Iggy Pop: The Rolling Stone Interview

Below is an excerpt of an article that originally appeared in RS 1024 from September 3, 1998. This issue and the rest of the Rolling Stone archives are available via Rolling Stone Plus, Rolling Stone's premium subscription plan. If you are already a subscriber, you can click here to see the full story. Not a member? Click here to learn more about Rolling Stone Plus.

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 Houseand 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."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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