Iggy's Dwarf-Metal Masterpiece

07/18/2001 4:00 PM, LAUNCH
Tim Stegall

Two illuminating recent tales about Iggy Pop:

A musician pal calls up, having just returned from a European festival appearance. He mentions the typically blinding Iggy performance he witnessed, then adds with a chuckle, "But the next night, Iggy apparently walked out and asked the crowd, 'HOW MANY OF YOU HERE LIKE WEEZER?' And when the audience cheered loudly as expected, Iggy walked off and refused to perform!"

Two days later, an email comes sailing across the electronic transom. Another friend forwards a news item from Reuters concerning Iggy's rider for a Scottish festival date. Amongst Iggy's demands: seven dwarves, American Spirit cigarettes, broccoli.

The latter two requests seem especially odd, considering 1) Iggy apparently gave up smoking years ago, and 2) the item reports Iggy has as much use for broccoli as the President's father. (The item clarifies Iggy will instead sate his delicate palate with "enormous pizzas" and "ginger beer or good red wine.")

Somewhere, David Lee Roth is curdled up with a big bowl of brown M&Ms, laughing in recognition.

Weeks earlier, in a conference room at his label's Manhattan headquarters, an Iggy Pop visibly curdled from a day's pressing of the journalistic flesh still flashes such mischief and defiance. "Stand here!" he laughs, mocking the various photographers he's faced this day. "No, here! Wear this! Now smile! No, frown! ARRGGHH!"

At one point he philosophizes, "Ideally, the music should be so good and connect so immediately to the public that one would be completely supported in all one's activities and desires without ever doing any of this. No interviews, no videos, no pictures, nothing." Still, the tanned, fit, and newly goateed rock legend sitting across from me and my microcassette recorder knows this isn't An Ideal World. No, he's got a new album, Beat 'Em Up, that won't be promoting itself. Hence, knowing it's only a temporary condition, Iggy puts up with a little poking and prodding, if only to clear some space in the public's consciousness for this noisy little beast he's about to unleash.

So, what about this new album? Well, it's raw. No, I mean it's raw! And not in the sense of his early-'70s masterwork Raw Power, the final studio document of his classic band the Stooges which inspired several generations of punk bands. Unlike the rampaging, Rolling-Stones-in-hell bombast of that record, Beat 'Em Up is very much Iggy's heavy metal record. It's even more metallic than 1988's Instinct, the last Iggy Pop record to be dubbed "Iggy's heavy metal record."

Iggy agrees. "It's '70s-inspired, I think, handmade, kinda somewhere between hard rock and proto-metal, the music that later became codified as metal but before it was called that. But it's not quite all the way to [metal]. There's more to it, there's a little more songiness and structure than I associate with a lot of heavy metal. Then within that format, we f--k around with it. It gets an urban twist from the basically South Central ghetto bass player [ex-Body Count bassist Lloyd "Mooseman" Roberts, sadly murdered this past winter in a drive-by shooting], and then it gets a little bit of an academic twist from me, 'cos that's what I do, word-wise."

And what Mr. Academia does with those words is basically what he does best: hurl considerable venom against a world he simply cannot tolerate. Iggy Pop has never gone gently into the good night, and he's not about to start here. Over riffs punishing and ugly enough to border on nu-metal (courtesy of longtime guitarist Whitey Kirst, who was rewarded for "having to play 'Raw Power' for me for 11 years" with the chance to write Beat 'Em Up's music), Iggy screams questions like "WHERE IS THE SOUL?!! WHERE IS THE LOVE?!!" on "Mask." Or else he snarls that "WEASELS CONTROL ROCK 'N' ROLL!!!" on "Weasels." All beneath the first Iggy Pop production job since Raw Power. And as with that record, Beat 'Em Up's sonics are so naked and alive, we might as well phrase that as a "production job."

C'mon, Iggy! When you handed this one in to your label, you were secretly, gleefully thinking, "SELL THIS, MOTHERF--KER!" Weren't you?

"The second half of it," he admits. "The way [the music business] works is they have to give you enough money to fly everybody where they're goin' and get the project off the ground and pay the studio. And they wanna hear sh-t, they wanna hear what you're gonna do in advance. So, I let 'em hear the stuff on the first half, which is a little more formal. There are a couple that are medium-tempo songs, and they hadn't heard 'Mask.' They heard cuts 2 through 8, something like that, and then they gave me the green light. Then I did stuff like 'Drink New Blood' and 'V.I.P.' and 'Ugliness' or all that sh-t, and nobody'd heard it. We got checked halfway through, and they said, 'OK, go ahead and finish it.'"

Once he finished it, Iggy claims with a laugh that as he turned it in he was "unplugging my phone and leaving the country. I didn't know what they'd say, but the A&R guy's cool, he didn't bat an eye. He just sorta said [affecting a slick-guy voice], 'Well the record certainly takes a dark turn, doesn't it? But that's cool!' Y'know, they're all right with it.

"It's a funny thing, that whole sales thing. Is it glorious to sell, or not sell? I dunno. I'd be happy if it sold, I'd be OK. But, if it doesn't sell, that's OK. But," he smiles, the I-want-seven-dwarves mischief shining through his fatigue, "it would be better if it sells more. Yeah, if it sells even one more, that's better! It's OK!"

Not that Iggy's exactly hurting for the cash one more record sold could bring. The number of commercials and film soundtracks which have used Iggy classics like "Search And Destroy" and especially "Lust For Life" have ensured that Iggy has "enough money to say f--k you, and that's nice, but not enough that I don't have to work. Because like everybody else, I have divorces and my old managers to pay, and my f--kin' car needs an oil change. I have sh-t like everybody else has." He also adds about the commercials, "The song's out there, and the only way you're gonna hear my stuff so far has been that way and not on commercial radio. And I've been happy with it. It sounds really f--kin' great." And c'mon, admit it: Aren't you thrilled the noise selling you that pair of Nikes a couple of years back was provided by none other than James Williamson?

Still, in order to pay off those ex-managers and ex-wives and keep up the mortgages on his houses in Miami and Mexico and keep oil and gas in his cherry '68 Caddy, here's Iggy Pop--the man who inadvertently fathered everything from various David Bowie personae to the Sex Pistols, who hurled himself in the third row and smeared himself with peanut butter and sampled every drug and f--ked every species and dragged himself half-naked across broken glass so you wouldn't have to--sitting happy and fit and healthy in his early 50s, promoting his most uncommercial record ever. He's also the man who began his career with a pair of records that featured him riding his Stooges' Detroit roar, screaming his discontent with the state of the young nation in the years of their making. Which means that the only question which truly bears asking is: If he was to finally follow up "1969" and "1970" with their proper follow-up, what would Iggy Pop be singing about in "2001"?

"We-heh-heh-hell!" the man chuckles, sitting bolt-upright, clearly enjoying the question. "It would probably be a question instead of a statement, at this point. I'd probably ask, 'What the f--k's going on?' I'd probably have to get guest vocalists. Yeah, young ones. To fill in the blank.

Like who?

"You could ask Sean Lennon, Lil' Bow Wow, maybe Hector Camacho Jr.--I dunno, somebody flamenco. Do you see my point? You'd have to ask somebody younger. F--k if I know."

I think he knows. He's just not telling! The unfortunate thing is, it usually takes Iggy a couple of years to get another record out. So, it looks like we'll have to wait for Iggy to write "2003."