| Beat
Em Up: Spring Tour USA 2001
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"I'm
not saying this is another Raw Power, but if Raw Power is a true Iggy album, Due
out in late spring, the album will feature guitarist Whitey Kirst, drummer Alex
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| 4/25/01: Cajun House, Scottsdale, AZ. 8pm. |
Interview: Gettin' Iggy with it after all these years By
Michael Senft It's
been more than 30 years since Iggy Pop exploded in the face of flower power, helping
to invent punk with his seminal band, the Stooges, in a public display of furious
rock-and-roll and personal abuse. But don't expect the angry upstart at his show
tonight at Cajun House. He recently spoke about his current tour and his place as a musical icon. QUESTION: It's been a while since 1999's Avenue B came out. What have you been up to? ANSWER: I got together with my band and started making some loud noises. . . . In the fall, we went into the studio, and I produced my own record. It'll come out in the summer. Q: Avenue B was rather introspective, and relatively quiet. Will we hear this kinder, gentler Iggy on the new album? A: It's more - what do they say? - accessible. This one's real loud, real rock-and-roll, real tough and raw. It's still got a personal tone, but it's easier to relate to for "real rock" fans. Q: Who's touring with you this time around? Any familiar faces? A: It's just my own little personal band. No big stars. It would have included the bassist from Body Count (Ice-T's metal band), Mooseman. He did the album, but he was murdered about eight weeks ago. It was a tragedy. He lived in South Central (Los Angeles) and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's just me and my bad friends. Q: What can we expect from the show? A: There will be songs from the record I've just made - they'll probably, unfortunately, leave you scratching your head, saying, "I wonder what that song is?" - plus songs that you'll know. It'll rock, as hard as I can make it now. Q: When you were doing songs such as Search and Destroy, did you ever think that your music would be used in commercials in 20 years? A: No, but when I wrote those songs, I paid a lot of attention to jingles. I thought there was a beautiful simplicity to the commercial music. The first time the Stooges' music was used in a commercial was for Detroit Dragway. I was so excited that I didn't think whether they paid us or not, which they didn't. I didn't get anything. I was just so proud - "That's my music." Then you heard the guy, "Come see the death-defying nitro-burning funny cars. Big Ed, tons of guts in his killer clown machine!" Q: Do you still have a Lust for Life? A: Heh. Yeah, or a thrust or a bust. A must! I have a must for life at this point. That's about it. A crust! You've unleashed a monster. Reach the reporter at michael.senft@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8489. By Mike from Texas (thanks from all!) What a night!! There were several suprizes in store for the faithfull at the Cajun House in Scotsdale.. The sound at the Cajun House was stellar (unless you were pressed up againist the stage, and this beef is common no matter what the venue) and with the exception of the L.A. shows at the El Rey a couple years ago ,a welcome relief from the usual barns hes' been playin in out here the past few tours. The performance was stellar on both Iggy's and the bands part, and included a very generous preview of his upcoming cd. Which sounds to be the Igs strongest in years.. The biggest surprize of the night was Pete on the bass , handling the chores in place of "Mooseman" Roberts...WHERE HAS IGGY BEEN HIDING THIS GUY ON THE LAST FEW TOURS AND WHY??? Standing off to the side playing guitar and often buried in the mix on the Naughty and B tours, Pete proved himself to be not only capable, but throttled my bass luvin ass. This guy is a monster and the most welcome "addition" to the lineup since the Brick tour. Strange how things work out, and If it hadn't been for the loss of the Moose, this gem most likely would never have been uncovered. And the benefits of this move get even greater!!! With Whitey on his own, he seems to be much more focused , pushing himself, Iggy and the music like I haven't seen since he joined the band. Along with his brother Alex playing on drums and the second nature musicianship that only brothers can have, this adds up to one of the most satisfyin bands the Igs had in as very long time. An amazingly full sounding and rockin 3 piece. I can't wait to see them again!!!!!! The set list as follows. 1)
The Mask (?) By Steve B. from Texas (thanks!) Got
back yesterday to San Antonio from the all-too brief Iggy tour after The
4th & B was a great place, in the heart of downtown among the scyscrapers.
