Iggy Pop (36 page)

They’d been Iggy’d.

In most cases, there was no harm done, but over this period Iggy displayed an increasingly childlike selfishness and ignorance of the consequences of his actions. Which was why, suggests Dayna Louise, he seemed intuitively to search out people who’d tolerate his behaviour. ‘As an adult, I can see that a grown woman would probably see through his manic depression and say, dude, you’re pretty fucked up. Whereas children, young girls, would just be so starry-eyed and enamoured of him that they wouldn’t care.’

Iggy had taken Dayna, who was now sixteen, to Houston in the autumn of 1981, but after an argument had abandoned her in the hotel, leaving a couple of hundred dollars on the mantelpiece for her to get home. Dayna returned to her parents in New Orleans and enrolled at high school. Iggy later tracked her down, sent flowers and begged forgiveness before, bizarrely, moving in with Dayna and parents; her mom put him to work on jobs around the house before he disappeared to a hotel. For a short time they shared romantic walks around the French Quarter, as Dayna returned to Iggy’s hotel on the way back from school each day, but Iggy was fascinated with the quarter’s gris-gris ladies, and also recruited a pair of dilaudid and heroin dealers as friends. Soon the atmosphere turned nasty; Dayna’s mother ascribed it to the gris-gris ladies, Dayna blamed it on the dealers. ‘They were a pretty rough crowd that did a lot of skank,’ says Dayna. ‘I kinda toyed with it, and I think he was getting into it honestly, ’cause he started getting very mean and very abusive again. And at that point I came home to the hotel from school and there was this woman in bed with him. I’m like, What the fuck’s this? And he goes, Well, baby, you’ve been replaced. He was fucking her as I packed my stuff up and left. And that’s the last I saw him.’ Some time later, Iggy apparently regretted his impulsive rejection of Dayna and started phoning her house. But Dayna’s mom, who had kept a watchful eye on how the singer treated her daughter in New Orleans, told him to stay away: ‘You hurt her, cheri. And you’re done.’

Contemplating her time with Iggy, Dayna describes him as ‘tal ented . . . but tormented’, and then ‘primal’, before, on reflection, she summarises his actions as ‘vampiric. Like a succubus.’ Now in his mid-thirties, he seemed irrevocably committed to repeat the destructive behaviour of his youth, seemingly without any clue how to extract himself. And while the live shows were consistently exciting, there was the odd echo of former humiliations, most notably when Iggy was booked at the behest of Keith Richards to support the Rolling Stones for two nights at Detroit’s 80,000-capacity Pontiac Silverdome, from 31 November 1981. On the second night Iggy appeared on stage in a ballerina dress, with what looked like a semi-erection clearly visible through his brown and cream stockings. Seemingly within moments, a hail of bottles, Bic lighters and shoes started spinning to the stage. This time around, Iggy told his band that such a reception was a sign of affection in Detroit, and at the end of their set the promoter, Bill Graham, read out an itemised list of the objects, in lieu of an encore. Graham would note in his memoirs that Iggy had attracted the most projectiles of any act he’d ever worked with. This was tragedy rewritten as farce.

Iggy’s recording contract had obviously been in serious jeopardy by the summer of 1981; Charles Levison, his champion at Arista, had been the victim of political manoeuvrings at the company throughout the year, and eventually jumped ship to WEA, at which point Jim was officially informed his Arista contract would not be renewed. Eventually, it transpired Blondie founder Chris Stein was starting his own record label, Animal, and was willing to fund a new album; early in 1982 Iggy and his guitarist Rob Duprey started working on material, mostly at Rob’s home studio set-up in his apartment on 6th Avenue. By now, Jim had moved to a new apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, an area he’d acquired a taste for since seeing John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
, and there were occasional scenes of near-domesticity. Eric’s mother, Paulette Benson, had decided that he needed to spend more time with his father, and the 12-year-old started visiting Jim and Esther more regularly. The couple did their best to look after his son, and they responsibly concealed their spliffs and cocaine - although Eric, who’d been brought up in California, almost certainly knew what was going on. James Senior and Louella, too, kept a close eye on Eric, delighted in their role as grandparents.

