Iggy Pop is one of the most fascinating rock legends of all time — and although he's famous
for his flawless career and his fearless stage antics, he might be one of the most underrated,
too. From his early years to his latter days, this is the untold truth of Iggy Pop.
Of course, Iggy Pop didn't pop into existence as a fully formed rock icon.
He was born on April 21st 1947, as James Newell Osterberg, Jr. The rock star spent
his formative years living in a trailer park in Ypsilanti, Michigan,
and harbored an intelligence and ambition that would prove handy during his creative career.
Iggy himself has admitted that he wanted to be the President of the United States when he grew up,
but reconsidered after John F. Kennedy was assassinated — which seems fair enough.
And if the young Iggy had ever become president, he certainly would have played the part.
He hung out with preppy, popular kids in the cashmere sweaters and chinos.
He didn't even smoke a single cigarette, let alone indulge in the other excesses of the youth.
But there was one indulgence Iggy did love; music was slowly but steadily taking over his life.
Iggy started playing drums in fifth grade, and his parents supported his ambitions to the extent
that they allowed him to set his small drum kit in their master bedroom. By age 15, he was drumming
and singing for the Iguanas, and eventually left them for a blues band known as the Prime Movers.
In 1966, Iggy briefly left Michigan to hover in the blues circles of Chicago,
where he learned that, to his disappointment, he was never really going to be Howlin'
Wolf's drummer. Nevertheless, he would soon find his own musical direction.
Iggy went to high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Back then,
of course, he was pretty far from the wildman he'd soon become,
and his hobbies included gymnastics and golf. He was also quite self-conscious about his
trailer park accommodations, and tended to avoid telling people where he really lived.
According to Scott Morgan, a musician who went to the same high school, the star's innate Iggy-ness
quickly manifested during high school talent shows. In one of them, he performed a pantomime
comedy act that was pretty similar to his future stage presence. Morgan told the Michigan Daily:
"He played this character named Hyacinth. He didn't talk, and he just kind of acted funny.
I don't know how to put it, but it was a look at what he would do later with the Stooges."
When he was finding his sound in the mid-60s, Iggy got a job at a local record store, Discount
Records — and this is where he acquired his famous nickname. He played with the Iguanas at the time,
and whenever he'd walk out of the stockroom, the manager of the store would yell: "Iguana alert!"
Eventually, "Iguana" became "Iggy," and after borrowing the "Pop" part from an associate
known as Jimmy Popp, the young James Newell Osterberg, Jr. had a name fit for a rock star.
Iggy Pop's unique stage presence and mannerisms have no doubt influenced more than a few frontmen.
As a young man, however, Iggy himself was influenced by one vocalist in particular.
In an interview with Classic Rock Revisited,
Pop revealed that the man in question was none other than Jim Morrison — an extremely
fitting role model for the rabble-rousing performer Iggy would eventually become.
Iggy was lucky enough to see the Doors in two different concerts.
The first was when they were in the process of hitting it big with "Light My Fire."
Though the band's sound apparently left a lot to be desired, Iggy was incredibly impressed by
the leather-clad Morrison and the way in which he dealt with the rowdy crowd. The Lizard King,
who Iggy says was, quote, "out of his head on acid," was extremely confrontational and
started deliberately insulting the crowd. This made Iggy think. As he later explained:
"If they've got a hit record out and they can get away with this, then I have no f---ing excuse
not to get out on stage with my band. It was sort of the case of, 'Hey, I can do that.'"
The second time Iggy saw the Doors, they had become massive — and were playing on a huge stage,
sounding like a million bucks. While Iggy concedes that Morrison still had plenty of stage presence,
he felt that the more polished experience was far less interesting.
Iggy Pop rose to fame as the frontman of the Stooges. They started out as the Psychedelic
Stooges but shortened their name after signing a contract with Elektra Records.
The group began as a hugely chaotic act that had little interest in things like, you know,
melody. In their first public concert at Detroit's Grande Ballroom in 1968,
Iggy took to the stage in a strange, nightshirt-style costume and a headpiece
fashioned from a swimming cap and some aluminum foil strips. The band played a droning noise that
featured instruments such as oil drums, hammers, blenders, and vacuum cleaners.
"Pretty cool. Shlock has its place."
This more primal approach eventually shifted from avant-garde to a wild form of proto-punk,
but the band's brutal sound and Iggy's wild stage presence captivated audiences. In 1969,
the Stooges released their debut album and became known as a dangerous and destructive band,
often hopped out on drugs and desperate to push their boundaries as far as possible.
While they inspired future luminaries like Television and Sonic Youth,
most fans and critics of the era thought that the Stooges' antics were sheer, distilled madness.
Amidst weak record sales and pressures from Elektra to take their act to a more
commercial direction, the band broke up in 1974 — and wouldn't reunite until 2003.
If you're only familiar with the Iggy Pop of the last couple of decades or so, you probably know
him as a sinewy old guy with an intense, piercing stare, an unpredictable move set, and a distinct
lack of shirt. You know, the kind of man who basically screams "old-school rock star."
The thing is, that guy is actually the mellower version of Iggy Pop. The Iggy of yesteryear was
a much more dangerous figure — and not in a metaphorical way, either. During his early
days with the Stooges, he was a bloody, nasty performer who made sure that basically anything
could happen when he was onstage. Iggy was known to throw up, draw blood by cutting into his own
chest with broken glass, and perform incredibly dangerous stage dives. He'd deliberately provoke
unsavory people. He'd smear himself with peanut butter — that he'd then throw at the audience.
