Authors: Paul Trynka
‘Meeting the guy, I could not believe what he was like. I guess it didn’t contradict anything else I believed about him. I was just shocked that a guy who was willing to cut himself up with broken glass was also so articulate. It didn’t mean that he was too smart to have done those things, that all those stories weren’t true. But it was a total shock.’
Don’s surprise was explicable, for he was not just meeting Iggy Pop. He was also meeting Jim Osterberg: the ambitious, charming, charismatic boy from Ann Arbor who had created this legendary rock ’n’ roll animal. Most of those who have been caught in the laser-beam intensity of a one-on-one meeting with this man speak of the same feeling. Jim’s voice is warm, intelligent, reminiscent of that of Jimmy Stewart, as is his effortless charm: he seems the perfect American icon, warm, alive, acute and playful. Impressively lithe, he inhabits his body gracefully, like a cat. The conversation ranges from Bertolt Brecht to Greek mythology, the avant garde to t’ai chi, the difference between the Apollonian and the Dionysian ideal. He fixes his clear blue eyes upon you, staring into your own eyes in almost disconcertingly rapt attention, but occasionally looks away in a coy, boyish kind of way, or breaks into a broad, seductive smile when he gets to the end of a harrowing anecdote. His voice is rich and elegant; he listens intently to questions, laughing at the ridiculous nature of his own life, wittily describing the many ludicrous predicaments in which he’s placed himself, caricaturing the self-destructive voices he’d hear in his head. For someone celebrated as perhaps the most committed, forceful performer ever to take a stage, he is shockingly and consistently self-deprecating. But never, even for one moment, does he suggest that his commitment to his music is anything but unyielding and absolute.
As you walk away from an encounter with Jim Osterberg, your head will probably be spinning, quite possibly with love and adoration, almost certainly with profound respect and a feeling of empathy. Fellow rock stars, casual members of the public, lords and media magnates, countless thousands of people will talk of their encounter with this driven, talented, indomitable creature, a man who has plumbed the depths of depravity, yet emerged with an indisputable nobility. Each of them will share an admiration and appreciation of the contradictions and ironies of his incredible life. Even so, they are unlikely to fully comprehend both the heights and the depths of his experience, for the extremes are simply beyond the realms of most people’s understanding.
Many musicians have doubtless suffered similar mockery and violence, countless others have demonstrated a similar capacity for self-harm and drug abuse, and more than a few have been taken up as heroes, decades later, by new legions of disciples. Yet no other figure seems to speak, like Iggy Pop, to generation after generation of musicians at such an intimate, personal level, nor inspire wave after wave of music that pervades the mainstream. Just as the Damned’s Brian James treasured his own copy of the Stooges’
Fun House
in the early 1970s, so would Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain play the same band’s
Raw Power
over and over, nearly two decades later, confiding to his journal that it was his favourite album of all time, even writing a song for his hero. Later still, in a new century, Iggy would finally appear at festivals alongside other celebrated fans, like the White Stripes or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, skipping, spinning and screaming before tens of thousands of 23-year-olds. Meanwhile, the musicians who topped the bill over him all those years ago, who threw lightbulbs at him or publicly dismissed him as a loser, play to shrinking crowds of ageing fans.
Every aspect of Iggy Pop that attracted outrage or incomprehension in the past - his appearance, his breaking down of the barriers between performer and audience, the eloquent simplicity of his music or the truculent anomie of his lyrics - has become an integral element of today’s rock and alternative music. This is a turnaround that seems almost without historical parallel, yet it cannot be considered a simple fairytale ending. Not when one considers the physical and mental depredations, the disasters and the rejections, that went on for decade after decade, even when by all accounts Iggy Pop was happily rehabilitated and reconciled with his creator, Jim Osterberg.
The legend and the music of Iggy Pop is today celebrated. Yet behind it there are endless confused stories and mysteries. How could one musician be so revered, yet so reviled? And how could one man be so clever, and so stupid?
