Iggy Pop - Open Up and Bleed: The Biography - Hardcover

Paul Trynka

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847440185 ISBN 13: 9781847440181

Publisher: Sphere, 2007

Synopsis

“Fellow rock stars, casual members of the public, lords and media magnates, countless thousands of people will talk of their encounters with this driven, talented, indomitable creature, a man who has plumbed the depths of depravity, yet emerged with an indisputable nobility. Each of them will share an admiration and appreciation of the contradictions and ironies of his incredible life. Even so, they are unlikely to fully comprehend both the heights and the depths of his experience, for the extremes are simply beyond the realms of most people’s understanding.”

—from the Prologue

The first full biography of one of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest pioneers and legendary wild men

Born James Newell Osterberg Jr., Iggy Pop transcended life in Ypsilanti, Michigan, to become a member of the punk band the Stooges, thereby earning the nickname “the Godfather of Punk.” He is one of the most riveting and reckless performers in music history, with a commitment to his art that is perilously total. But his personal life was often a shambles, as he struggled with drug addiction, mental illness, and the ever-problematic question of commercial success in the music world. That he is even alive today, let alone performing with undiminished energy, is a wonder. The musical genres of punk, glam, and New Wave were all anticipated and profoundly influenced by his work.

Paul Trynka, former editor of Mojo magazine, has spent much time with Iggy’s childhood friends, lovers, and fellow musicians, gaining a profound understanding of the particular artistic culture of Ann Arbor, where Iggy and the Stooges were formed in the mid to late sixties. Trynka has conducted over 250 interviews, has traveled to Michigan, New York, California, London, and Berlin, and, in the course of the last decade or so at Mojo, has spoken to dozens of musicians who count Iggy as an influence. This has allowed him to depict, via real-life stories from members of bands like New Order and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Iggy’s huge influence on the music scene of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, as well as to portray in unprecedented detail Iggy’s relationship with his enigmatic friend and mentor David Bowie. Trynka has also interviewed Iggy Pop himself at his home in Miami for this book. What emerges is a fascinating psychological study of a Jekyll/Hyde personality: the quietly charismatic, thoughtful, well-read Jim Osterberg hitched to the banshee creation and alter ego that is Iggy Pop.

Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed is a truly definitive work—not just about Iggy Pop’s life and music but also about the death of the hippie dream, the influence of drugs on human creativity, the nature of comradeship, and the depredations of fame.

About this title

About the Author:

PAUL TRYNKA is a former editor of Mojo magazine. He has also been the editorial director of Q magazine, launch editor of The Guitar Magazine, and editor-in-chief of New Projects at Emap. He is the author of Portrait of the Blues and of Denim, a history of the fabric. He lives in Greenwich, London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
Most Likely To
It was a beautiful drive up to Silver Lake, a resort just east of Lake Michigan where high school kids lucky enough to own their own automobiles would hang out on the beach for the summer. It was 1965, and Jim Osterberg had just joined the car–owning set, but as was his habit he had flouted the conventional entry requirements of parental approval, a driver’s license—or even driving lessons. Lynn Klavitter, his steady date throughout twelfth grade, was impressed that Jim had saved up enough cash to afford the ’57 Chevy station wagon, but she wasn’t so impressed by his driving on the two–hundred–mile trip to the resort. Yet the more she asked him to slow down, calmly, avoiding confrontation, the more her kindhearted, funny, but increasingly headstrong boyfriend floored the accelerator, insisting he was in control.

On the final stretch of Highway 31 up to Silver Lake, Lynn started to lose her temper as Jim coaxed the reluctant old red–and–white Chevy up to ninety miles an hour. Suddenly they were shouting at each other, and just as suddenly the wagon’s back end started fishtailing. They swerved out of control and veered off the road; before they could even react, the car flipped over once, twice, then a third time. It mowed down two trees on the grass verge and crashed through bushes upside down as it filled with wood splinters and dust.

As the Chevy groaned to a halt on its roof, its teenage passengers scrambled out of the open windows and looked at each other. The car was a total wreck, but apart from scratches from tree bark and Jim’s bruises from the steering wheel, they were both, unbelievably, unharmed. It was suddenly quiet. Calmly, Jim picked up a license plate that had been ripped from the Chevy, linked hands with Lynn, and they walked off, up the hill, and all the way to the resort, where they would both lie on the beach in the sun.

It was maybe a couple of days later that Osterberg told his closest friend, Jim McLaughlin, how lucky he was to be alive. “Here we go, another of Osterberg’s tall tales,” thought McLaughlin, and promptly forgot about it. A few years later, Iggy Stooge mentioned to a journalist how he was special, that he’d survived what should have been a fatal accident and was destined to make his mark. Even though the notion of an indestructible rock star seemed faintly ludicrous, like many of his inflated claims it made good copy.
These were optimistic, booming, postwar years in America, when anything seemed possible. It was a time and a place when a smart kid, brought up in an environment seething with intellectuals and scientific savants, driven by intelligent, hardworking ambitious parents, could seemingly do anything he wanted. He could make friends with some of the most powerful figures in the industrial world, and witness first–hand an intimate arts scene peopled with characters who would later become superstars. With this environment, the right kind of kid—one with drive, a fierce intelligence, and the right kind of charm—could become the president of the United States. And this was the future that classmates and teachers in Ann Arbor predicted for Jim Osterberg, the witty, well–dressed classroom politician, a kid with an enviable knack of making connections with the rich and powerful.

