The basic premise of this book is that Iggy Pop is actually two people. Jim Osterberg is the thoughtful, bookish intellectual and his alter ego Iggy Pop is the drug-fueled, sex-crazed, rock and roll monster. We’ve heard this story before. It starts off as the classic Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde, Professor Kelp/Buddy Love chemically induced transformation that goes terribly wrong when A) One identity has to take responsibility for the other ones actions, and B) The two start blurring together.
The author switches back and forth between the two too many times, but as a rule it’s “Iggy” onstage and “Jim” offstage. Then everything falls apart and starts over. It’s a bit much and I occasionally had to stop and think, “Who’s this Jim guy?”
David Bowie comes off fairly well in this book. He’s been accused of trying to steal Iggy’s soul, among other things, but is portrayed quite sympathetically here. Sure, he used his association with Iggy to gain street cred, but Iggy certainly benefited more from his association from Bowie. The “Lust For Life” album is rightfully presented as evidence for that. It’s not like either Iggy or Bowie has ever pleaded innocent to anything and I’ve carried the courtroom metaphors about as far as I can.
Most of the page space in this book is devoted to the most creative periods in Iggy’s career, like when the Stooges were together and the years in Berlin with Bowie.
In between creative surges, Iggy goes nuts. Seemingly every time he is on the verge of achieving greatness, he goes nuts and screws it up. Every time he establishes a mutually beneficial working relationship with somebody, something happens, he goes nuts, and he screws it up. He has a knack for self-sabotage.
The book sums everything since about 1987 briefly and succinctly until the recent reunion of the Stooges. It concludes with Iggy (or “Jim”) relaxing in his comfortable Miami bungalow. He has a Rolls-Royce and a twelve-foot-tall trophy girlfriend. Over the years, his back catalog has become quite valuable. The former honor student that was voted “most likely to succeed” finally has – but he crawled through every slimy gutter in the world to get there. He seems happy and I’m glad.
Since I started this book shortly after reading “Jagger Unauthorized, “ a mid-90’s hatchet-job by Christopher Andersen, I couldn’t help but make some comparisons between the Mick and the Ig. Both Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger are extremely clever and deviously smart people with pretensions of being both above and below their given stations, sometimes simultaneously. They both tend to use people and then cast them aside. They are both uniquely talented and have created recorded legacies consisting of both great art and total crap. They are also both carbon-based life forms, but that’s about it.
Where the two books differ is this – while The Jagger book goes out of it’s way to tell stories of Mick boinking every celebrity from Madonna to Mister Ed, the Iggy book is remarkably free of sleaze. It’s certainly not a white-wash, but it’s not a muck rake either. Since Iggy has never kept any secrets about anything, there’s no reason to go National Enquirer on him.
In summation, the Iggy book has a bittersweet, almost happy ending. Unlike most rock biographies, the subject doesn’t die at the end of the book. Iggy will probably end up fighting Keith Richards over who gets to eat the last cockroach on earth.
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