“The Young Vibrate at a Different Frequency”: Mick Harvey, Serge Gainsbourg and going to gigs alone in your 40s. Or “Mick Harvey live at Under the Bridge London 25th March 2017.”

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Delirium Tremens, Dublin Stories, Hovel Press, Intoxicated Man, Intoxicated Women, Josh Savage, Mick Harvey, Music, Mute Records, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Odd fragments of biography, Pink Elephants, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Serge Gainsbourg, the two man travelling medicine show, Travel, Under the Bridge, Under the Bridge London, UTB London, writing

“The Young Vibrate at a Different Frequency”:
Mick Harvey, Serge Gainsbourg and going to gigs alone in your 40s. Or “Mick Harvey live at Under the Bridge London 25th March 2017.”

“My loves that have passed on, are blown away like autumn leaves..” – The Pervert’s Song.

I have been feeling old. How? Why?

Let me count the ways and break it down by the numbers.

1- I am 45 years old and I feel the 5 more than the 40. 40 is a landmark, the extra 5 is just an indication that the ageing process never stops, the months and years just keep on adding up.

2- I love combat sports and the best and worst thing about combat sports is that they deal in brutal truth.

When you are trying as hard as you can to bring someone to the point where they must submit to avoid being choked unconscious or having a limb snapped and that person is trying just as hard to do the same to you, you cannot fool yourself about the outcome. You achieve your goal or you don’t.

That is a profound sort of truth. One aspect of that truth is the fact that being 20 is different from being 40. Being 20 is better. Say what you like, dress it up as you will- 20 is better.

After a training session recently I was chatting to a warrior and wise man (same person) about the difficulties of sparring with younger guys- the sharpness of their movement and the speed of their decision-making. It’s hard and frustrating to contend with that when you are also contending with a stiffening body and diminishing hormones of your own; when all you have on your side is some guile and a mysterious thing called ‘old man strength’ – a type of dogged isometric strength that is closely related to stiffness.

“The young vibrate at a different frequency.”

My friend and teacher remarked.

That says it. The young vibrate at a different frequency. Watch them, it’s obvious… and it’s annoying.

3- Lemmy died, Leonard Cohen died! This is not ok. This should not happen.

This is the reason I decided to go to gigs this year after years of listening to music mostly recorded (if it isn’t the band I write the lyrics for), staying comfortably at home with my own things around me, with none of the hassle and expense of getting to and from gigs and dealing with large groups of people. I decided to see and listen to the artists and musicians I love live and in person while both they and I still can.

That means dragging my home-loving ass up to London from my home in the middle-of-nowhere Dorset, staying in little hotels of varying quality and hygiene, spending too much money for food that isn’t worth it and dealing with the frightening realities of the Tube.

It’s a lot to ask of an old man who could be at home with his records and CDs and itunes and Spotify.

4- The damn, dreaded drip.

When I have absolutely definitely finished peeing and then about a dessert spoon more appears from nowhere and goes where it shouldn’t.

God I hate that. It makes me feel as if the death of my libido is approaching. I can hear it dripping in the darkest, most insecure places in my mind, like Poe’s ‘Tell Tale Heart’. It says I have a limited time left as a man. It says the juices; sexual and creative, don’t last forever. It says the day is coming when I will be no more than a burden to the pack.

5- Missing friends. You get to my age you’ve probably lost at least one friend and by that I mean they have died. But you will also have friends living all over the place. You will have real friends who you never get to see. People you care about spread across the country or the world through work and family commitments.

You realise that the time you get to spend with them is ticking away too.

I could maybe combine going to a gig or two with meeting a friend or two.

So, partly as an antidote to all this ageing I decided to do stuff. You know; say yes to things, compete in grappling competitions, go to gigs and see the people who make the music I love before they or I die. Also try to meet up with old friends.

That’s the background to the long trip to London to see Mick Harvey.

(I was planning to meet one of those old friends before the gig but circumstances took him away. That’s what life does when you’re a real grown-up adult, it makes demands that have to be met.