First
off, we were treated to the lovely absence of any opening act (it really The
set was basically the same except for the addition of another new track Overall,
I think this show was more enjoyable than the Scottsdale gig, although Oh,
yeah... on the way from AZ to SD we stopped at the Coachella festival site |
| 4/27/01: 4th & B, San Diego, CA. |
|
Iggy Pop attracts attention even when he's conducting a long- distance phone interview, as befits this hyperactive icon of musical extremes. Hailed as the godfather of punk-rock, Pop was speaking by phone from Miami, where he was doing a photo shoot for his next album. With his shoulder-length hair bleached somewhere between brown and blonde, rock's original wild-child attracted the attention of a passerby. Perhaps it was because Pop was lounging in his red Cadillac convertible, around the corner from a store called Ziggy Furniture, in Miami's earthy "Little Haiti" neighborhood. "Who are you?" asked the passerby. "I'm a musician!" bellowed Iggy, unaware of his visual incongruity in such a setting. "What are you doing?" the passerby shot back. "I was doing a photo shoot a block from here, and I'm taking a break," said Pop, "to talk to San Diego. I'm a musician!" Then, lowering his voice into the phone, he added: "This is a pretty rough neighborhood." Pop, who grew up in a Michigan trailer-park and moved to Miami a few years ago, has seen his share of rough neighborhoods. A profound influence on artists as varied as David Bowie and the Sex Pistols (who recorded their own version of Pop's song "No Fun"), he has long thrived on confrontation -- with his audiences, social mores, the music industry and any other target he set his sights on. In the late 1960s and '70s, Pop's hard-living ways and drug abuse threatened to place him alongside such rock casualties as Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. So did his stage antics, which saw him crawl across broken glass bare-chested, extinguish cigarettes on his body, pick fights with audience members, and worse. Against all odds, the man who invented stage-diving 30 years ago has survived. What's more, he's managed to do so without selling out, going soft, retiring, apologizing, becoming a reactionary blowhard or turning into a parody of himself. "Usually, there has to be some jail time for some of the band members involved for a band to be any good," said Pop, 53, who performs in San Diego tomorrow night at downtown's 4th & B. "As I get older, I try to be the one who doesn't have any jail time in the band. Other than that, I don't have a theory." Dynamite dancer What Pop, formerly known as Iggy Stooge and born James Jewel Osterberg, does have is a track record most of today's punk-rock upstarts can only dream of ever matching. As the founder of the proto-punk band the Psychedelic Stooges in 1967, he helped create an artistic template that endures to this day. The band, which soon shortened its name to the Stooges, quickly earned a reputation for its primal yet incendiary music, mixing dissonance and noise into a potent whole. At the forefront was Pop, who earned non-musical notoriety as a boyfriend of the Velvet Underground's ill-fated vocalist Nico. His quasi-performance-art approach to concerts found him smearing peanut butter on his body and rubbing raw steaks on himself, as a prelude to more destructive stage behavior. And his raw, stark lyrics were at distinct odds with the peace-and-love hippie ethos that dominated rock in the late-'60s. Recalling "No Fun," a standout song from the Stooges' self-titled 1969 debut album, Pop said: "On the first record I did, I sang: No fun to hang around / Freaked out for another day. And a lot of people were like: `What do you mean? Everything is great. We're all loving each other. John Phillips for president!' And I was like: `I don't think so.' "I didn't set out to collide with people, but I did. And I think anytime anybody goes against the party line in America, they get you back by making you look ridiculous. They don't have to lock you in jail; they just make you look like a (jerk)." As for his extreme music and even more extreme stage actions (which often resulted in no small amount of blood and self-inflicted physical damage), Pop cites a novel inspiration. Namely, his love for such legendary progressive-jazz saxophonists as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp. "What I heard John Coltrane do with his horn, I tried to do physically," he said. "And the simplicity of the compositions was -- how should I put it? -- encouraging to me, because