In the run-up to the recording of their album, Jim spent six weeks in Duprey’s apartment as they experimented with new material. As was his wont, Jim was a generous boss - he had received a $50,000 advance from Animal, but split the $10,000 he’d received for his own living expenses equally with Duprey - but he still lived ‘like a cat,’ says Rob. Each week he’d receive a stipend from his agency, FBI, and would disappear for a couple of days, although every now and then Duprey might see him taking ‘some big blonde’ into his room, blasting out his own single, ‘Bang Bang’, at staggering volume while he was doing ‘who knows what’. After three or four days his money would be exhausted, so Jim would instead skulk around the apartment, raiding the refrigerator for food, ‘being really friendly. Like a cat. Then as soon as the money came in the next Wednesday, he’d be gone again.’ When he was based in Brooklyn, life was more organised; Esther put Jim on a budget of $20 a day, handing over his spending money each morning, just like David used to back in Berlin. He’d keep a record of his expenditure, carefully noting his consumption of Big Macs (one for him, one for Rob Duprey), Cokes and other junk food, 85 cents for smokes, $4 for a cab and $4 for a nickel bag of grass.

For all that Duprey knew he didn’t have a close friendship with Jim - ‘he really associates with who he needs to associate with, I wouldn’t call him a particularly friendly-type person’ - he felt privileged to work with him. ‘I was just a bratty kid, and got treated really well . . . even if
Zombie Birdhouse
turned out to be his most pretentious record.’

In fact, pieced together for less than $50,000 at Blank Tapes, a budget 16-track studio in New York, with Chris Stein on bass and Clem Burke on drums,
Zombie Birdhouse
was a flawed but grown-up album, studded with odd moments of quiet, slightly weary beauty. Although the album was dominated by declamatory self-conscious exercises, such as ‘Bulldozer’, the Weill-esque ‘Life Of Work’ and the painfully arty ‘Watching The News’, there were intriguing experiments, such as ‘The Ballad Of Cookie McBride’, a skewed, catchy tale delivered in a yee-haw Southern yodel, and the stark, vulnerable ‘Ordinary Bummer’ - one of the finest songs Jim had written since
Lust For Life
days. Ultimately, the album would be regarded as a failure - not unreasonably, as its opening quartet of songs are strident and unlistenable - but it showed at least a desire to experiment and defy expectations, perhaps as David Bowie had done with ventures such as
Baal
earlier in the year. It was certainly a desire to ‘diversify like David’ that inspired work on an autobiography, tentatively entitled
Run Like A Villain
, at the suggestion of Jim’s old Ann Arbor friend Anne Wehrer - the woman who, with then-husband Joe, had first sheltered Andy Warhol and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable in Ann Arbor back in March 1966. According to Wehrer, the book was instigated with Bowie’s encouragement; Esther Friedmann, however, remembers Bowie counselling Jim that ‘you can only write your autobiography once’, perhaps sensing, as had happened so often recently, that this was yet another project that would go off half-cocked.

Wehrer had started her work as ghostwriter during the autumn 1981 tour, although unsurprisingly she’d found it difficult to make substantial progress thanks to the various distractions on offer. Occasionally she’d manage quiet conversations in Jim’s hotel - she remembers how he would personalise his soulless room by placing tapestries over the lamp and bed - and eventually she built up a close rapport with this one-time schoolfriend of her son, Tom. Anne, a rather patrician woman, had lost a leg to cancer and over the course of the tour grew to believe that Jim, like her, was damaged and vulnerable; that belief, she says, drew them together and they became lovers. Back in New York, though, progress was slow. Jim would take the subway to Anne and designer Wyn Loving’s loft, and sit in the huge clawfoot bath and dictate to them, but his anecdotes, hilarious as they were, were disjointed and hard to turn into a coherent story. Often, on quiet afternoons, Jim would take his newly purchased typewriter down to the street corner or local park and fashion stream-of-consciousness stories or reportage. They were hugely imaginative, intense and slightly scary, suggestive of mania. On one typewritten manuscript he mentions how he’s feeling good and is managing without the Valium, which was presumably prescribed to calm him down - the note is a poignant sign of a damaged psyche, and perhaps a portent of a coming crisis.

