What's The Big Deal About Iggy Pop

Summary

Ongoing History of New Music: What's The Big Deal About Iggy Pop

Released July 16, 2025 by Curiouscast

Introduction

In this engaging episode of Ongoing History of New Music, host Alan Cross delves deep into the life and legacy of Iggy Pop, exploring why this iconic figure remains a pivotal influence in the landscape of alternative and punk music. Skipping over the brief introductory segments and advertisements, the episode provides a comprehensive narrative of Iggy Pop's tumultuous career, his profound impact on music, and his enduring legacy.

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Early Life and Musical Beginnings

Alan Cross begins by introducing Iggy Pop, born James Jewel Osterberg on April 21, 1947, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Raised in the Coachville Mobile Home Park, Iggy's early environment was a modest 50 by 100-foot trailer. Despite a disciplined household—his father was a strict English teacher and his mother a secretary—Jimmy exhibited leadership qualities early on, becoming the student council president and vice president of the debating team in high school. In 1962, he embarked on his musical journey as a drummer for a local band, the Iguanas, showcasing his budding talent (03:00).

Quote:
"I was voted most likely to succeed by my classmates in grade nine." – Alan Cross [03:15]

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Formation of Iggy and the Stooges

Iggy's musical prowess led him to form the Prime Movers, a stint that was short-lived. Returning to Detroit after eight months in Chicago, his unique stage presence earned him the moniker Iggy Pop. The name "Iggy" derived from the Iguanas, while "Pop" was inspired by a friend named Jim Pop, who had a distinct appearance due to a medical condition (04:50).

On October 31, 1967, Iggy Pop launched Iggy and the Psychedelic Stooges in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The band quickly evolved into simply The Stooges, becoming notorious for their raw, powerful performances characterized by chaos and high energy. Iggy's onstage antics—ranging from smearing peanut butter and raw meat on himself to self-mutilation and physical confrontations with the audience—cemented their reputation as pioneers of what would later be recognized as punk rock (06:30).

Quote:
"The Psychedelic Stooges soon became just the Stooges. And here begins the legend of Iggy Pop." – Alan Cross [06:35]

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Struggles and Influence on Punk Rock

Despite their groundbreaking performances, The Stooges faced numerous challenges. Between 1969 and 1973, they recorded three major label albums with constantly shifting lineups. Iggy's severe drug addiction strained both his personal life and musical collaborations. His erratic behavior led to multiple arrests and violent incidents, including a notorious 1974 performance at the Michigan Palace where he incited a gang to attack him on stage, resulting in a raw and chaotic recording that became a legendary bootleg titled Metallic Ko (08:57).

Quote:
"They were every bit as nihilistic as the Velvet Underground and violent to boot. Those three studio albums and that famous bootleg became blueprints for the punk that was to follow." – Alan Cross [09:05]

The Stooges' uncompromising style and Iggy's fearless stage persona laid the foundational elements for the punk movement, influencing seminal bands like the Sex Pistols, who acknowledged Iggy as the "godfather of punk" (10:05).

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David Bowie's Crucial Role

The mid-1970s marked a turning point in Iggy Pop's life, largely due to the intervention of David Bowie. After The Stooges disbanded, Iggy fell into a severe personal crisis, culminating in a stint in a Los Angeles psychiatric hospital. It was Bowie who reached out, recognizing Iggy's immense talent and potential. Bowie not only provided emotional support but also facilitated a resurgence in Iggy's career by securing management and a record deal (12:09).

Quote:
"David Bowie was the only person in the world who cared about what happened to Iggy Pop. And it was him who finally convinced Iggy that he didn't need to kill himself." – Alan Cross [12:25]

Their collaboration resulted in the 1977 album The Idiot, marking Iggy's successful transition to solo artist status. This partnership revitalized Iggy's career and reinforced his status as a seminal figure in alternative music.

