>> Listen to exclusive audio from this interview.

Iggy Pop vividly remembers the tiny cutoff-denim shorts and moccasins he wore onstage; the way he repeatedly hit himself with a drumstick, raising bloody welts all over his chest; his headfirst dive into the crowd. The Stooges -- Iggy, guitarist Ron Asheton, drummer Scott Asheton (Ron's brother) and bassist Dave Alexander -- had issued their then-new, now-legendary 1969 debut, The Stooges, and were opening for Joe Cocker at the World's Fair Pavilion in Queens, New York.

After the Stooges' set, Iggy recalls, "I walked out to the middle of the floor, in my shorts with these welts on my body, to talk to the talent agent Frank Barselona about possibly booking the group. He said, 'Iggy, I think in twenty years or so, you're going to be a very important guy. But for now, no thanks.' "

Iggy laughs in a rubbery subterranean growl. Half of the fun of listening to him tell Stooges war stories is his vivid comic delivery. The other half is the survivor's triumph punctuating each tale like a power chord. Iggy Pop -- born James Newell Osterberg in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1947, the mad lad whose kamikaze drug use and ritualistic physical extremism onstage almost killed him before the mid-Seventies -- turns sixty on April 21st.

He is a Stooge again, too. "I'd been in an impossible band, living an impossible life," he says, referring to the notorious on- and offstage chaos that split the Stooges after 1970's Fun House and again following 1973's Raw Power. "But never, since I met Ron and Scott, has a voice been raised between us, a fist made. There was nothing in our way." The Stooges (with bassist Mike Watt replacing the late Alexander, who died in 1975) have been touring since 2003 and are now playing songs from their first album in more than thirty years, The Weirdness.

For eight hours over two days, at the small house in north Miami where he and the Ashetons wrote The Weirdness, Iggy spoke about his entire life: his Michigan origins; the wild birth and crash of the Stooges; David Bowie's role in resurrecting the band and the records he and Iggy made in Berlin in the mid-Seventies; and, of course, he cracks, "the list of thirty-two important transgressions -- my stations of the cross."

But, he insists, before going deep into the mess, marvel and legacy of rock's first and still greatest punk band, "I don't think there was anything wired or weird about the Stooges when we started. We were just creative."

In "Trollin'," the first song on The Weirdness, you sing, "My dick is turning into a tree." Is that something even a Stooge should sing at sixty?
You write about things of importance to you. And it's gotta be for real. Do I think about my dick? Oh, yeah, all the time. If I think about it all the time, I got a right to sing about it. If I wasn't thinking about it all the time but thought, "It's time to write a rock song, I'd better mention my dick," then I wouldn't even be able to say "dick" right. Besides, it's an ecological line. It's not, "My dick is all bad, motherfucker, wickety wackety woo." It's nature-oriented. [Pauses, looking serious, then laughs] It is!

In another new song, "Claustrophobia," you sing, "My second mind is burying me alive." Is that Jim or Iggy? You've answered to both names for most of your life.
Jim has the second mind. I would call it the executive area. I'm wary of terms like "bipolar." But when I've read about that sort of thing, I've certainly seen my past in it.