![]() “We trooped into the hospital with a load of drugs for him,” Bowie once recalled. He soon had some famous visitors: David Bowie and movie star Dennis Hopper. ![]() In 1975, in a bid to get clean, he voluntarily committed himself in to the UCLA neuropsychiatric institute. ![]() During a performance he named ‘The Murder of a Virgin’, he carved an X on his bare chest with a steak knife. Things didn’t improve later that year when he played Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco on LA’s Sunset Strip. In February 1974, The Stooges broke up after a gig in Michigan which Lester Bangs described as consisting entirely of hostile bikers who were almost as high as the band: “Iggy, as usual, fed on that hostility, soaked it up and gave it back and absorbed it all over again in an eerie, frightening symbiosis.” (The show was recorded and released as Metallic KO in 1976.) He cut himself with a knife and walked bleeding into the crowd. He could barely speak, let alone sing, and the show was a disaster. The following month, August 1973, backstage at a show at the Kennedy Center, Iggy snorted a line of white power he thought was cocaine. He was badly injured and was taken to hospital by Alice Cooper, who was among the crowd. In July that year, during a show to promote Raw Power at Max’s Kansas City in New York, a drugged-up Iggy jumped off stage and landed on a table. We thought we should bring him some drugs, because he probably hadn’t had any for days In 1973, there were crazy rumours that for a million-dollar fee he would end his life on stage at a show at Madison Square Garden. He looked at everybody and said: ‘You people make me sick!’ Then he threw up.” The band finally came on and Iggy seemed very upset. Dee Dee Ramone later wrote that The Stooges went on “late because Iggy couldn’t find any veins to shoot dope into anymore, because his arms were so f**ked-up. One show at New York’s Electric Circus in May 1971 was typical of Iggy’s state of mind and body. Whatever it was, the lead singer had become a maniacal drug addict. The next album Fun House was, according to Jack White years later, “the definitive rock album of America”. The chorus of the first song, ‘1969’, had Iggy sum up the mood of the country: “Well, it’s 1969, okay?/ All across the USA/It’s another year for me and you/ Another year with nothin’ to do.” The Stooges’s self-titled debut album, produced by John Cale, was what you might call (but not to Iggy) proto-punk when it was released in 1969. It was their first public show and a sign of things to come. In March the following year, The Stooges played Detroit’s Grande Ballroom. He wore a bathing cap and wig, offset by a nightdress bought in a second-hand shop. Four years later, on Halloween night at a party in Ann Arbor, his new band, The Stooges played their first show. He started a surf-rock band called the Iguanas in 1963. In junior school he was voted the pupil ‘most likely to succeed’. An only child, Iggy was born James Newell Osterberg Jr on April 21, 1947, in a trailer park in Muskegon, Michigan. It makes him chief among the great performers in rock history. ![]() In his head, he lives in a place of perpetual and interrupted adolescence. ![]() It is more him bounding about with his shirt off (sometimes his leather trousers too), swinging a microphone and threatening to dive into the crowd. Iggy’s stagecraft no longer includes grisly masochistic self-mutilation.
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