Iggy Pop and guitarist Ron Asheton of the Stooges perform live at Crosley Field on June 23, 1970 in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Gallery of Iggy Pop
1970
Los Angeles, California, United States
Iggy and The Stooges: from left to right Dave Alexander, Iggy Pop, Scott and Ron Asheton during the recording of their second album Fun House, May 23 1970 in Los Angeles.
Gallery of Iggy Pop
1973
Los Angeles, California, United States
Iggy Pop performs onstage at the Whisky A Go Go on October 30, 1973 in Los Angeles, California.
Gallery of Iggy Pop
1976
Iggy Pop holding a knife to David Bowie's throat, 1976.
Gallery of Iggy Pop
1976
Moscow, Russia
David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Moscow, 1976
Gallery of Iggy Pop
1977
State Theatre, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Iggy Pop, October 25, 1977 at the State Theatre in Minneapolis.
Gallery of Iggy Pop
1977
Iggy Pop and David Bowie photographed on tour for "the Idiot," 1977.
Gallery of Iggy Pop
1979
Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Iggy Pop, Cardiff, 1979.
Gallery of Iggy Pop
1987
Landgraaf, Netherlands
Iggy Pop at the Pinkpop Festival in 1987.
Gallery of Iggy Pop
2008
Waldorf Astoria, New York, United States
Iggy Pop, Madonna and Justin Timberlake at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in Waldorf Astoria, New York, 2008
Gallery of Iggy Pop
2010
Hollywood Palladium, Hollywood, California, United States
30th Anniversary Gala and Humanitarian Awards. Hollywood Palladium, Hollywood. September 25, 2010.
Gallery of Iggy Pop
2017
Beverly Hilton Hotel, Beverly Hills, California, United States
Iggy Pop attends The Weinstein Company and Netflix Golden Globe Party, presented with FIJI Water, Grey Goose Vodka, Lindt Chocolate, and Moroccanoil at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 8, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California.
Gallery of Iggy Pop
2017
New York City, New York, United States
Iggy Pop performs at the Tibet House US 30th Anniversary Benefit Concert & Gala Celebrating Philip Glass's 80th Birthday on March 16, 2017 in New York City.
Iggy and The Stooges: from left to right Dave Alexander, Iggy Pop, Scott and Ron Asheton during the recording of their second album Fun House, May 23 1970 in Los Angeles.
Beverly Hilton Hotel, Beverly Hills, California, United States
Iggy Pop attends The Weinstein Company and Netflix Golden Globe Party, presented with FIJI Water, Grey Goose Vodka, Lindt Chocolate, and Moroccanoil at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 8, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California.
Iggy Pop performs at the Tibet House US 30th Anniversary Benefit Concert & Gala Celebrating Philip Glass's 80th Birthday on March 16, 2017 in New York City.
James Newell Osterberg Jr. is an American singer, songwriter, musician, producer and actor. He was the vocalist of influential proto-punk band the Stooges, who reunited in 2003, and is well known for his outrageous and unpredictable stage antics.
Background
Ethnicity:
He is of German, English and Irish descent on his father's side, and Norwegian and Danish ancestry on his mother's side.
James Newell Osterberg, Jr. was born on April 21, 1947, in Muskegon, Michigan, the son of Louella and James Newell Osterberg, Sr., a former high school English teacher and baseball coach at Fordson High School in Dearborn, Michigan. Osterberg was raised in a trailer park in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Education
Iggy attended Ann Arbor Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Via the Rolling Stones, Osterberg discovered the blues and formed a similarly styled outfit, called the Prime Movers, upon graduating from high school in 1965. When a brief stint at the University of Michigan didn't work out, he moved to Chicago instead, where he played drums alongside the city's bluesmen.
His heart remained with rock & roll, however, and shortly after returning to Ann Arbor, Osterberg decided to form a rock band. This time, he would leave the drums behind and be the frontman, taking inspiration from the likes of the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed and the Doors' Jim Morrison. He tried to find musicians who shared his musical vision: to create a band whose music would be primordial, sexually charged, aggressive, and repetitive (using his early electric razor/car plant memories for reference). In 1967, he hooked up with an old acquaintance from his high-school days, guitarist Ron Asheton, who also brought along his brother, drummer Scott, and bassist Dave Alexander, thus forming the Psychedelic Stooges. Although it would take a while for their sound to jell - they experimented with such nontraditional instruments as empty oil drums, vacuums, and other objects before returning to their respective instruments - the group fit in perfectly with such other high-energy Detroit bands as the MC5, becoming a local attraction.