It’s also why you have to keep trying; making and taking opportunities.)
—————————————————-

A little background on Mr. Harvey: I first saw him in the picture on the back of the album “Tender Prey” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds that was released in 1988 I think. He was one of the original members of the Bad Seeds and indeed one of the original members of The Birthday Party and even The Boys Next Door, the two bands Nick Cave was previously in. He and Nick Cave have worked together since they were in school. I use Nick Cave as a reference point; as I possibly do too often in life, because he is more well known, more famous and it should, I hope, position Mick Harvey for readers.

He has worked with Crime and the City Solution, Einstürzende Neubauten, P J Harvey; more people than I can name.

In short, Mick Harvey has been played a crucial role in the production of many of the best and most influential ‘alt-rock’ music made in the last thirty years, working with bands across the borders of geography and language.

He is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, musician and song-writer.

Recently Mr. Harvey has produced four records (Pink Elephants; Intoxicated Man; Delirium Tremens and Intoxicated Women) of songs by the late French singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg.

So when I found out that he was playing a gig featuring the songs from those four albums at a venue called Under the Bridge in London I decided this was just the sort of thing I should be going to.

So, the 25th of March found me rocking up at Poole train station with my smallest backpack in tow.

I visited the public toilet and saw a syringe in one of the cubicles. That is something I have been seeing more and more of lately in the Bournemouth/ Poole area and there would seem to be a real increase in the number of people using heroin here.

The area around Poole rail station is filled with a number of large abandoned buildings which are clearly being used by homeless people and ‘chaotic drug users’ as squats and the whole place has a bit of a George A. Romero zombie feel about it. The situation doesn’t effect me like it did when I was young because I don’t have to live around it but I know the misery it causes and it makes me sad. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to run back to the Dorset woods and hide.

The train, of course, was diverted half way to Brighton and back again to cover for ‘planned engineering works’; a phrase only slightly less dreaded than ‘replacement bus service’

Still, I had a book to read, an audio book to listen to and my notebook to write in. The book is set in the ruins of Hamburg in 1947, the audio book, is largely set in the ruins of Ramadi in Syria and the book I am writing is about a child assassin so I was setting up the perfect state of mind for travelling to the great metropolis. Maybe I should have brought something sunnier.

A little background on London and me: London kicks my ass. It amuses London to do so. I never seem to get in and out of London without some minor trouble or disaster. I expect it now. I get off the train in Waterloo thinking ‘Ok London, what’s it to be this time?’ It’s a game we play, London and I, a game that London always wins.

This time London surprised me- everything went basically smoothly. The journey to Waterloo was long but steady; I got something to eat near the station that was nice and not too expensive (although I got grumpy about the fact that the price was printed on the menu with no ‘£’ and no pence, just numbers like 5. Five what? Five beans?); the tube form Embankment to West Brompton was not too crowded, easy to follow and the stations were pleasant- with flowers and everything.

I left the station anxious about finding my hotel. I was getting my A-Z out of my pocket and taking a deep breath as he walked though the door and… there was the hotel right in front of me.

It was a sixties, brutalist building looking a bit the worse for wear but then those buildings looked tired on the day after they were built so you shouldn’t judge.

It seemed to me to be a family run hotel. Things were done in a somewhat old-fashioned way. There are quite a few of these establishments around London, where things are a little more individual and idiosyncratic than your average Travelodge or Holiday Inn.

The good thing about these hotels is that I like to pretend to be in a 70s German New Wave film (whenever I can really) and they really lend themselves to that. The old-fashioned décor, the process of registering at the desk with passport details etc, the slightly scary lifts that are just about big enough for two and have that inner and outer door combination like a crocodile’s double eyelid.

I checked in and got to my little room, and it was a very little room but a clean one so that would do fine.

Ten minutes later I was on my way out again, on a scouting mission to make sure I could find the venue (and continuing to pretend I am a detective in a 1970s German movie, pounding the black and white streets of Hamburg or Berlin). I did fine going down North End Road but then went right where I should have gone left and ended up nearly at the King’s Road.

I took a deep breath, looked around, assessed the situation and make a decision. Turn back to the left and look for Stamford Bridge. Five minutes later I was in front of Chelsea’s football stadium. I asked a security guard, who was keen to ask me what I was doing wandering gormlessly about, where Under the Bridge might be.

“You mean that,” he said, not unkindly, pointing to large neon sign that said ‘Under the Bridge’.

