‘… it’s my album of freedom. I’m not saying that it’s a great album or some fantastic work of art, but I love it and it means a lot to me’
Iggy Pop, on finishing The Idiot in 1977.
I confess to getting a bit obsessed with the whole Iggy/Bowie/Berlin* thing, some incredible music came out of it Lust For Life, Low, Station to Station, Heroes, Lodger**. David Bowie and Iggy Pop decamping off to Berlin to try to clean up/take insane amounts of drugs/make haunting music/score some second-hand Weimar decadence – saving lives and Iggy’s career in the process, plus giving Bowie the chance to hide away and be Pop’s touring piano player for the next year.
This is such a downer album, in a good way – put it on, sink down into the cushions and slow your racing thoughts to a flickering barely perceptible crawl as the LP washes over you.
I agree with Mr Osterberg about The Idiot, it isn’t a fantastic piece of art but it is occasionally a great album. My very favourite track today is the 8 minute closer ‘Mass Production’, inspired by the decaying sounds and sights of industry back in Detroit, it does something that is always guaranteed to grab me by the cabooblies, by straddling that great brilliant/boring boundary. I never used to see the point in it at all, until one night I was sitting right here creating a little of that Hansa decadence myself, some lit candles, two glasses of red wine^ and some novelty slippers^^; it just clicked and Xeroxed its way into my affections right there and then. That slow-slow beat is totally infectious and, hey, sounds mechanical as Iggy intones his hymn to numbness over the top.
Cutting back to the beginning, ‘Sister Midnight’ is a tough baritone funker, featuring some great guitar, as always, from Carlos Alomar. Iggy described the sound of The Idiot as James Brown meets Kraftwerk and this is as close to JB as the album gets, Iggy’s voice humanizing the whole deal.
Even better is my very favourite track on the album yesterday, ‘Nightclubbing’ which until the film Trainspotting was released I thought was a Grace Jones song. Words cannot begin to describe how much I love that rudimentary, fucked-milking-machine rhythm, Phil Palmer’s astonishing guitaring and Iggy’s dead intonation of the lyrics; this is a man who took being jaded to absolutely Olympian heights at this point in his life. It is a seriously great track.
Hey, I feel lucky tonight
Fun
I’m gonna get stoned and run around
All aboard for funtime
‘Funtime’ is yet another missive from the Kingdom of Numb, Iggy’s lyrics at his most fittingly banal as the music churns and squirms beneath him. I’m not quite so sure what makes ‘Baby’ such a treat, Iggy giving it that whole ‘Mutant Sinatra’ thing again over what sounds like a simplistic cabaret backing track – in a good way. There’s a certain amount of Jim Morrison being channelled through the prism of ‘Baby’ too.
Dusted off and tidied up years later for Let’s Dance I think ‘China Girl’ is way better in Iggy’s paranoid iteration, you can really hear something feral and sharp lurking in the background, some kind of repressed chaos. I may be an innocent young rural Welsh boy but try to sell me that line about ‘China Girl’ being about an infatuation with a Vietnamese lady, rather than heroin and I’ll blacken your eye. Definitely unromantic opiate rather than the romantic hope I ate.
I find ‘Dum Dum Boys’ an interesting one, beginning as it does with a role call of the Stooges members and their fates. It is an oddly poised track, perched somewhere equidistant between eulogy and dismissal, I am a sucker for the growl of it though. Iggy’s assertion that ‘I can’t seem to speak the language’ any more, tells us exactly where his head was it in respect of the punk scene.
I love that The Idiot was such a great sidestepping of the prevailing musical tide, effectively inventing post-punk whilst most of the saps were still trying to work out what punk was. The man was at least 6 years ahead of his time.
Iggy’s earlier nihilism had gone, leaving us with a more uncertain adult Pop (with, or without the capital ‘p’), The Idiot comes from an honest place and a fairly well-intentioned one too; sometimes simplistically so, but het that’s idiocy for ya.
Prince Myshkin would be proud.
836 Down.
*I’m deliberately overlooking the fact that The Idiot was mostly completed at Chateau d’Herouville in France and not in Berlin. The truth doesn’t fit what I wanted to write about.
**not that I’ve ever heard Lodger***, but sometimes I pretend to have to seem cooler to muso friends at work.
***or had even heard of it until a certain Mr Hubner mentioned it, years and years ago.
^yup, a whole two. Just colour me Bogart.