It was around this time that the group shortened its name to the Stooges, and Osterberg changed his own stage name to Iggy Pop. With the name change, Pop became a man possessed on-stage, going into the crowd nightly to confront members of the audience and working himself into such a frenzy that he would be bleeding by the end of the night from various nicks and scratches. Elektra Records signed the quartet in 1968, issuing their self-titled debut a year later and a follow-up effort, Fun House, in 1970. Although both records sold poorly upon release, they've since become rock classics, and can be pointed to as the official catalyst for what later became punk rock.
The Stooges were dropped from their record company in 1971 due to the public's disinterest and the group's growing addictions to hard drugs. Pop's continuous death-defying acts also worried the label, whose decision to drop the band led to the Stooges' breakup the same year. One of the band's more celebrated fans, David Bowie, tracked Pop down and convinced the newly clean and sober singer to restart his career. Pop enlisted guitarist James Williamson and, after the pair signed to Bowie's Mainman management company and relocated to England, they eventually reunited with the Asheton brothers, with Ron moving from the six-string guitar to the bass.
After spending a brief spell homeless on the streets of Hollywood, during which time there was an unsuccessful attempt to form a band with Pop and former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, Iggy Pop checked himself into the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Los Angeles. During his stay at the hospital, Pop made an attempt at writing and recording some new tunes with Williamson, but when no labels expressed interest, the two went their separate ways.
During his hospital stay, another old friend came to visit him: David Bowie, whose career was still in high gear. Bowie offered to take Pop on the road with him during his tour in support of Station to Station, and the pair got along so well that they both moved to Berlin in late 1976, during which time Bowie helped Pop secure a solo record deal with RCA. Bowie had become interested in European electronic rock (Kraftwerk, Can, etc.) and later admitted that he used Pop as a musical guinea pig on such releases as The Idiot and Lust for Life (both issued in 1977 and produced/co-written by Bowie). Both albums sold better than the singer's previous efforts with the Stooges (particularly in the U.K., where Pop was looked upon as an icon by the burgeoning punk rock movement) as Bowie joined Pop on his world tour as a keyboardist. Shortly thereafter, a live album was culled from Pop's most recent tour, titled TV Eye. It was also around this time that Pop severed his ties with Bowie and struck out on his own.
Signing on with another new label, Arista, Pop reunited once more with James Williamson for 1979's New Values, an album that touched off a string of varied recordings on which Pop tried to reinvent himself as a new waver: 1980's Soldier, 1981's Party, and 1982's Zombie Birdhouse. Also in 1982, Pop penned his autobiography, I Need More, a fascinating book of rock & roll excess that chronicled his early years straight up to the then-present day. Despite the flurry of activity, Pop began succumbing to his vices once again and stepped out of the spotlight for a long stretch to sort his life out, during which time Bowie scored a massive hit with a remake of the Pop/Bowie nugget "China Girl" (recorded earlier on Pop's The Idiot). It wasn't until 1986 that Pop resurfaced, signing a new contract with A&M and issuing the Bowie-produced Blah Blah Blah, which featured his first U.S. hit single (albeit a moderate one), a cover of "Real Wild Child." Released in 1988, Instinct saw Pop try his hand at hard rock/heavy metal, joined by ex-Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones. Its "Cold Metal" was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance. Pop's first album for Virgin, 1990's Brick by Brick, resulted in his first U.S. gold-certified album and Top 20 hit single, "Candy," a tuneful duet with the B-52s' Kate Pierson.
Just as in the mid-'70s when Pop was looked up to by a slew of up-and-coming punk bands, history repeated itself in the early '90s with the emergence of such Stooges disciples from Seattle as Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, etc. Around the same time, a wide variety of bands covered Pop and/or Stooges tracks - Slayer, Duran Duran, Guns N' Roses, R.E.M., and Tom Jones - while Pop issued another fine solo set, 1993's American Caesar. In 1996, Pop attempted to re-create the Stooges' sound and approach with Naughty Little Doggie, and enjoyed another hit when the nearly 20-year-old "Lust for Life" was used prominently in the movie Trainspotting. Throughout the decade, Pop also tried his hand at acting in movies, scoring bit parts in such flicks as Cry Baby, Dead Man, and The Crow II: City of Angels, plus a recurring role on the TV show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Although he wasn't involved in it, the 1998 movie Velvet Goldmine was allegedly based on Bowie and Pop's relationship in the early '70s (Ewan McGregor's character, Curt Wild, was obviously patterned after Stooges-era Pop).