“Yep,” I replied, “I’ll be back later.” ..and I departed mysteriously.

On the way back to the hotel I bought some pasta, a veggie samosa and two beers in an M & S foodhall and took them back to my hotel. Nothing if not classy me!

By six o’clock I was back out on the road and heading to a pub half way to the venue for some chips and a pint. I took my time and pushed off for the gig just after seven.

The venue is friendly. The door staff are really polite and genuinely pleasant to chat to. In fact they probably wished I was less friendly but I hadn’t spoken to anyone all day. Downstairs there are photo prints on the walls that you should take some time to look over if you are ever there. I was particularly taken by a series prints of Sadé (Ah, memories). And this one of The Buzzcocks.

I get myself a comforting pint of Guinness although I am starting to feel a bit tired and am wondering if I have already had too much to drink.

I sit myself down at a booth and have a good look around. The place is filling up.

It quickly becomes clear that none of us here is young, except for the support act who sings his own songs and works well with the crowd. His name is Josh Savage and I find it particularly endearing that he was selling raw honey as well as his own album after his set.

Here is a video for one of his singles. He told a good story about making it, I’ll let you hear it from him if you go see him some time-

Looking around there is no way to deny that we are an older crowd for sure. There are an awful lot of bad postures, even outright orthopaedic disasters limping around the venue. I don’t say that to be cruel. In my proper job I am a Physical Therapist and I have feelings of real concern looking about me. I feel like lining some people up and getting to work.

Time is ticking on am I’m on my second Guinness and beginning to feel like it’s getting to my bedtime. Then the band start to take the stage. There’s James Johnston from Gallon Drunk. Now I’m getting excited and waking up again. Mick Harvey comes on stage and the music gets going with that song about the ticket-puncher in the Paris Metro losing his mind and obsessively taking about holes until he starts to consider putting another little hole in his head with a rifle. That’s the territory we are inhabiting here.

Mick Harvey’s approach to performance is tactical. Much like Brian Eno he sings like a producer, like a scientist. His performance as a singer is not showy (nor are the performances of the two other singers on stage) He builds an emotionally affecting whole by layering all the sounds available to him, the voice (his own and others) being only one part of that.

Like the crowd he is also getting on in years and in between being impossibly cool he has some trouble with his specs.

Gainsbourgh himself, as a lyricist was clearly concerned about ageing and the death of desire. He was constantly engaged with questions of desire, often personal and pressing but a great deal of his songs take place at a distance from his own person also- either in the past or in the notional.

Through it all the lyrics reveal a character determined to keep living, to hang on to the core of life long past youth, long past good form and decorum, past the point where desire becomes disgust (and for Serge it always turns to disgust or absurdity) for its own sake. There is always this conflict, this attraction and repulsion: and ageing brings it closer and closer to you. Flavours get more complex even if palates don’t.

I think this was the first evening of a tour and the band loosens up and gets better and better as the set progresses through songs like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “New York USA”. By the encores the band is blazing, sounding like a combination of The Velvet Underground and The Dirty Three.

After the gig I walk back to my hotel in the cool air enjoying a feeling I haven’t had it along time; surfing the wave of energy that you take from watching a fine band live. It’s hard work getting through the extras, the ‘everything around’ art, travel and living as we get older but that doesn’t kill the passion and the love of what is really important in art and life.

So the (slightly clichéd) advantages of age are there: experience, sophistication, best of all wit (Harvey and Gainsbourg have a genuinely pleasing grown-up wit about them); but there’s more than that, there’s old man strength, that dogged ability to hold on.

And maybe us older folks vibrate at a deeper frequency…

..No? Well, it was worth a try.

——————————————————————————————-

Next morning things are quiet and London is at its best, just waking as if from the river bank up; from history as much as from Saturday night. Before I get the train for the long, diverted journey back to Poole I take a stroll down the Southbank and happen to spot a reason why I might just be making another trip soon…

 

 

 

Jamie Lynch is an Irishman living in England. He is the author of numerous short stories, poems, child’s stories and a novel entitled “Opinion Pieces”. He has been published online and in print. He also writes the lyrics for the band “The Two Man Travelling Medicine Show”, who play at the crossroads where David Cronenberg and Merle Haggard meet. He maintains a blog at www.thestoriesihaveinme.wordpress.com.