CHAPTER 15

Night of the Zombies

With recording of
Zombie Birdhouse
complete, Jim flew to Haiti around April 1982 to finish up his autobiography with Anne Wehrer, and then to holiday and shoot cover photos for
Zombie Birdhouse
with Esther.

Wehrer thought Jim was a mess - ‘really drugged out, all of the time’ - but she did what she could and disappeared back to New York, happy to have seen Baby Doc Duvalier, who moored his boat by the local bar, the owner of which bought everyone drinks and told them - especially Jim - to not even glance at the notorious dictator. Esther, who stayed on, had a worse time. The couple were in Haiti for three months and, as far as Esther was concerned, what was meant as a holiday turned into a scary downward spiral, a nightmare of voodoo, zombies and murderous Tontons Macoute. ‘We went to hell and back. And it was all because Jim antagonised a voodoo priest. It was a voodoo curse. I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.’

Over their first few weeks, the holiday seemed blissful, Esther recounts, as they cocooned themselves in the luxurious surroundings of the Habitation LeClerc and got blasted on the cornucopia of delights available at the unregulated Port-Au-Prince pharmacies. In particular, you could take in empty 1.5-litre Coke bottles and get them filled with paregoric - camphorated tincture of opium - for two dollars, then use it to top up your piña coladas throughout the day and night. As was their wont, Jim and Esther also managed to line up suppliers of alternative substances within their first few days in Haiti.

As they sprawled around the beautiful but slightly decayed hotel, which had been owned in colonial times by Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline and was purchased in the 1930s by dancer and anthropologist Katherine Denham, who later became a voodoo princess, the surreal nature of their surroundings, in the middle of a huge botanical garden, was highlighted by the constant presence of a Christian group, preaching the gospel and distributing condoms. For their first couple of weeks, wherever Jim and Esther wandered, the Christians seemed to be there too, looking well scrubbed and scarily righteous.

It was a simple urge to dance that seemed to launch the harrowing series of events. After Anne Wehrer’s departure, Jim and Esther moved out of Habitation LeClerc to stay in Jacmel, a small town filled with French colonial-style nineteenth-century mansions; it was an isolated coastal town, and the local police checked their passports on the way in, keeping track of all visitors. After a few days, the couple managed to find an insider who offered to take them to a voodoo session. It was held in secret - practising voodoo had been forbidden by the Baby Doc regime - but Jim and Esther sat down in the darkness under the eyes of the locals, sipping some unknown but potent brew, believing they were about to witness nothing more than a colourful Saturday-night dance. Then the musicians started a drum roll and launched into a hypnotic rhythm. When Jim heard the drums start he leapt up, ignoring Esther’s pleas to keep quiet, ripped off his shirt, jumped into the middle of the ring of revellers and started dancing; soon he’d attracted a gaggle of Haitian girls to dance alongside him, but as Esther glanced around, she saw the priest who was directing the ceremony glaring at Jim. He was muttering, outraged at the disruption of his ceremony. Esther ran to Jim, shouted, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and pulled him away. ‘It was creepy,’ she remembers, ‘and then . . . for the next three months everything started to get out of hand.’

Initially a sceptic, Esther started to get increasingly spooked by her surroundings. At night there were always mysterious figures around, only their eyes visible in the darkness, who she became convinced were zombies. One afternoon she was sipping a drink when a rat ran across the floor in front of her - a local leapt out from nowhere and crushed it under his foot, all the while staring right in her face. And then she noticed Jim had started to give away his possessions. First his guitar disappeared. Then he had given much of his money and most of his clothes away. Soon they were down to their last two hundred dollars.

One night Esther woke up and saw Jim was gone. So was the local they’d hired to watch the room. She grabbed her clothes and ran out, found their guide and drove off into the night; they finally located Jim in a hole-in-the-wall bar, dancing with the local hookers. Esther ran in, shouting at him, ‘Where’s our money?’ As she’d dreaded, he’d given it away, and despite Esther’s pleas to the women - ‘I know you think we’re rich, stupid Americans, but that was our last two hundred dollars. Please keep half, but please give me half back’ - they were left penniless.