With just about every new rock band listing the Stooges as a major influence by the late '90s, Iggy tentatively began looking back to the band's legacy. He personally remixed a newly remastered version of Raw Power in 1997, after the long-lost original master tapes were rediscovered and Pop moved the album closer to his original vision of a total sonic onslaught. Also released around this time was another Pop/Stooges-related book, the must-read Please Kill Me: The Oral History of Punk, which recounted the Stooges' career in great detail (featuring interviews with all the band's surviving members). The year 1999 was a busy one for Pop as he was the subject of a VH1 Behind the Music episode, and a new solo album was issued, the laid-back Avenue B. But his more "refined" musical approach was strictly a detour, as proven by his next release, 2001's in-your-face rockfest Beat Em Up.
After abandoning a promised Stooges reunion in the late '90s, Pop finally made good on his pledge in 2003, bringing Ron Asheton and Scott Asheton aboard to write and record four songs with him for his album Skull Ring, and taking the reconstituted Stooges on the road for a short but riotously received tour (with Mike Watt standing in for the late Dave Alexander on bass, and with the set dominated by tunes from The Stooges and Fun House). In 2004, Iggy appeared in Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes. After issuing the January 2005 effort Penetration, Pop released the retrospective A Million in Prizes: The Anthology, which spanned his entire career and included a 37-track CD, a previously unreleased live DVD, and a round of essays about Pop's legacy penned by notables like Bowie and Lou Reed. Pop released another compilation, Where the Faces Shine, the following year.
Iggy continued to tour with the Stooges throughout 2010 and into 2011, taking time to pursue a couple of solo side projects, including singing with the Lilies and with Ke$ha, plus the 2012 album Apres, where he sang French standards (and the Beatles' "Michelle," which does have a verse in French). In 2013, Pop went full-bore with the Williamson-fueled Raw Power era of the Stooges, touring and releasing the Ready to Die album in April of that year. However, after the death of Stooges drummer Scott Asheton in 2014, it was widely speculated that Iggy was done with the Stooges, and the next time he set out on a tour of the United States in 2015, it was as a solo artist with a different backing band.
In January 2016, a surprise announcement from Pop and Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal) revealed that the pair had written an album together with the help of Dean Fertita (QOTSA, the Dead Weather) and Matt Helders (Arctic Monkeys). Recorded secretly and funded entirely independently, Post Pop Depression (Loma Vista) featured the single "Gardenia" and a short supporting tour with live backing from Troy Van Leeuwen (QOTSA) and Matt Sweeney (Chavez). Frequently compared to Pop's first two solo albums with David Bowie, the set was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Alternative Music Album category. Teatime Dub Encounters, a four-track EP produced by fellow Trainspotting soundtrack contributors Underworld, appeared in 2018.
There’s not a whole lot from Iggy in the political sphere either. We know he supported Ronald Reagan in the 80s. For Iggy, it’s all about liberty and he, along with many others these days, equates the left and its orientation to equality with oppression. He said of Reagan: "I’ve been waiting for someone who could communicate the joys of liberty as compared to the joys of equality."
When Clinton ran in 1990, Iggy was under contract by his record label to do some Rock the Vote ads, and he wasn’t registered to vote, so the label got him registered and made him vote–which he did for Clinton, even though, he says, he “knew [Clinton] was a crook.
But he didn’t have nice things to say about Bush II either, who he saw as a bit of a tyrant: "The way Bush talks, I think he could use the same rhetoric that he used to justify an illegal intervention, to stop losing an election. You know: ‘OK, we made a mistake in the voting process, but the country really needs us to save it."
Iggy’s non-partisan. He seems to evaluate politicians skeptically, and based on their own merits and flaws.
Views
Iggy Pop urges people not to use drugs. He was known for his hard partying as one of punk rock’s pioneers but Iggy Pop insists his drug of choice nowadays is a glass of wine. He said: "I don’t drug up any more. I don’t do it. I have wine with dinner and that’s about it."
Quotations:
"What I do on stage has utterly no purpose."
"If I don't terrorize, I'm not Pop."
"You say I look goofy? OK, great. You say it's comedy? Great. Whatever anyone thought, I didn't care. Could be goony, could be sexy, could be stupid, could be cool. I didn't know, but as long as it was something, you know?"
"I feel like God peed on all my enemies. For a long time I was very bitter that the people who controlled the means of anybody ever hearing my songs were never gonna play them."
"Everybody's a little more worldly now, and there's more exposure to things. When I made Fun House, back in 1970, nobody wanted to interview me. It was wonderful."
"I wore that because it makes me look beautiful. I stare at myself in the mirror and I think, "Wow, I'm really great-looking." ... I think I'm the greatest, anyway."
