Pushkin. Iggy Pop is one of the craziest rock and roll frontmen to ever grace the stage. As a lead singer of The Stooges, Iggy was known for bending and contorting his sometimes blooded body while feverishly pacing the stage like a wild animal. His fifty year career has been as tumultuous as his performance style. After starting the Stooges in Michigan in sixty seven, the band released three albums, including fun House and rob Power. The band eventually disbanded in the mid seventies, and Iggy went solo, recording a series of albums, some of which were instant classics like the two recorded with David Bowie, and others more experimental actually some of my personal favorites. At seventy five years old, He's just released his newest album, produced by Andrew Watt, Every Loser. On today's episode, Iggy shares incredible stories with Very Ruben about his career. Their conversation was so great we decided to split it into two consecutive episodes. Today. In part one, will hear Iggy reminisce about recording fun House in Los Angeles and the first time he saw the ocean He also talks about the tight knit rock scene in Detroit and how it was in some ways led by a local Madman, writer, activist, and music manager named John Sinclair. And stay put at the end of this episode to hear his song off of Iggy's newest album, This is Broken Record liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Rubin in conversation with Iggy Pop. Rick recorded his side in parts unknown, and Iggy recorded his side of the conversation at Shanger Law in Malibu. He what's happening to me? How are you feeling? Hey, I'm alright, good. It's good to see you. Good air up here, Yeah, really really nice. Yeah, you're sitting in my usual spot. That's where I usually hang out. Oh, that's great. That's a good spot. I used to drive over here a lot when when La would get you know, too close. You know, I understood. When did you live in La? Well, I lived here around here seventy seventy three, seventy four and then a little bit into seventy five, so about two and a half years. But I would come out a lot in the eighties. You sort of had to come here to do things. You know a lot in nineties two? And when you when you left LA, did you moved to New York? When I left LA in the seventies, I hitched onto David Bowie's Station a Station tour and started writing with him as that tour progressed across America until we got busted in Rochester and then from there went to Europe. How did you guys hook up in the first place? We hooked up originally when I was staying in New York in nineteen seventy one at the loft department of a guy named Danny Fields, who was a key positive force for people like the Ramons myself. He helped out Lou Reed in a lot of ways, all sorts of all sorts of good people. Did Danny sign you to Electra? Danny was the guy who originally came to the Union Ballroom at University of Michigan to see the MC five and we were opening and he saw us, and he recommended. We spoke, and he recommended to Jack Holtzman that well, if you're going to sign the five, maybe you should sign this other band too. I thought they had something amazing. He was he was the guy. Yeah, they didn't have a functioning A and R. A lot of a lot of labels didn't at the time, so he was there publicist. But he was the kind of guy that Jack Holtzmann used as the in house hipster, you know, the guy who knew what was going on and what was cool. And apparently he had good taste, because at that time I can't imagine any other label signing those two bands well exactly, and Danny had very, very event taste. He was a very intelligent, well educated guy. He'd graduated Princeton University, and he was a kind of a low key, you know, kind of guide were a little suede or leather jacket but not too flashy, and slacks and that was about that was about as far towards straightness he would go. But he didn't. He wasn't flamboyant about anything, and he sort of fit right in with the back room crowd at Max's with Andy. Warhol would hold court with a group of sort of young eccentrics in New York. They were like people who should have been the Kennedys and they weren't. They were like intelligent, nice looking American kids gone hard left suddenly, and if you became a Warhol star, and we're willing to work in his movies. You got a little paper, a little sort of piece of paper similar to the draft cards at the time, with Andy Warrell's signature that you could present at Max's Kansas City and get all you could eat, but you had to pay for your own drinks. Wow. So yeah, that's how he paid his feel. Yeah. Yeah. It was a little oval room at the back of a steak and beer joint on Union Square, and you would have. The first time I went in there was because Danny was calling me on his phone. I was staying in his loft and I was watching mister Smith Goes to Washington on his TV. And I was just almost in tears at the sincerity of his willie just to take on the corruption, and you know, I was relating it to the music industry. I have was plenty angry at the time. And he had to call me three times. He said, there's some people down here. They really want to meet you. It's David Bowie and his group and you could do yourself a favorite, damn it. So I finally, yeah, I finally said, all