by Art Chantry:
one of the things i love so much about iggy is that astonishing mind of his. i’m not saying he’s an intellectual genius (although he actually seems to be in interviews). or that his mind is broken or mad (which may actually be true. he spent time in a mental ward more than once.) he suffers a from a sort of uncontrolled mania that shoves his every moment of being into ‘fast-forward’ at an vicious pace. “i need more” is more than a mantra for the poor guy.
oh, and then there is his amazingly strangely “un-aging” body i had another friend who had a condition where he had virtually no fat cells under his skin. it was a strange thing to see. his skin tightly draped over every finely pronounced muscle on his body – no matter condition he was in. the gals loved it. i think the iggster may be like my friend. it certainly looks the same.
—It’s not an easy album, by any means. Hovering around the same kind of rough, unfinished quality reminiscent of the Velvet’s White Light/White Heat, the record seems caught in jagged pinpoints, at times harsh, at others abrupt. Even the “love” songs here, Iggy crooning in a voice achingly close to Jim Morrison’s seem somehow perverse, covered with spittle and leer: “Gimme Danger, little stranger,” preferably with the lights turned low, so “I can feeeel your disease.”
The band is a motherhumper. Ron Asheton has switched over to bass, joining brother Scott in the rhythm section, while James Williamson has taken charge of lead; the power trio that this brings off has to be heard to be believed. For the first time, the Stooges have used the recording studio as more than a recapturing of their live show,and with David Bowie helping out in the mix, there is an ongoing swirl of sound that virtually drags you into the speakers, guitars rising and falling, drums edging forward and then toppling back into the morass.—Read More:http://www.superseventies.com/sppopiggy.html
back in the mid 70′s, when iggy was at his most decadent worst, virtually bottoming out, david bowie encountered him on one of his tours of america. since both of them were chemical nightmares at the time, they bonded immediately (dope fiends have that bond). but, what also happened was that they had similar astonishing minds – free-form and spontaneous and speeded to the max. they were “like-souls” and became close friends.
in an old interview i read (maybe 30 years back) bowie talks about what he found so astonishing about working with iggy pop. it was during the recordings for the monumental LP “raw power”. iggy was so messed up that his ‘babysitters’ would have to drag him into the studio manually to even get him there. then they would literally prop him up in front of a microphone with david behind the recording consul.
during their interview, the reporter was there at the scene watching it unfold before him. david bowie said, “now watch this. it’s amazing what iggy can do. i’ve never seen anything like it…” and he leaned into the microphone and gave iggy instructions over the rhythm the band was making. i seem to remember that it was the moment he began to record this very song. he told them to say the word “TA!”. you can hear him at the beginning of the song. then he turned off the control room mike, leaned to the reporter and said, “now watch what happens…”
iggy awakened enough to start to “sing”. well, it wasn’t really singing so much and just making up the lyrics off the top of his head and rattling shit out of his mouth. he just has the intellectual ability to spontaneously improvise language. the ‘lyrics’ here are generated off the top of his head apparently on the spot! listen to this song and you can hear some of this was obviously written in advance, but after a while you can actually FEEL him starting to just “GO”. the bleed-out at the end is astonishingly brilliant improvisation. when it was all done, bowie leaned back and said flatly to the reporter, “iggy is a genius.”
over the years since i read that i’ve thought a lot about the concept of “genius”. in this context, a lot of folks would argue that what iggy could do wasn’t genius but some sort of lizard-brain ACTION. other would say that it was anti-intellecual “SCAT” (in both definitions). but, as i’ve aged, i’ve learned very clearly there are many kinds of genius.
primarily there are two, however. there is the commonly accepted definition of ‘genius of thought’. the einsteins of the world are obviously in this category. but, i’ve also come to recognize the ‘genius of action’ category. people like arthur rimbaud, michael jordan and jackson pollack fit squarely into this turf. and iggy pop is above all else a “genius of action.” these people are true treasures.
supposedly this song was originally recorded in a much much longer version approaching some ten minutes or so – all of it with iggy just rambling on improvi
the entire thing. it was edited down after some conflicts (artistic? credit? label conflict? dunno) and then not released until some years later on the iggy pop LP called ‘soldier” in this extremely edited short (just barely over two minutes) version. somewhere out there is the full recording of this moment and someday i wanna hear it all….
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