This is an extract from "Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed".
Columbia Records released Iggy and the Stooges' third album Raw Power in May 1973, but now the band had been dropped by David Bowie's management company, MainMan, the label made little pretence of commitment. Vice-president Steve Harris still persevered, concluding that the only way to make New York radio stations take notice of the Stooges was to underwrite a series of shows that he termed 'Iggy at Max's at Midnight'. At first band manager Jeff Wald was suspicious - 'You expect me to send Iggy to New York?' he roared. 'It's junk city out there!' Once Harris assured him he would watch the singer's every move, it was agreed the band would start a four-night residency on 30 July.
The Max's dates were strung together with a few Midwest and Canadian shows to make a ramshackle tour. New keyboard player Scott Thurston's first meeting with the band came on the ride to a show at the Ice Arena on Lake St Clair, just north of Detroit; that night he shared a stage for the first time with Iggy, who was dressed only in kneeboots and bikini briefs.
It was a baking hot day and the band had been eating watermelons backstage. As the Stooges blasted out the opening chords of 'Raw Power', Iggy ran out on stage and hurled a watermelon into the crowd; it hit a girl in the audience, who was apparently concussed, causing ructions with the promoter later. A few songs in, Iggy felt an irresistible urge to empty his bowels and ran behind the Stooges' Marshall stacks to take a dump; Michael Tipton, a friend and fan whose tapes documented many of the band's final shows, watched Iggy run back on stage and start throwing 'stuff' at the crowd. Once he'd exhausted his ammunition, Iggy took a cup of ice and emptied it down his Soho briefs, then fished it out piece by piece, sucking it provocatively or throwing it at the audience.
Thurston was shell-shocked, transfixed by the power of the band in performance and appalled by the increasingly obvious hopelessness of their predicament once they left the stage. He would hang with guitarist James Williamson, the one band member attempting to be positive. 'He was circling the wagons, like we were under attack in a Western. The kind of Western where everyone gets a bullet, but maybe you can shoot somebody on your way out.' But no one, not even James, could change the path down which the Stooges were heading. 'Nobody was in control. It was complete anarchy.'
The opening night at Max's Kansas City in New York was packed, with old friends like Lenny Kaye, Alice Cooper and rock writer Lisa Robinson in attendance, and a huge queue outside the club. There were problems with the PA, which meant Iggy's voice was swamped by the huge wall of sound generated by the rented guitar amplifiers, and James's guitar was occasionally out of tune, but the band was magnificent. Bob Czaykowski - Nite Bob - was hired for the Max's shows to look after the amplifier backline; his job was to get 'the clang': the ringing, physically brutal noise that would help beat the audience into submission.
In the confined space, the New York crowd was transfixed with both excitement and fear, for as Bebe Buell, the Ford Agency model and celebrated girlfriend of Todd Rundgren, points out, 'There was that element of danger, because everybody had heard about his antics on stage.' The second night, the club was again jammed, and as Iggy walked over the tables and chairs, glaring at the crowd, one chair either wobbled, or was pulled from under him; he slipped and fell onto a table top full of glasses, which shattered under his weight. As Iggy got up again, Nite Bob saw cuts on his chest and chin, and a puncture wound by one of his ribs; as Iggy staggered to the side and crashed into him, Bob noticed his own shirt was covered in blood and shouted, 'Let's pull it. Let's stop it, man. You can't do this!'
Iggy kept singing, the blood dripping down his chest. He discovered that if he pulled his left arm back, blood would spurt out in a continuous stream. 'It was horrible, like a Roman arena,' says Wayne County, Max's DJ who later became an unlikely punk star. Nite Bob recalls, 'We had this saying that a piece of Gaffa tape will fix anything, but he was bleeding so bad the tape wouldn't even stick.'