right, all right, you know, okay, we'll meet these strange people, and I went down there one in the morning and Lou Lou Reid was down there, David Tony Defreese his manager who had a manager get up Big Cigar for quote, the Big Frow, you know. But also down there was an Ultra Violet and Taylor Mead, who was just a strange, very flamboyant street character. There was a wonderful guy named Donald Lyons in that group who was a professor of Greek. He could teach you, yeah, actual he spoke Greek and Latin. But it was just a cool guy, right. It's like someone it was like my dad without being judgmental, you know, yeah, you know, just somebody like you know, wow, it educated man who wears a suit and everything, but it's just like easy going, you know. And gosh, who else was down there? Baby Jane Holtz was there that night and they all just sit around and chitter chatter a lot. Had you had been aware of Bowie's music at this point in time or not? Really, I was only aware that he had. He'd mentioned the Stooges or maybe it was me in a little piece in the Melody Maker magazine as one of his favorite groups or favorite songs, and I can't remember. It was right around that time that I heard what he was what he was doing, which was the album I think it was Hunky Dory and it had Life on Mars, and I remember listen to it and I thought, well, this is not my cup of tea, but whoa, this guy can do things musically, Holy cow, you know, they're incredible grasp of melody and not only chord changes, but he would actually do harmonic shifts and uh and transpositions and well, oh, dear, dear, dear me. And he had he had the range in his voice to carry what they call lift a chorus, you know, the old lift the chorus singing the song the refrain. So that was out I think at the time, and I was listening to that and that was my That was my first impression. Bold, not any it's not at all related, like you know, tough bro rock music, but there are skills. This person has actual skills. Who were the tough bro rock music that spoke to you in those days at the time. Mitch Rider in the Detroit Wheels, for instance. Yeah, yeah, he's still alive, right, yes he is, and he's still doing us. They still do the same songs. And gigs and Johnny b who is amazing, you know, one of the finest drummers in America. Still will go out, still play with him. But Johnny also did like Stevie Nicks tours. You know, he gets he gets good work. Who else music like that. I always liked the MC five quite a bit. There were some things I liked more than others, like like with anybody else, you know, I liked. I liked very much the Stones albums where they did mostly covers, that was what I was listening to it first. I liked very, very very much the first album by the Paul Butterfield Blues band, We're Born in Chicago, and Melodon Easy. They were doing a lot of little Wallder and stuff, and they had a mixed band. Some of the guys were born into the White Side and some of the guys born into the Black tradition. And sam Ley was on drums, who was later it was nice to me and then he played on Higher sixty one. Revisited the Dylan album That's sound. Did you like Hendrix Hendrix incredibly much? Hendrix? I saw him because we were in the Midwest at the time, in the old days when the groups would come over. You had to get from the east coast to the west or vice versa. And Anne Arbor and Detroit was one of the stops. So I saw Jimmy Hendricks in ann Arbor, Michigan, in a converted bowling alley on a stage about twelve inches high. And I was right in front of that stage, and he had a single stack and Mitch Mitchell on drums and Knoll on bass, and he wore the suit with the eyes and he played the hell out of it. And the stage was right in front of the men's room at I remember before the break, see Mitch Mitchell had to go into the bedroom and come back. You know, it's a little odd things that you remember like that right right there. And in Detroit, Michigan, at the Grande Ballroom, where the Stooges played a lot, and especially with the MC five. We opened for the Who, we opened for Cream, we opened for Sly and the Family Stone. You could see Van Morrison, you know, everybody played there. And again the very close quarters kind of must have held a thousand people. One window, very hot and low procenium, so you were really right there. You could really see it, really hear it for what it was led Zeppelin also led Zeppelin didn't want to use there were these two tiny dressing rooms next to the stage. They didn't want to use that, so they used the manager's office and walked through the crowd to get on stage. But in those days, when Jimmy Page hit his guitar, the sound you heard was coming out of his amp. It was not miked through APA. In those days. At an average ballroom there, PA would be used only for the vocals and they'd usually be one mic placed under the snare drum on the battering side of the bass drum, goin to collect everything and that was about it, you know. So it was a it was a more organic sound, and it was great if you were in the right spot, you know, would you move position to get it to sound as good as he could? Like yes, next, yes, oh hell yeah, yeah that's it, you bet I did. Yeah, and you push yeah, push my way absolutely because you would have