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There’s extreme, there’s legendary – and then there’s Iggy Pop. From his early days with the Stooges, provoking fraternities in Ann Arbor and small-towners in Michigan, Iggy made excess his art. Self-mutilation, self-exposure and self-destruction. Its risky theatrics required the audience to react, participate or leave. And the sex and violence hardly stopped after the show ended. Here are 20 of Iggy’s wildest moments, both on and off stage.
Iggy appears completely naked on the cover of “Little Caesar” (1979)
“We are not 50-year-old art patrons,” New Yorker writer Dennis Cooper proclaimed in the first issue of his magazine. “We are young punks, just like you.” And over 12 issues, Cooper’s zine-turned-journal was the place where avant-garde poetry and punk glamor consummated their relationship. Issue 8 of Little Caesar emblazoned the magazine’s characteristic image. A black and white shot of Iggy in his muscular prime.
The muscular definition of his torso and his confident aura were so striking that his significant, er, passenger might not even have been the first thing you noticed. The ’70s were coming to an end, but Iggy Pop was just beginning.
Iggy and Bowie perform in “Dinah!” on (April 15, 1977)
“Iggy Pop is considered the founder of today’s punk rock,” daytime television doyenne Dinah Shore informed her middle-class American viewers in a surprisingly knowledgeable tone.
After a performance, Dinah speaks to Iggy with gentle, motherly concern: “You cut yourself with a bottle.” The audience laughs after Iggy most charmingly explains, “I got treated for something like that.”
Bowie gives Iggy cocaine to the psychiatric hospital (1974)
After his attempts at a solo career failed and his addiction got the better of him, Iggy checked into the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA in hopes of getting clean. Or at least keep the police away from you for a while. Soon a famous visitor from his past came by with a gift.
“We marched to the hospital with a load of drugs for him,” he said Bowie Blender in 2002. “He wasn’t feeling well, that’s all we knew. We thought we should get him some drugs because he probably hadn’t had any in days!” Iggy’s handlers politely declined the gift. “It was a hospital where you had to leave your drugs at the door,” as Bowie put it. But the restored connection with Bowie would soon usher in the next phase of Iggy’s life and career.
“Murder of a Virgin” (August 11, 1974)
After the Stooges ended, Iggy limped to LA, where he gave his first solo concert at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, with a performance he called “The Murder of a Virgin” “Do you want to see blood?” Iggy asked the audience, who shouted in agreement.
Then, at Iggy’s urging, guitarist Ron Asheton, dressed in a Nazi uniform, repeatedly whipped Iggy. Iggy began shouting racial slurs at a black audience member, hoping to get the man to stab him with the steak knife he had brought on stage. Since that didn’t work, he ended the performance by carving an X into his chest.
Iggy Fights Bikers (February 1974)
In February 1974, the Scorpions, a biker gang from Detroit, became Iggy Pop’s most famous enemies. The Rock & Roll Farm in Wayne, Michigan was her local bar. And they weren’t thrilled with the skinny guy in the leotard on stage. They expressed their displeasure by throwing eggs at Iggy, who then jumped into the crowd. And was promptly stopped by a powerful biker’s fist.
The band escaped to safety, and during an appearance on radio station WABX, Iggy asked the Scorpions to appear at the Stooges’ upcoming show at the Michigan Palace in Detroit, which would also be their last. The Stooges’ final show, captured on the live album Metallic KO, was the culmination of everything that had come before. Never before had Iggy provoked an audience so viciously. Never before had an audience reacted so violently.
Critic Lester Bangs summed it up well: “Nobody gets killed. But Metallic KO is the only rock album I know where you can actually hear beer bottles hitting guitar strings.” However, contrary to legend, no member of the Scorpions appears to have shown up at the last concert.
Toledo drops Iggy on his face (1974)
At the peak of his career, audiences feared and obeyed Iggy Pop. But when the Stooges’ tour spiraled out of control and Columbia announced it would not be renewing Iggy’s contract, the audience sensed failure and turned against the band.
Twice Iggy – wearing white makeup and a bow tie – plunged into the crowd in Toledo. Both times the crowd, probably there for Stooges-hating headliners Slade, stepped aside and let the singer fall flat on his face.