“When I’m in the grips of it, I don’t feel pleasure and I don’t feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you just couldn’t feel anything, and you didn’t want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?”
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one small seed pays tribute to a lifetime of wild, and salutes ‘the Godfather of Punk’ and truly eccentric living legend. isting rock ‘n roll’s original wild sons, the roll call of honour would include such rock royalty as Ozzy Osbourne, Jimmy Page, Jim Morrison, AC/DC’s Angus Young, Sid Vicious, Slash, Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, The Who’s Pete Townshend, ZZ Top rocker Billy Gibbons and Alice Cooper. The name Iggy Pop would undoubtedly be in the top five. And so it was that the legends of music from across the globe gathered in London in early November to celebrate their industry and crown one of their own a ‘Living Legend’. The winner of the prestigious title at the 2009 Marshall Classic Rock Roll of Honour awards was none other than the aforementioned Mr. Pop. The 62-year-old Iggy (a.k.a. ‘the Iguana’) – famed for exposing himself onstage – began his acceptance speech by saying, “It’s been a long dinner, so I’m not gonna whip out my dick.” He
went on to thank everybody with such strong feelings about music “that when you hear something you don’t like you wanna fucking kill somebody, and when you hear something you do like you wanna fuck everybody!” It seemed like a most justified award for the singer who reminded journalists that, for him, being wild and making music “was never a career thing, it was a life thing”. Simply being alive after four decades of ritualistic abuse both on and offstage is in itself testament to the rock ‘n roll spirit. Born James Newell Osterberg, Jr. in Ypsilanti, Michigan in 1947, young Iggy Pop (‘Iggy’ from his first band The Iguanas, ‘Pop’ after the leader of a gluesniffing high school gang leader who Iggy admired) was inspired to adopt music as his weapon of choice after seeing The Doors rock out in his hometown back in ’67. Jim Morrison’s stage antics and fuck-you attitude struck a powerful chord with Osterberg and his trailer-park pals and would be the inspiration for his own stage persona. Soon Iggy Pop was fronting his own power-chord and guitar
distortion band The Iguanas and later on The Stooges (“We were on LSD when we named the group”), rolling around in broken glass, covering himself in peanut butter, whipping his cock out for the crowd, vomiting on request and pulling poses like a human pretzel – taking a sledgehammer to the fourth wall between crowd and conventional performer. Indeed, Pop would be credited with inventing the stage dive after hurling himself into the crowd at a gig in Detroit. “I always felt that in rock ‘n roll, something’s gotta happen. If it wasn’t going to happen in front of me, I was going to make it happen,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. “The day I got out of high school…I bought a bottle of Clairol Ultra Blue, dyed my hair platinum and started playing in a rock club full time: five sets a night, six nights a week. I started going wild… getting drunk... borrowing cars and crashing ‘em. And I was listening to two albums: Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan, and The Rolling Stones’ Now!”
Forty-two years in and while the cracks might be starting to show (“I have a dislocated shoulder. I have a lot of cartilage lost in my right hip. Both knees are about to go. I have one leg about an inch and a half shorter than the other…a fall I took dancing on an amplifier left me with my spine twisted and a slight limp.”) he shows no signs of putting on the brakes, passing off his now limited physical ability to a life of misadventure but in no way letting it slow him down. “(These days) I’m a much more remarkable person mentally than physically,” he admitted to Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke in 2007. Rock is certainly not short of style icons of self-destruction. Where others (e.g. Sid, Jim, Kurt, et al.) died in imitation of excesses enjoyed and`– most importantly – that were, most importantly, endured by Iggy Pop, a lifetime achievement award is a statue well-earned by only the wildest living punk in musical history.
*WATCH THE VIDEO CLIP AND HEAR THE INTERVIEW WITH IGGY POP AT THE 2009 MARSHALL CLASSIC ROCK ROLL OF HONOUR AWARDS EXCLUSIVE TO WWW.ONESMALLSEED.TV