In a town where fame and money are worshipped above all things, there is little pity and zero tolerance for those with the potential to achieve both who nonetheless end up broke, unemployable
and out on the streets. On at least one occasion when Iggy and I were together in local clubs some ‘industry insider’ would take me aside and lecture me about the supposedly dire consequences of ‘being seen with that loser’. ‘Listen,’ I’d fire back, ‘Iggy Pop is not a loser. He’s already made three records that one sweet day will come to redefine the very sound and vision of rock ’n’ roll. The women are all still in love with him and most men still want to be him. This man you call a loser - really, he’s the king of the world.’
Which was precisely how I saw him back then: bloodied but unbowed, still a worthy target for veneration despite his self-destructive skittishness and catastrophic run of bad luck. Over the next two months I spent a lot of time in his company, buying him meals, following him around from place to place in search of free drugs and generally listening to him philosophise at length about life, art and his tumultuous career to date. The guy presented me with such irresistible subject matter to write about later on. But mainly I was drawn to him like a young disciple seeking out his personal guru.
I didn’t see his poor-boy status as demeaning and contemptible - I even found it oddly inspiring. Iggy - from my perspective - had lately turned floating through life like a cool breeze into a kind of zen art. It helped of course that practically every woman in the region nursed a raging crush on the guy and was only too happy to invite him into their homes, even if it meant only to share their drug stashes. There were a couple of lesbians living in the same apartment building as James and Iggy and even they were aflame with mad love for the man. Everywhere he went, females stalked him like bounty hunters. At first I thought it was just down to his personal charisma. But then
late one night in early March we found ourselves both standing outside the Roxy surrounded by a bevy of equally intoxicated revellers. I was staring up at the stars in the sky above when I heard a sound like running water below me. I looked down to my left and saw Iggy holding what at first appeared to be a fire hose from which a flood of liquid was pouring onto the sidewalk. I looked again. It wasn’t a fire hose, it was his penis urinating all over the club’s courtyard. Everyone stopped their idle banter and stared at his wedding tackle in mid-gush. It was uncommonly big. Then he shook the last drops off, stuck it back in his jeans and walked off into the night as if nothing had happened.
Iggy Pop’s penis is actually a bit of a thorny topic with me. I wish he’d keep it under wraps when it comes time to step out in the public arena. Seeing it or hearing him describe it in song is just too much information. David Bowie is apparently of the same opinion. ‘I wish Jim wouldn’t keep exposing himself,’ he informed a French newspaper back in the nineties. Put our reactions down to an Englishman’s natural sense of reserve. Back in the old country people called them ‘private parts’ for a reason.
Maybe he had the same problem when they later shared an apartment in West Berlin that I encountered from time to time in 1975 when I happened to pass out on the sofa at James Williamson’s place and ended up spending the night there. The next morning I’d awaken with a fierce hangover only to see Iggy parading around stark naked before my ill-focused eyes. There was inevitably something slightly intimidating about the ease with which he let himself be witnessed au naturel. And it only got worse when I later joined him for an impromptu swim at a nearby hotel pool. My own more modestly proportioned sexual apparatus was duly stricken by some serious shrinkage just as
soon as I’d jumped into the cold water. Iggy, as you might imagine, didn’t seem to suffer from this kind of humiliation. See, that’s the problem whenever you hang out with a fellow who just happens to possess unfeasibly large genitalia. He’s got a huge penis, you don’t, and the contrast inevitably begins eating away at your personal sense of manly self-esteem. But I never let the matter sully our relationship because I was always more interested in what was going on in the man’s soul. And I sense that David Bowie felt the same way.