He'd walk among the crowd, of course, but he'd also occasionally walk on the crowd.
All in all, he was fearsome, irresponsible, and often downright dangerous. In other words?
Pure, unadulterated, early-stage Iggy Pop.
If you look through the liner notes of Iggy Pop's early solo work, you might find one name that's
even more famous than the artist himself: David Bowie. The friendship between these two titans
gave the world some of the very best rock music the late 1970s had to offer.
In 1976, Bowie invited Iggy to travel with him on a massive tour after the release of
Station to Station. Their shenanigans in various locations were pretty much
what you'd expect from the ex-Stooges vocalist and Bowie in full Thin White
Duke mode, and even involved an arrest for marijuana possession in Rochester, New York.
In late 1976, Bowie decided that the pair should hit Berlin,
and the German capital proved perfect for their creative juices.
That year, Bowie helped Iggy write and release the latter's classic solo albums The Idiot and
Lust for Life. The pair developed a distanced collaboration system where they often worked
in the studio without the other one present. This curious, competitive system caused Iggy to write,
record, and mix the second album in a mere eight days. As Iggy once explained:
"See, Bowie's a hell of a fast guy. I realized I had to be quicker than him — otherwise,
whose album was it gonna be?"
"You know, who took what and who did what is not as important as
'was everyone useful and fulfilled?'"
Like many rock musicians of his generation, Iggy Pop used to be very, very fond of drugs. In fact,
the Stooges' implosion in 1974 was partially caused by their frontman's heroin addiction,
and that same year he even checked himself into a psychiatric ward to deal with his issues.
Unfortunately, he still had a long way to go.
At the height of his mid-1970s substance abuse,
Iggy's regular drug cocktail included LSD and cocaine. In a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone,
a much older, clean-living Iggy described how terrifying his drug habit was. He explained:
"Going back, I had a binge on MDMA in the 1970s, and at a festival called Goose
Lake in Michigan, I was snorting something they said was coke
but I learned later was ketamine. I couldn't remember who I was for about 12 hours."
He also remembers that he had a less than pleasant experience smoking crack, which he describes as
"frightening." Combined with his tendency to barely eat and constantly harm himself onstage,
this all might have spelled doom for Iggy, but fortunately, he was eventually able
to clean up his act. Nowadays, old Iggy Pop's biggest vice is the occasional glass of wine,
and he appears to be at least as against drugs as young Iggy Pop was for them.
Sadly, Iggy Pop has never been a huge chart-topper. In fact,
the only solo album he landed on the Billboard 200 was 1990's Brick by Brick,
which peaked at 90. To be fair, though, his songs have still earned him a decent payday or two.
In 1983, David Bowie had a huge hit with "China Girl," a song he and Pop
co-wrote during their Berlin days. And then in 1996, "Lust for Life" reached new heights of
lucrativeness after Danny Boyle used it in the famous opening scene of Trainspotting.
In his interview with Rolling Stone, Iggy said that he managed to become
"barely solvent" in the late 1980s and had very little in the 1990s. He reminisced:
"I remember spending the winter of 1990 freezing because there wasn't
much heat. But everything changed in the 21st century. It's a nice story arc."
Iggy's fortunes truly changed when the Stooges reformed in 2003,
and he suddenly found himself at the front of a popular festival headlining act. After that,
his financial life has been considerably smoother, to the point that wealth estimation
site Celebrity Net Worth guesstimates the rocker's fortune to be a very respectable $20 million.
Iggy might be most famous as a musician, but he's also a pretty prolific actor,
and his IMDb page is full of acting roles big and small. His first major role was in
the 1990 John Waters movie Cry-Baby, in which Johnny Depp plays the lead,
and Iggy provides capable fire support as his amiable older relative, Belvedere Rickettes.
Iggy often works with director Jim Jarmusch, who has cast the musician in no fewer than three of
his movies. In 1993, Iggy and fellow music legend Tom Waits discussed quitting smoking
over a cup of coffee in the short Coffee and Cigarettes (Somewhere in California),
which won the Cannes Film Festival's short film Palme d'Or that year and eventually became a
part of 2003's Coffee and Cigarettes anthology film. In 1995, Iggy rejoined forces with Depp
in Jarmusch's western Dead Man, in which the rocker plays a rather peculiar fur trader.
The most recent fictional Jarmusch work Iggy has featured in is the 2019 zombie
horror-comedy The Dead Don't Die, in which the musician plays a coffee-obsessed zombie.
While the young Iggy Pop was a reckless and dangerous force of nature, these days, the
rock star likes to keep it mellow — and that goes especially when he's preparing to go on stage.
In 2019, the New Yorker revealed that Iggy's pre-show rituals take around eight or nine hours,
and involve significantly less running around shirtless than you might expect. He explained:
"I wake up, cup of coffee, stay in bed, clear my mind,
don't think about the show. I'm not going to talk to anybody about anything."
A few hours before the show, Iggy likes to lie down on the floor and employ a deep-breathing
technique called wu chi for 30 minutes or so. After that, he visualizes the beats of
the upcoming show in order to keep everything in mind, and does some Qigong exercises to get his
physique ready. After that, he likes to take a hot shower… and then turn it cold. Not exactly living
life on the edge, but hey — if anyone deserves to take it easy after all these years, it's Iggy.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Grunge videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.