to do that, you know, if you were on the guitar side, you'd hear more of that and you wouldn't hear the bass much. Amazing. Yeah. When the who played there, Townsend had the Leslie speaker, you know, the large wooden box with the JBL twelve in speaker and then the fan going around him and want to want to do that to your guitar, And he had that up on stage and in those days it was very hard. H Sly had a B three, so they had to bring to B three. There's no B three in the Psychedelic Ballroom. They had somebody had to get that B three in there and get it out. It was a big deal. That's a huge piece of stuff, you know, So things were different. I always preferred those songs. It's a different world down and a great sound engineer can do a lot of stuff to manipulate what's coming out of the amp. Sly, But the problem is it can become sammy to my ears, in other words, to my ears, still, a drum kit sounds like a drum kit. It's very, very exciting. It's a boom when you hit the whack or didn't didn't ding whatever it is, and a bass sounds like a bass, etcetera, etcetera. And I usually prefer minimum interference. But it's it's different now. It's better to use some smaller amps, and you know, I get that, but something is lost with size. Yeah, it's hard to say what's better, though, you know, it's just I wouldn't say better, just say you know, yeah, it's just different. I just recently recorded an album with Neil Young in that room, and he had you did that? I heard the first one. It's good. Yeah, yeah, we did that there, and yeah it was all live and all of the amps were in the room and they were playing blisteringly loud, and yeah, yeah we miked it. But on every mic you can hear every instrument, you know, because it's just a barrage of sound in the space. That's I like that. Yeah, I like that a lot. That's I did a couple albums that way, especially the second moment of the Studge is called fun House, and you know that's my favorite of the studges. That's what I liked the best too. We had little we had little baffles in the room, you know, the mini baffle, like about as big as that screen you're on right now, but nothing, nothing too much to separate. The engineer on that was a young Englishman named Byron ross my Ring, and I thought I'd never seen such a dashing young englishman. If he didn't wear an ask out, he should have. And he looked like ready for yachting, you know. And apparently it was his second album and the first one he'd done over here was Barbera Streisando and he went right, yeah, right from that to us and he didn't bat an eye. There was a producer hired to do it named Don Golucci, who had played the organ on The Kingsman on Louis Louis, and Don was worried about. Well, they tried separating us the first day and we were we wanted to cry. It didn't work, so Buyer said, don't worry, it will set this something fighting. It was fine. He wasn't bothered. Where was it recorded at that killer studio? It's the Elector Studios that's right there on Lasienega Boulevard, two doors from the down the hill from Santa Monica on the east side of the street. It was a it's still a studio, I think, but it was the Elector, Yes, I believe, so Japanese architect that was designed, you know, spirit or no Gucci, very minimal architecture with a nice little Bonsai garden and just a nice place. One recording room, you know, mid size. It's all you needed. Really. It was done right there. We stayed at the Tropicana and we would all walk to the corner together with the guitars at the drop sticks and everything each day and wait at the light by the liquor store there Laziannega Lanes and then cross and walk down the hill about forty steps to the to the studio and we each each day we would do one song over and over and over until we thought we that was the take, that where everything went right. That's all we did it. We're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with more from Rick Rubin and Aggy Pop. We're back with more from Rick Rubin and Iggy Pop, who are talking about the making of the Stooges nineteen seventy album fun House. How are those songs written? Most of that album I wrote in my bedroom in Michigan for them to play, for the band to play. I understood the strengths of the Ashton brothers. They had a special timing and especially the drummer. The drummer was Elvis Redux. It was Elvis Presley in like every town probably had and Elvis, and he was our Elvis. He was a good looking, large kid and you just looked at him, and you knew this guy had something, and he had been a teenager he dropped out of school and I was a local drummer and he kept bugging me to teach him to play drums. So finally, when I wanted to start a group, I did and he was very good, very good. And Ron had these beautiful A lot of guitar players that are good have these beautiful hands, they have the fingers. He had lovely fingers, and he was playing bass at the time, and he's sort of in a walking style, and it was a very good bassist. And at one point I tried to do guitar and I didn't have the talent. I said, Ron, you're the guitarist. Now I'm gonna front, And that's how we sort of got the group together. It was a three of us, and then their friend Dave came in later to play bass and and he did a really good job with