform has been in reunion formats -- and my experiences at such shows have been extremely mixed. During the early '90s, I caught a reconstituted Buzzcocks at a small Denver club and was pleasantly surprised by their vigor. In contrast, I witnessed a Red Rocks gig by the surviving Sex Pistols later the same decade that was pathetic in the extreme. Between virtually every song, John Lydon/Johnny Rotten staggered to the rear of the stage area to suck on oxygen, looking like a sad, decidedly unlethal version of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. The April 17 gig by Iggy and the Stooges, who headlined at the Fillmore Auditorium, fell somewhere between these two extremes. Don't know if I could quite classify the appearance as "good" in the most common sense of the term -- but it was a bizarre spectacle I'm very happy to have witnessed. And most of the credit is due to a certain Mr. Pop. The show, which was witnessed by a slow-building crowd that eventually filled approximately two-thirds of the house, didn't start out on a promising note due to the performance of the opening act, Bay Area-based Sistas in the Pit. Their presence on the bill smacked of an attempt by Stooges management to make their aging clients seem ahead of the curve, and giving an opportunity to an all-female, all-African-American power trio would have done the trick if the group had been interesting. Unfortunately, the act's playing had no sense of dynamics (it was pretty much at one level for the duration); its slack rhythm section kept slowing down -- a fatal flaw in rock; the anthemic nature of many lyrics didn't translate to the music; and during a slack power ballad called "So Afraid," guitarist Anita Lofton's ax was painfully out of tune. It was the Pits, all right. The Sistas were probably less than half the vintage of the three main Stooges; substitute bassist Mike Watt, of Minutemen fame, isn't quite as venerable as his current employers, but his full head of gray hair helped him fit in perfectly. These dudes from Detroit sure didn't act their age, though -- especially Iggy. Despite being just four days shy of his sixtieth birthday, Pop entered the spotlight in a crazed burst that left the younger musicians who preceded him figruatively eating his dust, and they kept choking on the stuff for the duration. Wearing no shirt and the tightest drawers imaginable, Pop was a study in contrasts: long, stringy hair suitable for a wicked witch with a fondness for blondness, the grisled visage of fist-shaking curmudgeon, and a body like no other. He's incredibly muscular, but the muscles themselves have an old-man texture about them, making him look like an Adonis sculpted from cottage cheese. The sight of him shaking and twisting this figure from one side of the stage to the other while braying the opening number, "Loose," was patently absurd in the best possible way -- a different kind of freak show that Pop put on during the '60s and '70s, but a freak show nonetheless. Musically, the Stooges were just as manic. Rather than presenting mature versions of favorites such as "TV Eye," "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "1970" (which, frankly, would have been a terrible idea), Pop, Watt, drummer Scott Asheton and Scott's brother, guitarist Ron Asheton, ripped through them like a pack of jackals. The results were edgy, spirited and unapologetically stoopid in ways most veteran combos refuse to be. As expected, Pop led the charge. At one point, he dove from the stage, and when he emerged from the maelstrom, he wore an expression of bemusement and satisfaction -- maybe because he didn't break a hip. He also spent plenty of time bellowing from the floor, encouraging those around him to shout into the microphone with him, and many of them obliged. The same thing happened when Pop shouted, "Fuck all these boundaries" and invited as many attendees as possible to join him onstage for a fractious take on "No Fun." The performance area was flooded with young people (for the most part, the boomers in attendance wisely chose to stay in their proper place), and when a set of speakers on the side of the proscenium began rocking back and forth, there seemed a danger that the chaos might get out of control. Yet once the number ended, the mob disassembled, thrilled and shocked to have been given the opportunity to mingle with a madman. Predictably, material from The Weirdness, the Stooges' new album, constituted various low points: Even Pop didn't seem all that excited to sing "Trollin'," and the decision to belt out "My Idea of Fun," whose central couplet reads, "My idea of fun/Is killing everyone," may not have been especially wise just one day removed from the massacre at Virginia Tech. Still, what constituted lulls at this concert would have seemed like the height of activity at most other gigs by musicians from the Stooges' original era. Iggy and company are devoted to the idea of growing old disgracefully. And more raw power to them. -- Michael Roberts
|
|