The singer's injuries meant that the next two Max's shows were postponed, but rather than recuperate, he wandered off to see the New York Dolls at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum the next evening. The Dolls were fast emerging as claimants to the Stooges' status as pre-eminent icons of decadence, and that evening Iggy looked a forlorn figure; he collided with a glass door, cutting his head, and New York's glitterati were literally stepping over him, laughing at his condition. Fortunately, Bebe Buell had persuaded Rundgren along to see the Dolls and she saw the stricken hero leaning against a wall. She kneeled down to minister to him, tenderly wiping off the blood with a towel, while Todd was plainly irritated. His concern was justified, for by now Buell had concluded that Iggy was 'totally fucking gorgeous. Built like an Adonis. Plus, he had these big blue eyes which were like saucers. He was a walking sex machine. Maybe a fucked-up one, drooling and falling down, but any girl would wonder, "Hmmm what's he like after a shower and a good night's sleep?"'
Rundgren finally tugged Buell away from the scene, but in their brief conversation Bebe had mentioned where she and Todd lived, confident that in his confused state Iggy couldn't possibly remember. The next day, moments after Todd stepped out of their Greenwich Village apartment to replenish his sock supply for a trip to San Diego, Bebe heard a knock at the front door and there, bouncing with vitality, was Jim Osterberg, Iggy's alter-ego. 'You said 51 Horatio, right?' He explained, with almost excessive politeness, how he had no money and needed a place to stay.
The returning Rundgren was rightfully suspicious, but it was too late to cancel his trip. Unable to do more, he issued a stern order to Bebe: 'Do not, under any circumstances, leave him in the place by himself. He'll steal everything we've got to buy drugs. And whatever you do, lock up the third floor, and don't let him anywhere near it.'
For their first couple of days together Bebe and Jim simply talked and talked, as he acted cute in his puppy dog way, treating her as if she were some pure-blooded Scandinavian princess. Then the inevitable happened and Bebe embarked on what would be her first affair since she'd moved in with Todd: 'When we finally made love it was, I don't want to sound like a sap, but it was incredibly beautiful, storybook. Then we were like, "Oh my God! All we did was shag, seven times a day, everywhere, anywhere."'
In the mornings Bebe would sit on the huge round waterbed with him, admiring his ballet dancer's body - 'breathtaking, like a work of art' - while he would improvise songs, serenading her with smoochy lyrics in his best Frank Sinatra baritone. Over those waking hours, Jim Osterberg was the most considerate house-guest - cooking omelettes, vacuuming, keeping the place tidy, attending to Bebe's two dogs - although as time went on, Bebe noticed that sometimes after Jim disappeared in the afternoons for an unspecified rendezvous, Iggy would return in his place. And Iggy could be 'creepy and mean and nasty'. It seemed to Buell that Jim could switch on his Iggy persona easily enough, but he couldn't always switch him off.
One morning she rose early for a modelling assignment, leaving Jim asleep, alone in the house. On her return that afternoon she looked around, but Iggy had obviously left for one of his assignations. Seizing the opportunity, Bebe walked up to the second-floor bedroom, sprawled out over the big round water-bed and within moments was fast asleep.
Not long afterwards, she was woken by the insistent splashing of water dripping on to the bed, and realised that water was seeping through the ceiling. Running up the stairs to the forbidden third floor, she entered the bathroom to see Jim fast asleep in the tub, his head resting gently on an inflatable pillow, his toes blocking the overflow, with Bebe's two dogs cradled one on each shoulder, both of them out cold.
Bebe pulled Jim's toes away from the overflow, then noticed a neat little row of blue pills lined up on the toilet cistern. She shook him awake.
'Jim, what have you done?'
'Nothing,' he replied, dreamily, 'just a little Valium, relax!'
'So what's wrong with Puppet and Furburger?'
'I just gave them a little Valium ...'
Incandescent with rage and fear for her dogs, Bebe slapped Iggy hard, before gathering Puppet under one arm, Furburger under the other, and running out of the house. It was a two-minute sprint to St Vincent's hospital, up the ramp and into the emergency room.
'Help! Help! My dogs have OD'd!'
'Miss, we don't treat dogs here. This is the emergency room. This is for people ... What did they take?'
'Two and a half milligrams each of Valium.'