In all the biographies and articles written about Bowie and/or Iggy, it’s claimed that the pair stepped into a studio to write and record together for the first time ever sometime in May 1975. But the session actually occurred some two months earlier, in mid-March by my recollection because Iggy told me about it the day after. Bowie had phoned him up clear out of the blue and invited him to collaborate on some new material he was set to demo in a local Hollywood recording facility. Iggy turned up at the appointed time to find a rail-thin Bowie alone in the studio apart from an engineer and an oval-faced teenager who turned out to be the journalist Cameron Crowe on assignment for both
Rolling Stone
and
Playboy
magazines. After snorting cocaine together, Bowie and Iggy set about composing and then recording three impromptu songs - ‘Turn Blue’, ‘Speak to Me’ and ‘Sell Your Love’ - with the latter supplying both lyrics and vocals and the former playing and overdubbing all the instruments himself. There were scattered moments of open conflict. At one point Bowie admonished Iggy for sounding ‘too much like Mick [Jagger]’. ‘I don’t sound like fuckin’ Mick,’ the Mighty Pop snapped back sniffily. But this experiment in creative human bonding turned out to be a successful one for both parties. Iggy
was elated to be back in a studio and working with such a quick-thinking and prestigious presence. And the prestigious presence was thrilled too - if Cameron Crowe’s account of the session later printed in
Rolling Stone
is any indication. ‘Bowie clutches his heart and beams like a proud father watching his kid in the school play . . . “They just don’t appreciate Iggy,” he is saying. “He’s Lenny fucking Bruce and James Dean. When that adlib flow starts, there’s nobody like him. It’s verbal jazz, man!”’
It was Iggy’s talent for ‘verbal jazz’ that ultimately attracted the newly christened Thin White Duke to work with him - rather than a desire for some
Velvet Goldmine
-like sexual trysting. David Jones had devoured Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
as a teenager. Now, in his twenties, he’d found the ultimate wild American friend - his very own Neal Cassady - to share his life with.
History now indicates that Bowie and Iggy did indeed become travelling companions, globetrotting the world - and elsewhere - together. But these journeys only began taking place the following year. After the session, Iggy didn’t hear from him for months. The Thin White Duke had other more pressing matters to regulate. There was a film being shot in Mexico that summer entitled
The Man Who Fell to Earth
that he’d agreed to play the starring role in. There was a new manager and new business advisers to select and monitor. But, most urgently, he needed to be put in touch with a reputable exorcist. In her autobiography
Backstage Passes
his then-wife Angie recalls receiving a barely coherent phone call from her husband that must have taken place shortly after the Iggy session: ‘He was in a house somewhere in LA and three people - a Warlock and two witches - were holding him for some terrible Satan-related reason. He wanted to get away . . . but the witches wouldn’t let him leave.’ Flying over from London to help
calm her spouse’s paranoid fantasies, she ended up consulting a white witch herself about the best way to exorcise demonic spirits from their temporary LA homestead. The real problem, she strongly implied in her text, was that these spirits were nothing more than hallucinations visited upon Bowie due to his grave overdependence on cocaine and a general lack of food and sleep.
Iggy too had hellhounds dogging his trail. His demons were real though: poverty, public indifference, a stalled career, boredom, frustration and flat-out despair. He still had his patrons. A gay youth named Raymond who’d somehow managed to con his way into receiving ATD - financial aid for the totally disabled - even though he was quite able-bodied would turn up every month to share his drugs and government cheque with his downtrodden hero. A teenaged girl whose father was a rich Mafia lawyer would raid her parents’ jewellery stash, pawn the stolen items and then give the money to Iggy to tide him over financially for a couple of weeks at a time. He’d mastered how to survive in the margins alongside the rest of the dispossessed and how to gainfully court the kindness of strangers. But he was also going stir-crazy because he’d been born with a hyperactive nature and couldn’t stand being made temporarily redundant as a performer and musician. He always needed some work-related pursuit to keep him halfway anchored or else he’d be off somewhere running wild, spinning like a spinning top in a hurricane. Drugs were still a problem for him because he still intuitively believed he needed to be intoxicated in order to summon forth the essential all-defiant Iggyness that lurked within his otherwise somewhat guarded and inward-looking personality. But the drugs weren’t working any more because his nervous system couldn’t take the continued abuse. Back in the not-so-distant past,
chemicals had helped ease the pain and beat the odds but now they were only pushing him further and further into the black hole of despair.
Another outstanding LA-based music-maker struggling to hang on to his sanity in the mid-seventies was Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ former guiding light. Iggy had encountered him once at a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Alice Cooper had also been on the premises. Wilson - overweight, sweating profusely and dressed only in pyjamas and a dressing gown - had tried to get the two singers to harmonise on a version of ‘Shortnin’ Bread’ that he’d improvised on a nearby piano. I asked Iggy how Wilson had seemed that night. ‘Like a total, certifiable lunatic,’ came the reply.
