The album that nearly killed Iggy Pop's career

Iggy Pop : Knocking 'Em Down (In the City)

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In February of 1980 Iggy Pop released Soldier, an album almost as lifeless as the zombie Pop appears to be portraying on the cover. On paper, it should have worked. Iggy recorded the album with former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock, ex-XTC keyboardist Barry Andrews, Steve New, formerly of Rich Kids, and Ivan Kral, Patti Smith's former bass player. A reluctant James Williamson of The Stooges was  hired to produce the album after doing such a fine job writing and producing the songs on New Values. Arista Records wanted a record that would make Iggy a star.

The magic did not happen a second time.  As Paul Trynka writes in Iggy Pop ( Open Up and Bleed), Iggy was unhappy to be recording in Wales. The recordings were leaden. The songs dull. Williamson was bringing a bottle of vodka and a revolver to the sessions. The musicians assumed it was loaded, but nobody ever asked. 

"No on was flying the plane," Andrews told Trynka.

The only highlight of the sessions was the day David Bowie visited, wearing a cape. He sat down in the studio dining room and entertained the band as well as members of Simple Minds who were recording next door. Bowie captivated the room with a story about infamous British gangster John Bindon, his giant cock, and his affair with Princess Margaret. 

On the spot, much to Williamson's chagrin, they decided to record a song about the gangster. Bowie recruited Simple Minds to sing back-up.

 "It was fairly easy to song," recalled their lead singer Jim Kerr to Mojo April 2012. "In his diplomatic way, Bowie said, 'Why don't the people who sing professionally step nearer the microphone, and those who don't step well back? That's how I came to find myself sandwiched between David Bowie and Iggy Pop, singing that song. Astonishing."

All lyrics about the gangster and Princess Margaret were taken out before final mixing. The world has never heard the line "I wish I was Johnny Bindon with the biggest fuckin' dick in London and a private income..."

In fact a lot seemed to be missing when the album was finally released. There were some kind reviews noting a "quirky" sound but Soldier quickly vanished without a trace. 

Barry Andrews had to buy his own copy of the album. He tells Trynka about the first time he heard Soldier:

"I was flattered there were so many of my keyboards on it. Then, quite quickly, I realized it had none of the virtues of a good Iggy Pop record."

He would forever refer to it as "the one that came after the good ones."

Not Just Another Slimy Bore

Iggy Pop : I'm Bored

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In the Summer of 1979 Iggy Pop made a memorable appearance on the Australian music show Countdown. Fresh off a flight across an ocean, a shirtless Pop appears glassy-eyed, playfully manic, and incapable of sitting in a chair or paying attention to "sensible questions" from host Molly Meldrum. As the program aired a video of David Bowie's "D.J.", Pop wandered off the set but he returned for an energetic lip-syncing performance of the New Values track "I'm Bored".

Many years later Pop would return to Australia where he was taped watching his performance."I coulda gone on there and spat at the guy or whatever. I didn't do that," he said. 

Regarding the performance: "That's a pretty rocking song and it's hard to deliver a rock song solo like that. Harder when it's an audience that doesn't know what planet you landed in - from and wishes you'd go away and wants their daddy to get rid of you or whatever."

Chairman of the Bored

Iggy Pop : I'm Bored

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In April of 1979 Iggy Pop released New Values, cited as one of the 13 favorite albums of The Pixies's Frank Black who told The Quietus  "There’s honest admission of frailties and the human condition. It is saying, 'I am the lamest, I am the shortest.' It’s still bravado and fuck you, get out of my way, it’s not just saying I want to fuck you either. He’s trying to say some stuff. It’s not diary rock. When Iggy gets poetic, he’s the best Iggy. "

To be forever compared to the pair of Bowie produced masterpieces that preceded it, New Values shows Iggy teaming up with fellow ex Stooge James Williamson behind the board and touring Stooge Scott Thurston playing most of the instruments. Pop told NME's Nick Kent that the album is really about the things that concern James Osterberg. Things like? Well, first of all, that he's bored. He's the Chairman of the Bored.

And second of all, at Five Foot Seven he is no giant, though he might look like one to someone who is Five Foot One. 

I think this might be my favorite Iggy Pop album because we get to hear Iggy Pop unchained from the influences of David Bowie. He's a funny guy."I got a hot-ass pair of shoulders" he sings on the title track. "I love girls," he sings on "Girls", "I like to look at cha." Yes, the song "African Man" is a bad idea especially when he adds monkey chants but the everything else has great energy. 