'Don't worry, they won't die,' the helpful ER medic assured her. 'Take them home, and they'll wake up.'
Back on Horatio Street, an angry Bebe berated Jim, telling him he could have killed her precious dogs. 'I'm a dog lover!' he replied, soothingly. 'I know a lot about animals.'
Within a day or so, Jim had left for a string of Stooges shows in Canada and Arizona; the two kept in regular touch, planning a rendezvous before the gig at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC on 19 August. Unfortunately, Bebe arrived with Alice Cooper's girlfriend, Cindy Lang, and another friend of Cindy's. When the friend walked into the dressing room, Iggy snarled, 'What the fuck are you doing here?' at her. She doled out a huge line of what looked like cocaine to placate the irate singer, who hoovered it up, not realising it was THC. He collapsed within seconds, occasionally burbling semi-consciously in response to who-knows-what visions as the powerful synthetic hallucinogen took effect. Bebe and road manager Chris Ehring slapped his face and attempted to walk him around the dressing room or get him to drink some liquid.
Eventually, Jim told them he was capable of singing, and the band rushed out on to the stage and started hammering out 'Raw Power', playing the opening riff again. And again and again; Thurston believes they repeated the opening chords for a full 15 minutes before Ehring carried Iggy on stage and dumped him there. Eventually Iggy managed to sing, mumbling the words at half speed, then walked out into the audience before attempting to climb back onto the stage. His band laughed at his pathetic efforts until Thurston walked over to help him up - and then recoiled in horror: 'I saw his chest, it looked like he'd cut himself up really bad, there were bits of flesh hanging on him, it was ugly to see.' Disgusted, Thurston turned back to his piano as Ehring rushed over to investigate. A few minutes later, Thurston saw Ehring laughing as he discovered the gaping wound was in fact a peanut butter and jelly sandwich someone had crushed onto Iggy's chest.
The incident became yet another surreal episode in the Stooges' increasingly doomed drama. It contributed to a reputation for excess that meant they'd soon be thrown off tours for such minor incidents as eating a cake meant for the J Geils band. For all the chaos - much of which wasn't totally Iggy's fault - the Stooges still had a hard-working, Midwestern ethos, but, little by little, the number of venues willing to book them was dwindling.
The band returned to their Detroit home turf for two shows at the Michigan Palace, starting on 5 October. There was something about the venue's atmosphere that the band disliked, but the once lavish, now decrepit theatre was packed, and that night they received a raucous reception, with the audience invading the stage. At some point, Iggy invited the crowd back to the band's hotel, the Detroit Hilton, for what might well have been the band's most gloriously depraved night in the city.
Michael Tipton and Natalie Schlossman, two of the band's closest friends, were staying at the Hilton but, like most of the hotel guests, got little sleep that night. At one point Michael Tipton was chatting with Scottie Thurston in his room when James Williamson knocked on his door, walked in with two friends, one male, one female, explained that his own room was packed with people, asked if he could use Tipton's bathroom, and the three of them disappeared inside. Twenty minutes later, Natalie Schlossman arrived in search of James, and knocked on the bathroom door; after a pause, James and friends emerged, apologising to Tipton for the mess. Tipton looked in the bathroom and saw the walls were splattered with blood. When Natalie and Michael called at Iggy's room later that morning, they saw around 20 people in various sexual combinations once he opened the door. Politely, he told the pair: 'Sorry, I've changed my mind about breakfast. I think I'm going to crash.'
That night's show was triumphant; one Detroit fan, photographer Robert Matheu, remembers: 'We all loved "Cock in My Pocket", it became quite a local anthem for a while.' A few days later, the band settled into a residency at a small club in Atlanta, Georgia, for what James Williamson regarded as a string of their best performances. Several of the band's fans, including Ben Edmonds of Creem magazine, conspired to raise their morale with an endorsement by Elton John. Elton was sweeping across the US on a hugely successful stadium tour and he decided to signal his support for the band, plus his own general zaniness, by renting a gorilla suit and planning a one-ape stage invasion during the Stooges stint.