 

Twitter: @HovelPress

 

Read for free: “Bodies” https://thefictionpool.com/2017/01/15/bodies-by-jamie-lynch/; “The Night I got lost on the way home from China” http://www.litro.co.uk/2015/02/the-night-i-got-lost-on-the-way-home-from-china/; “The Pleasures of Reading Short Stories” http://www.litro.co.uk/2014/12/the-pleasures-of-reading-short-stories/

& any- and every- single thing on http://www.thestoriesihaveinme.wordpress.com

 

The Two Man Travelling Medicine Show on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/medicine-show-136232208

 

Children’s Stories on Kindle: ”The True Story of how Plopinton got its name” https://www.amazon.co.uk/true-story-how-Plopington-name-ebook/dp/B00DY8S2XM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485361666&sr=8-1&keywords=The+True+story+of+how+plopington+got+its+name

“Small tales of little creatures” https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-tales-little-creatures-James-ebook/dp/B008NALXTG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485361727&sr=8-1&keywords=Small+tales+of+little+creatures

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Iggy & Me; Part 4

Tags

Hovel Press, Iggy Confidential, Iggy Pop, James Lynch, Nick Cave, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Odd fragments of biography, Rock Music, Songs, The Stooges, Trailer Home

4-

‘I was born in a trailer camp, the days were cold and the night’s were damp.”- Iggy Pop

The boy who would become, on and off, Iggy Pop was born James Osterberg near Ann Arbour in Michigan. He was raised in a 500 square foot trailer home situated by a cornfield by a mother and father he describes as inspirationally decent, hardworking and kind.

This is the problem, for me, with biography- there is too much to it. Those first two sentences have so much in them, so much resonance and potential that they make my temples throb and my pulse race.

How am I to properly tease out and develop all the history and emotions implied by the picture they paint?

How am I to interweave all that with the bells it rings in my own psyche?

In fiction you can play around with the scenes you choose; the facts of an actual life are so demanding, the responsibility so great.

“There should be a painting,” that is my first thought. A painting would capture this so much better:

The Osterberg family outside their trailer home with the golden corn waving in the background. The father is study, steady of gaze but not aggressive. He has a neat, short haircut and neat clothes. The mother is smiling, her shoulder length hair is gently held back from her face with a single pin. She too is neat and combines a look of strength and gentleness.

A simple, clear painting. Perhaps with the perspective slightly flattened; nothing too dramatic, nothing that draws too much attention, but enough to give the viewer a slight ‘iconistic’ feeling. A certain sense of transparency that makes the viewer feel that they might see through the painting, for just a moment, and catch a glimpse of something transcendent.

And then my mind skips, as it does so often, like a vinyl record. I wonder why Americans are so keen on describing their homes in terms of square feet. Does it come from the abundance of space? Would it not be more likely to occur in countries where space it at a premium, like Japan? Is it some kind of shadow of the urge to occupy space expressed in the move west, the cowboy movies of my youthful Saturday mornings?

It puts me in mind of a story that the Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski tells in an interview from the book “Kieslowski on Kieslowski” published by Faber. He had made a film called “Three CoIours: Red”. It was the last in a series on the symbolism of the colours of the French flag.

The film was about to be released in the States and there was a problem. The problem was that in one scene a young female character, after the break up of a relationship goes and visits an older man. Apparently, American test audiences found this confusing. Who was this old guy? What was she doing there?

It was, of course, her father. The director didn’t feel there was any need to make that explicit but perhaps there was such a need.

On the plane on the way to the States to try to fix the problem he was sitting beside a European manufacturer of windows. This man also had business to do in America and a story to tell.

His firm had manufactured windows in Europe for generations. They were very proud of the quality of their work and they offered a lifetime guarantee to back that up. Not long ago they had started doing business in America. Business had not gone well at first. They were puzzled. Did they not offer the highest quality window at a fair price with a lifetime guarantee? What did these Americans want?

Then an American business colleague suggested that they should reduce the length of the guarantee to twenty-five years. It didn’t really make sense but it was worth a try. Anything was worth a try at this point. They did it; and sales of windows went up. They reduced the guarantee still further, to fifteen years, and sales went up still more.