New Values received quite a bit of critical praise finishing #15 in the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop Critics Poll. Robert Christgau gave the album a grade of B+ writing:

This album provides what it advertises only to those who consider Iggy a font of natural wisdom--there are such people, you know. But it does get at least partway over on the strength of a first side that has the casual, hard-assed, funny feel of a good blues session--except that it rocks harder, which ain't bad.

Stereogum ranked the album the 3rd best of the entire Iggy Pop/The Stooges catalogue, ahead of all but Lust For Life and Fun House and calling it "secretly one of the best records of his career". 

Elvis Costello's Fave Albums of 1977

Ian Dury : Sweet Gene Vincent

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In 2000 Elvis Costello looked back on his own Class of '77 and put the following albums into a list he made for Vanity Fair of his 500 Favorite Albums. The song selections are his.

David Bowie Low, “Always Crashing in the Same Car”
                      Heroes , “Joe the Lion.”

Ian Dury: New Boots and Panties!! , “Sweet Gene Vincent.”

Richard Hell and the Voidoids: Blank Generation , “New Pleasure.”

Iggy Pop: The Idiot, “Nightclubbin’”
                Lust for Life, “Some Weird Sin.”

 The Sex Pistols: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols , “Pretty Vacant.”

Television: Marquee Moon, “See No Evil.”

Playground to the Rich

Iggy Pop and James Williamson : Kill City

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There are some people who believe the best album Iggy Pop released in 1977 had nothing to do with David Bowie. While The Idiot and Lust For Life get all the attention, there's a third album that was released by Bomp! in November of 1977. Kill City was recorded with ex-Stooge guitarist James Williamson in 1975 on weekends when Iggy was given permission to leave his mental hospital.where he was receiving treatment for his heroin addiction.

 Iggy's state of mind comes through on the title track: "Livin' here in Kill City / where debris meets the sea/It's a playground to the rich / it's a loaded gun to me" 

More raw than Raw Power, more Alice Cooper than punk rock. . The Wire included Kill City in their list of "100 Records That Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening)"

Is There Rock After Punk?

Iggy Pop : The Passenger

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On September 9, 1977 Iggy Pop released his second David Bowie produced album of the year. While The Idiot was a dark reflection of where Iggy was in the years before he teamed up with Bowie, Lust For Life sounds like a man who has found a new reason to live. There are still some dark moments, including the title track and "Tonight" which deals with his heroin abuse: I saw my baby/ She was turning blue/ Oh, I knew that soon/ Her young life was through".

Lust For Life is Iggy Pop's best selling album of all time and his only gold record.

For Rolling Stone, Billy Altman wrote:

Iggy Pop's second comeback album leaves one with ambivalent feelings: glad that Iggy is alive, apparently well, writing, singing and performing again, but upset because his new stance is so utterly unchallenging and cautious. Taken purely on its own terms, Lust for Life is a successful album. Side one is quite good, starting with the title cut, which rocks with a Sandy Nelson-like drum style while Iggy delivers his survivor message to the masses, and continuing to the closing track, "Tonight," easily the most straightforward pop song Iggy has written. Side two is considerably weaker, with a pair of overdrawn ballads, an infectious throwaway and one bona fide winner, the ominous "Neighborhood Threat."

 Were this just another album by just another artist, that might be the end of it, but Iggy Pop has never been just another entertainer. As rock's truest bad boy, Iggy led the Stooges with a vision of frustrated, depressed and angry young adult life that will probably never be seen (or dared) again. That he has come back from the edge relatively intact is almost a miracle. With David Bowie as producer and guide, he is actually realizing a career for the first time. Like Lou Reed, Iggy is most likely headed on a course just left of center, bizarre enough to attract those inclined toward something different but safe enough not to scare them away. 

 It is questionable, though, whether Iggy has anything important left to say. To make any art in the future, he would probably have to start self-destructing, and neither he nor any of us really want to see him crawling through the broken glass again. Here comes success, Iggy, and you deserve it more than just about any perform I've ever seen or heard. I just wish there were some way that your music could be important and your life happy at the same time.

