“Well I’m just a modern guy.”

Update: Dangerous Minds has the hippest readers on the planet. Thanks for the heads up. It seems the above photo is an altered version of the photo below of Iggy and Sable Starr.
 

 
Via Flash Glam Trash

 
Two cool clips from Dutch television’s Top Pop of a lip-syncing Iggy Pop in 1978 and a low-key interview. Although it is just pantomime, it’s pretty badass pantomime. For whatever reason he’s doing the seldom heard “I Got A Right” from the James Williamson-era, plus “Some Weird Sin” from Lust for Life.
 

 
After the jump: A 1978 TV performance of “Some Weird Sin.”

 
This Channel 4 UK program from the mid-80s compiles some incredible performances culled from Tony Wilson’s late 70s Granada TV series, So It Goes. Includes the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Buzzcocks, Iggy Pop (with horsetail sticking out of his ass and saying “fucking” on 70s TV), The Fall, The Jam, Elvis Costello, Blondie, Penetration, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, Tom Robinson, Magazine, John Cooper Clarke, XTC, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sham 69 and ending with the classic clip of Joy Division performing “Shadow Play.” Many of the groups represented here were making their TV debuts on So It Goes, a regional tea-time program.
 

 
James Williamson of the Stooges discusses the newly remixed, remastered version of 1977’s Kill City, a little-known album in the Iggy canon, but one that is ripe for rediscovery 34-years after it was first released. James also talks about what it was like to stand on-stage with people throwing beer bottles at the band the night that Metallic K.O. was recorded, his career as a rocker turned SONY executive turned rocker again and the current Stooges tour.

Read Beyond the Law: Brilliant reissue of 1977 Iggy Pop & James Williamson album ‘Kill City’
 

 
For me to properly communicate why I feel that the restored, remixed, remastered version of Iggy Pop and James Williamson’s ill-fated 1977 album Kill City is such a major event for rock snobs, my initial reaction to hearing it—yikes—34-years ago, is probably the best place for me to start, because I thought it sucked back then.

I was an 11-year-old budding rock snob at the time. My introduction to the Stooges had come a year or two earlier, via Lester Bangs rhapsodizing about them in the pages of CREEM magazine and due to the fact that David Bowie had produced Raw Power. To me this was the ultimate double seal of approval and after reading about the music and hearing it described so vividly by Bangs—who’d clearly had his life changed by the album—I just had to hear it for myself. I wanted to have that same sonic baptism Lester Bangs had. I wanted Raw Power to change my life, too. If I could only hear Raw Power, I’d get to enter some sort of druidic inner temple of rock and roll gnosticism. I wanted to hear this album so fuckin’ bad that I simply had no choice in the matter.

There was one problem, though. In 1976, I was a little kid in Wheeling, WV, which was not exactly a place with tons of great record stores (or anything else for that matter) even if I would have had any money. I was SOL when it came to being able to walk into a store and be able to purchase an Iggy Pop album. The nearest place where I could have done so was about an hour and a half away, in Pittsburgh, and that wasn’t ever gonna happen.

This will no doubt seem quaint, today, in the age of consumer enlightenment and instantaneous digital gratification, but back then I had to do at least two day’s worth of unpleasant chores and yard work and then resort to mail order, yes mail order, to be able to get my mitts on a copy of Raw Power. This meant getting my mother to write a check to Moby Disc Records in Los Angeles—one of the sole mail order outlets for prog, punk and imports back then—mailing it to them, waiting for the check to clear and then having them ship it to me. (It you got a defective LP, it was easier just to keep it and grin and bear it when it skipped).

The entire transaction took a little less than six weeks and with each passing day that it didn’t show up in the post, my desire for Raw Power to be completely incredible and totally life transforming—the most amazing thing I’d ever hear—grew and grew. Whenever younger folk look at guys my age with huge record collections with befuddlement, it was this sort of anticipation of a truly holy experience that started us on that road. These sorts of obsessions didn’t always pay off, but often times they did in spades. How could anyone ever feel the same today about something they acquired with a few clicks of a mouse?