Now they were doing a roaring trade and he was on his way to New York to organize the legal end of reducing the guarantee still further.

Form this, the businessman had taken a lesson about Americans; they did not enjoy the feeling that they would be in the same home for a lifetime. He thought they were motivated by the unconscious desire to be always moving to a bigger and better place- more square feet. He suggested that the director’s problem may be that the idea of one, fixed home might not be the most immediately available to the American psyche.

Who knows? At lot of ‘maybes’ and large generalizations there but I find it interesting. I would genuinely appreciate suggestions, especially from my American readers.

Young Jim Osterberg’s father was a veteran of WWII, educated on the GI bill and by the time Jim arrived in the world, a high School teacher.

The topic of fathers and sons hits home hard here. Mr. Osterberg was a man of intelligence, imagination and ambition who, like a lot of people for his generation, found that when he should have been fulfilling those ambitions he was off to fight the Nazis and when he got back it was time to settle down and be responsible.

I should say that no doubt the same thing and worse was probably true for mothers. It was true for that generation of Americans; it was equally through for my parents generation of Irish. I notice it was true for people like Nick Cave, whose father sounds very much like Iggy’s. It is probably a good bet that if someone is able to spend a decent amount of their time and energy on expressing their thoughts and feelings, exercising their artistic muscles, there was likely to be a generation before who sacrificed their opportunity to do the same thing so that they could work jobs and keep homes that nurtured within their children from a young age the feeling, the expectation that they had the chance and the right to try to do fulfilling work and even follow an artistic path if they choose. The people who open those doors make up many ‘great generations’.

Of course you still have to put the work in, and it helps if there is some support outside the family.

It seems that Jim Osterberg found that in the public school system in the Ann Arbour area which was an example of excellent progressive educational programming. He mixed there with the sons and daughters of ‘the great and the good’. The children of Robert McNamara attended his school for example. From a young age, Jim thought he should find a way, a decent way, to “syphon off some of that power and money”.

The Asheton brothers, Ron and Scott (a.k.a. Rock Action), who would become the guitarist and drummer in the Stooges, also attended Iggy’s high school. They were not the children of ‘the great and good’, they were what people called ‘Townies’ back then, which gets me to wondering how a word can carry with it such weight of condescension even when you have never lived in an environment where it was current.

The Ashetons would be dropped off by their mother at the back door, walk through the school and out the front door again. Presumably to go stand on a corner and smoke. My grandmother would have called them ‘corner boys’ or ‘guttersnipes’, I think.

But that’s not exactly how it started.

It started with Jim Osterberg learning to play the drums, or just starting to play the drums, he taught himself with endless hours of practice in his trailer home.

In fact his bedroom was too small to fit his drums into so he took over the living area. After about a year of that his parents ceded the large bedroom to him and moved their own sleeping quarters to his child’s bedroom. Parents again.

That’s it for this instalment. Next time we’ll see where all that noise in the trailer home so productively lead.

Jamie Lynch is an Irishman living in England. He is the author of numerous short stories, poems, child’s stories and a novel entitled “Opinion Pieces”. He has been published online and in print. He also writes the lyrics for the band “The Two Man Travelling Medicine Show”, who play at the crossroads where David Cronenberg and Merle Haggard meet. He maintains a blog at www.thestoriesihaveinme.wordpress.com.

 

Twitter: @HovelPress

 

Read for free: “Bodies” https://thefictionpool.com/2017/01/15/bodies-by-jamie-lynch/; “The Night I got lost on the way home from China” http://www.litro.co.uk/2015/02/the-night-i-got-lost-on-the-way-home-from-china/; “The Pleasures of Reading Short Stories” http://www.litro.co.uk/2014/12/the-pleasures-of-reading-short-stories/

& any- and every- single thing on http://www.thestoriesihaveinme.wordpress.com

 

The Two Man Travelling Medicine Show on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/medicine-show-136232208

And the debut album “Weeding out the Wicked” is released worldwide on April 28^th 2017.

