Iggy Pop - Lust for Life
Written By: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 09.09.1977
Imagine Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, James Brown and David Bowie merging into the body of a single artist. What an incredible performance we would get. Well, we did get it, and he did not even know he was all of those things. I am talking, of course, about Iggy Pop.
Iggy Pop was the nickname given to him by members of his early band, "The Iguanas". After his friend Jimmy Popp lost all of his hair, including his eyebrows, Iggy responded by shaving off his own eyebrows, and the rest is history. The name Iggy Pop stayed with him for good.
The lust for life is a basic instinct in every human being. Even when life puts difficulties in our way, we find a way to overcome them. The will to live is stronger than anything.
That will to live was the basic force that drove the creation of Iggy Pop's second album, "Lust for Life", released on 09.09.1977.
Iggy Pop was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a father who taught English and a Jewish mother who worked as a secretary. Early in his career, Iggy was a drummer. Only after realizing that his place was at the front of the stage did he form "The Stooges" with his school friend Ron Asheton, Ron's brother Scott Asheton and bassist Dave Alexander.
Pop, who had been a shy kid in his youth, turned out to be a wild stage animal. "They have a good rhythm and a strange singer who blends sensuality and violence onstage," said the "Elektra" representative who recommended signing them.
Pop, who as mentioned was shy in everyday life, moved across the stage with feline energy while constantly interacting with the crowd. He did not shy away from bizarre gestures either, such as rolling around in broken glass and smearing his body with peanut butter. And, of course, Stage Diving, that leap into the audience that Pop was the first artist daring enough to perform.
Pop took the inspiration for his uninhibited stage behavior from Jim Morrison, lead singer of "The Doors", whom he saw perform in 1967 while he was a student at the University of Michigan.
At the end of the day, "The Stooges" became a band that, in hindsight, served as a magnet and a guiding light for groups such as "Television", "Nirvana", "The Smiths", "Sex Pistols", "Siouxsie and the Banshees" and others.
"The Stooges", like "The Velvet Underground", became highly influential in hindsight, but struggled to sell albums, perhaps because they chose to play a lot of punk in its various forms. Iggy, who struggled with drug addiction over the years, was left penniless, until his good friend David Bowie, who was addicted himself, decided to try to save "The Stooges" from financial collapse, much as he had done a year earlier with "Mott the Hoople", who benefited from the huge hit "All the Young Dudes", which Bowie wrote for them.
Bowie produced "The Stooges"' third album "Raw Power" (1973), which also failed commercially. The band broke up afterward.
Bowie and Iggy Pop, both addicted to drugs, went on a European tour and afterward drifted as far as Germany in an effort to get clean. Both wanted to live and understood that they could not go on that way. While staying in the house where they were recovering from addiction, the idea of recording an album began to take shape. The album was created in a studio located not far from their home, close to the Berlin Wall, which had not yet fallen, at Hansa Studios, known for their distinctive acoustics and sound, and a place many artists flocked to in order to record their albums.
The album was recorded quickly, partly because Iggy Pop wanted to receive more credit and feel that he had contributed more to an album released under his own name, after feeling that he had contributed too little of himself to his first album "The Idiot", created with David Bowie half a year earlier.
The album includes songs about addiction and the desire to break free from it. "Lust for Life" deals exactly with that place. The addictive rhythm at the beginning of the song actually came from the Morse-code-like sound of the opening theme of the television channel Iggy Pop and David Bowie watched while going through recovery.
At the time, "Lust for Life" made less of an impact, and only about twenty years later, when it was featured on the soundtrack of the film "Trainspotting", did it receive the recognition it deserved.
The song best remembered from the album at the time is "The Passenger", inspired by the way Jim Morrison saw modern life as one long journey inside a car. Over the years, the song received many cover versions, including recordings by "Siouxsie and the Banshees" and Michael Hutchence.
Iggy Pop and David Bowie took the album's title from Irving Stone's novel about the life of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh.
The album cover, photographed by Andy Kent, captures Iggy Pop in a distilled "nice guy next door" moment. It is a cover that reflects the positive change in Iggy Pop once he began the process of getting clean from drugs.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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