When my copy of Raw Power finally arrived—it was a glossy import with a plastic lined inner sleeve, the first I’d seen—I slapped it on the stereo and cranked it to the max my speakers could handle and had every bit the experience that I wanted to—expected to—have. Truly, the speaker-shredding violence of the record did not disappoint! I listened to that ear-bleeding monster a gazillion times that summer and for years afterwards.

The next Iggy Pop album I bought via mail order was Metallic K.O. (Imagine how my mother would have felt if she’d have known what she was helping put into her preteen son’s hands!). I had the one on blue vinyl. I think what it was (and that it was a live album) overshadowed how awful it sounded, because this, too, I played endlessly. After that I bought The Idiot, which I was slightly put off by at first—because it was so different from the primitive insanity of the Stooges’ albums—but I quickly grew to love it.
 

 
Then came Kill City. This was on green vinyl, and although it was a studio album, it sounded as bad as Metallic KO did, which is to say, pretty bad. This I found perplexing, thinking it was a creative choice that it sounded so murky and dank. I never really listened to that album. I tried, it just sounded like total dogshit to my young—but reasonably sophisticated—ears. I concluded that the album sucked, didn’t play it for years and eventually I traded it in. Wanting to give it a chance years later, I owned a CD reissue briefly, but it was obviously mastered from the same source—the master tapes were long lost—and probably was played no more than one time before I traded it in, too. It was impossible to listen to that much tape hiss and muck. It sounded like there might be something great lurking underneath it all, but it was still difficult listening.

In 1996, an otherwise pedestrian Iggy compilation called Nude and Rude featured a much improved version of Kill City’s title cut—I bought it for that reason alone—but the rest of the album was sadly not forthcoming.

It would take another fourteen years before Iggy fans would get to hear Kill City in all its unhinged glory. In 2010, James Williamson and engineer Ed Cherney remixed Kill City from the original mulitracks and Alive/Bomp Records released it last Fall. I didn’t hear about it until a week ago and I’ve not stopped listening to it, or raving about it to my rock snob pals, since.

It’s as if a ripsnorting hotrod that was stored in a garage for three decades has gotten a major overhaul, a shithot Big Daddy Roth paintjob and is now screaming down the old highway, blowing off toxic exhaust fumes for the rest of the world to choke on. This isn’t a minor face-lift, it marks a tremendous difference with past releases. NOW it sounds like what it IS: the music recorded by Pop and Williamson after Raw Power. More specifically after Raw Power and the dissolution of the Stooges and before Iggy decamped to Berlin with David Bowie to record The Idiot. Not that it sounds like either one of those records. In many respects, Kill City is more accessible than both.

The back story of Kill City is that it was recorded during 1974, when Iggy had checked himself into a mental hospital to dry out and kick junk. The vocals were laid down during weekend leave. It was never intended to be a proper album, but rather a demo that was supposed to snare a record contract and resurrect Pop’s stalled career. Pop and Williamson were hoping John Cale would produce it, but nothing happened. Eventually Bomp Records gave Williamson enough money to finish the album due to the success of The Idiot and Kill City was put out on the substandard green vinyl pressing in 1977.

Heard in this vastly cleaned-up new version, Iggy’s vocals are nothing short of jaw-dropping. As in the best he’s ever done. Pop might have been in a diminished mental and physical state when this record was made, but to my ears, he sounds every bit the same “street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm” that he did on Raw Power. His performances here are outrageously good. Make no mistake about it, this is prime, primal Iggy Pop from his best period. It’s not like I’m blabbing on about an album’s worth of Avenue B outtakes!

Musically, like most reviewers, I hear something midway between Raw Power and Exile on Main Street (there are even touches of country). Johnny Marr of the Smiths had this to say about James Williamson’s guitar work:

“He has the technical ability of Jimmy Page without being as studious, and the swagger of Keith Richards without being sloppy. He’s both demonic and intellectual, almost how you would imagine Darth Vader to sound if he was in a band.”

Too true! On Kill City he does manage to sound like both Page and Richards within the same song. His treble-cranked leads will claw your eyes out. Williamson chords more furiously than any guitarist I can name. He’s quite ferocious on Kill City, although he’s not intending to recreate the incendiary slash and burn of the album that came before it.