Creem had prepared a photographer for the stunt. Unfortunately, no one had prepared Iggy. Indeed the previous night he had disappeared with the usual local 'Rich Bitch', to use the Stooges' term of endearment. Early in the morning she brought him back to the band's hotel unconscious; he had gobbled down her entire supply of Quaaludes. Drummer Scott Asheton and a friend of the band, Doug Currie, were called to lift his dead weight out of her Corvette; carrying him into the hotel, they dropped him and were overcome with a giggling fit, seeing him peacefully sleeping, sprawled over a spiky Mediterranean bush.
He was still hardly conscious that evening when Doug and Scotty carried him into the club, and after a quick discussion of what to do, Doug announced he had some speed. James Williamson managed to find a syringe, and they duly shot their singer full of methamphetamine sulphate in order to get him on his feet.
For a couple of seconds, as Elton emerged from the wings in his gorilla suit, Iggy thought he was hallucinating, or else a real gorilla was raiding the stage. The Creem photograph documenting the event is hilarious, showing James Williamson transfixing the uppity ape with a malevolent glare that signals, he says, his intent to 'take him out. He lucked out, because he was smart enough to take his head off to let people know who he was, just in time.'
The encounter failed to lift the Stooges' spirits. Soon the band were becoming more obviously frazzled and many of them seem to have clung to pathetically poignant lucky mementoes. Iggy had a pet cuddly rabbit. Drummer Scott had a lucky towel, which he would wrap round his head in times of stress. Guitarist Ron Asheton had a treasured pillow which his mum had embroidered - if any of his fellow band members hid it, he had a panic attack.
By the end of the year bookings had started to fizzle out, and the dark mood was intensified by the news of the death of Zeke Zettner, the Stooges roadie-turned bassist, who died from a heroin overdose on 10 November. Ron Asheton describes those last months as 'never-ending torture'. Jim Osterberg today displays very little emotion about his physical and mental travails. But by January 1974, this ambitious, driven man was regarded by everyone, even his closest bandmates, as a failure and a liability. And whatever drugs he was taking, says Michael Tipton, Jim knew exactly what was going on, and was suffering greater mental torture than any of his bandmates could comprehend. 'Everybody thinks he's not 100 per cent - but even when he's high, the little man thinks a lot. He knew.'
Over the following weeks, the Stooges continued zig-zagging across North America, from Wisconsin to Toronto to Long Island. On Monday 4 February 1974, the band was booked into a tiny club on the far West Side of Detroit, on the way to Ypsilanti.
The Rock and Roll Farm, in Wayne, Michigan, was a tiny bar, with a capacity of 120 or so, that normally hosted blues or rock'n'roll revival acts. The road crew started complaining the moment they realised how difficult it would be to cram the Stooges' amplifiers onto the tiny stage. Bob Baker, a Stooges fan, had arrived early and started feeling uneasy when he saw how many bikers were filling the bar. There were several dozen scattered around the audience, with a huddle of six or seven at the edge of the dance floor; heavy-set bearded guys, aged around 30, most of them in dark denim jackets, several of which were decorated with the colours of the Scorpions, a West Side Detroit biker gang.
Even as the Stooges launched into their set - now augmented with more new songs, including another poignant doomed anthem, 'I Got Nothing' - there were scuffles at the back of the venue. At some point, the bikers produced a carton of eggs and started throwing them at the stage. What happened next would be heavily mythologised by the Stooges. As Bob Baker watched from a couple of feet away, the flurry of violence seemed more hurried, nastier and brutish. 'Iggy came into the audience, went right up to one of the bikers. This guy was big and heavy. And the biker just nailed him right in the face and he went flying backwards through the crowd. It's just a law of physics if you weigh 300 pounds and you punch somebody, that punch carries a lot more wallop than a 100-pound guy punching you. So when he hit Iggy he just flew backwards through the room, like something in a movie. And then they all just laughed.'