I did not have more than an extremely rudimentary sense of chordings and song structure. And yet I heard these great and very listenable modern jazz compositions being done over a bass line, or a simple snatch of a melody being stated and then returned to. "It was very fluid and free and flexible music, and therefore convincing to me, in a way that (Procol Harum's) `A Whiter Shade of Pale' was not. That was a rock adaptation of a piece of classical music that worked great, commercially, for listeners who couldn't touch their toes -- old white men, or people who in 50 years would be old white men. "If I have any honor at all I have to mention that jazz was one more brilliant facet of black music, and all black music is the (best). And I tried to do some of what I heard in jazz through the visual approach I did on stage. I kept the structures loose enough that they allowed for events that were particular and special, and would never happen again on another night, yet still have some structure. "I heard the sax floating, and I tried to float as a person, in general. I tried to float 24 hours a day. Like, when I first started listening to James Brown, I got rid of all the chairs and sofas in my home." Come again? "I started sitting on the ground," Pop explained, "because I thought I could get in touch with the Earth and learn to dance. Because most white people need a stick of dynamite (in them) to dance. It kind of helped me. I started off bridging the gap between rock and what is generally termed the avant garde, or the artsy fartsy side of life. I also have one foot firmly rooted in vulgar commercial (stuff)." Middle-age blues Pop's most recent solo album, 1999's "Avenue B," found him turning away from rock to desolate torch songs that suggested a meeting between Frank Sinatra and Brazilian bossa-nova pioneer Antonio Carlos Jobim, in a bar that might be called Impending Doom. The album found Pop crooning such grim lines as: It was in the winter of my 50th year when it hit me / I was really alone, and there wasn't a hell of a lot of time left. The album's intensely personal tone and shift to understated music gave Pop a new lease on life, artistically, but confounded most listeners. His next release, due in June, returns to his hard- driving rock style. "With `Avenue B,' in a lot of ways, I was trying to make a middle- aged, desperate, sex-collision record," he said. "And it was also important to me, just as a sort of musical auteur, if you will. I was aware of the importance of rounding out my oeuvre. So I couldn't look in the mirror if I didn't make it personal. Unfortunately, for some people `personal' is really dark." And where does this rock legend see himself in 10 or 15 years? "Probably with a chick a lot younger than me, and doing regular work, regular music work," he said. "Who knows? But one has certain limitations of one's talents. I wonder what I'd do if I had Mariah Carey's voice?" he mused, launching into a falsetto scat vocal. "Maybe I would have been a parakeet like her, because I wouldn't have to develop any taste." Iggy
Pop Reviews: By Mike from Texas. Ah the gods were smilin.. I've never been to the 4th and B before and more was more than pleased to see that it was right ontop of the old California Theatre, scene of the infamous Instinct tour gig which is one of the best shows I've ever seen him give. The stars seemed to have aligned, all would be good. Karma continued with the absence of there being any opening band to suffer through and the presence of a jam packed full house. The man and the band were certainly up to the task as they stormed the stage with a blistering version of the Mask. We were treated to yet another new song ,The Jerk (?), and a locomotive of a set list that included virtually no between song breaks or banter with the audience. The highlights for me were the guitarless (for awhile) version of Cold Metal (After Iggy kicked Whiteys stack over), and the extended flight of musical and lyrical fantasy at the end of No Fun. The moment to live for though was the sight of Iggy Layin flat on his face , doing a full body crawl across the stage to end the set. The desperation and anguish as he reached for the life yet another inch might give , was vintage. Iggy fights the fight for all of us. 1)
Mask 4/27/01: 4th & B, San Diego, CA. 8pm. By Steve B from Texas. Got
back yesterday to San Antonio from the all-too brief Iggy tour after The
4th & B was a great place, in the heart of downtown among the First
off, we were treated to the lovely absence of any opening act (it The
