page_title: Iggy Pop
section_title: The Stooges era: 1968–1974
hierarchical_section_title: Iggy Pop / Music career / The Stooges era: 1968–1974
caption_attribution_description: Iggy Pop performing at Massey Hall, Toronto, 1973
context_page_description: James Newell Osterberg Jr., better known as Iggy Pop, is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. Designated the "Godfather of Punk", he was the vocalist and lyricist of influential proto-punk band the Stooges, who were formed in 1967 and have disbanded and reunited multiple times since.
  Initially playing a raw, primitive style of rock and roll, the Stooges sold few records in their original incarnation and gained a reputation for their confrontational performances, which often involved acts of self-mutilation by Pop. He had a long collaborative and personal friendship with David Bowie over the course of his career, beginning with the Stooges' album Raw Power in 1973. With both musicians having relocated to West Berlin to wean themselves off their respective drug addictions, Pop began his solo career by collaborating with Bowie on the 1977 albums The Idiot and Lust for Life with Pop usually contributing the lyrics. Throughout his career, Pop is well known for his outrageous and unpredictable stage antics, poetic lyrics and distinctive voice. He was one of the first performers to do a stage-dive and popularized the activity.
context_section_description: The seeds of Pop's stage persona were sown when he saw the Doors perform in 1967 at the University of Michigan and was amazed by the stage antics and antagonism displayed by singer Jim Morrison. Morrison's extreme behavior, while performing in a popular band, inspired the young Pop to push the boundaries of stage performance. Other influences on Pop's vocals and persona were Mick Jagger and James Brown.
  I attended two concerts by the Doors. The first one I attended was early on and they had not gotten their shit together yet. That show was a big, big, big influence on me. They had just had their big hit, "Light My Fire" and the album had taken off. ... So, here's this guy, out of his head on acid, dressed in leather with his hair all oiled and curled. The stage was tiny and it was really low. It got confrontational. I found it really interesting. I loved the performance ... Part of me was like, "Wow, this is great. He's really pissing people off and he's lurching around making these guys angry." People were rushing the stage and Morrison's going "Fuck you. You blank, blank, blank." You can fill in your sexual comments yourself. The other half of it was that I thought, "If they've got a hit record out and they can get away with this, then I have no fucking excuse not to get out on stage with my band." It was sort of the case of, "Hey, I can do that." There really was some of that in there.
  In addition to Jim Morrison and The Doors' influence on the band, Pop also attributes the Stooges getting jump started after seeing an all-girls rock band from Princeton, New Jersey, called The Untouchable. In a 1995 interview with Bust, he relates:
  And the other thing was we went to New York. We had gone to New York a couple of months before that just to check out the scene, and we had never been to a place like New York ... we went down around Eighth Street there where all the young tourists hang out, and we met these girls from New Jersey, from Princeton, they had a band called The Untouchable, and we're like, "Oh, you've got a band, sure, ha ha ha," and they said "Well, come to our house and see us play." And we didn't have anywhere to crash, and they played for us, and they completely rocked, and we were really ashamed.
  In 1968, one year after their live debut and now dubbed the Psychedelic Stooges, the band signed with Elektra Records, again following in the footsteps of The Doors, who were Elektra's biggest act at the time (according to Pop, guitarist Ron Asheton called Moe Howard to see if it was all right to call the band "The Stooges", to which Howard responded by merely saying "I don't care what they call themselves, as long as they're not The Three Stooges!" and hung up the phone). Pop himself told the story in the 2016 Jim Jarmusch documentary film about The Stooges, Gimme Danger. The Stooges' first album The Stooges, (on which Pop was credited as "Iggy Stooge"), was produced by John Cale in New York in 1969. Both it and the follow-up, Fun House produced by Don Gallucci in Los Angeles in 1970, sold poorly. Though the release of Fun House did not receive the recognition it expected, it was later ranked No. 191 in Rolling Stone's '500 Greatest Albums of All Time' in 2003. Shortly after the new members joined, the group disbanded because of Pop's worsening heroin addiction.
  In 1971, without a record deal, the Stooges kept performing in small clubs with a 5-piece line-up that included both Ron Asheton and James Williamson on guitars and Jimmy Recca on bass, Pop having fired Dave Alexander the previous year when he turned up for a gig unable to play because of his chronic alcoholism (he died in 1975). That year Pop and David Bowie met at Max's Kansas City, a nightclub and restaurant in New York City. Pop's career received a boost from his relationship with Bowie when Bowie decided in 1972 to produce an album with him in England. With Williamson signed on as guitarist, the search began for a rhythm section. However, since neither Pop nor Williamson were satisfied with any players in England, they decided to re-unite the Stooges. 
caption: Iggy Pop performing at Massey Hall, Toronto, 1973
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