'I've heard how the biker was supposed to be wearing studded gloves or a knuckle-duster,' says Skip Gildersleeve, another Stooges fan who saw his favourite singer being punched out. 'He didn't. He didn't need one.'
As Iggy staggered back onto the stage, he shouted, 'That's it, we're gone,' and the band scrambled out of the venue.
Speaking today about the scary confrontation, Jim sounds philosophical, as if conscious of the inevitability that one day his confrontation of the audience would invite revenge. But to his fellow Stooges, who had come to believe in his invincibility, the shock seems more profound. 'It did change everything,' says James Williamson. 'The invincibility of the band was shattered. Think about all the gigs we played and Iggy always did this crowd interaction thing. Then somebody just knocked him down.'
The Wayne show was on a Monday. It had been a mere stopgap to earn a little money before the Stooges played a much bigger show at the Michigan Palace, a decaying 1920s movie theatre on the Saturday, 9 February. Phone lines around Detroit burned red-hot with conflicting rumours: predictions of Iggy's suicide, boasts that the Stooges would enlist another biker gang's assistance, speculation that the Stooges wouldn't show. In reality, every member of the band and crew desperately needed the $5,000 plus share of the gate they were being paid for the performance. What would later look like heroism was, in fact, more like simple destitution. The band was upset, scared and simply fed up; but that didn't stop them from appearing on Detroit's WABX radio station and challenging the Scorpions to show up at the venue.
There was defiance as the Stooges took the stage, following a support band named Aerosmith. Nothing would change about their act; James still wore his slightly camp Star Trek costume, but by now it was dirty and a little threadbare. Jim wore his leotard and ballet shoes, with a shawl wrapped round his waist. The evening was dank and depressing, with the sidewalks of Grand River Avenue coated in dirty slush, but still the hall, of around 1,200 capacity, was full, ensuring the Stooges would at least command a substantial fee.
No Scorpions seemed to have turned up; so for their final show, the band wouldn't even have the dignity of meeting a formal enemy who'd set out to destroy them. Instead, those who came to mock did so purely to indulge Detroit's traditional 'fuck you' attitude. 'It was nuts,' says Skip Gildersleeve. 'There were people that you thought lived out in the woods and only came out once in a while. It was like Charles Manson's followers.'
Michael Tipton was taping the evening and was convinced that Iggy knew it was all over. 'That's why he had fun with it, antagonising the crowd.' Over the last few months, if a record company executive was in the audience, Iggy could be guaranteed to fuck up. Now, with maybe half the audience baying for his blood, he revelled in the moment as he prowled the stage in his ludicrous costume, soaking up the hate. The sound was often ragged, the singing just a shout, much of the music simplistic aural thuggery, but the real performance was in Iggy's incessant insulting of the audience. The banter was drawn out, and any odd projectile - a coin, ice cubes, an egg - launched in his direction served only to prolong his speeches. Watching Iggy confront this hail without flinching, a few audience members thought this meant the band would survive. Others, like Bob Baker, who'd also seen the violence at the Wayne show, were convinced it was over. 'I was extremely depressed. You got the feeling that it was his farewell concert, although you didn't know for sure. It was such a hostile environment, people were obviously trying to mess with his head ... I thought, This guy's not going to live to be very old.'
'I thought they'd given up,' says Skip Gildersleeve. 'It was the end of something really good.'
'Part of you was sad,' remembers Scott Thurston, 'and guilty that you've seen something that probably was worthy of some respect [being] degraded. Otherwise you were just worried about getting hit with a bottle.'
After leaving the stage briefly, the Stooges returned for their last number, 'Louie Louie' - the song's message was that anything more sophisticated would be lost on such a deadbeat audience. Iggy improvised new, obscene lyrics to this garage band staple that he'd sung once with his first band, the Iguanas. And as the song reached its conclusion, more missiles showered onto the stage, one of them a large Stroh's bottle that shattered on Scottie's piano. 'You nearly killed me, but you missed again,' sneered Iggy, 'so you'd better keep trying next week.'
But there was no next week.
