By Ted Burke and Barry Alfonso
By Ted Burke and Barry Alfonso
Ted: As for Iggy himself, he remains difficult to categorize within the familiar taxonomy of rebellious youth culture because rebellion ordinarily presupposes awareness of the conventions being violated. Iggy projected something more unsettling: not opposition to bourgeois restraint but apparent incomprehension that such restraints existed in the first place. Shirtless, angular, perpetually twitching, he moved across the stage with the alarming spontaneity of impulse emancipated from reflection. One hesitates to call the effect nihilistic, because nihilism at least possesses philosophical self-consciousness. Iggy appeared liberated even from that burden. Barry Alfonso and I have been trying to get the the center of Iggy’s immodest presentation of self these last five and a half decades. Our latest attempt at a disquisition follows .
Barry: Iggy Pop turned 79 years old on April 21st, an event that I think should be celebrated here in America (and around the world) as a testimony to survival and endurance and a certain kind of native-soil craziness that speaks to something noble in the human spirit. Over the course of his long and remarkable career, Mr. Pop (as The New York Times used to refer to him) has come to embody a stubborn sort of integrity and dignity not normally associated with rock musicians. As an old man unafraid to expose his aged but still-supple flesh, Iggy remains the self-proclaimed Idiot who is the wisest man in the charnel house, flexible enough to kiss his own ass but sufficiently pain-inured to walk on the broken glass of his own past sins, unafraid of his own naked skin and looming mortality, jaunting and squirming on the rim of the Abyss, a man who will be your dog but nobody’s tremulous, cringing worm. When it comes to Iggy Pop, there’s a lot to talk about. His paradoxical nature makes him far more interesting than your average rock icon. I took these thoughts to my friend Ted Burke, and together we explored the heights and depths of Iggy Pop’s nearly 60 years-worth of disgraces, debasements, resurrections and triumphs in the following dialogue…
Barry: So Ted, I was watching the footage of Iggy at this year’s Coachella Festival. I was going back listening to some earlier things. I watched some video footage of him as well. And I did check out his album Avenue B, which I had never heard. And I see your complaints about it. Ted: I think it could have turned out better if he weren’t so mumbly and the music weren’t so quiet. I don’t know quite why they chose to do it that way. But I’ll give him this: he puts out a lot of records and continues to do new work. He seems to think, “This is what I feel like doing right now,” and then he does it, with mixed results. Still, I think he’s somebody who acknowledges his limited vocal range and just says, “I’m going to work with what I have.” Maybe he wondered what it would be like to do a slowed-down, meditative, mumbled recitation of hard life experience. But I think that works against his strengths. His best work is short and succinct—images, remarks, ad-libs that sound fresh, immediate, and in the moment, set against a brisk and usually abrasive backbeat. The meditative, reflective stuff just isn’t where he’s strongest.
Barry: Well, of course, Iggy has done some acting and voice work. So perhaps he approached it that way. Ted: It’s almost like he approached it as a monologist. I think so. The first time I remember hearing him do any voice acting was in some heavy-metal-inspired animated sci-fi fantasy—though I can’t quite remember whether it was the movie itself or just the soundtrack. And I know he was in, I think, the second Crow movie, after they tried to restart that series. He was walking around looking exactly like Iggy Pop, so he fit right in.
Barry: He was very funny in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, where he's a zombie that comes into a diner and wants coffee and pours it on his face and then smashes the pot, because he kind of looks like a zombie now. He was perfect for it. Ted: Well, you know, he refuses to die. In that mythological list of people everyone assumes are going to die next, he was always there—along with Lou Reed—and yet he outlived Lou Reed. He really did defy people’s expectations.
