(he records it in Miami, where he has lived for nearly a quarter of a century), displaying a thoughtful and esoteric taste in music. It’s been a long way from there to here, and there were plenty more difficult years along the way, but now he is thriving in all kinds of ways: touring regularly to big crowds, making new records, selling old records (“all the studio albums are in print and they all sell, all the live albums sell-I have 79 or 84 or 102 or whatever they are-reconfigured, repackaged albums licensing and the Stooges’ licensing is through the roof…”), acting (most recently as a zombie who still hankers for coffee in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die), making endorsements (most recently his own signature brew of, er, Stumptown coffee), doing voice-overs (recently narrating both the surreal art movie In Praise of Nothing and the art-world documentary The Man Who Stole Banksy), and for several years now, hosting his own weekly radio show, Iggy Confidential, for BBC6 in the U.K. It’s not so much the excesses that strike a modern-day reader but the sense of a chaotic life without a center or a moral compass or viable path forward. I remember one night I was sitting up, just sitting up all night with our road manager, John Adams, shooting coke with a hypodermic needle. The first two sentences we get from Pop in the book, setting up an anecdote about how he was once mistakenly arrested under suspicion of being a murderer, are these: Yeah, so when I was in the Stooges a lot of dumb things used to happen to me. He is so good,” and a text that offers plenty of clues to clear up the mystery for Warhol. It has a brief foreword by Andy Warhol, including the lines: “I don’t know why he hasn’t made it really big. These days he rebuffs the inevitable invitations to write his autobiography, but a scrappy memoir with his name on it, I Need More, did come out in 1982, long before the ground beneath his feet stabilized. In truth, Iggy Pop’s story was messy and uncertain for a long time, and it ending well was no sure thing. ![]() It ignores the fact that once the outcasts have been cast out, most of them never find their way back in, and that long shots are long shots because most of them will never see their number come up. That’s the way pop-culture history is generally written, where you know that every oddball and pioneer and long shot at the beginning of the story is always going to be acclaimed and get their due before the story’s end. As others around him have withered and fallen, he has persevered and triumphed. Then, in the 1970s, with acolyte David Bowie alongside him, he makes two remarkable classic-packed solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life…and on it has gone ever since. You may have to select a menu option or click a button.Told through the soft gauze of nostalgia, Iggy Pop’s story is one of the great ones: In the late 1960s, James Osterberg, a small Michigan youth with big ideas, takes a new name and forms a group, the Stooges, in which he lays down one of the no-nonsense propulsive templates for punk rock, years ahead of time, and recklessly extends the possibilities of how one’s body might be used and abused on a stage-for just one aspect of this, he is often now credited as the inventor of the stage dive. Follow the instructions for disabling the ad blocker on the site you’re viewing.You may have more than one ad-blocker installed. You’ll usually find this icon in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. Click the icon of the ad-blocker extension installed on your browser.When it turns gray, click the refresh icon that has appeared next to it or click the button below to continue.Click on the large blue power icon at the top. ![]() Click the UBlock Origin icon in the browser extension area in the upper right-hand corner.It will turn gray and the text above will go from “ON” to “ OFF”. Click on the “ Ad-Blocking” button at the bottom.Click the Ghostery icon in the browser extension area in the upper right-hand corner. ![]()
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