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Resurgence and Lasting Legacy

With Bowie's mentorship, Iggy Pop released Lust for Life in 1977, an album that became his most celebrated work. Tracks like "Night Clubbing" gained legendary status, with artists like Trent Reznor later sampling its beats, showcasing Iggy's lasting influence across generations (15:07).

Throughout the 1980s and beyond, Iggy continued to evolve, dabbling in acting and producing further music. His collaborations with figures like Steve Jones kept him relevant, leading to hits like "Real Wild Child" and albums such as Blah Blah Blah and Instinct. These efforts introduced Iggy to new audiences, solidifying his role as an enduring icon in alternative rock (17:15).

Quote:
"You can draw a straight line from Iggy through the punk of the 70s, the indie rock of the 80s, the grunge of the 90s, to the punk in the underground of today." – Alan Cross [21:58]

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Conclusion: The Big Deal About Iggy Pop

Alan Cross concludes by emphasizing Iggy Pop's indelible mark on the music industry. Iggy's relentless pursuit of the unconventional and his ability to push artistic boundaries have made him a foundational figure in the evolution of punk and alternative music. From his chaotic performances with The Stooges to his resilient solo career, Iggy Pop exemplifies the spirit of unfiltered, passionate rock and roll.

Final Quote:
"Iggy was one of the very first to show us how it should be done. That's the big deal about Iggy Pop." – Alan Cross [21:58]

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Closing Remarks

Alan Cross wraps up the episode by inviting listeners to explore the extensive Ongoing History of New Music archives and his other podcast, Music Meets True Crime, Mayhem in the Music Industry. For those eager to dive deeper into music history and its intricate narratives, these resources offer a treasure trove of information and storytelling.

Further Resources:

• Ongoing History of New Music available on all major podcast platforms.
• Visit alanlancross.ca for more music news, updates, and the free newsletter.

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About the Podcast

Ongoing History of New Music is Canada’s most renowned music documentary series, hosted by the legendary Alan Cross. The podcast covers a broad spectrum of genres, from alt-rock to hip hop, featuring artist profiles and thematic explorations that provide listeners with unique insights and comprehensive historical contexts.

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Notable Timestamps:

• 03:15 – Iggy's early leadership traits and high school accolades.
• 06:35 – Formation and initial impact of Iggy and The Stooges.
• 09:05 – The Stooges' influence on the punk movement.
• 12:25 – David Bowie's pivotal role in rescuing Iggy Pop.
• 15:07 – Lust for Life and its enduring legacy.
• 21:58 – Summary of Iggy Pop's monumental impact on music.

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Listen to the Episode

For a detailed exploration of Iggy Pop's life and legacy, tune into What's The Big Deal About Iggy Pop on your preferred podcast platform and uncover the story of a true rock and roll icon.

Transcript

[Alan Cross]

Hey, it's Alan. And I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music, early and ad free on Amazon music included with Prime.

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Hi, it's Alan.

[Alan Cross]

Let me explain what's going on here. For the next couple of podcasts, we're going to go back into the ongoing history of new music vault. With over 1000 original radio episodes and several hundred of them as podcasts, some episodes still need to see the light of day. Now There are about 500 podcasts available, but you can see that there's more. For this one, we're going to go.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Back to our what's the Big Deal? Series for a look at Iggy Pop.

[Alan Cross]

Now, even though this is a show.

[Unnamed Speaker]

From the earlier part of the ongoing.

[Alan Cross]

History library, it's still very relevant. We thought you'd might like to have a listen and find out what's the.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Big deal about Iggy Pop.

Welcome to the musical trivia game. Contestants, are you ready? Alright. Name a famous musical icon who once made a living by regularly smearing peanut butter all over his body. All right, here's clue number two. This same person was once banned from performing live on CBC TV because he used to cut himself on stage using a razor. Anyone?

Um, Nick and AJ from the Backstreet Boys.

Oh, no, I'm sorry, that's incorrect. Your final clue is James Jewel Osterberg. Come on, people, it's Iggy Pop, one of the most important historical figures in New Rock. What's the matter with you? Iggy Pop.

