THE WYMAN WEEKLY

Just Another Empty Head.

Issue 11 April 19,1996

 

 

 

So I’m walking down the east sidewalk of Freemont Avenue enjoying the beautiful weather when I notice a rather cute girl wearing sweats and walking a black lab heading my way. As we meet, the dog saunters in my direction to take a sniff of my leg. The girl smiles sweetly and waits for me to say something. The dog glances up at me and I point at him and say “hi.” I say nothing to the cutie. Why? All I’m thinking about is getting home and writing The Wyman Weekly. This is what we call Suffering For Your Art.

 

THE IG

 

Another week and another knockout show at First Avenue. This time it was Iggy Pop and I still haven’t come down from the cloud he put me on.

 

The Ig appears onstage in skin-tight shiny rock star pants. He’s got long bleached blonde hair and is shirtless, showing off his exquisitely toned and muscular bod. Just like the cover of Raw Power minus the lipstick and makeup. But Raw Power came out twenty-three years ago and Iggy’s face looks like he’s aged about eighty years in that time. His band all (‘cepting the drummer) have long frizzy metal band hair and hunch over their instruments accordingly. Iggy entertains by mouthing obscenities, diving off of the stage into the crowd a few times, and repeatedly sticking his hand down his pants. He proceeds to kick our asses with renditions of his songs old and new. The place is going nuts and then a few songs into the show, they break into “Raw Power” and everyone goes doubly nuts. When watching the Ig the best thing to do is drink your beer and just go with the feeling that he radiates. What feeling is that? Well, the best way to put it is that Iggy is like your uncle who always gets drunk at family reunions and gatherings. You feel for him as he’s cracking you up and embarrassing you all at the same time. Iggy is one of the most alive, animated and intense performers I’ve ever seen, right up there with Springsteen and Soul Asylum.

 

Before they go into “I Wanna Be Your Dog” Iggy sends the song out to “all of the black sheep.” And by black sheep, he doesn’t mean just punkers or rebels. Because this song is on the same Stooges album that contain two of the greatest teenage-loser anti-anthems of all time - “No Fun” and “Not Right.” As much of an unreal cartoon character that the Ig seems to be and as easy as it is to just write him off as such; the bottom line is that he knows what it means to be alone and what it means to have the pain that goes along with it. Maybe that’s why he performs “Death Trip” (the most terrifying song I’ve heard along with the Stones’ “Sister Morphine” and Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”) with all of the lights off.

 

But there’s light at the end of the tunnel as my prayer from last week comes true. At the end of the extra-long encore, Iggy and the band go into “Louie Louie” and of course the Ig sings the mythical dirty lyrics, although he prefers “I feel a rose down in her hair” to “I felt my boner in her hair.” Iggy remembers to shout “Let’s give to ‘em right now!” before the guitar solo and he sings in the last verse “Now ‘Louie Louie’ is a stupid song / But it’s all we got left so sing along” and although the folks around me were curiously silent (what - they were expecting “Bridge Over Troubled Water?”) I shout along until the song and his set are over.

 

After the show I’m walking through the upstairs bar and some dolly of a girl pops out of nowhere and clinks her beer glass against mine. I look at her blankly. “I’m just friendly.” she says. “Here’s to another verse of ‘Louie Louie’” I say as I raise my Leiny in a toast and then walk away as I don’t want to talk to any babes when DUH-DUH-DUH DUH-DUH DUH-DUH-DUH DUH-DUH is going through my head.

 

REFLECTIONS ON THE IG

 

First time I saw Iggy (besides that picture of him in The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll where he’s crouched onstage with his hand down his pants and the caption - by the late great Lester Bangs - says something like here’s Iggy Pop about to do something naughty) was on Letterman in the early eighties. The Ig came out and did some furious number. Which one I don’t remember, but what I do remember is that the Ig had short black hair with a purple streak in it. The thing that absolutely sticks out in my mind about the Letterman appearance is that he sat down to talk to Dave and had a slight Scandinavian accent. Swear to God. (Is Osterberg a Norwegian name?) And this did more to win me over to the Ig than anything else because it just went to show that after all these years the Ig was still just some Midwestern punk (as in garage, not Sid Vicious) with an accent and a mischievous streak.

 

Unlike Lou Reed, who is from the East Coast - specifically New York - and therefore cannot be totally trusted, Iggy is from blue collar Detroit and doesn’t have all those art school pretensions about him. I’ll take Iggy’s thrown off lyrics over Lou’s worldly wisdom any day. And although Iggy has written some great lyrical lyrics like “Brick by Brick” and “I Need Somebody”, when I think of the Ig I think of stuff where the title says it all like “Raw Power”, “Search and Destroy” and “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell.” And while AC/DC has more phallic metaphors, only Iggy would have a fast blues song called “Cock in My Pocket” where only he would rhyme “it’s shovin’ up through my pants” with “don’t want no romance.”

 

WYMAN’S SEARCH FOR THE HOLY IG GRAIL

 

Last year I went to Let It Be on my lunch hour and la-de-dah they had a vinyl section. I hate vinyl and just like every other sorry thing from the past I wish it would go away instead of being revived. I just don’t feel like cleaning the needle and album every time I want to listen to twenty minutes of snap, crackle and pop. Unless it’s Iggy and the Stooges. You see, I had been on a mission for years to score a copy of the Stooges’ Metallic K.O., which is a legendary semi-legal quasi-bootleg import recording of their last ever show which took place in Detroit in January of 1974. (The funny thing is that I used to always see it in Grand Forks at Mother’s Records in the used bin when I’d go there after high school every Friday afternoon. It was usually right by those used Prince records for fifty cents that I also didn’t buy.) Why is Metallic K.O. legendary? Glad you asked. At the time, nobody thought of Iggy as some sort of icon. (Like I remember - I was in elementary school and listening to the Jackson 5.) People would actually show up at Stooges shows to heckle and pick on the band. The Ig just ate it up and threw it back, so on Metallic K.O. we get to hear Iggy detailing all the eggs and stuff being thrown and he baits the crowd by saying things like “You pricks can throw every goddamn thing in the world ... and your girlfriend will still love me” and “I won’t fuck you while I’m working.” He also introduces a song by saying “One two fuck you pricks!” The album finishes with “Louie Louie” where Ig sings all the dirty lyrics with the last line in the song being “they threw a Stroh’s!” The last sound you hear is a thrown bottle breaking on the stage after the song is done.

 

REFLECTIONS ON THE IG (REPRISE)

 

Iggy gained notoriety in part by stabbing himself with pencils while performing. I’m still waiting for him to thank me as that’s a move he copped from me. I stabbed myself in the head (mere millimeters away from my right temple) with a blue pencil when I was two - well before the dawning of the Stooges. Don’t believe me? Check out the blue mark that’s still there twenty-seven years later!