Coachville Gardens Trailer Park sits in green surroundings on Carpenter Road, just outside the city of Ann Arbor, officially in the town of Ypsilanti, Michigan. Although it’s gained the inevitable gaggle of sprawling big–box stores, Ypsilanti is still mostly a lush, quiet place where nothing much happens. There are plenty of isolated wooden houses where you can live undisturbed, watching out for cranes and squirrels in the summer and taking your dogs for long, reflective walks through the crisp virginal snow in the winter. It’s a beautiful setting, although, like many small country towns, there’s occasionally a feeling of claustrophobia, and it’s easy to bump into slightly odd characters who watch TV late into the night on jerry–rigged cable hookups, haunt Internet chat rooms, or get loaded on illegal drugs to numb their boredom.

Although these days Ypsilanti rather grandly terms itself a city, in reality it’s overshadowed by its much bigger neighbor, Ann Arbor, which since 1837 has been defined by the presence of the University of Michigan. The university was celebrated for its diverse curriculum and liberal ethos and, together with the presence of General Motors and Ford in nearby Detroit, it would attract a constant influx of new residents to the city and stimulate thriving local industries in engineering, pharmaceuticals, and electronics.

The influence of the university ensured that Ann Arbor was a classy town. People who lived there drank espresso, formed arts groups, and took dancing lessons. In contrast, people from Ypsilanti were often regarded as midwestern hillbillies. The two towns weren’t totally uneasy bedfellows: plenty of academics might dispense intellectual wisdom at the university and then return home to a sprawling isolated farmhouse in Ypsi’s beautiful countryside, but the divide was perceptible for anyone who crossed the city limits: the gap between people whose salaries were generated by their intellects and those whose weekly paychecks were earned with the rude labor of their hands on a farm or in a factory; between people of culture and rural rubes. It was on that divide that Jim Osterberg and Iggy Pop grew up.

As a rock star, Iggy Pop would often refer to his upbringing in a trailer park, the definitive blue–collar home. But as a schoolboy, Jim Osterberg was regarded as the middle–class boy most likely to succeed. Other kids admired, and some of them envied, his elegant dress, his parents’ house in Ann Arbor Hills—an elegant enclave peopled by academics, architects, and the nation’s most significant captains of industry—and a confidence that seemed unshakable.

In the late 1940s, Ann Arbor, along with most of Michigan, was undergoing an economic boom. Money still flowed in from military contracts, while industrial giants including Ford and General Motors were readying themselves for a huge expansion in demand as a million ex–servicemen prepared to spend their government mortgage loans. In the east of the state, all the way over to Detroit and its huge River Rouge Ford plant, new factory buildings sprouted in once-green, peaceful locations, with resonant Native American names. Multistory buildings shot up on the Michigan University campus, and although housing was being developed all around the city, there was still a severe shortage. In 1948, a small group of businessmen headed by Perry Brown, who managed a machine shop in the city, and the Gingras brothers—Irv, Leo and George—developed a small trailer park on Carpenter Road, which they named Coachville Gardens, aiming to attract workers at the Ford factory and the local telephone company. Among the first people to move in, in the fall of 1949, were James Newell Osterberg, his wife Louella, and their infant son, James Newell Junior, who had been born, prematurely, in Muskegon’s Osteopathic Hospital on April 21, 1947. The unconventionally small family would become well known around Coachville Gardens: “It was a small trailer with a very large mother and a very skinny tall father,” says Brad Jones, who lived nearby, “like something you’d see in a cult movie. The trailer was very small, and the dad was an Ichabod Crane kinda guy, real tall and thin, and mom was just a square body. But you know what? They connected alright. Somehow it worked.”

Jim Osterberg’s earliest memory is of being in Louella’s lap, playing a game where “she’d recite a kind of a chant, in Danish, then on the last word almost drop me to the floor and pick me back up. And I wanted to do it again and again.” Jim Junior grew up in his mother’s warm, nurturing love and surrounded by his father’s baseball accoutrements (“He had played some semi–pro baseball, he had an enormous bat, and the mitt, and everything that goes with it”).

James Newell Osterberg Senior, the dominating influence in the life of the son who carried his name, was born on March 28, 1921; he was of Irish and English descent, but spent his youth in a Michigan orphanage, lonely and unwanted until, when he was age fourteen, two spinster Jewish sisters named Esther and Ida Osterberg walked into the orphanage and decided that James was the child who most needed a home. They nurtured and loved him, and paid for his education, before passing away in quick succession; one in mourning for their lovely house, bulldozed to make way for a highway, and the second for her adored sister. James appreciated the break he’d been given late in life and worked hard at school. A keen baseball player, he later played in the minor leagues and tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, although he never obtained the contract card that designated professional athlete status. Like many of his generation, James Osterberg’s education was interrupted by the war, but his obvious college potential meant he was trained as a radio operator in the Army Air Force (in later years he would still remember his missions over Germany and warn his son off the place). After the war James Senior toyed with studying dentistry and osteopathy, before training as a teacher of English and moving to Ypsilanti to take a job at the high school on Packard Road, a four–minute drive from Coachville.

James Osterberg Senior was regarded by most of those who knew him as a reserved, even severe teacher, who graded his students strictly. He taught English, and assisted in sports; as a new teacher, he was more likely to teach the less academic pupils, in which case much of the emphasis was on public speaking. Many of his ex–pupils ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Sphere
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1847440185
• ISBN 13: 9781847440181
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464