set was basically the same except for the addition of another new track Overall,
I think this show was more enjoyable than the Scottsdale gig, Oh,
yeah... on the way from AZ to SD we stopped at the Coachella festival |
| 4/28/01: The Coachella Valley Music Festival, Indio Polo Field, Indio, CA. |
CONCERT REVIEW - Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, Indio, Calif. 04/28/2001 By Lyndsey Parker, launch.com The second annual Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, held in the dusky, dusty Southern California desert just outside Palm Springs, was supposedly modeled after relatively peaceful and pleasant British musicfests like Reading and Glastonbury, and in many ways, it was a successful simulation. Parking was free; bottled water was reasonably priced; indoor restrooms with working sinks, actual flushing toilets, and plenty of toilet paper were easily accessible; and best of all, there were no reported moshpit rapes, looting riots, arson flare-ups, or other senseless acts of violence a la Woodstock '99. However, Coachella differed from its British counterparts in one major way: On April 28, 2001, the temperature in Reading, England was a crisp 54 degrees. At Coachella, however, it was 98 degrees--and we're not talking about the boy band here! As the direct desert sunlight beat down mercilessly upon the 30,000 or so dehydrated, sunstroked, lightheaded, burnt-to-a-pink-bacon-like-crisp concertgoers attending Coachella, one had to wonder: Must these outdoor rock festivals always be held in the sweltering desert? Come on, is there not some patch of land near a beach somewhere--where it's a good 20 degrees cooler--that could serve the same purpose? Still, risk of sun poisoning and unsightly tan lines aside, Coachella was a fine way to spend a dog day afternoon, with an impressive lineup of about 50 acts (spread across two outdoor stages and three covered tents) that ambitiously and accurately emulated the diversity of the music festivals held across the Atlantic. The marathon bill included rock acts like the lackadaisically cool Dandy Warhols, the recently re-reunited Jane's Addiction, almighty punk warrior Iggy Pop, and geek gods Weezer, as well as techheads like the Chemical Brothers, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Paul Oakenfold, the Orb, Photek, Ian Pooley, Roni Size, Fatboy Slim, Squarepusher, and Tricky; rappers like Aceyalone, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, Gangstarr, Mos Def, the Roots, and Souls Of Mischief; and a few plain old uncategorizable artists, like fiery soulstress Nikka Costa, Tijuana electronica ("Tijuanica"?) DJs the Nortec Collective, Latin funk soul bruthas Ozomatli, avant-garde Icelanders Sigur Ros, and ambient acid-jazz Frenchies St. Germain. And if that wasn't enough to entertain the sweaty masses, there was also an aesthetically pleasing sculpture garden, a thankfully air-conditioned film tent (screening such rock 'n' roll flicks as Radiohead's Meeting People Is Easy, the Mos Def documentary Freestyle, and the Dandy Warhols' short film The End Of The World As We Know It), a PlayStation hub offering the latest in PS2 gaming, a DJ tent sponsored by Urb magazine, and, last but certainly not least, two beer gardens. Indeed, Coachella offered more than a little something for everyone--in fact, if anything, it offered too much to take in within the space of a single one-day event, even though this event was an exhausting 13 hours long. The
Dandy Warhols went on bright 'n' early (early by rock 'n' roll standards, at least)
at 2:30 p.m., and while their hazy, druggy vibe hardly seemed suited for a sunshine
day of hackey-sacking, beachball-tossing, and snowcone-gobbling, the noticeably
pasty-pale band rose to the challenge with dreamy tunes like "Minnesoter"
and "Godless." But really, the Dandys were just the warm-up act for
Iggy Pop. And the Igster was indeed in fine form: blonde, goateed, and shirtless,
flaunting his famously frightening physique (all 95 pounds of it, all bones and
scars and sinew) and exhibiting more energy and pure raw power than any of the
other acts on the bill (most of which were about half his age). The 54-year-old
Stooge spent his hour in the Coachella sun alternating between ferocious performances
of classics like "Search And Destroy," "The Passenger," "Lust
For Life," and "Raw Power" and equally ferocious stage-banter rants
("Some days, I wake up and say, 'Today's gonna be a good day. Today, there's
gonna be real justice. Today, there's gonna be a real f--kin' tune on the radio!'").