^^it is a little-known fact that Iggy Pop and Bowie spent the whole Berlin period wearing a startling array of novelty slippers, without any regard for their health, or street cred. True story.
Iggy looks “chillaxed” on Gilligan’s island talking about the record. CB always likes to learn things and Pop bringing out the drill is now in my kit bag.
I exist to inform and educate.
When he busted out the drill, all i could think of is “he’s my hero”
Thank you for covering this one. I see it occasionally in my travels and I always think I should grab it and then I don’t and find other things to get and then I forget about it for a while until I see it again… you make me think I oughta just buy the damn thing and get on with it!
I didn’t like it at first because I wanted a full-on Stooges assault, my brain cleared later though. It’s an LP with some real depth I say.
Depth from Iggy? Wowzers! Hahaha
Most people seem to like this album (and indeed, Iggy post Stooges) more than me. That’s OK.
I had a moment of insight reading this, when you revealed your love of the story. I think that summarises things nicely for me: I like the story more than Iggy’s albums.
Thank you for helping me clarify that.
Curiously, I have been tackling the full Bowie discography lately (only having listened to Ziggy before I began this adventure) and I am currently in the midway point of the Berlin trilogy; that is, Heroes.
As for The Idiot, it is certainly not an album one would expect from Iggy following his work with The Stooges. I quite like its mechanical darkness, and Dum Dum Boys is my favorite track of the bunch. It has one sick guitar line!
Hey Matt, I think ‘mechanical darkness’ is a great phrase. I’ll steal that from you.
Well, thanks! hahahahaha
Excellent post, sir. There are few Iggy albums that I’d care to own on vinyl, but (naturally) this is one of them. A real highlight and, for my money, consistently great.
Thanks Mr J. It’s a sound he’s almost gone back to with ‘Post Thingy Depression’ too.
It’s never a very expensive one this.
Post Thingy is one of my favourite albums of the last few years. So much so I’m away to listen to it just now.
… and I really should pick this one up pronto.
Perhaps you could market a line of Lego novelty slippers.
Sign me up for a pair.
Nothing is better than stepping on lego…
It is the painfulest thing in the whole world.
I don’t know this one but I have been listening to Station To Station and Low quite a bit recently, so I’m also in a Berlin kinda mood.
It’s a little known fact but Station To Station was actually recorded in Swansea. Bowie and Iggy just thought Berlin would sound a bit cooler.
Low was recorded in Auchtermuchty, but none of the critics could pronounce it , so everyone has always pretended that one was cut in Berlin too.
Two true stories for you, right there!
Wow. I’m actually pretty amazed they lived through the insane hedonism of 80s Swansea! Most people didn’t.
I know, I know – imagine going out drinking 9 pints of Brains Bitter and getting chips on the way home … on a Tuesday night! truly, we are not worthy.
It’s amazing to imagine but it was that Swansea-night-out vibe that inspired the song Young Americans.
I know. But then you have to think about all those fabulous blues musicians who come from the Auchtermuchty delta like Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson – arguable it’s a place that may even have made a bigger contribution to popular culture than Swansea. Which is not something to say lightly.
I heard Lust for Life (the album) for the first time this year – and adored it!
So I’m keen to hear this one too, what a year of productivity.
I’d like to use it in class as an example of what can be accomplished in a year, I suppose I’d have to gloss over the bits about the insane amounts of drugs/novelty slippers?
This is a lower key album, still great though – I suspect they were recorded on different drugs.
I would tell your class about the drugs, but personally I would always want to protect impressionable young minds from the dangers of normalizing novelty slippers.
I was just looking at China Girl the other night and added it to my list of possible Original vs Cover songs for my series. It might have just moved up the list a little more than it was.
Synchronicity! I prefer Iggy’s version because it is a little less sugar coated, although I really like the Bowie one too. It was such a great period for music, this.
Here’s all I know about Iggy Pop. I didn’t know he co-wrote an album with Bowie for example but I know THIS:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Iggy_Pop
Wow! I had absolutely no idea!
You’d be shocked at the rock stars on Star Trek. Mick Fleetwood played a fish man…
Actually lounge singer James Darren was a semi-regular character in the last season, playing a singer named “Vic Fontaine”.