 

Children’s Stories on Kindle: ”The True Story of how Plopinton got its name” https://www.amazon.co.uk/true-story-how-Plopington-name-ebook/dp/B00DY8S2XM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485361666&sr=8-1&keywords=The+True+story+of+how+plopington+got+its+name

“Small tales of little creatures” https://www.amazon.co.uk/Small-tales-little-creatures-James-ebook/dp/B008NALXTG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485361727&sr=8-1&keywords=Small+tales+of+little+creatures

Iggy & Me; Part 3

Tags

Fiction, Hovel Press, Iggy Pop, James Lynch, John Cale, Lester Bangs, Lyrics, Music, Nick Cave, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Stooges, writing

3

Like E M Forster said: “A novel needs and plot; oh God, a novel needs a plot.”
In that spirit it’s time I tried to lay some facts and background out here. Who is Iggy Pop, where does he come from, as Tricky wrote in some sleeve notes once about Kate Bush: “Is (s)he from this planet?”

I’ll do my best, with the help of some interviews, books and documentaries that are out there to tell the story of a life.

My sources are these-

1- A book called “I Need More.” Written by someone whose name I can’t recall. This is a strange book. There are ‘celebrity’ biographies that are serious and in-depth; there are ones that are short on text and long on pictures. This book is something of both. It seems to be out of print now but it was really quite good. There was a lot of information about Iggy and about the Stooges- well written, adult and informative stuff. Also, since the element of performance is so important in the Iggy story it was really great to have a lot of candid, publicity and concert photos collected in there also.

I have admitted that I have a very poor memory in many ways but I have a excellent memory in one particular way. This is best illustrated by my fascination with motorbikes when I was a child. There was a motorbike dealership in Phibsboro, quite near to my school and not too far from my house. When I was around ten years old I was obsessed with motorbikes. There was a programme on TV about motorbike scrambling, the one where they race against time on a cross country course, crossing logs and mud fields and ploughing up ridiculously steep hills. It was great. I was fascinated and dreamed all the time about riding a motorbike. Strangely, in my fantasies I always rode a medium sized bike in a very sensible manner. I never dreamt of speed or of being the next Barry Sheen, my desires were far tamer, but no less ardent for it.

The dealership used to allow me to wander around their shop looking at bikes and asking questions as if I was in the market, they were really very kind and would give me brochures to take home to further ponder.

At some point I got a book, illustrated with photos , teaching the reader how to ride a motorbike. I read it from cover to cover, over and over again. In truth I have probably read that book far more times than any other piece of literature in my life, and for me then it was a great work of imagination, even though it has been lost I know not where for at least thirty years now.

Years later, in another country, in what can sometimes feel like a different life, I bought my first small motorbike. I had ridden mopeds previously, having never learned to drive (there wasn’t really any need in the inner city and I never thought I’d life any where else I suppose) but this was an actual, real motorbike with gears and a clutch.

I bought and paid for it on a Saturday and then had a week to go get insurance and organize such practical things until I could pick it up and drive it away.

I had never had a lesson and never ridden a geared bike before. I had sense enough to understand that might present a small problem.

I sat in a quiet room, closed my eyes and in my mind picked up and opened that illustrated how-to manual from all those years ago.

It was all still there.

The clutch is the lever on the left hand, the back brake is the operated with your right foot. I recalled it perfectly page by page, picture by picture. I worked through it’s virtual pages slowly and carefully, practising everything over and over in my mind.

A week later I got the bike. Wheeled it to a side street. Put it in gear, drove up and down the street a few times to make sure I had this stuff right and then rode about fifteen mile home with not too many problems.

My long overdue point is this, I have a similar sort of recall when it comes to that book about Iggy. A great deal of that information is still very clear in my mind. I just have to be quiet and close my eyes for a while.

Still I cannot remember the names of either author 9the motorbike book or the Iggy book)- some kind of author envy I suspect and I apologize. These two books have been at least as influential for me as “Moby Dick”, “The Story of Mr. Sommer” or the Moonin novels, and I remember who wrote all of them.

One other literary input has to be mentioned. He went by the name of Lester Bangs. Still does in a way.

He was a writer who famously, now, really only ever produced record reviews and still managed to be one of the best writers of the last century. In truth that is a little bit of a case of printing the legend. He wrote a lot more than record reviews: novels, short stories, manifestos- they just didn’t get published that much. They should have been but they weren’t.