Barry: The first thought that comes to mind about Iggy is that he was and is all about risk. He obviously risked himself physically, not only as a performer, but offstage with all the drugs he did, as well as the risk of embarrassing himself, and the risk of maintaining a career, meaning that he was so unreliable and self-destructive a person in his dealings with record companies that people didn’t want to deal with him. So to an unusual degree, it seems like that's what his career is about, and he still is doing that. When I see footage of him from Coachella footage, this is an old man with sagging flesh and what looks like a twisted back. His shirt is off. He's 78 years old, going on 79 and he's basking in his glory. And that's risk like looking like a senile old fool doing that, and yet he's willing to do it. I can't think of anybody comparable to that. Certainly not someone who has been around as long as he has. Ted: The only comparable image I can think of—an old man walking around with his shirt off—is Clint Eastwood in Bridges of Madison County. I think he was in his seventies then, and he looked all right for a man his age, but even so you kind of wished you’d never seen him shirtless. But Iggy is different. He has some of the traits people associate with a sociopath: lack of inhibition, disregard for boundaries, no real concern for social cues. Yet I think that extremity is part of what people respond to as heroic. Lester Bangs talked a lot about this—why he liked Iggy. In one of his essays, maybe in Psychotic Reactions, he more or less admitted that Iggy, and Lou Reed too, personified every fucked-up impulse he could imagine but didn’t have the nerve to act on himself. People love antiheroes. We don’t really have pure heroes anymore. In comic books, in westerns, in all kinds of stories, the compelling figure is the one with an edge—someone capable of violence, with an amorphous moral compass that is flexible, pragmatic, and unpredictable. You never quite know where he’ll go. That’s what Iggy has represented forever. I don’t think he cared much about pain or embarrassment. He really didn’t pay attention to social cues. He was a creature of impulse, doing things because he wanted to do them, because he wanted to feel something visceral. And we should remember that he was a drummer in a blues band for quite a while. I think I read an interview where he talked about loving the power of drums—the sense that when you think you’ve had enough and said all you can say, the beat tells you, “No, you’re not done yet. Keep pushing.” That’s part of what we admire in people who push boundaries and truly don’t give a damn, people determined to express themselves. It makes me think of that pompous speech by Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart, where he models himself after Elvis Presley and talks about wearing a particular jacket to express his individuality. It’s ridiculous, but it points to a whole worldview: to be absolutely in the moment, and not just in the moment but almost to become the moment itself. I think that’s what Iggy wants—to experience the moment completely and, in a way, to become the experience other people are having. Barry: It's so interesting what you're saying. I think that Iggy is one of those great performers or great artists that you can say contradictory things about. I would not apply the label sociopath to him, because even though much of his behavior on stage seemed extreme to the point of being sociopathic. I think Iggy very much cared about the audience. I think he always has. I think that he wanted to provoke people. He demanded that the crowd love him or hate him. Sometimes they hated him to the point of beating him up physically (as was captured on the bootleg live recording Metallic K.O.). And also, interestingly, calling him an anti-hero, yes, but I think over time he evolved into a legitimate hero by his perseverance, by a certain kind of humanity to him. I mean, Iggy may chew the root, but he never quite drinks the dregs. If you look at his lyrics even into recent times, there are weird sexual games going on, where Iggy is both demanding and wanted to be your dog or looking for a master. But there's also a sort of benign quality that he developed over time. As his flesh has gotten more saggy and ragged looking, there's, there's a kind of martyrdom he’s taken on that is sort of heroic. It's strange how you can say two different things about Iggy at the same time. Ted: Yeah, I wouldn’t disagree with anything you just said. That’s exactly what makes him an antihero. Just look at the phrase itself: the antihero manages to contain elements of both heroism and something darker. To continue the superhero comparison, Superman is a superhero and that’s all he is. If you follow Superman at all—or even the intense online arguments about what Superman is—you know the position is absolute: Superman doesn’t kill, and people will practically kill to defend that principle. He is eternally good. He tries to help others. His moral compass is flawless and consistent across the decades. And interestingly, he still looms large in the culture. He’s almost a hundred years old, close enough, and still vital. The antihero, by contrast, is someone whose direction you can’t predict. The moral line keeps moving; his ethics are situational. That’s the difference. And I’d probably say Iggy himself is not actually a sociopath. Sociopaths, according to the psychiatric research I’ve come across—not that I’m an expert—don’t really change. But Iggy did change. I think he made a choice to embody a certain thing. He has remained consistent in motivation and behavior up to a point, but he hasn’t remained the same person. Even if you just look at the lyrics, there was a period—certainly early on, even up through the Stooges and Raw Power—when he was deeply nihilistic, or maybe “self-extinguishing” is the better phrase. Barry: Yeah, well, “Search