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| Iggy Pop and The Stooges performing at the Saugatuck Pop Festival, Michigan, July 5, 1969 |
BY BRETT SOKOL
I never thought to myself, I want to be a rock star!” chuckles Iggy Pop, who has logged four decades—and counting—as a rock ’n’ roll icon. “But when I got to be about 16, I realized that no way was I going to spend my life in some horrible job that’s going to be just like high school—and then you die. So I had to be a musician. That was the only thing that felt good.” And today, as a 62-yearold Miami transplant, does careening across stages worldwide still “feel good?”
Pop pauses, his signature deep-throated drawl turning solemn: “Being in a band is still compelling. Absolutely compelling.”
The evidence is on ample display in The Stooges: The Authorized and Illustrated Story (Abrams, $35), a gorgeous new collection of photography chronicling Pop’s pioneering band, edited by lensman and fellow Detroit-area native Robert Matheu. The book opens with a photo of a dazed-looking Pop in the fall of 1968, then a 21-year-old University of Michigan dropout, sprawled shirtless across a rocking chair inside his fledgling quartet’s ramshackle home-cum-clubhouse.
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| left: Pop amid a stage invasion at a Detroit club in 2003. right: The Stooges: The Authorized and Illustrated Story |
“That’s my favorite shot in the whole book,” Pop explains, because it reminds him precisely of how The Stooges began. “It’s just me and my tie-dyed jeans, stoned out of my mind,” he continues with a laugh. “This was the month between our discovery by Danny Fields, who was acting as a recruiter for Elektra Records, and the actual gig that we were going to have to do for the [record label’s] owner and chief executive.”
Pop had finally emerged from behind the drum kit of several Ann Arbor garage bands, taking center stage as the singer for the appropriately christened Stooges—who hypnotically ground out a set of primitive guitar riffs while Pop all but swallowed his microphone and then artfully pinballed out into the audience. As Matheu’s early photos strikingly attest, crowds were both mesmerized and delighted. Indeed, they may not have been the most technically accomplished outfit on the scene, or even the most oddly named (that honor goes to Weird Dude Employment Agency, pictured on a concert poster taped to the wall behind Pop in that 1968 photo), but The Stooges were certainly the most audacious, a distinction that had attracted Elektra’s Fields.
| “I was so nervous that whole month,” Pop recalls of that pre-audition period. “All I could do was get stoned and steam.” And return to the campus library stacks in search of a little aesthetic guidance. “I was looking at books of Egyptian history and Pharaonic religion. I was struck by how amazing those guys looked with no shirts on. And I looked at my own equipment and thought, I could do that! Just make it jeans instead of a tunic, keep it elemental.”
It’s a uniform that Pop has embraced ever since, sensually contorting his bare torso for admiring eyes both on- and offstage. The Stooges reprints a 1970 Vogue fashion spread of Pop, down on all fours, suggestively arching his back and lasciviously grinning for the camera. The original layout’s caption is priceless: “In silver lamé opera gloves and faded jeans, Iggy taunts and worries the audience with his drive and hype: ‘I wanna be your dog.’” Flip further in the book, moving across the years to 1977, and then to 2008. In each instance Matheu captures Pop performing before a rapt crowd, still writhing away, his splayed limbs poetically framing a taut chest that could easily promote workout tapes. As Anna Wintour herself would no doubt advise, If you find a public persona that works for you, by all means stick with it.
“Those jeans, man!” exclaims Matheu. “I don’t know if there have ever been more than two pairs. I remember being in a lot of five-star hotel lobbies and seeing The Stooges’ road manager walk in at midnight with those sweaty jeans over his arm.” Of course, latenight laundry sessions were the least of the on-the-road issues facing the band. But for Matheu, that debauched mythology is often a distraction from both the band’s actual music and the visceral pleasures of witnessing Pop in action.
“I really wanted this book to be a celebration of a unique band that was misunderstood and underappreciated,” Matheu says. “It’s not that I want to set the record straight— those ‘extracurricular’ activities did exist. But very seldom did they actually compromise the performances. And it wasn’t something I wanted to explore. I’m a photographer: The visual aspects of the band are what excite me.”
These days, Pop himself is also anxious to keep the media focus on his music. It was a desire to disappear from the spotlight—at least between gigs—that first drew him to buy a hideaway condo on South Beach in 1995, and then move down from Manhattan year round in 1999. “Nobody knew me in Miami,” he enthuses of his new life. And the Wild West vibe of the Beach in the ’90s only deepened the attraction. “In The Teachings of Don Juan books”—the ’70s series of consciousness-plumbing writings by Carlos Castañeda—“they used to call twilight the crack between the worlds, when you can use your imagination fully. I found my twilight place here.” He adds wryly, “I tend to like seedy, disorganized problem areas. The Beach has become maybe a little too stable for me now.” Moreover, anyone doing a double take when spying Pop around town need only consult Matheu’s photos in The Stooges for an even more dramatic sense of just how far Pop has traveled from Ann Arbor.
“I have similar books at home on Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones,” Pop says. “They don’t show you pictures of themselves when they were locals starting out, trying to get it together. But we put that in, to show the whole progression. Here in this book you can see people who started out as a bunch of ignorant nobodies, and hey, whatever you think of the journey, look where we got!” OD |
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 Read on...
For or at least one weekend a year, critics of Miami desist from knocking the city as simply the land of the lotus-eaters. That weekend arrives on November 13, when the 26th annual Miami Book Fair International unfolds on downtown’s Miami Dade College campus. Tens of thousands converge there to immerse themselves in nothing more than the pleasures of the written word. And maybe a fresh arepa.
 The College hosts more than 200 booksellers and publishers, as well as over 300 author presentations. Some homegrown highlights: Best-selling novelist Edna Buchanan will speak about her newly reissued 1987 memoir, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face (Pocket, $15), an engrossing account of her Pulitzer-winning years as a Miami Herald crime reporter during the ’70s and ’80s, fishing bloody torsos out of a car trunk, dodging rioters in Liberty City and rescuing stray kittens on South Beach. The kittens turn out to be equally problematic.
 Campbell McGrath, the Beach’s own MacArthur Award-winning poet, returns with Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Ecco, $23.99), an epic meditation on the teenaged George Shannon, who managed to get epically lost from his fellow 19th-century explorers not once but twice. Another celebrated local poet, Mia Leonin, turns to prose with Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona, $16.95), an elegiac search for identity that takes her to Cuba and back.
 Jetting in from New York, Larry Wilmore, “senior black correspondent” on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, reads from his satirical I’d Rather We Got Casinos: And Other Black Thoughts (Hyperion, $23.99). (Expect him to break from his signature deadpan tone for the subsequent Q&A session.) And Robert Polito arrives as the editor of Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (Library of America, $40). A champion of unsung B-movies, or as he called them, “termite art,” Farber created essays that practically crackle off the page. For a full schedule, visit miamibookfair.com. —Brett Sokol |
Email brett@oceandrive.com
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT MATHEU FROM THE STOOGES: THE AUTHORIZED AND ILLUSTRATED STORY, ABRAMS
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