[Katy]

Watch the Freak

Mike Jahn, New York Times, 3 April 1970

Iggy Pop – magnificent name, much better than Jim, which is really his name – is on national television. He is lead singer in a group called the Stooges, who are living up to their name. Iggy has just covered his chest with peanut butter and is out in the audience, writhing and moaning and jumping on people. Now he disappears and is apparently on the ground, but all the viewers at home can see is a bunch of people looking down. He is chanting the lyrics to a song called '1970'.

He is screaming:

"I'm all right!"

"I'm a-a-a-ll right!"

A girl looks down at him. "Are you all right?" she asks.

This scene was broadcast in a recent Metromedia television special called Midsummer Rock, a 90-minute tape of a rock festival held in Cincinnati. The highlight of the program for many people was the appearance of Iggy and the Stooges. Previously known as the Psychedelic Stooges, they came out of Ann Arbor, Mich., and perhaps are rock music's greatest contribution to that fun-time sport called "Watch the Freak". No doubts here, Iggy has become the freak to watch.

You never know what is going to happen at a Stooges concert. They climaxed their performance at a college rock festival with Iggy carrying one of the fans away on his shoulder. She turned out to be the daughter of a horrified dean. Says Elektra Records, for whom they record, "They are not called the Stooges for nothing."

The group is more important visually than musically. Musically, they fill up the room with very loud sound and keep it going while Iggy does his routine, whatever his routine happens to be on that particular night. Musically, the image presented by the phrase "a wall of sound" is appropriate. The Stooges' music, for all practical purposes, is one big noise that throbs. The parts are at first indistinguishable from each other. The important thing about their music is that it fills the room and provides a context for Iggy Pop, who is watched by the audience with intense fascination.

Pete Townshend of the Who used to destroy guitars at the end of a set. On those occasions, the audience would be drawn, transfixed, to the scene of the destruction like the traditional moth to a flame. With Iggy it is the same thing. He writhes. He moans. He seems totally self-involved. He rubs his body, he contorts, bending over backwards until his head nearly touches the floor. He rolls his tongue around. He makes grotesque shapes with his lips. He is very ugly and precociously sexual. The audiences love it. They don't understand it. Neither does he, most likely. But they are drawn to watch him with mouths agape. Watch the freak! It’s great fun.

Consider this episode from the Stooges concert of last year at the Pavilion in New York. The Pavilion is the former New York State Pavilion at the l964-65 World's Fair. The ground is a giant map of New York State. For this occasion, the stage was set up along the Canadian border. The other end, the men's rooms, were just south of Long Island. The audience was seated on the floor, on top of New York State.

Iggy did his normal writhing, then spotted a blonde sitting on Syracuse. He stared at her a long moment, until a kid behind her made an obscene gesture in his direction. Iggy sprang into the audience. He landed on all fours and began crawling toward the kid, slowly. Just as he reached him, the audience stood up. Much pushing and screaming for a few minutes, then Iggy crawled back out of the audience. He crawled to the guitarist, pulled him down on the floor, mauled him for a few minutes, then let him go. Then Iggy disappeared behind the bank of amplifiers, emerging on the other side a few minutes later. He got to a racing start position, sprint-ed across stage, and made a perfect head-first racing dive into the audience, knocking down about 25 people in the vicinity of Albany.

Earlier in the show, he took a drumstick and raked it across his chest until he started to bleed. After another concert he was heard to lament the fact that he hadn't bled enough. While the previous routine was going on, the band never let up for a second on its wall-of-music. A full-color, four-part-harmony version of this episode is included in my just-published novel, The Scene.

Watch the Freak! Surprisingly, the Stooges make fairly good records. Their just-released second LP, Fun House is much better than was reasonable to expect. They have made quite an art of this solid sound; listening to it on headphones provides one with complexities that don't come through in the Stooges' live performances, possibly because one is too busy watching Iggy to notice. The songs on the LP will not go down in musical history, but they certainly do fill a room with noise.

See the Stooges, if you can, perhaps even buy the record, and bring a little bizarre freakery into your life.

Yeah, I'd want to see the Stooges if I'm in 1969..