very simple skills, and he was stayed out of the way of what else was going on and held it down well. So basically I would write up something and then go down into our rehearsal room in the farmhouse and pull teeth to get everybody together for a rehearsal is sets banded life in those days, and we rehearse it up and then we go out on the weekend and play the new song in our sets until we had a whole repertoire. And the big number that Ron red the acet which I think is my favorite number on the thing, is tv I too, And that was his. Yeah, yeah, that's the best one because he can actually play a guitar. I couldn't. But Ron had a very slow event horizon in his life. He would play like on the first record that he had, the one big one, I want to be your dog riff. Wow, what a riff, you know? And for this one he had, I just kept knocking on his door in the band house until he said, all right, all right, all write a song with you. And he started playing tv I the way it sounds about three minutes into the song where it's really he's going very furious, and I thought about it. I said, Okay, that's great, but look, if it's gonna develop work as a song, play it like started out like Hooker, like John Lee. Hooker started out single string with a droning string, and that's he. He liked Hooker too, so we started that way. Then I gave him the variation where instead of da da da da da da da da da da, where it's just dada dada that suffices as a chorus, you know, for for the way we played something that's just a little a little wrinkle, yeah, you know. And then Uh developed the part where it kind of melds into the the just the drone. When did the lyrics come there in Michigan in the farmhouse, It wasn't as hard as the first album. I remember that they just kind of came down on the street. Was originally down on the Beach and yeah, I've always liked beach culture, and I would singing about down on the beach and where the stars shine and how the open feeling at night. And then I thought, well, look, I'm in this rock culture now, maybe something more people can relate to. And at some point we took a trip to New York and I was pretty high one night and I was hanging out on Eighth Street when it was very active between like university place of sixth, and everybody was down on the street and there were so many young faces milling around that everybody seemed interesting. So I took it from there you know, and it was sort of it was sort of meant to be also a little bit about esthetics. I was just fascinated by everything in the big city, you know, whether it was it might be an attractive girl or it might be just a really interesting guy. But faces. It started from faces, you know. So that one was that was like that TV I I remember that came from We did a gig at a junior high school in ann Arbor, Forsyth Junior High and we were playing We weren't playing that number, we didn't have it yet, but there was one of the students at the junior high she was laying on her back on in the what they call the multi purpose room where you play you know, it's a gymnaisy, it's a luge shrew, it's a dance all which she was just laying there sort of taking it in on her back with her arms folded behind her. And I thought, but she's just taken this like like watching TV. And I thought about that, and then I always liked the CBS logo yeah at the time, the eye the Big Guy. So I thought TV I, well, that's interesting, you know. So that was that was where that came from. So cool. I always loved the song and never had any idea what it meant. Yeah, so it's it's cool and who It takes on its own pretty simple, She's check it out. But it still takes on its own mythical you know. I've been hearing the song my pretty much my whole life, so it takes on a mythical meaning beyond. But knowing that it actually is rooted in reality is really interesting. I tried to keep it away from the strict you know, I did it go into the carnal details or implications. I thought it was more fun to be just I just like the TV I yeah, yeah, just the sound of that. You know, it's funny. I think about it a lot lately. Where Orwell In nineteen eighty four had this idea that the televisions in England would all have an eye that could spy on you. And now, of course you know that could be done through your phone. Yeah, I'm looking at one right now. I'm looking right, looking at me, looking at you. That's how yeah right now, yep, yep. When's the first time you ever saw that the ocean here? It was when we came to make fun House and we all went out. We stayed in the Tropic Cannas, so you had to do is go straight out Santa Monica Boulevard, which at the time was a real boulevard with a grassy medium in the middle, and you'd see horses sometimes there. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And we just drove out and we went to the beach. Me and the Sacks player Steve McKay maybe I think one of the roadies, and we went to the beach right by the Santa Monica Pier and I saw it and the moon was up even though it was light, and I remember I was not upset, but I was kind of bummed because I felt that the moonwalk had ruined the moon. You know, I liked the moon the way it was. I didn't like the idea of God. Now there's some guy up there, you know, playing golf. And I remembered that. So it was nineteen seventy. That's pretty great. That's a great take. I've never heard that take about the moon, that the man going to the moon rounding. Yeah, yeah, in nineteen seventy. And the other big impression on me that I used it in a lyric later on Raw Power. It was I had never felt the ocean breeze on a good day. It has a pitter patter to it. It's not like a light wind that blows constantly. It hits your face and it hits your body that you know. I have this really on again, off again rhythm to it, and man, dide, I like that, you know, So I used that in and give me danger on the raw power I was. It kissed me like the ocean breeze. I loved the ocean breeze. It made a big impression. Now, so I was twenty three. You know, some people are raised right by the ocean, but once I saw it, I've always gone way out of my way to be near the ocean as much as I possibly can. It's interesting that down on the Street started as down on the Beach, and it sounds like at the time you wrote it, you hadn't yet seen the ocean. Well, the beach at that time was we have many, many, many lakes in the Midwest. So the particular beach I was talking about was a place called Silver Lake, and it was a little lake where the we would all go on the weekends or in the summer. You know, it's like a bigger than a pond. You know, maybe maybe a mile across, maybe not, you know, like that, and you had this little kind of a dirt slope that was that was a beach in a changing area, you know, like a county park that was. That was the beach. And I had been when I did my first full professional gig. I was a drummer straight out of high school and I was playing in my high school cover band all summer in a beach area of Michigan on Lake Michigan called Harbor Springs, and it had sand dunes and everything. So we had that culture, but it's not the same as the ocean. Yeah, how would you describe your relationship to music? It gives me in my connection to emotion, and I feel if I don't have that connection to emotion, I don't feel for some reason interested or that whatever I might be doing is worth doing it. It doesn't mean I have to go around having emotion every second of the day. That that doesn't work that way. But it started out as I'm sure you've felt this, you know, maybe you're I was on the school bus listening to be My Baby by the Runouts, and you're you have this wave of I don't know what that Is. You know, it's like this adolescent yearning, that sort of thing. But on the other hand, you also listen to Louie Louis by the kigsvid you know, you want to have a wild time a little bit, or some of you get excited, you know, the different things. And I've always been susceptible to it, right up through when I started listening to things. My parents brought up Classical, one of these ten great classics, you know, one of these albums, and they had some revel on it. They had Bolo the Ravel's Bowl there, and I loved it. I was only twelve thirteen when I heard that and liked it, maybe a little more than the records Elvis was making at the time, because he wasn't doing his greatest stuff, you know. It was more like a return to Sender or something. He sounded great with the music. I liked it, but it wasn't you know, it wasn't the greatest. Although Return to Sender was funny because I always thought he was singing return to Cinder, and I saw, my god, he's singing about regeneration, of course. Yeah, and I did it, yeah, you know, I was. I don't know, you hear funny things when nobody tells you what's going on, but that's pretty much it. It was that, and then at some point I wanted to do things and if I could sing like Dion Warwick, I would have tried to find backreck and done music like that, which is so wonderful, you know. But I didn't have that, and I remembered listening to Gloria by them, and I thought I could do that sort of thing, you know, So starting from what can You Do? And then later for fun House, it was that James Brown was a huge influence and the bands he had at that time, the drums and bass, the syncopations. I thought, well, I could be influenced. I could do something that had my own particular flavor of that. You know. It didn't have to sound like that. I'm not going to try to do that, but that was the idea behind it. It's interesting something recently where it described the Stooges as the first rock band that didn't have any of the influence of soul or R and B, and I thought, wow, these people don't really listen to music just in terms of the groove of it. It's so exactly incredibly groovy and there's there's so much music that's not you know, that's just cold. But that's not Chad Scottie. I taught him Stax volt speeds. Yeah, did you become boom? You know that sort of thing. And a lot of the music I don't like is when the artist goes into what I would call aping, you know, aping something that's good. Well, we could do it almost like that, but maybe for a different crowd, did you know. I don't want to hear that. But when you try to take the qualities the qualities and do that in your own way, that's sort of the stuff I like more. I have a funny question about the relationship between music and time, and I'll tell you why I'm asking about it is and I'm wondering, in my case if it has to