His best between-song moment came when he asked if anyone wanted a beer, then
chucked an open, full plastic cup of Budweiser into the audience, dowsing the
first few rows in the process. Explaining this reckless act of beer-spilling with
the rather remorseless (if not truthful) excuse, "I'm a rather f--ked up
person in real life," he proceeded to tear into "Real Wild Child"
without missing a beat. As his set drew to a close, he grinned mischievously at
the crowd and happily announced, "I'm f--kin' enjoying your presence!"--and
judging from the rowdy cheers, the feeling was mutual. Must these outdoor rock
festivals always be held in the sweltering desert? Come on, is there not some
patch of land near a beach somewhere--where it's a good 20 degrees cooler--that
could serve the same purpose? |
| 4/29/01: The Fillmore. San Francisco, CA. 8pm. |
|
Q
& A with Iggy Pop Q: Do you think people in Michigan are sexually repressed? Every time I go through the Detroit airport I get strip-searched. A: No kidding? I get stopped and searched in various airports. In some of them, they've just given up at this point. Sometimes they just say, "Welcome home, Mr. Sir" and all that. But I haven't been there in a long time. I'm going there on this tour, so I'll see if they search me. Q: What are they going to find? A: Not much. What usually goes on in my day-to-day is generally a drink with dinner. That's my thing. Q: Do you ever get tired of being all naked and humping the stage and slashing your guts out every night? A: That would be a burden. That would be if I . . . (pause) Well, that's not really exactly the way I see what I do. You kind of just slipped that in. Q: I was making an assumption there. A: Right, which is OK. Q: So are you like that all the time or just when you're onstage? A: You know, when one is an audience member as I have been and continue to be from time to time, one is so often disappointed. When you really get it and you really get a good show and it's happening for real -- wow! -- there's nothing like it. For me, anyway. So, that's sort of at the core of what I'm trying to do with my work. But there's certain work you have to do offstage to get that together. Q: That's too bad, because I always had this image of you having dinner at Sizzler with your shirt off and your pants hanging off your back. A: Listen, dude, I think I've done this for 30 years. The first 15 years were highly creative and featured a low discipline level. The second half has been a reverse. There was overall less striking creativity but more discipline. So, in effect, luckily for me, during the second half once I quote-unquote got my s-- together, I started getting paid for when I didn't have my s-- together. Do you know what I mean? Q: So, the secret is to make a complete fool out of yourself for a few years and then just sit back and live off your notoriety? A: I think the thing I'm most famous for is just being Iggy Pop. That's my best trait. Q: But it hasn't always been easy. Do you ever consult that reggae psychic woman on TV for career advice? A: From my point of view, my career is probably not as jagged as it might look from the outside, depending on who the person is who's doing the looking. These days, rock 'n' roll has absorbed attention from a much wider spectrum of the society than it enjoyed when I started. So you get attention from all sorts of people who would have a different outlook from what I do. So a smokestack industry worker who goes to a lot of (strip) bars might say, "Oh yeah, Iggy. He rocks. He's done a couple of good tunes." That's that. Whereas someone who spends a lot of time in chat rooms on their computer and is approaching the history of rock as an academia may have a different viewpoint about all that. Q: Being one of those who fall into the latter category, do you think people didn't get what you were trying to do with your last record or were they just mad that Iggy Pop was growing up? A: I think you have to be careful. You can't use the G-word around me. You can't generalize people. There were people who really appreciated the record because it was a serious piece and because it had some real content there and wrestled with more things. I think there are a lot of different circles of opinion. But in general, I think it was Fatboy Slim who mumbled something to me: "Just rock, because that is what you should be doing." And I thought, "Well, you're a DJ. Shut up and have another drink. Who are you?" I think it was a good record. It was a real record. Q: But I hear you're a complete gorilla on your new record. A: It's a hard-rock record. Super hard rock. Not heavy metal or punk. Hard rock. Q: So you took Fatboy Slim's advice? A: No, I just felt like making a hard-rock record. It was time to do it quick. The f-- record company was barking for one. I wouldn't have enough time to marshal all my angst for another moody record. I just did what I knew how to do. ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page 69 Tour Diary: SFX IGGY
POP ON TOUR : In the week that saw Tricky, Pancho Sanchez, Semisonic and Prince hit the Fillmore, one would expect that there was nothing left to give. With most of those shows controlled by some mitigating forces-- be it musical form, ego, sonic limitations, or industry scrutiny--you'd think there was nothing worth giving. For those of you unfamiliar with James Osterberg's career as a junkie, poet, provocateur and punk, his show at the Fillmore as Iggy Pop showcased his inventive knack for taking nothing and blowing it up into a million pretty pieces and shot gunning the whole mess out of his ravaged psyche into the face of an adoring sold out Fillmore. Why would a crowd take abuse with open arms? Because, that's how Iggy takes the audience with open arms, warts and all. He'll even add a few bruises for extra color. Bruising is the best word to describe the pounding musical onslaught that Iggy and this year's young guns gave