What's the big deal about him? This is the ongoing history of new music podcast with Alan Cross. There's a song that's been used to sell everything from movies to cars to beer. From September 1977, Iggy Pop with Lust for Life. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross and this is another program in the what's the Big Deal? Series. This is where we try to figure out why we keep hearing and reading about these old names from the past. How are they connected to today's music? What did they do 20, 30 years ago and why should we care? And if they were so damn important, why didn't they ever sell a lot of records in the first place? Simple. We need to care because without these performers, today's new rock and alternative music wouldn't be possible. And honestly, icons don't get much bigger than Iggy Pop, who is universally known as the Godfather of punk. His real name is James Jewell Osterberg. He was born on April 21, 1947 and grew up in the Coachville Mobile Home park in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Home was this 50 by 100 foot trailer. Jimmy's dad was a highly strung, very uptight English teacher while his mom worked as a secretary. Meanwhile, Jimmy was pretty good in school. He was president of the student council and vice president of the debating team. And when he was in grade nine, he was voted most likely to succeed by his classmates. In 1962, he started playing drums for a local group called the Iguanas. Jimmy was a pretty fair drummer and and started getting some studio work. In fact, check this out. It's very possible that Iggy Pop played on the same record as Billy Joel. Remember the old song from the Shangri Las called Leader of the Pack? Legend has it that Iggy was hired to play the drum part, then paid and sent home. Then Billy Joel came in and did his piano bit reading from a piece of sheet music. In other words, it's possible that they appear on the same record, but. But they were never together in the same studio.

I met him at the candy store. He turned around and smiled at me.

You get the picture? Yes, we see. That's when I fell for Leader of the Pack. There was one Iguanas single, a track called Mona, which was issued in 1965. Iggy then moved to a group called the Prime Movers. But that gig didn't last long. After eight months in Chicago playing in various blues bands, Jimmy moved back to Detroit. This is when some friends christened him Iggy Pop. Iggy after the Iguanas and Pop after a junkie friend named Jim Pop. But the connection with Jim Pop had little to do with drugs at the time. Jim suffered from some kind of medical condition that made him lose all his hair, including his eyebrows. Iggy thought this was pretty cool, so he shaved off his eyebrows too. And that's what cemented his name. Iggy Pop. Iggy enjoyed being weird for weird's sake. He liked strange haircuts and liked wearing these big baggy overalls. And every once in a while the cops would stop him on the street, thinking that he was an escaped mental patient or something. Some of his buddies thought he was perfect to be the frontman for a new band. And on October 31, 1967, Iggy and the Psychedelic Stooges made their debut in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They were loud, spontaneous, sloppy, fuzzy, arrogant, violent, angry, and above all, powerful.

Music.

The Psychedelic Stooges soon became just the Stooges. And here begins the legend of Iggy Pop. Iggy got weirder and weirder whenever the band played live. And it's important to put this into context. Some of what Iggy did back then would still get him busted today. So try to imagine the effect his antics had in 1967 and 1968, when the whole peace and love hippie thing was at its height. Before each show, Iggy would take several hits of acid, maybe a few grams of crank and as much pot as he could smoke. He would wear dresses and maternity clothes on stage. From there, he would strip down to sometimes nothing at all. He'd smear his body with peanut butter and raw meat. He'd carve up his chest using a broken beer bottle. Or maybe mutilate himself with a steak knife, drawing long, bleeding open wounds. Sometimes he'd get Stooges guitarist Rob Ashton to whip him with a real leather bullwhip. He'd smash himself in the head with a microphone. And he wasn't afraid of physically attacking members of the audience. No wonder Iggy kept getting arrested for indecent exposure. And no wonder when the Stooges left the stage, it was slick with blood. And the Stooges music was as in your face as Iggy. It was raw, it was sloppy, it was high energy rock and roll unlike anything else out there at the time. And it was every bit as punky as some of the indie stuff we hear today.

In the beginning, there was Igg. Then there was Alice.

I want to get out of here.

And then there was David.