Kill City is certainly more musically sophisticated an album than Raw Power—which is not necessarily to say it’s better. Kill City is much less monolithic—if no less nihilistic—than its predecessor. It’s horned-drenched with squealing 70s saxophones—in a very good way—and is one of the sleaziest sounding records this side of Lou Reed’s Sally Can’t Dance. It’s a tremendous musical high to hear rock and roll this primal and dark and just authentically weird in 2010. What can compare to (finally) hearing Iggy Pop and James Williamson’s Kill City with fresh ears over three decades since its ill-fated 1977 debut?

I tells ya, it’s a knockout, everything that it always should have been what never was. Pass this one by at your own peril, it’s not often that a reissue like this come around. For the first time ever, this significant batch of recordings from the partnership that gave the world Raw Power, can be properly evaluated and enjoyed. It’s nothing less than a gift.

Compare the difference between this (original) version of “Kill City” with the 2010 upgraded version below it. You’ll hear immediately why this is such a reason for rock snob rejoicing.
 

 
Below, the 2010 version. I always thought that “Lick It Up” by Kiss sounded like this song.
 

 
An interesting short video piece from Fortune magazine about about James Williamson, who after leaving the music industry, got a degree in technical engineering and became a Vice President at Sony.
 

 
Bonus clip of Iggy performing “Kill City” in an episode of HBO’s Tales From the Crypt in 1990:

 
This is simply lovely. Iggy is such a gentleman.

“Iggy Pop speaks of his friend, Ron Asheton and the sings “Ron’s Tune” written by him and James Williamson at the Tribute to Ron Asheton concert.”

Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor. April 19, 2011.

Artwork by the supremely talented Jeremy Wheeler.
 

 
Holy shit. Believe it or not, some more incredible footage of Iggy and the Stooges at their most primal proto-punk prime has been uploaded to YouTube. If they sound a bit “thin” here, this performance, taped at the Goose Lake music festival in Michigan in 1970, was done without original bassist Dave Alexander, who arrived at the gig too fucked up to stand, let alone play.

Alexander was promptly fired. A heavy drinker, he died at the age of 27 in 1975. He was name-checked a few years later in Iggy’s spoken-word intro to The Idiot’s “Dum Dum Boys” song: “How about Dave? OD’d on alcohol.”
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Raw Power: Iggy Pop invents stage diving in 1970 and smears himself in peanut butter

 
I think this is kind of cool, but I question the wisdom of choosing to immortalize the Iggster at 64-years of age rather than 24? 

This I can pass on, though had they gone with a Raw Power-era Iggy in his silver pants, I’d have bought it without hesitation…

Pre-order your Iggy Pop action figure from Toys R Us, it’ll ship in early June.

Below, Iggy smears himself in peannut butter at the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival of 1970. Scroll in about two minutes for the Stooges mayhem to start:
 

 
Thank you Chris Musgrave!

 
While Steven Tyler’s heart palpitates like a little bird in his chest and Jennifer Lopez does her best to keep her lunch down, Iggy Pop is the definition of self-parody as he lip syncs and flexes his stretch marks on American Idol.

Punk may not be dead but its varicose veins are showing.

Iggy, I still love you but I’m done defending you.
 

 
Thanks, I think, to Jack Sonni.

 
This is a clip from The Venture Bros’ Showdown at Cremation Creek (Part II) which aired in 2006.

I never thought back in the late ‘70s when I knew Klaus Nomi that one day he’d be a cartoon action hero. But upon reflection nothing about Klaus should surprise me. Here he is teaming up with Iggy Pop to defeat David Bowie. Tons of subtext for a cartoon.

More can be found here.

“Now you’re gonna be my dog.”

“Ding, dong, the queen bitch is dead.”
 

 
This was brought up in the comments to Marc’s last Iggy-centric post  - it raised some interesting points, so I thought it would be good to expand on, and to fill in the details.

He may be one of the greatest performers in modern music, the definition of a rock’n'roll animal, but to a section of the planet Iggy Pop is now best known as being that guy in those car insurance ads. This wasn’t a simple case of Iggy licensing music to an ad (as has happened before) - he actively participates in the adverts. The fact that he did them is not news but the campaign has had a few twists and turns along the way. For the benefit of the folks who don’t know the story, here’s the low down.

