

By the late Eighties, the rock veterans realized they might be in a position to help each other out. Iggy goes hair metal! Pop met Alice Cooper back in the Stooges days when they were front men for two of the wildest bands on the Detroit scene. He begins "Risky" by intoning, "Born in a corporate dungeon/Where people are cheated of life/I knew I could never stay home," before breaking into the low crooning style he settled into in the Eighties. Iggy contributed the disc's sole English language vocal. Nat Geo explored international music styles and cutting-edge electronics, and boasted an ensemble that included Bootsy Collins and Sly Dunbar. The same year he would compose his Oscar-winning score for The Last Emperor, Ryuichi Sakamoto assembled a mostly instrumental album in collaboration with bassist and producer Bill Laswell. Chas Ferry, an assistant engineer at the session, claims that the four musicians threw the song together in 20 minutes before the tape started rolling, then bashed out "Repo Man" in two takes, after which Iggy announced, "Well, I think that's good enough unless somebody has a problem with it." Iggy being Iggy, he had no problem quickly gathering up a punk supergroup: Steve Jones, the guitarist from the Sex Pistols, as well as Nigel Harrison and Clem Burke, the rhythm section from Blondie. Iggy Pop was in rough shape when director Alex Cox personally visited his apartment and asked him to record a song for his future cult classic, Repo Man. Steve Jones, Nigel Harrison and Clem Burke) (1984)

"That's how I came to find myself sandwiched between David Bowie and Iggy Pop, singing that song." Speaking of sandwiches, the sessions also completely upended Kerr's expectations regarding Bowie's diet: "I remember David Bowie eating a lot of cheese and thinking, I didn't think David Bowie would be a cheese-eating guy." "In his diplomatic way, Bowie said, 'Why don't the people who sing professionally step nearer the microphone, and those who don't step well back?" Simple Minds lead singer Jim Kerr later told Mojo. At the same time, a fledgling Scottish New Wave group was also recording at Rockford, which is how Simple Minds got to guest on an Iggy Pop track. While Iggy was recording Soldier at Rockford Studios in rural Wales, he and Bowie decided they needed a bloke-y chorus to sing "I want to be a criminal/Play it safe" in the style of a football chant. In the Eighties, Bowie would record his own versions of the songs he and Iggy had co-written in the Seventies, including the hit "China Girl," which helped Pop financially during a tough stretch. They composed the title track of the latter while laying on the floor, as Bowie plucked out a riff on his son Duncan's ukulele, built around the rhythm of the Armed Forces Network call signal.

It was in Germany that Bowie would produce two of Iggy's landmark albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life. Bowie visited Iggy and invited him on tour, and the two men struggled to get clean together in West Berlin. The intervention Iggy refers to occurred in 1976, after the Stooges breakup, when Pop spiraled out of control and checked into a UCLA mental hospital.
Iggy pop post pop depression professional#
"The friendship was basically that this guy salvaged me from certain professional and maybe personal annihilation – simple as that." Bowie met Iggy in 1971, and the following year the Thin White Duke would produce the final Stooges studio album, Raw Power.

"He resurrected me," Iggy said of David Bowie after his friend's death earlier this year. “Lust for Life” (with David Bowie) (1977).My guess is that there's something about it that they find profoundly embarrassing and for that reason it's titillating and it removes barriers somehow… The more I dance, the more their heads go down and stare at their toes, and the better they played. "He spotted that the guys didn't play as well if I wasn't dancing around," Iggy later recalled. Even more importantly, Cale's insight into the group's dynamics enabled him to coax an almost professional performance from the sloppy punks. Cale contributed some brilliant musical touches: That's his persistently thudding piano and haunting sleigh bells on "I Wanna Be Your Dog," and his viola provides the drone around which the 10-minute "We Will Fall" ebbs and flows. Stooges manager Danny Fields tapped Lou Reed's former foil in the Velvet Underground to oversee the band's debut album, which proved an inspired choice. The Stooges, “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (feat.