He’s the sort of fella we like to lionize in order to paper over the sad facts of a life cut short and seriously frustrated. But he was a fine writer and he wrote some serious words on Iggy and the Stooges. He also did this close to the time this was all happening whereas most Iggy appreciation has come a long time after the fact (guilty as charged).

The two pieces I have read and reread over time, and which are risky reading for me on this subject because they are so good they tend to colonize the landscape surrounding the subject, are entitled “Of Pop and Pies and Fun (A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who’s the Fool) and Iggy Pop: Blowtorch in Bondage- both contained in the excellent collection “Psychotic reactions & carburettor dung” edited by Greil Marcus.

“ Of Pop and Pies and Fun…” is presented as a review of “Funhouse” the second Stooges album but is very much an anatomy of the band and of the times. Bangs perfectly understands the importance of the Stooges as being rooted in a great willingness to make fools of themselves in a sincere way in the age of the dominant and obsessive ‘supergroups’ but he gets it wrong with- “The Stooges are not for the ages- nothing created now is, but that are implicitly for today…”

In fact the Stooges more than lasted the test of time (as has Lester Bang’s own writing). Perhaps because they were not of their own time but so purely their own weird shelves their music has not been temporary but has remained with the permanence, if not the pretence, of, dare I say it ‘art’.

There will probably; moreover, never be a time when it will not be the case that we need liberating ‘from basically uncreative lifestyles in which people often lacking half the talent or personality or charisma of you or I are elevated to godlike positions’.

We’ll always need the Stooges to combat that disease.

Bangs also correctly identifies that Iggy himself was at heart a nice sensitive young guy reacting to an environment where everything from the music scene to social movements were beginning to look a little (or a lot) too damn sure of themselves and just plain corporate.

Things were getting somewhat self-satisfied in certain hip quarters and the antidote required someone willing to be dismissed and disrespected as ridiculous but for honest reasons.

Who might be the Stooges to the Apple and Google corps I wonder?

The Stooges helped to break down the wall that was building up between audiences and ‘superstar’ musicians and without them or something like them- no Sex Pistols mixing fluids with the crowd, no Nick Cave in The Birthday Party days kicking and punching folks at the front.

Iggy was always more inclined to take punishment than to dish it out but that’s just taste and personality, I suspect Nick ain’t quite as sweet as Iggy when it comes right down to bruises, but the action and the atmosphere and the environment is the same. I’ve seen both live in concert and it’s a similar energy.

It is extremely difficult to describe music, in that sense it is like anything which is its own best and final explanation such as sex and the pleasures of eating but Bangs pulls off a near perfect clause about the Stooges and the few other groups that have managed the same trick of sculpting beauty from noise- “Because properly conceived and handled noise is not noise at all, but music whose textures just happen to be a little thicker and more involved than usual,…” Boom, drop the mic.

Iggy Pop: blowtorch in Bondage comes from a later period- 1977 and the tour Iggy did with David Bowie after the album “The Idiot” was released. It’s a much, much shorter piece- no less insightful for it.

It’s disappointment with “The Idiot” (just past its 40th anniversary) is not one I share (I don’t believe that Iggy sounds like a dead man on that album, just a tired one, which may have been part of the point and, more basically- true) but it’s central theme, concern really, that being Iggy might turn out to be an impossible burden for Jim Osterberg is clear and urgent. I’ll refer to it again perhaps in an upcoming discussion of Iggy and Primatology.

2 (Secondary)Audio material.

I have a large type podcast habit. Really, it’s a problem. I’m waiting for the syndrome to be named. Heck, they may end up naming it for me. At present I have too real addictions, by which I mean obsessions that I sometimes worry about, and they are coffee and podcasts.

It doesn’t help that they go so well together too.

I have, at present, at least five different devices for brewing coffee and none of them are those crappy Nespresso machines or whatever. I have, at present, about 3,000 podcasts downloaded or waiting to be downloaded. There are just so many of them and they are so perfect. I can listen to them when I am out for a walk, when I’m riding my moped, when I am travelling back and forth to Dublin. They always seem to be just about the right length and they cover pretty much any subject and interest. They are also largely uncensored. They do not have to pander too much (usually) to corporate sponsors and they allow people who genuinely have put in the work to understand a subject to explain it at the appropriate length without being made to fit into a fixed half hour or hour slot or chopped into sections of a specific duration to accommodate advertisements with every section beginning with a reprís of all prior sections to comfort anyone who has turned the TV on with three quarters of the programme already over.