and Destroy” would be an example of that… Ted: “The world’s forgotten boy, the one who searches to destroy.” One thing this makes me think about is how people sometimes ask me, as a poet who writes a lot of melancholic work, whether I’m okay based on what I’ve written. And I always want to say: there’s also a style at work here. I think Iggy is like a good dime novelist, or like Elmore Leonard, in the sense that he chose a particular world to write about—a world he knew because he had been to the bottom and come back. That became the territory he was going to cover. There’s a kind of realism in that. His version of realism is: this is what I experienced, this is what I want to write about, and I’m going to render it viscerally and without apology. But he also has a sense of irony. I don’t think he’s doing exactly what someone like Mick Jagger does. Jagger, to my mind, really is a chauvinist, and that has been consistent for a long time. How long did it take the Stones to drop “Brown Sugar” from the set list? That felt more like public pressure than self-awareness. Iggy, by contrast, seems to say: I’m going to write about people who see the world in a certain way, with certain attitudes, and I’m going to do it almost photographically, through little images and fragments that capture a moment of frustration. In that sense he’s closer to early blues songs—John Lee Hooker, “I’m gonna shoot you right down”—violent imagery used as part of the art. Not necessarily because it stems directly from the blues tradition, but because he was exposed to that way of being true to the moment itself, without apology and without pretending to be philosophical or sociological. Just: this is an ill-fated action, this is what it feels like, this is what it looks like. Barry: Well, since you brought this up, I'll read you a quote where Iggy does some self-analysis during an interview he did in 1977. He was complimenting his fans who stuck by him “when I was a jerk, when I could, couldn't talk three words in a row without falling down. I'm one of the most inane, ridiculous dorks. I'm Alfred E Newman. I'm a nerd.” Iggy called himself a stooge, called himself an idiot, but he seems more honest and he seems less ridiculous in how he conducted himself than Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison, strangely enough. Ted: Yeah, I think that’s a big part of his appeal: he debunks himself. That’s the whole thing. It’s as if he’s saying, “I write about situations in these songs. Maybe I really feel that way, maybe I do honestly feel like that, or maybe it’s jive.” I remember seeing him with Howard Stern, back when Stern’s radio show was televised, and the two of them weren’t exactly getting along. Iggy more or less said, “No, this is your job. Your radio show is your job. I’m jive—we all are.” Basically, he was saying that both of them were performing to audience expectations. This is what the audience expects, and this is what we’re giving them. I think Iggy knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s not afraid to admit it. That’s why I’ve never thought of him as someone who stands there declaring, “I’m an artist,” or appealing to some lofty principle like freedom of speech. He’s the last person I’d expect to strike that pose, even though he has done things brilliantly enough to sustain serious interpretation. Barry: Oh, he considers himself an artist. Furthermore, he wonders in that same interview why do people want to see him? He says it’s “because I work hard and make a really nice piece of art. And once I started, I never gave up.”
Ted: So he did take himself seriously, and probably still does to some degree. But he takes himself seriously the way a good auto mechanic takes the job seriously: this is the work, and this is what I do. And as for calling him an artist, I probably need to revise what I just said, because a real artist is someone who changes. We’ve seen that with people like David Bowie and Frank Zappa. Iggy fits that pattern too. He tried new things, not all of them worked, but none of the failures sank his career. He changed in response to who he was becoming and to who his audience was.
Barry: He became an elder statesman against all odds. He shouldn't even be alive! He is someone who doesn't run away from his age and his sagging flesh, and he embraces that. By calling himself an idiot all those years ago, he inoculated himself from turning into a fool. Ted: We were asking why we’re still talking about him. The answer is: because he’s Iggy. He’s someone you keep talking about even when the work itself hasn’t always been consistent, because he embodies something rare. He somehow exceeds his own body of work. If he had simply become a self-parody and produced nothing but bad albums, that would be one thing—but that’s not really true. Instead, you forgive the less interesting records and move on to the next one, because as long as he’s alive you assume there will be a next one. And there usually
I keep thinking of older artists who continue producing work—Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Clint Eastwood. Eastwood, especially, keeps trying different genres with a very stripped-down, efficient style of filmmaking. Sometimes it works incredibly well and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not like Woody Allen, whose movies are essentially variations on the same movie over and over. Clint Eastwood isn’t like that, and neither is Iggy. What matters is the willingness to experiment. Barry: Speaking of his earlier work, years ago I wrote that Iggy is threatening because he harms himself. When you heard or saw Iggy in his 20s, what he was willing to do to himself – cutting himself with glass, walking on the upraised hands of the crowd — was somehow intimidating and made you wonder if you would be capable of that. It's like, it's like rubber-necking an accident, but also like you being the participant in the accident.