The Iggy Pop/Swiftcover insurance adverts debuted on British TV in January 2009. In February 2009 it was acknowledged that Swiftcover didn’t insure musicians (who were part of a “danger group” that also included gamblers, bailiffs, professional sports people, bouncers and, um, models.) An investigation was launched by the Advertising Standards Authority (after a grand total of 12 complaints - not a lot but, hey, they made a good point) and in April 2009 the ad was banned for being misleading. The company weakly claimed that they didn’t hire Iggy Pop as a musician, but rather as an actor who “loves life.”

Well, either Swiftcover turned punk fuckin’ rock or they decided to protect their investment in Iggy as, in May 2009, they changed their minds and started covering musicians in their insurance policies. Unfortunately they still don’t cover gamblers, bailiffs, bouncers, sports people or models. It’s not clear exactly why the firm won’t cover these professions, but at least now musicians can claim with them, thanks to Mr Pop. Pity about those models though -  perhaps their dainty little feet don’t contain enough muscle power to properly work a set of pedals? A company spokesperson gave this statement to the Telegraph:

Tina Shortle, marketing director of swiftcover.com, said: “Insurance premiums are based on a number of different data, including the historic claims costs for specific occupations. This means that we do not provide cover to some professions that, according to that data, have a higher level of claims costs.”

The adverts returned to the telly, and 2010 saw the appearance of the “Little Iggy” puppet. The puppet is meant to symbolize Iggy’s wildman rock’n'roll past, and how the Iggster is constantly battling to keep it under control when all he wants to do is have a quiet game of golf.

Now, regardless of your views on whether respectable artists and musicians should sell anything except themselves, credit should be due to the technical side of this campaign. The “Little Iggy” puppet is so close to the real thing that it’s creepy - the first time I saw it on a billboard I had to do a double-take and if that’s not effective advertising, I don’t know what is. The hair, the hang-dog face, the knotted muscly torso - it’s incredibly like him. Who would have guessed that in the 21st century Iggy Pop would have gone from iconic rock’n'roll wild child to insurance salesman to being at the vanguard of uncanny valley?
 

 
Iggy’s notorious 1977 performance of “Lust For Life” on Dutch TV show TopPop was a media sensation. Frustrated by having to lipsynch with no band, Iggy went apeshit and tore up some scenery, knocked over some potted plants and body slammed a stagehand. It got him tons of press and record sales. “Lust For Life” was propelled into the Dutch Top Ten.

Iggy’s no fool, so when he returned to Holland the following year he was prepared for another bit of performance art and so were the press. As you can see in the sequence where he is lipsynching to “I Gotta Right” he’s surrounded by a ring of cameramen. While not as dramatic as the previous year’s telecast, Iggy still gave an intensely deranged performance.

Iggy made no attempt whatsoever to even pretend to be singing the songs. Instead he used his body as a diversion from the artificiality of the moment and made it real. Almost mocking the situation

As I watched these clips it hit me that Iggy is among a very small handful of artists who are keeping Antonin Artaud’s Theater Of Cruelty and Julian Beck’s Living Theater concepts alive. Can you a imagine a more inspired bit of casting than to have Iggy portray Artaud in a film of the French provocateurs life. “I Wanna Be Your Frog.”  Or the Bunuel version: “I Wanna Be Your Andalusian Dog.”

Here’s Iggy being a very bad bad boy.
 

 
An inspired bit of photoshopping by the folks at Cherrybombed. The picture was used in tandem with an article about The Stooges and Grinderman sharing the bill at Australia’s massivie music fest Big Day Out.

 
Five foot one and 240 lbs.

Shocking video of a grossly overweight Iggy Pop performing “Lust For Life.”
 

 
Actually, this is Dutch actor Frank Lammers doing a spot on imitation of what Iggy would look like if he morphed into late period Elvis.

 
French TV host and provocateur Yves Mourousi interviews Iggy Pop in 1977.

The exceedingly hip Mourousi and Mr. Osterberg seem to be on the same wavelength in this totally charming clip.

Mousousi abandoned the constraints of television when he quit his TV gig and opened up “Look,” a Parisian nightclub where he was able to actualize his own rock and roll dreams.