Finally Esther and her helper bundled Jim into their rented VW Beetle and they started off home, their guide at the wheel. The couple fell asleep; then Esther awoke and realised they were on a tiny dirt road, glanced out of the window and saw faces staring in. ‘I screamed! I yelled, They’re going to kill us!’ Their driver was so alarmed by the bloodcurdling scream that he wrenched at the wheel, crunching the Beetle into a stone wall. As it skidded along, Jim jumped out, hitting the wall and, it later transpired, breaking three ribs. While the driver cradled his head, which he’d hurt in the crash, Esther screamed at him to get out; she took the wheel with Jim beside her, leaving the driver, turned the badly damaged but still driveable Beetle round and drove back along the dirt track until finally she reached the hotel.

The next day Esther decided she needed to obtain a police report to explain the damage to the rental company. Accosting her guide, who’d turned up at the hotel, she marched him down to the police station, leaving Jim back in their room. The commissioner at the desk was a portly, intimidating figure who reminded Esther of Idi Amin, and at one end of the police station was, Esther remembers, ‘a cage, with a guy hanging in it. I swear to God; it was like a bad movie.’ Esther realised her guide was transfixed with fear; she looked down and saw he’d wet himself and quickly mentioned it was she who’d been driving the car when they crashed. Finally they managed to get the requisite report and left; the guide was so grateful not to have been left in the clutches of the police, and their feared secret service counterparts the Tontons Macoute, that he found an uncle or cousin who repaired the Beetle.

Over subsequent weeks Esther found a job to raise some cash, assisting a Belgian dentist named Pierre, who specialised in bargain-basement extractions. ‘It cost one dollar with nothing, two dollars with procaine, and three dollars for a tooth out with a shot of anaesthetic.’ While Esther was away, Jim would stay with a local woman, her numerous offspring and her one-legged dad, all of them crammed into a tiny hut. The woman was just a friend - ‘I don’t think anything unseemly was going on’ - but he’d sit there all day while she braided his hair. The skewed domesticity lasted until Esther’s dentist friend was murdered - ‘the Tontons Macoute slaughtered him - it turned out because he was competition for the local dentist’ - and again they moved on, fleeing Jacmel in the middle of the night after being warned that someone would be lying in wait for them on the single road out.

It was at this point that Esther became convinced that the voodoo priest had put a curse on them. She began attempting to get the two away, but whenever they tried to get to the airport, something would stop them, and all the while Jim was becoming more and more mentally disturbed, says Esther: ‘He was ill. I mean really ill.’ They made it to the airport and even had their luggage on the plane for Los Angeles one time when Jim disappeared. Frantic, Esther searched the airport. ‘Then finally this dude comes up to me and says, if you’re looking for your boyfriend, he’s gone off in a car to do something. So it was bam, luggage off the plane. And this happened at least three more times.’ From Jacmel they moved to a bungalow on the beach, rented from an American expat who gave them credit; she seemed to rent out most of her rooms to CIA agents or other people with something to hide. They remained there for a month or so before renting another house. Jim would bring kids back so they could get to try sleeping on a bed; Esther would wander around and chat with the landlord as the man took his cow for a walk. By now, Esther was calling her friends all over the world, her father, ex-boyfriend Norbert, and Jim’s agents, FBI, to raise enough money to pay off their debts and get another flight home. Meanwhile, Jim was either flying away on some doomed manic escapade or slumped like a morose drunk, incapable of the most basic functions. She started hiding his clothes, just like Ron used to in the Stooges days, to ensure he wouldn’t wander off at night, but that didn’t necessarily stop him. One night he disappeared, naked but for one of her skirts, took the rental car, even though he couldn’t drive, crashed it and then hitched a lift to the Hotel Oloffson, from which someone called Esther, begging her to take him home.

Within a few days, Esther had phoned around to raise more money, and this time managed to get Jim home to Brooklyn. Still he seemed deranged. Unable to endure any more, Esther took the advice of a friend back in Haiti, who told her the couple were undoubtedly the victims of a voodoo curse. Following their instructions, she took a pair of scissors, bent over Jim when he was asleep and snipped through the yellow T-shirt that he’d been wearing since the start of their holiday and gently pulled it off his back. Taking the remaining clothes he’d been wearing throughout their time in Haiti, she set fire to all of them, banishing the spell.