CHAPTER 1
Most Likely To
It was a beautiful drive up to Silver Lake, a resort just east of Lake Michigan where high school kids lucky enough to own their own automobiles would hang out on the beach for the summer. It was 1965, and Jim Osterberg had just joined the car-owning set, but as was his habit he had flouted the conventional entry requirements of parental approval, driving licence - even driving lessons. Lynn Klavitter, his steady date throughout twelfth grade, was impressed that Jim had saved up enough cash to afford the ’57 Chevy station wagon, but wasn’t so impressed by his driving on the 200-mile trip to the resort. Yet the more she asked him to slow down, calmly, avoiding confrontation, the more her kind-hearted, funny, but increasingly headstrong boyfriend floored the accelerator, insisting he was in control.
On the final stretch of Highway 31 up to Silver Lake, Lynn started to lose her temper as Jim coaxed the reluctant old red and white Chevy up to ninety miles an hour. Suddenly they were shouting at each other, and just as suddenly the wagon’s back end started fishtailing, then swerving out of control. As the novice driver tried to correct the swerve, the car veered off the road; it flipped over once, then twice, then a third time, ploughing down two trees on the grass verge, crashing upside-down through bushes as wood splinters and dust filled the car.
As the Chevy groaned to a halt on its roof, its teenage passengers scrambled out of the open windows and looked at each other. The car was a total wreck, but apart from scratches from tree bark, and Jim’s bruises from the steering wheel, they were both, unbelievably, unharmed. All was quiet. Calmly, Jim picked up the number plate that had been ripped from the Chevy, linked hands with Lynn and they walked off up the hill and all the way to the resort, where they would both lie on the beach in the sun.
It was maybe a couple of days later that Osterberg told his closest friend, Jim McLaughlin, how lucky he was to be alive. ‘Here we go, another of Osterberg’s tall tales,’ thought McLaughlin, and promptly forgot about it. A few years later, Iggy Stooge mentioned to a journalist how he was special, that he’d survived what should have been a fatal accident and he was destined to make his mark. Even though the notion of an indestructible rock star seemed faintly ludicrous, like many of his inflated claims it made good copy.
These were optimistic, booming, postwar years in America, when anything seemed possible. It was a time and a place when a smart kid, brought up in an environment seething with intellectuals and scientific savants, driven by intelligent, hard-working, ambitious parents, could seemingly do anything he wanted. He could make friends with some of the most powerful figures in the industrial world, and witness first-hand an intimate arts scene peopled with characters who would later become superstars. With this environment, the right kind of kid - one with drive, a fierce intelligence and the right kind of charm - could become President of the United States. And this was the future that classmates and teachers in Ann Arbor predicted for Jim Osterberg, the witty, well-dressed classroom politician, a kid with an enviable knack of making connections with the rich and powerful.
Coachville Gardens trailer park sits in green surroundings on Carpenter Road, just outside the city of Ann Arbor, officially in the town of Ypsilanti, Michigan. Although it’s gained the inevitable gaggle of sprawling out-of-town stores, Ypsilanti is still mostly a lush, quiet place where nothing much happens. There are plenty of isolated wooden houses where you can live undisturbed, watching out for cranes and squirrels in the summer, and taking your dogs for long, reflective walks through the crisp virginal snow in the winter. It’s a beautiful setting, although, like many small country towns, there’s occasionally a feeling of claustrophobia, and it’s easy to bump into slightly odd characters who watch jerry-rigged cable TV late into the night, haunt internet chat rooms or get loaded on Class A drugs to numb their boredom.
Although these days Ypsilanti rather grandly terms itself a city, in reality it’s overshadowed by its much bigger neighbour, Ann Arbor, which since 1837 has been defined by the presence of the University of Michigan. The university was celebrated for its diverse curriculum and liberal ethos and, together with the presence of General Motors and Ford in nearby Detroit, it would attract a constant influx of new residents to the city and stimulate thriving local industries in engineering, pharmaceuticals and electronics.