the Fillmore. I mean, is 1/1 really a time signature? From the opening attack, Iggy pranced, wiggled, screamed and caterwauled into the great divide between "Us and Them" that creates all great rock n' roll. Speaking of great rock n' roll, Iggy's back catalogue is a virtual "how to" of rock. First was "Get up and Get out" as a mission statement. "Raw Power" and "Search and Destroy" made early appearances, reminding one and all that while the rest of the country and possibly the whole world was seeking an expanded consciousness and flower power, Iggy was literally crawling through the gutters and cutting himself to the bone in an effort to find his soul. It seems like experience has served him and his audience well, for this was not only (arguably) the loudest and most rockin' show I've seen at the Fillmore, it was certainly the oldest skewing and most diverse crowd I've seen in three years. When you practice what you preach, the faithful always return. And Iggy did not disappoint, slamming through other hits like "Passenger" and "Lust for Life", at several points diving into the audience and even bringing about fifteen fans up on stage to boogie to the Motown blues and celebrate a la "Real Wild Child". After "Corruption", "Now I Wanna be Your Dog" became a eulogy for truth and justice while both "Cold Metal" and "I'm Alright" summed up Iggy's post-80's sobriety with a final challenge to the audience to persevere. The encore was no less of a challenge, at five songs it was worth the price of admission by itself. Careening through "Down in the Street", Iggy climbed on the amps, beat his chest, singing of no walls and also the teen scream to anti-social love: "No Fun". With a final dive into the audience with the amps feeding back after "1969", Iggy left us with that old feeling, if not his actual blood and guts on the stage. Even though I wasn't even a twinkle in my father's eye, and I'm from Indiana, I felt like I could have been at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit at the dawn of the Aquarian Age. With nothing between him and the audience except his scarred guts, Iggy Pop has the power to transport us all back to when rock n' roll did change the world. --Charlie
Knote, SFX/San Francisco |
| 5/16/01: First Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 9:30 pm. |
| 5/18/01: Vic Theatre, Chicago, Illinois. 8pm. |
Rock review, Iggy Pop at the Vic Theatre By Greg Kot The Chicago Tribune Iggy Pop hasn't softened his raw, reckless approach The
world's forgotten boy, as self-proclaimed in the Stooges' immortal "Search
and Destroy," came to the Vic over the weekend with a few issues to get off
his spindly chest. "Where is the soul?" Pop demanded on the opening screed, "Mask," from his forthcoming album. Backed by a three-piece band that at times quaked in his presence but gave no quarter nonetheless, Pop set about the task of finding the soul of this night, and he didn't quit until he had gouged, ripped, romped and howled himself into exhaustion. The singer's approach is bedrock simplicity. He emerges as though unleashed from a cage, wearing the frenzied, feral look of a prisoner tasting freedom for the first time in years. The hair tumbles past his shoulders, the washboard torso is shirtless, the frayed jeans cling to his inconsequential hips, inches away from an arrest for indecent exposure. He dances as though taunting a biker wielding a pool cue, breaking into a mariachi fast-step, flapping his wrists, leaping and writhing at the same time. There is joy in this ritual, but also a kind of desperation, Pop sticking his face and then his entire body into the audience's maw, breaking down an unseen wall to make his case. "We live in a maaaa-sheeen!" he cried on the night's third number, "Beat 'Em Up." "We can't keep up with a machine!" It was simple logic, and even simpler music. Pop's backing bands sometimes have a tossed-off, Chuck Berry-like feel to them, as if the singer thought anybody could play those three-chord Stooges riffs with proficiency. But not just anybody can get the groove right, that greasy sense of swing that made every note the Stooges ever played sound both lethal and somehow sensual. Pop's current ensemble came closer than most to getting that sex beat just right, especially drummer Alex Kirst, who refused to overplay, and guitarist Whitey Kirst, whose tone was covered in Detroit rust. Still, the band had a tendency to play everything in Pop's past faster than the way it was originally recorded, until they let the tempo breathe a bit on a killer version of "Loose," Pop prowling like a panther in search of a mate. After a breathless one-hour opening set, spanning "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "Raw Power" to "Home" and "Corruption," the encore shifted into an even higher gear. The singer grunted pithy commands — "Street!" "Noise!" "I'm lost" — that summarized not just the content of the songs, but his worldview. Forgotten or not, Pop represents everything that once and forever will be great about rock 'n' roll. His bouts with hard drugs, abusive record companies and more than a few embarrassing songs — included the self-parodies "Wild Child" and "Cold Metal," performed at the Vic — have not softened him. On the contrary, Pop is still the one act that no rocker wants to follow on stage. Pix
of the Chicago show by Rolling
Stone. I'm in two of them :-) |
| 5/19/01: The Canopy Club, Urbana, Illinois. 10pm. |
| 5/20/01: State Theatre, Detroit, Michigan. 7:30pm |
|
Vintage, energetic Iggy is a pleaser Iggy
Pop proved he's still a Detroit rock city wild one Sunday night, romping and stomping
through a vintage, Stooges-fueled hard rock concert before a passionately noisy,
nearly sold out audience at the State Theatre downtown. |
| 5/22/01: Club 5, Jacksonville, Florida. 8pm. |
| 5/23/01: House of Blues, Orlando, Florida. 9pm. |
digitalcity.com/orlando Tim Mohr Iggy Pop:
The godfather of punk still packs a punch.