Ted: Yeah. I’ve seen that same dynamic in bars: you watch something starting to go down between two or three people who’ve been drinking, and you can see it building. They lean in closer, the hand gestures change, the shoulders tighten, and you realize you’re waiting for the fight—for the explosion. I think that’s part of what Iggy was about. And I did see him back in the day, three separate times. Barry: Tell me about your Iggy experiences. Did you see him in Detroit? Ted: I saw him in Detroit. I saw him at the Grande Ballroom twice, and I saw him at the 1969 Detroit Rock and Roll Revival, which had an incredible bill—Dr. John, the MC5, Chuck Berry, all kinds of people. And Iggy was this guy who would come onstage and instantly divide the audience. At the time, Iggy and the Stooges were seen as a kind of younger-brother band—not as great as the MC5—and that’s changed since then. But he’d get up there, kick over a small amp they were using for the PA so the band could hear itself, and then just launch in. They opened with “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” if I remember right. His movements were fantastic and weird. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. And at the time I didn’t even like him. I was one of those people thinking, “These guys really effing suck.” Barry: But why did they suck? Ted: I had something like an Ed Ward reaction. I read that review again last night, and he basically says that he liked Iggy despite all the things other people would hate: he can’t sing, he’s a bad Mick Jagger imitation, Ron Asheton sounds like he just got a wah-wah pedal for Christmas. But somehow it still works. I didn’t like him then because I was one of those people who wanted rock and roll to become a progressive art form—closer to classical music or jazz. So no, I didn’t like him, though I came to appreciate him. And in retrospect I feel lucky to have seen him during that more feral period of his life. For me, he was the guy people yelled at: “You fucking suck.” And then someone would shout, “You come up here, I’ll fuck you in the face,” and Iggy would snap right back: “I’ll fuck you up. Come on up.”
Barry: That's what makes the Metallic K.O. bootleg so valuable — you have that on tape. You don't have him being beaten up afterwards, but all the hostility and the baiting of the audience is on there. But apparently that was just sort of the way it was back then. Ted: Well, it never quite came to that in the shows I saw. I never actually saw him get into a fight onstage. But there were always stories going around—like, “Did you hear what he did at that club up in Ypsilanti? Throwing folding metal chairs at the audience,” that kind of thing. It was all shouting and escalation. But I think, in a strange way, that was part of the social contract. It’s like the disclaimer on a baseball ticket: you’re at a live event, and if you get hit, that’s part of the risk.
Barry: Why did people hate Iggy and the Stooges so much? Some people hate Iggy in the Stooges so much in their hometown? Ted: Precisely because most of the audience expected local bands to be aspiring to high art. They wanted rock and roll to ascend into something more serious and respectable, whereas Iggy ran against all of that. Detroit rock in general was already pretty different from what was going on in California, and maybe that’s part of what still attracts people to old Michigan rock. But there were also a lot of local Detroit bands that wanted to be arty—Savage Grace, Third Power, the Detroit Wheels-adjacent crowd, the Amboy Dukes, the Frost, Dick Wagner. They were guitar bands with competent songwriters, vocal harmonies, long guitar solos, showcase pieces, extended songs, even obligatory drum solos. They knew what the market wanted and what the audience expected, and they delivered it. That was fine; I liked a lot of it. I liked Dick Wagner’s guitar work. But the Stooges were contrary to all of that.
Barry: What was the fan base for the Stooges, what kind of fucked-up, ifreaky idiots liked the Stooges back then?
Ted: There were a lot of fucked-up, freaky idiots in Detroit. It was an angry place, and the music scene was racially divided. But what I remember from those audiences is that there were also a lot of Black listeners there, and they seemed to respond to the stripped-down, no-BS quality of Iggy and the Stooges. It was like they recognized that this guy was really putting himself on the line, and they appreciated that. I hate using a broad word like “they,” because it flattens people into a type, but it was still an identifiable part of the audience. And I think people now might be surprised to hear that Black audiences liked Iggy and the Stooges, because that’s not what they’d expect.
Barry: So this is interesting. How similar were the audiences for Iggy and the MC5? Were they one in the same, or were they significantly different? Ted: There was definitely some overlap. In both cases, part of the audience was pissed off—angry, primed, looking for something raw. It’s basically the template for a punk-rock story. Barry: And yet, Iggy was not political at all as far as I can discern. Ted: Anti-social, yeah. He wasn’t political. He just wasn’t going to give you a dime for your jive.