It was the influence of the university that ensured Ann Arbor was a classy town. People who lived there drank espresso, formed arts groups and took dancing lessons. In contrast, people from Ypsilanti were often regarded as Midwestern hillbillies. The two towns weren’t totally uneasy bedfellows: plenty of academics might dispense intellectual wisdom at the university and then return home to a sprawling isolated farmhouse in Ypsi’s beautiful countryside, but the divide was perceptible for anyone who crossed the city limits: the gap between people whose salary was generated by their intellects, and those whose weekly paycheck was earned with the rude labour of their hands on a farm or in a factory; between people of culture and rural rubes. It was on that divide that Jim Osterberg and Iggy Pop grew up.
As a rock star, Iggy Pop would often refer to his upbringing in a trailer park, the definitive blue-collar home. But as a schoolboy, Jim Osterberg was regarded as the middle-class boy most likely to succeed. Other kids admired, and some of them envied, his elegant dress, his parents’ house in Ann Arbor Hills - an elegant enclave peopled by academics, architects and the nation’s most significant captains of industry - and a confidence that seemed unshakeable.
In the late 1940s, Ann Arbor, along with most of Michigan, was undergoing an economic boom. Money still flowed in from military contracts, while industrial giants including Ford and General Motors were readying themselves for a huge expansion in demand as a million ex-servicemen prepared to spend their government home loans. In the east of the state, all the way over to Detroit and its huge River Rouge Ford plant, new factory buildings sprouted in once green and peaceful locations with resonant Native American names. Multi-storey buildings shot up on the Michigan University campus, and although housing was being developed all round the city, there was still a severe shortage. In 1948, a small group of businessmen headed by Perry Brown, who managed a machine shop in the city, and the Gingras brothers - Irv, Leo and George - developed a small trailer park on Carpenter Road, which they named Coachville Gardens, aiming to attract workers at the Ford factory and the local telephone company. Among the first people to move in, in the fall of 1949, were James Newell Osterberg, his wife Louella and infant son James Newell Junior, who had been born, prematurely, in Muskegon’s Osteopathic Hospital on 21 April 1947. The unconventionally small family would become well known around Coachville Gardens: ‘It was a small trailer with a very large mother and a very skinny tall father,’ says Brad Jones, who lived nearby, ‘like something you’d see in a cult movie. The trailer was very small, and the dad was an Ichabod Crane kinda guy, real tall and thin, and mom was just a square body. But you know what? They connected alright. Somehow it worked.’
Jim Osterberg’s earliest memory is of being in Louella’s lap, playing a game where ‘she’d recite a kind of a chant, in Danish, then on the last word almost drop me to the floor and pick me back up. And I wanted to do it again and again.’ Jim Junior grew up in the presence of his mother’s warm, nurturing love, and his father’s baseball accoutrements (‘He had played some semi-pro baseball; he had an enormous bat, and the mitt, and everything that goes with it’).
James Newell Osterberg Senior, the dominating influence in the life of the son who carried his name, was born on 28 March 1921; he was of Irish and English descent, but spent his youth in a Michigan orphanage, lonely and unwanted until two spinster Jewish sisters named Esther and Ida Osterberg walked in and decided that 14-year-old James was the child who most needed a home. They nurtured and loved him, and paid for his education, before passing away in quick succession: one in mourning for their lovely house, bulldozed to make way for a highway, and the second for her adored sister. James appreciated the break he’d been given late in life and worked hard at school. A keen baseball player, he later played in the minor leagues and tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, although he never obtained the contract card that designated professional athlete status. Like many of his generation, James Osterberg’s education was interrupted by the war, but his obvious college potential meant he was trained as a radio operator in the Army Air Force (in later years he would still remember his missions over Germany and warn his son off the place). After the war James Senior toyed with studying dentistry and osteopathy, before training as a teacher of English and moving to Ypsilanti to take a job at the high school on Packard Road, a four-minute drive from Coachville.
