If you want to understand one of rock's greatest survivor stories, you'd do just as well to listen to "Nude and Rude," Iggy Pop's 1993 greatest hits collection as to wade through Paul Trynka's 300+ page biography of James Osterberg, Jr. Even better, go see the 79-year-old "Godfather of Punk" in live performance before the coffin lid--a stage prop at Coachella earlier this year--closes on him for good.
Paul Trynka, a British music writer, thoroughly documents Osterberg's life until he hit 60, about the age Iggy was finally getting overdue recognition of his influence on music. Unfortunately, he makes the same mistake that Will Hermes did with Lou Reed: all fact and little psychological insight ends up mostly exposing the guy as an asshole whose talent, while considerable and unique, doesn't quite redeem his overweening ambition.
Thanks to his early gigs with the Stooges, recounted in stupefying detail, Osterberg--voted most likely to succeed in junior high school (!)--learned that bad behavior got him more attention than good. Trynka compares the difference between his off-stage charm and intellect, and his occasionally bloody live performances to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but that still leaves readers wondering what makes the guy tick.
Osterberg did give Trynka permission to interview his shrink who, by the end of the book, walks back his diagnosis of possible bipolarity, mostly because Iggy can dial up the manic energy for his shows and then revert to normal in between performances. Exhibitionism or BDE (big dick energy) may also have contributed to Iggy's "Real Wild Child" stage persona; despite repeated flashing of what Trynka describes as his "impressive" penis, he was never arrested, unlike Jim Morrison who may have given him the idea (Iggy: Open Up and Bleed helpfully provides a photograph taken by Factory denizen Gerard Malanga, cropped below the waist for the cover of Nude and Rude so that the album could be sold in Middle America retail chains).
Osterberg's ego, addictions and womanizing (he liked 'em younger than legal in some cases, at a time when that mattered less) aren't particularly unusual in show business, but his relationship with his collaborators, always strained by the end, suggests that his childhood competitiveness left him more resistant than many of his peers to sharing the spotlight. Trynka's book picks up some badly needed steam when the Thin White Duke throws him a career preserver in the mid-70s and whisks him off to Berlin where they record The Idiot and Lust for Life, the twinned fonts of his best solo work as far as I'm concerned although Trynka goes a little overboard in his estimation:
Not since van Gogh and Gauguin spent nine weeks together at the Yellow House in Arles had two artists of such stature, with such distinct styles, cooperated so closely, with such influential and fulfilling results. But where the two painters' creative winning streak had culminated in madness and breakdown, Bowie and Iggy's great, innovative work together would prove a healing process for two severely damaged individuals.
The unexplained healing--Trynka tells, rather than shows--lasts longer for Bowie than Iggy and the two eventually lose touch. I'm guessing that had as much to do with Bowie's stabilizing marriage to Iman and fatherhood as Iggy's bruised ego and obsessive touring but Bowie remains the bigger man (and talent) to the end. “I think there was a moment where Jim decided that he couldn’t do a fucking article without my name being mentioned – and I don’t think that’s a very comfortable feeling,” Bowie said.
Trynka also leaves it to the reader to fill in the blank about what motivated Bowie to champion Iggy in the first place. I would venture that Iggy was id to Bowie's super-ego, all-American primal instinct vs. a completely cerebral approach to music-making steeped in the traditions of British music hall and mime. Bowie evolved to the very end; Iggy doesn't seem to have changed at all, at least on stage, where he clearly feels most like himself given what Bowie identified as his obsessive need to tour. I also suspect that Iggy's athleticism held an aesthetic appeal for rock's greatest chameleon (what is it about these Michigan jock rockers anyway? Like Alice Cooper, who doesn't get enough credit for the influence of his early work IMHO, Iggy took up golf, something I can't imagine Bowie ever doing).
Since publication of Trynka's prematurely definitive biography in 2007, I've downloaded some of Iggy's subsequent work, mostly for the pleasure of hearing his distinctive baritone and the occasional atavistic lyric, although nothing can compete with "I've never had it in the ear before" from Lust for Life, my introduction to his work. Chiffon even included "New Atlantis," a paean to his adopted home ("Somewhere south of Alabama and north of Cuba there lies a beautiful whore of a city") and the threat it faces from global warming, on his 2023 year-end list.
Who woulda thunk that Iggy Pop and Keith Richards, the two 60s rockers with reputations for the hardest living, would still be around more than a half-century later, long after the possibility of staying pretty had expired? Just for fun, I queried AI to determine if online prediction markets were taking bets on who would last longer only to learn that even Polymarket and Kalshi have some scruples. Death bets are forbidden even though your options for bankruptcy are unlimited.
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