Barry: You know, the revolution does not say that you should be anybody's dog. That does not seem like a very revolutionary call to the brothers and sisters. Or maybe it was on a certain level…
Ted: No. He flirted with death and suicide as closely as anybody at the time, and it wasn’t pretty—it was kind of a drag. “We Will Fall,” with that John Cale drone, shows that he wasn’t afraid to be boring. Even that was an act of not giving a shit. It was as if things were going great—they had a major record deal, momentum, all of it—and he still wasn’t afraid to push into something difficult or alienating. He just wasn’t afraid. Barry: Generally, one thing I've noticed, and this sticks in my mind, is that several times on the early Stooges records, Iggy will say, “COME ON!” And I've said for years that if you could go into a crowded room at the right time and just simply shout the words “come on,” people would immediately start fighting. What it says to me is there's just something held back in everybody. Iggy is giving permission by the self-torture and the sociopathic behaviors he’s displaying on stage for you to simply cut loose and let all the horrible shit out. Ted: I think he probably would have been provoking fights in real life if he hadn’t been in a band. There’s a DVD documentary about the Stooges reunion at the Fox Theater, and there’s a moment where he tells the security guards to back off while what looks like a third of the audience is up onstage. And I remember thinking: this is a guy who has beaten death several times, who is now clean and sober and in his rational mind, and he’s still bringing anarchy with him.
Barry: But I think he fundamentally likes people. If he didn't like people, he wouldn't want them up there on that stage. I mean, the Velvet Underground used to perform with their backs to the audience. Iggy wants people around him, even if he wants to make some of them fight with each other, perhaps. Ted: But he likes the scrum of humanity. That doesn’t necessarily mean he wants to hug everybody. Togetherness can be rough.
Ted: But as I’ve watched him perform in old age, I’ve sometimes found myself wondering whether this might be the time he finally takes himself out. There has always been that fascination for me: whether Iggy might make even his ending into a performance. [NOTE: At this year’s Coachella Festival, Iggy finished up his performance by climbing into a black, red-lined coffin, which was then wheeled offstage. He had pulled off a similar stunt on his 2025 UK tour. A statement of how he wants to go out from this mortal plane, to be sure.]
Barry: Oh, but he's got a lust for life. I think, I think he might collapse on stage, but I don't think he would end his life deliberately. I think if he knew his, his end was coming, he might want to be on stage, when it when it comes. Ted: Well, I think that supports your point that he does like people. Look at all the collaborations he’s done. People who genuinely dislike other people usually don’t seek out other talented people to work with. And there aren’t many famous feuds attached to him either. If you’ve been around that long, there’s usually some well-known rivalry, but I can’t think of one associated with Iggy. Compare, for example, Lou Reed’s relationship with David Bowie after Bowie helped produce Transformer with Bowie’s relationship to Iggy. Lou Reed ended up accusing Bowie of messing up recordings and all the rest of it, but Iggy seemed to recognize that Bowie was the right guy at the right time. I think it’s interesting that someone like Lou Reed, who was generally not a pleasant fellow or a particularly nice guy, still found some kinship with Laurie Anderson—and I’m glad he did—in his later years. But Iggy seems different. I think he genuinely enjoys what he does. He takes himself seriously, but he also seems to enjoy sharing it with the audience he’s earned over a long time. Barry: I can tell you a little story that may or may not be typical. I knew a woman who was an engineer on the American Caesar sessions, and she felt somewhat abused and condescended to by the producer of that album. But Iggy went over to her and made her feel better, welcomed and appreciated. She was an assistant engineer, low on the totem pole, but he made a point of being kind to her. Do you think Iggy would have become the person he is if he hadn’t gone through those horrible, self-destructive drug experiences? Did that somehow remake him—like a kind of rebirth through the crucible?
