Bob Dylan and the ancient Egyptians: not the most obvious influences on the idiot king of gonzo rock, you might have thought, but it was bearing witness to Dylan’s bulletproof indifference to those taunts of ‘Judas’ when he went electric that had the most impact on the teenage Jim Osterberg. And it was a brief spell studying anthropology which led him, with characteristic modesty, to cop his stage look from the pharaohs (the bare chest, not the PVC kecks). But it was hooking up with ‘teenage glue heads’, brothers Ron and Scott Asheton, that was the real making of Iggy Pop. The nickname came from his old band The Iguanas (it was meant to be derogatory, though Ron got saddled with ‘Javalina’, after a midget warthog you can smell coming), and the once-geeky, high-school election champ freely admits that he allowed himself to be ‘corrupted’ by them.
In these days of ‘secret’ gigs for mobile phone subscribers, it’s worth noting the scene at The Stooges’ inaugural performance at their notorious HQ, the Fun House. One of John Sinclair’s acolytes turned up with 100 pre-rolled joints which were freely passed around; in the kitchen people were getting high on DMT, amyl nitrate and Freon aerosols, sprayed into balloons and inhaled; and, in case there were wasn’t enough white noise emanating from the primitive guitar, bass and drums set-up, Iggy plunged his mic into a blender full of water.
Trynka’s biography is admirably matter of fact, resisting the temptation to do a Johnny Rogan and interpolate The Stooges’ commercial inertia with, say, the fortunes of Detroit’s ailing motor industry. Instead, he lets the participants do the talking, even pitching up at an Ann Arbor high-school reunion to meet Iggy’s school pals who remember him, pointedly, as someone who tried hard but ‘never quite made it’.
Unsuprisingly, The Stooges disintegrated once heroin took hold of three-quarters of the band and their entire entourage (the Fun House was condemned the same year), but, like the skilled student politician of old, Iggy soldiers on to sniff out comeback after abortive comeback. By 1983, things lurch from high farce (giving away all his possessions as the result of a ‘voodoo curse’ – not the drugs, then) to high rolling (suddenly, unexpectedly made of money as royalties from David Bowie’s cover of ‘China Girl’ pour in). Though there are more dalliances with underage girls than are strictly savoury, like Dylan and the pharaohs, his myth endures.