Everyone in Hollywood had their own ‘crazy Brian’ anecdote to share. Iggy and James Williamson’s next-door neighbour was a woman who’d recently become the personal astrologer of Wilson’s wife Marilyn and she’d often recount with saucer-eyed incredulity the dysfunctional vibe of her new employer’s Hollywood home. A guy living just down the hall had once stumbled upon Wilson passed out on someone’s lawn. It often made for painful listening: people invariably invoked the term ‘some kind of permanent brain damage’ when attempting to define his mindset.
I was staying in the spare room of Ben Edmonds’s rented house at this point and most mornings I’d awaken to the gentle pitter-patter of early morning rain just as dawn was lighting up the sky. By 7 a.m. the sun would be gleaming and I’d fleetingly feel that healing California glow I’d come in search of. To keep that good feeling flowing, I’d play Beach Boys records throughout the morning way into the afternoon - early stuff like
Summer
Days (and Summer Nights!!)
and the incomparable
Today!
. I needed to rid myself of all the jadedness I’d lately become engulfed by, and the Beach Boys’ vintage music proved a bracing tonic in that regard. It still thrilled me the way it had when I’d first been exposed to it as a dreamy-headed pre-pubescent sprog. There was hope yet. And the more I listened, the more obsessed I became with trying to fathom out what had really happened to Wilson in his rise and fall from grace. Without at first realising it, I’d found my next project for the
NME
.
When the penny dropped, I went into full ‘investigative journalist’ mode, tearing around the region in search of clues and Beach Boys acquaintances who could still remember what had transpired in the LA music community over the past fifteen years. His evolving story soon started to feel like a potent metaphor for La-La Land itself. It had once been the closest thing in the Western world to a Garden of Eden. But disruptive forces had taken dominion over the terrain and turned it into a sun-baked snake pit. Many of the carefree golden boys and girls who’d roamed the beaches with surfboards back in the sixties were now crazy-eyed human wreckage. No wonder Brian Wilson had retreated deep inside his bedroom and become scarily obese and creatively inactive. He just wasn’t made for these times.
With the promised land’s native spawn starting to turn distinctly frayed and crispy around the edges, it was down to the bulldog-breed expat rockers who’d lately installed themselves in this balmier clime to bring the requisite star-power and sparkle back to Tinseltown. Like David Bowie, they’d come to luxuriate in the American dream after having spent far too long cocooning in England’s dreary landscape only to find the drinks more toxic, the lines growing fatter and the laughs getting thinner. No fewer
than two ex-Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, were holed up there now, though they generally made a point of never seeking out each other’s company. The still boyish-looking McCartney - in town to mix Wings’
Venus and Mars
album - had lately sullied his usual squeaky-clean image by getting busted driving around Santa Monica with reefer in the car. Wife Linda saved him from possible extradition by taking the rap. Starr meanwhile had fallen into the role of Hollywood’s most illustrious town drunk, with local lesser lights like Harry Nilsson and ex-Monkee Micky Dolenz providing a raucous and ever-willing entourage at watering holes dotted throughout the region. But lately he was facing stiff competition: Keith Moon had moved into the area too and was bent on drinking the town dry. Everyone remembers Moon nowadays as this mischievous imp who caused mayhem and merriment wherever he went but the man I saw night after night out in the clubs rarely corresponded to this image. He’d be sitting in a corner with a look of utter misery on his face, pouring booze down his neck to drown his sorrows and still his inner demons. Where had all the good times gone for these guys? Those crazy days and crazy nights, those high-spirited Pied Piper sixties? One minute they and their peers were high and happy and on the brink of some shared state of enlightenment, the next they were nursing dour faces and stiff drinks and practising the dark art of self-obliteration. The spell had been broken - that was it. The good magic just wasn’t happening any more and everyone who’d lived in the cloud-cuckoo-land of Utopia now had to face the painful descent back to planet Earth and the harsh realities of broken marriages and aimless hedonism.