Ted: I would say his background and the decisions he made earlier in life clearly shaped the choices he made later on. We’ve already talked about how some of that behavior seems to have been deliberate. But plenty of people had heroin addictions, nearly overdosed, and never emerged with this strange aura of health, endurance, and even a kind of sanity within the insanity. From Johnny Thunders to Nico to countless other self-destructive figures, most did not survive in the way Iggy did. He’s exceptional in that sense. Even someone like Keith Richards isn’t regarded quite the same way, because Iggy seemed like such a self-destructive lunatic, and yet he survived, pulled himself together, and now seems proud of both his body and his longevity. Barry: It’s strange. It's such unique story. I can't think of someone that's duplicated that. Ted: Well, I think he has a healthy ego. He won’t be pushed around, and he’s not a doormat. He knows who he is. At the same time, he’s not arrogant, and he doesn’t lord it over other people. He doesn’t go around saying, “I survived the Stooges, man.” I understand that Carmine Appice later turned out to be a decent guy, but I remember William Hamilton running into him at the campus radio station when they were doing live interviews. Maybe he was just burned out from the road, being shuttled from one radio station to another and back to the hotel. So when somebody asked a stupid question like, “Why do you think you’re qualified to be playing with so-and-so?” he snapped back with the usual chest-thumping –“I played with Beck, man. I played with Rod Stewart.” He was frustrated, maybe understandably. But Iggy never did that. He never pounded his chest or talked that way. He doesn’t seem to regard himself like that. Barry: But related to that is this pugnacious attitude he's always had about the music business. On Every Loser (2023), the last song on there is called “The Regency.” The Regency is Iggy’s term for the music business, and the song’s final chorus is, “fuck the Regency!” It’s repeated over and over again. And yet he seems like a nice guy. He seems like an honest guy. And the music business could have gotten rid of him a long time ago, and somehow it never did. He's like a piece of gristle in your teeth. You never could quite get him out, you know. In some ways, he’s still the skinny half-naked freak daring all comers to take him on.
Ted: He essentially said that at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction too. The industry has been smart enough to recognize what he is. He’s a class act. He doesn’t sell huge numbers of records, but he has a devoted following, and he gives a record company a certain kind of credibility. Having Iggy Pop on the roster is like having a small but valuable jewel—it says something about who you are. We could both name plenty of people who should have stopped at a certain point but just kept running themselves into the ground. Iggy never really did that. And that’s remarkable, because on paper he’s the kind of supposedly limited performer people underestimate: a guy who can’t really sing in the conventional sense, makes a spectacle of himself onstage, and doesn’t play an instrument. Yet he never simply became a burnout case or a parody of himself. Barry: And he's incredibly durable. That's another paradox about him. Ted: I’ve always admired people who work brilliantly within their limitations, like the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger isn’t a great singer in the classical sense, but he gives fantastic vocal performances. He’s not really a singer so much as a vocalist, and I think that distinction matters. Keith Richards isn’t a great guitarist in a technical sense either, but he has the feel, and he knows how to come up with a hook. They function incredibly well within those limits. Barry: Well, it relates to that word that was so big in the ‘60s, and I have a problem with it, because it's so overused, which is authenticity. There’s this idea that roughness is authentic. I haven't heard the word authenticity applied to Iggy, because generally, authenticity has this association with certain sorts of very left-wing, progressive, forward looking ways of conducting yourself, and Iggy seems so destructive to himself and to others that you don't want to admit that Iggy is being authentic, because there's so much horrible, frightening stuff inside of him. Is he being authentic by letting this out? But in a real sense, he's a very authentic guy. Ted: The word authentic, in my view, has been co-opted. Whenever I see it used in criticism, it usually implies a moral structure—a sense that the artist is moving in some direction that is inherently beneficial to everyone else. That’s what the word has come to suggest. I wouldn’t call Iggy authentic in that sense. In my opinion, he’s real. Barry: Okay, then tell me the distinction. I think it goes back to — he's that character. He's a man who doesn't really care what you think he is, he's just being himself. Isn't that being authentic? Ted: Well, not in the way the word is usually used. [Barry: That’s right.] I think it has been shaped into something predictable: you call someone authentic when you expect them to embody a certain moral position, or to contribute something affirming to the moral structure of the universe. Iggy is more like someone saying, “Here are the snapshots.” He presents what he sees or experiences, but he doesn’t apologize for what he’s writing about. Barry: No, he never has been an apologist for anything he's done, really, and that I appreciate that.