In short, podcasts allow for a level of rigour I very much appreciate.

I subscribe to lots of podcasts and download individual episodes of still more. One of the van guards of the podcast movement was WTF. An podcast produced by the American comedian Marc Maron. Mr. Maron is a big fan of musician’s so he has had a lot of fascinating cats on there. He has interviewed John Cale and Nick Cave and back in 2013 he had one Iggy Pop.

I think he interviewed Barrack Obama too which apparently was some sort of big deal but anyway. ..

The Iggy podcast, of course, has been useful to me in getting some of the biographical details of Iggy’s life a little straighter and the podcast with Cale also shed some useful light on my subject as he produced the first Stooges album He played the viola on at least one song on that album and I think was at least partly responsible for the inspired, what I have always taken to be, single note piano pounding on ‘I wanna be your dog”.

Another extremely important audio source of information, and a gift straight from the gods for the likes of me, is the fact that for a couple of years now Iggy has had a semi-regular radio show on BBC 6 Music for two hours on Friday evenings.

This show proves two things- the first, that Iggy has a record collection that puts even Alan’s to shame. The second is that there is a great need for an Iggy Autobiography. I suspect, but don’t know, that he would be resistant to a straight forward, chronologically bond autobiography but it could work brilliantly in the same sort of form as Nick Ray’s fragmentary “I was interrupted”.

I am convinced of this because Iggy, now in his seventies, is a wonderful storyteller.

Sure it helps that his voice has the deep, considered, friendly, sincere. mid-western tones of your very best fantasy American uncle but more importantly it is clear that Iggy never took himself so seriously that it got in the way of him noticing and really paying attention to, the people around him.

He has a clear and intense interest in other people. He has a respect for knowledge and experience and basically, he’s been watching and listening for a long time. It’s no surprise that in the Marc Maron interview he mentions that one of his two favourite courses during the short time he attended college was Social Anthropology, (the other being Asian studies.)

He tells a lot of these stories in a relaxed, unaffected manner on the radio show “Iggy Confidential” and it will put you in mind of the likes of James Agee and Walker Evans and any other fine and sincere collector of the stories of real American lives in recent history. I’m a big Iggy Pop fan, you get that by now, but try it, it’s that good.

Another important secondary audio source is the John Peel Lecture given by Iggy in 2014 with the title “Free Music in a Capitalist Society”. I’ll write about that at more length later in this series but for now I want to acknowledge the fact that it has helped provide me with material for these posts.

3 The primary sources. The most important of all. It’s a cliché but no less true for that (which in itself is another cliché; thus helping to prove that it is impossible to write without cliché because language implies a certain level of cliché. It may be the skilled use of cliché that counts. That…,or cut-up techniques) that the best explanation of a poem or a song is the damn poem or song itself.

What’s the meaning of that poem? Read the poem, maybe out loud- that’s the meaning. What’s that song about? Listen to the song, maybe quite loud- that’s what the song is about.

It’s ok, if it doesn’t mean that much to you. It’s also ok if a repetitive, droning, strange, sort of hard rock but not really song with equally simple, repetitive lyrics cracks your heart open like an egg and changes the course of your life.

We all like different things, we all react in our own ways. Or rather we all play out small but significant variations on basically similar themes in response to our slightly unique but often routine reactions to the soup of primate hormones, social interactions, experiences and ideas that make our lives and personalities special, but not that much; or the same, but not quite.

It’s like the cliché thing. Most of our lives are a series of clichés; bond by restrictions of biology, history, environment and economics, but not so that you can actually pin down the formula, not so much that the mystery doesn’t leak in and leave people like Iggy watching the world and trying to make sense of it all through words and noise, and people like me trying to make sense of it my writing about him.

…and one live concert….

After all that I think we are going to have to start the biographical content next week. I promise I’m not going to get Tristam Shandy on you. I’m not that clever.