Iggy's anthemic nugget 'Lust for Life' got movie houses rocking during 'Trainspotting,' highlighting once again one of rock’s seminal figures. In addition to inspiring legions of punks to action over the course of a 30-year singing career, Iggy’s amassed a canon of rousing songs. Siouxsie and the Banshees, for instance, remade his 'Passenger' into one of their biggest hits. Many of the songs he recorded with The Stooges are still starting points for garage bands the world over. Iggy Pop is the walking, talking incarnation of teen punk spirit -- and he still outperforms most of his younger disciples. |
| 5/25/01: Jannus Landing, St. Petersburg, Florida. 7:30pm. |
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Mischievous Iggy Pop still a riveting spectacle ST. PETERSBURG -- Iggy Pop brought his own brand of mayhem to Jannus Landing Friday in an powerhouse hour-and-a-half performance that had the fierce and fit 54-year-old Godfather of Punk dazzling a crowd of several hundred. Midway through Pop's set, during the classic 1977 Lust For Life -- a song enjoying more popularity than ever thanks to those Mitsubishi Galant television commercials -- the singer, who began the show shirtless, invited fans onstage. About a dozen or so took his offer, dancing, pogoing and singing along with Pop. One young man, a bit overzealous, if not a bit inebriated, grabbed Pop's mike and screamed into it. Security guards scrambled to stop him, but the fan resisted and several men fell to the ground trying to restrain him. Pop regarded the scuffling behind him, admonishing the guards in between verses, "Easy! Easy!" In typical punk fashion, all four members of the band kept playing, finishing the tune with nary a missed beat. That, in a nutshell, is what makes Iggy Pop such a delicious rock 'n' roll character: despite three decades of self-destructive stage antics and naughty behavior, you get the feeling Pop, born Jim Osterberg in Ann Arbor, Mich., is, at heart, a decent, sensible fellow. Perhaps a bit more expressive than the rest of us, but an okay guy, really. Pop certainly showed that he's in rare form as a performer. Though he no longer rolls around in broken glass or smears himself with foodstuffs, as he did in the heyday of the 1970s punk with the legendary Stooges, he still mesmerizes. Pop was manic and mischievous on Friday, cranking up the speed and ferocity of classics including Raw Power, Search & Destroy, I Wanna Be Your Dog and The Passenger. He is the consummate showman, dishing out his signature move of clasping his fists above his head and quickly sashaying to each side. He's a riveting spectacle, gyrating and shaking his fanny like a dirtier, grittier Mick Jagger. Indeed, watching Pop at work is a lesson in rock 'n' roll history: You can see his moves -- and style -- in stars who followed. Think Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis is coincidentally a shirtless, ripped, wild child onstage? Think again. Pop treated fans to speedy new tunes from the upcoming Beat 'Em Up before encoring with No Fun and T.V. Eye. Locals The Gotohells took advantage of the much-coveted opening slot by delivering a quick, no-nonsense set of feisty punk rock. |
| 5/26/01: Atlantizz, Fort Myers, Florida. (otherwise known as the Orbit) 9pm. |
| 5/27/01: Culture Room, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. 8pm. |
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Iggy
Pop -- Time has been kind to one of the founding fathers of punk. The longtime
heroin addict and founder of the legendary Stooges, Pop escaped the early death
of some of his peers to see his popularity surge with a new group of fans. You
can even hear snippets of his song "Lust for Life" in a car commercial.
And you can see him live at the Culture Room this Sunday. |
return home to iggypop.org many of the above shows can be found at Dirt's Iggy Pop Tradelist, for TRADE only. |