Ground control to Major Tom.

But the most bizarre of this incredible trio has always been and remains Iggy, Iggy and the Stooges. Some of the most bizarre performers in rock music today. Return to St. Louis tomorrow night at the visually and acoustically per American Theater. Iggy and the Stooges at the American Theater tomorrow night for two shows at 7:30 and 11:30pm Reserve seats are only 3, 3, 50 and $4. Tickets may be purchased at Orange Julius, Northwest Plaza, Spectrum Music Village, Glad rags and Marty G.R. records. A contemporary production.

Stoo the Stooges recorded three major label albums between August 1969 and May 1973, with the lineup shifting almost monthly. It also didn't help that Iggy was totally off the deep end at this time. He spent $100,000 of his record company advance on a suite at a Beverly Hills hotel. He had a huge coke and heroin habit that needed to be fed. He was arrested a number of times, charged with impersonating a female, which was apparently a crime back then. And then he took an axe to a Mercedes owned by a wealthy one night stand. In 1974, after a particularly brutal confrontation with a Detroit gang, Iggy played a gig at Michigan palace, where he demanded that this gang come up on stage and beat him to a pulp. Some of his friends believed that Iggy wanted to die on stage. Meanwhile, the audience bombed the stage with beer bottles, not all of them empty. Years later, a cassette recording of that performance would be released on an album called Metallic Ko and this is about as raw and as dangerous as it gets. If you listen closely to this record, you can actually hear the beer bottles breaking as they land on stage. From October 6, 1973, and formerly one of the world's most respected and sought after bootlegs. One more time for Iggy and the Stooges. Thank you very much to the person who threw this glass bottle at my head and nearly killed me. But you missed again, so you have to keep trying. As crazy as they were, it's hard to understate the importance of Iggy Pop and the Stooges. They were every bit as nihilistic as the Velvet Underground and violent to boot. Those three studio albums and that famous bootleg became blueprints for the punk that was to follow in the 1970s and 80s. Bands like the Sex Pistols would later acknowledge that Iggy was, yes, the godfather of punk. When the Stooges finally blew apart, Iggy had nowhere to go but a psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles. He was a babbling, strung out freak, prone to blackouts and random acts of violence. After a while, he disappeared and the cops found him in a heap under the counter at a hamburger joint. And that's when they gave him a choice, jail or a long stint in the mental unit. You know what? Nobody cared. No one came to visit. No one except Iggy's new friend, David Bowie. Bowie had admired Iggy's energy for years. In fact, in 1972, Bowie wrote this song about Iggy.

Lives on his back the Gene Genie loves Jimmy Stacks inside the play Jazz the screams and he falls the jinging.

Bowie was the only person in the world who cared about what happened to Iggy Pop. And it was him who finally convinced Iggy that he didn't need to kill himself. And thanks to Bowie, Iggy's career was reborn. That part of the story is next.

[Alan Cross]

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Ba da ba ba ba.

David Bowie truly admired and believed in Iggy Pop. That's why he not only got Iggy a new management deal, but but a record contract as well. Then in June 1976, Bowie began working with Iggy on Iggy's first solo album. It was Iggy on vocals and Bowie on everything else, and it was ready by March 1977. It was called the Idiot.

When I look at my china gay I could pretend that nothing could. Well, I meant too much.

China girl from 1977, a song co written by David Bowie, who of course had a big hit with his own recording of that song in the early 1980s. And yes, Iggy made a ton of money from Bowie's version. In fact, a good guess would be somewhere close to a million dollars. Seventeen years later, another part of that record was made famous, and it began with the opening beats of a track called Night Clubbing. Okay, you got that? In 1994, Trent Reznor took those beats, loaded them into a Macintosh computer, turned the waveform upside down, added a few extra effects, and got this the Idiot did all right, sales wise, certainly way better than anything the Stooges had ever released. Of course, the Bowie connection didn't hurt, and Bowie even toured with Iggy not as a headline act, but just as the keyboard player in his backup band. Once that tour was over, the two of them went back to West Berlin, where they made another record for iggy in just 13 days. And in celebration of Iggy's renewed prospects, the album was called Lust for Life. And it remains the best work of his entire career.