"I used to catch myself - maybe we'd be having dinner with the future king of Spain, and I'd be grumpy, like, "What are we doing here, hanging out with these swells?" And then, right away, I'd realize, "Dude, you're jealous." It got very hard on a certain level. He was a person of affairs, in the worldly sense, with a lot of choices laid out on his smorgasbord. I had no choices whatsoever. I was a pariah. But a very fortunate one, in that he saw something worthwhile in me, and he made me two terrific records. He gave me the break I needed to continue living life. He is my benefactor."
"I'm really not good with the pickups. I'm a klutz and don't have a line of gab. I'm only good if they know who I am. So I'll just sit and wait for somebody to say, "Aren't you ...?" and then go from there."
Personality
Iggy Pop is famous for his crazed behavior in the late 60s and 70s, much of Iggy's craziness was fueled by his addiction to heroin. Iggy would often mutilate himself, roll around in peanut butter or broken glass, throw himself offstage (and once down a flight of stairs), bend his body like a pretzel, hump his amps, go naked, and insult the audience. Offstage, he did little else other shoot heroin and have promiscuous sex. In the late 70s, he quit heroin to save his own life and lost interest in sleeping around.
Pop is the godfather of the stage dive. He pioneered the move when he played gigs with The Stooges at The Grande Ballroom in Detroit. At this venue, the audience was up against the stage, which allowed Iggy to fall into it easily. Computer animators on Peter Jackson's LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) used his movement and body as a basis for the character Gollum.
Iggy Pop has famously performed topless onstage for decades. Asked what prompted him to stop wearing shirts, during an interview at Red Bull Music Academy in Montreal, Pop replied: "When I dropped out of college to start the band, I kept my library card. I've always had a student mentality, so I would go to the library, and take books. Cult books about culture and religion, and think about how I could apply those, and I kept seeing these pictures of the Pharaoh. He never wore a shirt. That just looks about right, you know? I don't know why. I feel lost in a shirt. I just get lost."
Physical Characteristics:
Iggy plays guitar left-handed.
Quotes from others about the person
Nina Alu: "You know, I love Iggy Pop, and I respect him, but I don't think I could live with him. But Jim, Jim is sweet and peaceful and romantic; when we're having dinner or making love, that's Jim, and sometimes I'll catch him just looking at the trees and birds. It's endearing and almost childlike, just the way he looks at the world with those big eyes."
Danny Fields: "The best of all of them is what happened when he played the Whisky in Los Angeles ... It was a very star-studded, Jack-and-Anjelica-and-Warren night. He was waiting for his dealer, to cop, intent on getting his shot of heroin before he went on. But he had no money. So he went to the VIP booths one at a time and explained the situation. He said, "Look, you're here to see me, and I can't go on until my dealer is here, and he's waiting to be paid, so give me some money so I can fix up, and then you'll get your show." He got more than enough money. He stood off to the side and shot up. The lights went down, the music went up, he stood onstage and collapsed. Without a note being sung. He'd OD'd in front of everyone. And had to be carried off. I think that was one of his greatest shows ever... It was so minimally perfect. It just says a very great deal."
Erik Hedegaard: "Nothing makes sense unless you know who Iggy Pop was. Back then, right around 1969, while the rest of the world was going psychedelic, he presided over quite some reign of perverted rock & roll terror. He would slather his body in peanut butter; barf on his audience; cut himself up with broken glass; wear silver-lamè evening gloves onstage; shoot heroin; make frequent use of his big, beautiful penis; crash his car into trees; beg horrified record-label executives for drug money; pass out in bathrooms with the spike still in his arm; check himself in to a mental institution and score coke off David Bowie while there. Just in general, he lived the totally messed-up life and wrote the totally messed-up songs without which there could have been no angry punk-music explosion of the 1970s, much less anything that has evolved since, angry-punk-music-related... It's been twenty years since he last did heroin, four since he smoked dope or snorted coke, five since he enjoyed a cigarette. Except for a nightly glass of red wine and too much strong Cuban coffee, he's clean and leading a very regular kind of life. For love, he's got his statuesque, extra-buxom, super-sweet girlfriend, Nina Alu, who is half Nigerian, half Irish and twenty-five years his junior; for extra warmth at night, he's got their fluffy little dog Lucky."
Interests
Iggy Pop enjoys looking at other people's paintings. He told Q magazine: "I can spend more time looking at art and have better feelings than I'd do from TV, DVDs and all that crap." He enjoys art so much that he even posed naked for Jeremy Deller's Life Class in 2016.
Music & Bands
Bob Dylan, The Sonics, MC5, The Doors
Connections
He has been married three times: to Wendy Weissberg (for several weeks in 1968, the marriage was annulled shortly thereafter), to Suchi Asano (1984–1999), and most recently, to his longtime partner Nina Alu. He has a son, Eric Benson, born in 1970 to Paulette Benson.