Robert Christgau gave the albim an A minus grade , writing:

If The Idiot exploits the (trance-prone) affinity for the slow rocker that Bowie evinced on Station to Station, this reestablishes the (apollonian) affinity for the dionysiac artist Bowie made so much of five years ago on Mott's All the Young Dudes. Like most rock and rollers, I prefer this to The Idiot because it's faster and more assertive -- which means, among other things, that the nihilistic satire is counteracted by the forward motion of the music itself. 

Visions of Swastikas

Iggy Pop : China Girl

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On May 6, 1977 Iggy Pop released "China Girl", the second single from his first David Bowie produced album of 1977, The Idiot. Idiotic may have been exactly how Iggy felt after confessing his feelings for Kuelan Nguyen, partner of French actor-singer Jacques Higelin, who was also recording at Château d'Hérouville at the time. As he spilled his heart, she reportedly stopped him with a "Shhhh".

Most people still believe the song is about heroin. 

Nile Rodgers, who produced Bowie's single said "I figured China Girl was about doing drugs ... because China is China White which is heroin, girl is cocaine. I thought it was a song about speedballing. I thought, in the drug community in New York, coke is girl, and heroin is boy. So then I proceeded to do this arrangement which was ultra pop. Because I thought that, being David Bowie, he would appreciate the irony of doing something so pop about something so taboo. And what was really cool was that he said 'I love that!'." 

Iggy's version is so much darker that it's kind of a shame you can still hear Bowie's version even when this is playing in your earbuds.  By the way, this was the second single from 1977 that Bowie covered on Let's Dance. The other is Metro's "Criminal World".

The Idiot

Iggy Pop : Nightclubbing

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On March 18, 1977 Iggy Pop released The Idiot, a haunting autobiographical album produced by David Bowie. Recorded in Berlin, Pop has described the album's sound  as "Kraftwerk Meets James Brown". Its release coincided with the advent of punk rock and helped earn the fallen star a new title as the Godfather of Punk.

The most autobiographical song on the album is probably "Nightclubbing", with its zombified drum machine shuffle ( later sampled backwards by Trent Reznor for Nine Inch Nails's "Closer"). Pop says it's a comment on what it was like to hang out with Bowie every night."Dum Dum Boys", about meeting The Stooges,  is the album's funniest song : 

The first time I saw 

The dumb dumb boys 

I was fascinated 

They just stood in front 

Of the old drug store 

I was most impressed 

No one else was impressed 

Not at all

Back Seat Bowie

Iggy Pop : Funtime

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On March 1st, 1977 Iggy Pop kicked off  The Idiot UK tour with David Bowie playing piano and on backing vocals. The first show was a small time gig at the Friars Club in Aylesbury, a small town outside London. The tour, in support of the upcoming album Bowie produced,  lasted a week before the band flew to New York City for six more weeks of shows, culminating in an appearance on the Dinah Shore Show on April 15.

In his book Bowie In Berlin : A New Career in a New Town Thomas Jerome Seabrook writes 

 More than anything, Bowie seemed to enjoy watching Iggy. "I'd never seen him onstage up until then," he later admitted. "I couldn't get over his energy and commitment to savage realism." Bowie, on the other hand, remained in the seat behind the keyboard throughout, lit only by a row of fairy lights, but some observers were still convinced that he was calling the shots. Writing in the New Music Express, Nick Kent felt that the "totally workmanlike" Bowie was "very much in charge here", at least from a musical perspective. He was certainly a big draw for the audience, too, with the number of Bowie fans in attendance generally matching those who had come just to see Iggy.

40 Year Itch : Arrest of the Thin White Duke

David Bowie : TVC-15

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  On March 20, 1976 David Bowie, Iggy Pop, a bodyguard and a local woman named Chiwah Soo were arrested at the Americana Rochester Hotel on marijuana charges. Bowie and Pop had apparently picked up two women in the bar and brought them up to their 17th floor suite. The women were both undercover officers. They called in the waiting police who found half a pound of marijuana. Bowie, Pop and the two other spent the night in jail. Released on $2000 bail, with no charges pressed, Bowie escaped the whole incident untarnished. Very lucky considering the hard-drug use going on at the time.

40 Year Itch : A Breakage Inside

Iggy Pop : Sister Midnight

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   In February of 1976, between the orgies, the long cross country car rides and the Isolar tour performances, David Bowie offered Iggy Pop a new song he had written with his guitarist Carlos Alomar. "Sister Midnight", which Bowie performed at some of the early dates, sounds like a lost track from the Station to Station album. The definitive version, recorded under Bowie's watchful eyes and ears at Chateau d'Herouville in June of '76 , kicks off 1977's The Idiot, Pop's comeback album. Its spiky sound would inspire Bowie's own Berlin trilogy.