James Osterberg Senior was regarded by most of those who knew him as a reserved, even severe teacher, who graded his students strictly. As well as teaching English, he assisted in sports. As a new teacher, he was more likely to teach the less academic pupils, in which case much of the emphasis in the English lessons was on public speaking. Many of his ex-pupils remember being intimidated by him during their school days, although as adults they’ve come to admire his tenacity and commitment; one pupil, Mary Booth, describes him as her most ‘feared - and favourite’ teacher. Around 1958 Osterberg landed a better-paid job at Fordson High, in the Dearborn district, an area on the outskirts of Detroit dominated by a huge Ford plant. The bigger paycheck meant the family could move from their Spirit trailer to a much bigger New Moon, all futuristic and Jetsony. At Fordson, Osterberg was respected as a committed, dedicated and fair teacher, who would occasionally unleash a quick, dry humour. ‘Mr O’ was an idealist; sometimes this made life difficult, notably when he unsuccessfully attempted to found a teachers’ union. According to Jim Junior, only one friend backed him up, and the project was abandoned.
Not all of Mr Osterberg’s charges remember his lessons, but those who do retain huge respect for his dedication and perseverance. Patricia Carson Celusta was inspired to become a high school teacher by his example, and credits him with transforming her from a shy girl into a confident public speaker. ‘He made you think beyond yourself,’ she recalls fondly, remembering that this inspirational figure helped impart ‘truths that have sustained us all’. Now retired after her own long career as an English and speech teacher, Patricia Celusta hails James Osterberg as ‘the very definition of a teacher’, and still treasures a battered old copy of the English textbook from which he taught. Mr O inculcated confidence and the power of the spoken word into his successful pupils, as well as encouraging their understanding of wider cultural and literary issues. Many other ex-pupils back up Patricia’s description of him as committed, capable and fair. So does Osterberg Junior. But this was the 1950s, and Jim Senior was a military-minded man, and that intellectual rigour required a backbone of discipline, which meant on several occasions he would resort to using the belt or the hickory stick on his son.
While Jim Junior would disappoint his disciplinarian father countless times over the following years, and often confront him, sometimes with violent undertones, you could say the belt and hickory stick worked. Like his father, Jim was a driven personality, although in his case that drive was wrapped up in a charm and wackiness that also betrayed the influence of his easy-going and loving mom.
Around Coachville Gardens, Mr Osterberg was regarded as an intimidating presence, although a few people speculate that some of that severity came from necessity, given his job. According to neighbour Brad Jones, ‘He’d only be severe if you let him get away with it.’ James Senior ’s tough, no-nonsense attitude (‘trailers make sense’ was how he justified the family’s unconventional abode) was reflected in his dress and military haircut. But he would also take Jim Junior on long idyllic drives into the country. When Frank Sinatra came on the radio, Osterberg Senior would sing along with him. Over fifty years later, his son remembers drives in the Osterberg Cadillac, listening to his dad crooning ‘Young At Heart’, and dreaming of becoming a singer.
Louella Osterberg, née Kristensen, was a cuddly woman of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian blood, who doted on the two men in the house and became a well-loved figure around Western Ypsilanti, despite working full-time in an office at Bendix, one of the main industrial employers in Ann Arbor. In later years she would preside over increasingly competitive arguments between father and son, but remained remarkably unfazed. Somehow, for all the male aggression on display in the tiny trailer in later years, there seemed little doubt that this was a happy, loving, if unconventional, family.
For many people in Coachville Gardens, the trailer park represented an American arcadia, where kids in bibbed denim overalls played happily in rolling fields, dreaming of Sputnik and Superman. Parents could leave their children to play around the park, safe in the knowledge they’d be watched over by friendly adults in the close-knit community. It was probably this family atmosphere, plus the postwar housing shortage in Ann Arbor, that initially drew the Osterbergs to the park; once there, though, they stayed put until the autumn of 1982, becoming some of Coachville’s longest-term residents. There was green farmland all round, the nearest building being a stone, one-room elementary school on the other side of Carpenter Road. The Leveretts’ adjacent farmhouse was the premier hangout for kids in the area, who could earn pocket money working at Chuck and Dorothy’s vegetable stall or picking corn for them in the summer. For Osterberg Senior the presence of Pat’s Par Three golf course, right beside the trailer park, was a major draw. Behind the trailer park a small track led to the railway lines. Young James could hear the mournful hoot of freight trains passing through at night, and in the daytime he could sneak down to watch them clatter past on their way from New York to Chicago.