I am the passenger and I ride and I ride I ride through the city backsides I see the stars come.

Out of the sky the Passenger, a song later covered by and performed by Susie and the Banshees and and Bauhaus. The song was allegedly inspired by door singer Jim Morrison. In fact, legend has it that Iggy once owned a pair of Jim's old leather pants and that Iggy believed Morrison's spirit had passed to him from those pants. Those albums that Iggy did with Bowie were important not only to him, but to the exploding punk rock scene in England. Thanks to Bowie, Iggy's presence and influence was felt by a lot of the new young, hungry, extreme bands of the era. Going to see Iggy during that period was almost akin to making a pilgrimage to some holy ancient punk shrine. However, the next five years were once again kind of weird for Iggy. After a strong start, his solo career started to sag. By 1982, he didn't have a record contract and had to keep touring just to make ends meet. Fortunately, though, his old pal David Bowie came through right about then with his recording of China Girl, and things turned around again. This guy's got more lives than a cat, doesn't he? Iggy then met and married a Japanese woman named Tsuchi. He did some studio work with Bowie, and he started getting into acting. Over the next few years, Iggy picked up roles in films like the Color of Money with Tom Cruise and Paul Newman. He was in Sid and Nancy with Gary Oldham, and he was even in an episode of Miami Vice with don Johnson. In 1985. It was Bowie to the rescue again. After listening to some rough tapes of some new songs, he encouraged Iggy and his new buddy, ex Sex Pistol guitarist Steve Jones, to make another album. A recording contract was secured and the result was Iggy's best album in years. He called it Blah Blah blah, released in October 1986. There's Iggy with a song that introduced him to a third generation of music fans. Real Wild Child. Few people realize this, but that's a cover. The guy who wrote that song was an Australian rockabilly performer named Johnny O'. Keefe. He recorded that song back in 1940. 57. Iggy stuck with Steve Jones for his next album, from July 1988, and the record called Instinct. Here's Iggy and Steve with Cold Metal.

I'm a product of America from the malls to the prison Cold metal when I start my van Cold metal in.

My garbage can Back with more on the big deal that is Iggy Pop right after this.

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The early 90s were pretty good to Iggy. He was cleaned up and sounding better than he had in years. And at the same time, indie and alternative music was rising up and Iggy was once again named as a legendary alt rock pioneer. Right up there with the Velvet Underground and the Ramones and the Sex Pistols and the Clash. The acting roles kept coming and he even had an Honest to God top 40 hit single. It came from his 1990 album Brick by Brick, and it featured a duet with Kate Pearson of the B52S candy.

Candy candy I can't let you go all my life you're a haunting me I loved you so.

Iggy has survived long enough to be declared an alt rock icon. He was there at the beginning laying the foundations for what was to come. Iggy was one of those guys who insisted on doing the unconventional, someone who pushed the envelope so far that few people since have managed to stand that far out on the edge. You can draw a straight line from Iggy through the punk of the 70s, the indie rock of the 80s, the grunge of the 90s, to the punk in the underground of today. The lineage of uncommercial, undiluted, straight from the heart rock and roll. And Iggy was one of the very first to show us how it should be done. That's the big deal about Iggy Pop.

[Alan Cross]

Thanks for taking a trip with us into the ongoing history of new music vaults, our big archives, a reminder that there are hundreds of ongoing history shows available on demand as podcasts. Yeah, hundreds. They're all free and you can download them wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, grab a few episodes of Uncharted Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, which is my Music Meets True Crime podcast. Let me know what you think. We can connect on most of the social media platforms. I'm always updating my website with music news and information that's ajournal of musicalthhings.com it comes with a free newsletter too, and you could also email me about anything. I'm available through AlanLancross CA Technical Productions by Rob Johnston. We'll talk to you next time. I'm Alan Cross.

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