She also had to find medical care for Jim. Danny Sugerman managed to track down Dr Zucker, who was now working at Northridge Hospital in Los Angeles; Eric’s mother, Paulette Benson, agreed to meet Jim off the plane and take him to the hospital. Esther’s main worry was that Jim wouldn’t be allowed on the plane, because he was literally raving; but she knew that his chances were infinitely better in first class. Finally she managed to buy the ticket using a borrowed credit card, put Jim on the plane to LA, and told him to sleep and not say a word. She watched the plane take off, and waited for him back in Brooklyn.

Jim spent a few weeks in Northridge. It was like going back in time to 1974, and again he had to spend a week or so cleansing his body of its cocktail of drugs before he could sit down and talk with Murray Zucker, who admired Jim but also worked hard on the underlying issues that caused the singer’s predilection to crash and burn. Just as last time around, once Jim was settled and out of his rock ’n’ roll habits, Murray found him a vulnerable, sensitive and empathetic character. There was a disturbed teenager in the same unit who suffered from Duchenne’s disease, which meant he was somewhat malformed, could only walk with difficulty and whose life expectancy was severely shortened. The boy was deeply depressed; Jim gave him his jacket and transformed his condition. It was a wonderful thing to behold, Zucker thought; far more effective than any treatment he could have prescribed; Jim’s spontaneous act of sympathy turned round what remained of the youngster’s life. At another point during his hospitalisation, a psychotic inmate attacked a nurse; Jim spontaneously leapt up and wrestled the patient to the ground, saving the nurse from possible serious injury.

It was probably during his stay at Northridge that Jim made the decision to quit his destructive lifestyle. But still there was the omnipresent problem of money, or lack of it. For the only way to generate cash was live work: ‘What else could I do? I didn’t even think about it.’

In October, he hit the road again, promoting
Zombie Birdhouse
and his autobiography,
I Need More
. The book was a hilarious read, but showed only occasional glimpses of Jim’s intelligence and insight, handicapped by the circumstances in which it was written. Esther contributed dozens of photos, Anne Wehrer and designer Wyn Loving spent weeks finding rare shots, but the costs of putting it together were perilously close to the advance from the small New York publisher, Karz-Cohl, while the text itself was riddled with mistakes, occasional grandiose fantasies and gratuitous insults aimed at most of those with whom Iggy had worked. Back in Ann Arbor the word was that Scott Asheton, Jim’s closest friend in the Stooges, arranged a barbecue and invited his friends around to watch his copy burn on a bonfire in the garden.

Unsurprisingly,
Zombie Birdhouse
sold poorly, and by the end of the tour to promote it which opened on 13 October, Jim was, say the rest of the band, more crazed than ever. New drummer Larry Mysliewicz was apparently freaked out; Frank Infante, yet another recruit from Blondie, lapped up the experience, which reminded him of the
Last Days Of Pompeii
. One night Iggy was smashed full-on in the head with a Heineken bottle. He kept singing. The band was hassled by Hells Angels in London, and then, on a quick flight to Newcastle to film the TV show
The Tube
, Iggy turned up at the end of the soundcheck and fell backwards into the drums, destroying the carefully-placed array of microphones. Iggy returned to the hotel before the show; the house security guard heard suspicious noises in his room and decided to investigate. As he opened the door with his pass key, he was treated to the entertaining spectacle of a stark naked Iggy with his foot braced against the wall, attempting to pull out a live power outlet socket, which he’d apparently decided would make an attractive belt. The long-suffering Henry McGroggan managed to persuade the hotel management to let the rest of the band remain at the hotel, as long as Iggy flew back to London straight after the show. After a short break for January 1983 the live shows resumed again, this time presciently titled
The Breaking Point.

In May 1983 there was a brief respite. Jim and Esther had moved to a new apartment in Columbus Avenue, New York, and he continued tapping away on his typewriter. ‘Decided not to bother with hospital this year,’ he wrote. ‘Too much monkey business, rather take my chances.’ He continued a few lines later: ‘I believe I am a farmer of sound. I treat my crops with infinite devotion and tenderness.’