Ted: And nowadays people often seem to think you’re supposed to love someone because they admitted they were wrong. But what kind of payment is that for the damage they may have
done? That attitude has really grown over the last fifty years, and Iggy bypasses it. He doesn’t seem interested in offering the audience something useful, uplifting, or morally instructive. Instead, he’s saying: this is what is happening, this is a representation of it, and it’s up to you to make sense of it if you can. But you do at least have to acknowledge that it exists. And don’t put anything on me for presenting it without apology or justification. A prime example is “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” Relationships like that do exist, and there were probably times when he willingly put himself in positions where he could be degraded or harmed. The song acknowledges that reality directly, without trying to soften it or explain it away. Think about two obvious examples: Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done” and Joni Mitchell’s “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire,” and then compare them to the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” I like the Neil Young song, and I like the Joni Mitchell song too. They’re poetic and heartbreaking. But part of me also resists them because they’re so heartbreakingly framed; they push emotional buttons and romanticize the tragedy. The listener is led toward sorrow—“he died so young,” “he had so much potential”—and that can shift attention away from the experience itself. Writers like Hubert Selby Jr. or Jean Genet try instead to put you inside the experience. The shocking thing is not just that it is destructive, but that part of the experience may actually feel compelling from within. That, to me, is the more profound thing to confront.
Barry: Well, the artist should take responsibility, though, for what may happen. I remember one of the first interviews I ever did was with John Cale, and in our conversation I asked him if an artist is responsible for what the audience makes of their work. And he said, “not very.” I don't agree with that. I mean, you should look at the implications of what you are putting out there. Hubert Selby was a profoundly moral writer. His heart bled for the world, and he became a Christian. I believe he wrote about these tormented characters because he really wanted people to feel compassion for the weak and vulnerable. You could write about doomed, self-destructive people and not want people to feel that. You might just want to exploit people's love of sniffing around the edge of death. Ted: I’m not sure Iggy was consciously sorting through all of that when he wrote those early Stooges songs. But the issue is still there, whether or not he was fully theorizing it at the time.
Barry: Is that sense of responsibility there in Iggy’s case? Ted: I think that sense of responsibility probably grew in Iggy over time. He likely does feel more responsible now. But ultimately, I still think the way people respond to a work of art is their responsibility, not the artist’s.
Barry: I can't entirely believe that, though. Don't you think that any art is a collaboration between the artist and who receives the art? Ted: No, not always. I don’t think this is something that can be reduced to fixed rules and regulations. Barry: There are no absolute rules, no. But I think, in general, I think the artist has a responsibility to react, to respond to people's reactions. Most of all the responsibility is to be honest, I would say.
Ted: For me, the question is whether an artist should censor himself by saying, “Someone might get really upset by this.” Remember the Buoys and their cannibalism song, “Timothy”? What if that had inspired a wave of cannibalism? [Barry: Well, that’s an extreme scenario.] But a Lou Reed song may well have inspired some people to go out and start using heroin. [Barry: He probably did inspire some people.] My point is that once you put the work into the world, that possibility becomes part of the mix whether you like it or not. Barry: I think that's what I'm talking about — the idea artists should be willing to discuss and acknowledge the effect they might have on someone.
Ted: In that sense, yes. But at the same time, I don’t think you can count on artists to be responsible people, because a lot of people who become artists were never especially responsible to begin with. Barry: I do think, though, that as certain artists in mass entertainment become bigger and bigger, their sense of responsibility should grow bigger, because they have more and more indication of how their music or their art is being regarded. There's more and more people around them that are advising them probably, I think the responsibility grows as someone becomes extremely successful. It’s not credible or sustainable to just say you’re a “bad boy” who gets away with shit.
Ted: Well, in that case the artist starts to be shaped by the corporations that employ them. And of course the artists themselves become businesspeople too: they have to keep the machine running, keep the wheels greased, and think about what audiences expect. That’s why I’ve always found it more interesting when an artist resists that pressure. I’ve long been interested in artists who made striking early work before they became popular, and then eventually had to pay the price of meeting expectations. Iggy never really did that. People may have wanted another “Five Foot One,” but he didn’t give them that. Instead, he produced work that was stylistically diverse and uneven in quality, which at least shows he wasn’t second-guessing audience expectations. He was doing what he wanted to do.
Barry: Have you heard any of the Stooges reunion recordings? I like them, but I think that they're good, but they're not the same as the original. The one track by the band I heard on Skull Ring was particularly good. And then I listened to some of the stuff on The Weirdness, which was good and hard-hitting also. Still, it's obviously the work of people that are older and are a little more self-aware than perhaps they were when they were 20 years old. It's just inevitable.