40 Year Itch: "Iggy Pop Will Be a Star"

A review of the Stooges last show of a four night stand at Max's Kansas City in the Summer of 1973 from unimpressed Billboard writer Phil Gelormine:

The midnight performance was already 45 minutes late when the Stooges finally took the stage. Max's was unbearably packed and anticipation on this, Iggy's final night, was high. He looked older than expected, straight bleached blond hair limp and bare chest glistening in the lights revealing the several stitches attained a few nights back when rolling across the stage he cut himself on the several broken glasses hurled by audience members.

After witnessing his performance, it's a wonder more wasn't levied toward him. The wall of blazing music as dished out by the Stooges only served to deaden the senses while Mr. Pop, garbed in flap-studded bikini briefs with a nylon hose right leg, minced, writhed, contorted and pulled out every trick in his limited supply to get the confined crowd off its hands. "You're a tough audience to crack," he snarled before giving us his ultimatum. "Get up and leave or stay and hear more." Max's Sardine City unfortunately left us with no choice but to endure.

So away on his ego trip we continued. What vocals could be heard from him, comprised material from his Columbia album "Raw Power". He also poured beer over his head, tossed the mike stand wrecklessly into the audience, put it between his legs and clutched  the heads of ringsiders for support. Iggy Pop will be a star.

Six Degrees of Separation: Dave And Ansell Collins to The dB's

1. With their UK #1 single " Double Barrel", Dave and Ansell Collins brings reggae to the masses in 1971. This is the first record a 14 year old drummer named Sly Dunbar ever plays on.




2. The following year Sly teams up with bassist Robbie Shakespeare. Sly And Robbie become one of the most sought after rhythm sections in the world. They play with, or produce, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and reggae greats like Peter Tosh and Black Uhuru. In 1981 they back up Grace Jones on her club hit "Pull Up To The Bumper", the single from her album Nightclubbing.




3. The title track  is a cover of the 1977 Iggy Pop/David Bowie tune which appears on Iggy's album The Idiot.





4. In 1994 Trent Reznor samples the kick drum sound from "Nightclubbing" for his disturbing hit "Closer". The video is directed by Mark Romanek who has won 19 MTV Music Video Awards.

5.The following year Romanek directs the video for R.E.M.'s "Strange Currencies" which, for some reason, can't be found on YouTube. This is the third single from Monster, produced by Scott Litt ( who produced the Katrina and the Waves hit "Walking On Sunshine" as well as the final Replacements album All Fall Down).





6. Litt made his debut as a producer on The dB's 1982 album Repercussion, which is best known for the cut "Amplifier". So we're going to dig a little deeper into this terrific album and post "We Were Happy There".

From a Pagoda The World is So Tidy: Songs for China

The Chinese will decline a gift three times before finally accepting, so as not to appear greedy. You will have to continue to insist. Once the gift is accepted, express gratitude. You will be expected to go through the same routine if you are offered a gift.

Bowie Bio Starman Chapters 11-14 Jean Genie to Fame

In Chapter 10, Bowie tours America with the Spiders. And mountains of cocaine. They record "The Jean Genie"--a song about Iggy Pop --borrowing a famous riff from Muddy Waters ("I'm a Man"). Angie and Bowie are butting heads constantly.


In Chapter 11, Bowie records his cover album ( Pin -Ups) before Bryan Ferry finishes his cover album (These Foolish Things) and tapes a special for NBC that never airs...as his costume, seen above, is declared too provocative.
In Chapter 12 Bowie tries to "out Rolling Stone" the Rolling Stones with the album Diamond Dogs. He gets close with "Rebel Rebel" (note the drums echoing "Satisfaction")



After seeing the Main Ingredient in Chapter 12, Bowie tries to record a soul album. He name drops as many American images as possible in "Young Americans" including Nixon's resignation announced three days before the song was recorded.



Bowie and Lennon have a blast in a NYC studio, borrowing riffs from The Rascals "Foot Stompin" (really?) and Shirley and Company's current hit "Shame Shame Shame" which Bowie mishears during the jam as "Fame Fame Fame". The last minute addition to Young Americans is Bowie's first #1 hit in the US. He celebrates by performing on Soul Train.