Photos: Rob Morata/Michael Priest Photography
Iggy Pop’s new album, Free, is, by all accounts an excellent effort, so when the opportunity arose to hear him speak about this latest work, I arrived all ears. We heard little about the album, but learned enough about Iggy Pop to want to buy all his records.
Sitting down one-on-one with Jim Jarmusch, Jim Osterberg Jr., known to the world as the Stooge’s Iggy Pop, came off intelligent, relaxed, confident and funny. Regularly poking fun at himself and—very gently—of others. In speaking of a late bandmate, Pop seemed genuinely saddened even after all these years, and nonjudgmentally repeated “He took too much of the wrong thing.” Of one song Farnk Sinatra made famous, “My Way,” Pop gave an educated, cogent history of the song, telling his audience that it was based on a mediocre French song “D’Habitude” [“As Usual”], summing up the caterpillar-to-butterfly-metamorphosis succinctly, “That’s the American way: take something shitty and make it glorious.”
The audience demographic wasn’t the Americana, John Mellencamp or Paul McCartney crowd, but a forty-to-fifty-something hipster group, with three chunky rings on each hand and a wonton disregard for natural-looking hair, or professionals related to that crowd.
Pop has a radio show where, unsurprisingly, he plays an eclectic selection. His take on most programming: “Each station’s goal is to play variations on shit; Celine Dion and seven women who sound like Celine Dion.” Of the long list of artists he’s featured recently on his own show, I recognized about half.
The talk ranged from the appeal of male/female duets to a lengthy reminiscence about Anthony Bourdain, whom Pop knew well, and clearly missed. Jarmusch related an anecdote in which he attended a particularly insane, killer Pop show. Afterward, backstage, Pop was seen icing his elbow. Jarmusch assumed the injury was show-related, but Pop corrected him, saying “Nah, I hurt my arm playing golf with my dad.”
The evening wound up with Pop’s thoughtful explanation of how and why he separates Iggy Pop from Jim Osterberg. “It’s great when someone gets excited about what you do, but after, you’d like to have people get to know you. Being only Iggy Pop can get really old.”
—Suzanne Cadgène
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