Ted: Yes, and I think part of that comes from the pressure artists feel as they get older to keep producing. A lot of that may simply be fear of death. You get closer to the end of your life, and once you stop doing the thing that made you creative, fruitful, controversial, or visible in the world, you may feel you’re losing your reason for being here. So many creative people would rather stay busy. Some of the artists we’ve already mentioned keep producing work that remains worth paying attention to, because they never stop being good at what they do. Others keep going decades beyond their best period and really should have stopped. I’m thinking of someone like the poet John Ashbery, who produced a dozen books in a relatively short span, and much of that later work just feels prolix rather than necessary. Take Charles Bukowski. I use the phrase “when Charles Bukowski became Charles Bukowski.” Once he had that relationship with John Martin at Black Sparrow, he could just turn in piles of manuscript pages and they would keep being produced on schedule. At first he was a fresh voice; later he became a brand, obviously living up to what the audience expected. It’s like Barton Fink. [Barry: Yes, I saw that Coen Brothers film.] Remember when he meets the studio head and the whole point is, “We want that Barton Fink feeling—who better to give it to us than Barton Fink?” That’s what happens when an artist becomes his own formula. Iggy never really did that. Barry: Well, that's another paradox about him. First of all, he changed his name from Jim Osterberg. He had a stage name. He established this extreme image early on, and he's never left it behind entirely. And yet, he's made it work for him, and I have no sense that he's a prisoner of it. And yet, and he's grown as a human being within that image. There's a lot to unpack there. Ted: I think Iggy has been the beneficiary of an extraordinary number of fortunate events—things that weren’t planned and couldn’t have been predicted. I’ve met people in real life who say, “I’m going to be famous and I don’t care how I do it,” which sounds like a kind of mental illness. But Iggy’s case feels different. He acted on impulse and was self-destructive in ways that probably would have killed almost anyone else. I’m not sure there was some grand self-awareness on his part, as if he always knew exactly what he needed to do. I think he was carried along in part by the writers and artists around him who recognized something in him as a marginal but important figure. He easily could have died like hundreds of others, but what he did with the early Stooges made people think, “We can’t let this guy disappear.” I think David Bowie genuinely liked him, and Bowie may have been one of the main people who helped save his life. Barry: I know when he was in Los Angeles detoxing in 1975, he recorded the stuff that came out on Kill City at Jimmy Webb studio. Jimmy Webb did him a good turn. I mean, there were people around that saw something of worth in him as a human being and as an artist, that they went out of their way to help save him at that time.
Ted: Right, and in that sense he received a lot of kindness—not necessarily from strangers, but from people who chose to help him when they didn’t have to. That may well have changed his worldview. In the end, so much comes down to circumstance, luck, and how you respond to both. I suspect he gradually became aware that he had been blessed far beyond what he had any right to expect.
Barry: You were talking earlier about seeing Iggy in Detroit, so I was gonna tell you my Iggy story. I saw him twice, and the first time was the most memorable. It was at the Catamaran Hotel in San Diego in 1979, and you remember how small the performing area was and how low that it was, and you remember how there were posts that were in front of the stage? Well, I saw Iggy there when he was doing the tour supporting New Values. And he's there with this band, with Ivan Kral from Patti Smith's group and Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols. And he does “I Wanna Be Your Dog” or some other early Stooges song. He throws himself around the room in this confined space, like a rubber doll. And he bumps into a pole, and he wraps himself around it, and the song is over, and people applaud, and he gets this shit-eating grin on his face and he goes, “Gee, thanks!” As if he's surprised that people would like this. And it felt genuine. It's like he appreciated playing this little club and having an audience applaud his antics. There's something very human about it, and I think it goes to your point about him considering himself lucky.
Ted: I really believe that. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard him say it explicitly, but I would bet he does think of himself as blessed and lucky. One thing that really struck me in that Live in Detroit reunion concert with Ron Ashton was the joy and energy he was drawing from the audience. Onstage it’s pure anarchy—people dancing everywhere, Iggy moving through it all, handing the microphone to people. He seemed completely alive to that exchange.
Barry: Maybe that’s what Iggy was getting t with his song “Lust for Life”: be completely alive, be in the moment, yes, but also be aware of Time and who you are and what you mean to people. Stand behind your work, admit you are an idiot but don’t apologize. He grew into that role over the decades and his stature as a battered and bruised but unbowed elder is more significant than any individual song or album he’s released. With Iggy, it’s the total human being, the total life from youth to old age, that’s important. Ultimately, it’s the most meaningful thing about him.
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