do with when I was born and what I listened to. When I think of the Beatles, and I think of the Beatles was a very long time ago, and then I think of the Stooges, and I think of the Stooges as much more modern. I don't think of it from the Beatles era. Yet the Stooges existed when the Beatles were the Beatles. The Stooges came into some degree of popularity only very recently, and I think that has a lot to do with it, because it's the social cues that you cannot ignore that come from the outside. The type what subthing is the Beatles right off bang that stuff. Once they got out of Hamburg and got the suits and started singing about love Bang, that was popular. And so I think because of that they have to carry a certain baggage. The students that don't have that problem. It was so obscure and so small, and we'd go places sometimes if we if we went out of the Detroit area and maybe went across to Ohio, we'd have twenty people. You know, that was it, you know, so little by little the group became more popular later, and I think for that reason, and as our listeners are younger, although there are a lot of old people who like it, you know. But I think that might have something to do with it. Although I've been really happy that the group gets included more and more in discussion and portrayal of what's called classic rock, because it is classic suck it away you know in a way. But you know, so I would say it might have something to do with that, and the music also was cut clean, like a Corvette, like Ferrari, like no Gucci, like Jean Prouvet, like clean cut lines done very very simply. Maybe helps it age pretty well. The music hits hard and it kind of it has its power, but it's not it's not grabber music. It's not music that reaches right out and take sure you know you know not those not those first two. And part of a lot of that was the personality of the brothers. They were just drawn back individuals, both of them and Um did not put themselves forward very easily, did not say a lot very easily, just had something a slow groove. It might have been because they lost their father at a keytone, and I think it was traumatic for them. They were in their young teens, and I remember Scott saying toward the end of his life, so well, we just didn't have the guidance. There was a comic named Jonathan Ross who has a popular show in the UK, and we played his show and then we sat for a talk and he sort of asked the brothers. You know, I said, now, if you hadn't been in the Stooges, what would you have done with your life? And immediately didn't miss a beat. Jet pilot race car driver like, yeah, bag right, I was. I wanted to cheer at the boy. Yeah. Honestly, the father had been a marine fighter pilot. Yeah, and I think he had trouble adjusting to life after that experience. After the war was over. He was a macho man, you know, and he was he was teaching was to be a jet pilot, the other way, to be a race car driver a minute, so yeah, yeah, yeah, but there was an abrupt stop to that and all of a sudden, you know, I think it affected them in a deep way. Would you say you were very different than the other members of the band, or would you say you were very different from everybody? Well, I'd say the latter. I didn't realized that at the time. I thought it was just different from them. But of all the people with whom I wanted to communicate, they were the most difficult to communicate with. It was. It was a real challenge, and I did manage and we did some great stuff together. But yeah, that's a good point. I never thought about it that way. And I read an interview years ago with one of our one of our roadies. He was now I'm a very mature man and works at Chrysler. And he just said, well, the rest of the band they were just you know, they're just regular guys from from down river. But you know, he's not regular. So that was his point of view. I listened to him, and I thought, oh, maybe, so maybe I'm a little different, possible. I think I think the difference is and it's not any uh, it's not a good or bad. It just seems like you have a more let's call it an artistic temperament and good and bad comes along with that. And they had a more workman like jet pilot, you know, mentality, And those are just two very different ways. Even though they had they had a lot of artistic talent, yes, you know, but that's different. They could do stuff really well if you gave them the right setting. Wow, yeah they could execute. But yes, you had a different vision than they had. And that's yes I did. And against better or worse, it's just they're all kinds of people with different strengths and weaknesses. And if they were like you, the students wouldn't be like the Stuges. So the fact that it is what it is is it was perfect. Well, you know years later when the rom did some interviews when we weren't together, before we reunited and then even after, where he said, yeah, you know, we could have been the American Stones, And what I would say to that was, no, the American Stones are aerosmiths. And that's because the way things are done in America. If you're going to be the American Stones, you need a singer who can sing rings around Mick Jagger. You need a guitar player who can play more cleanly and incisively than Keith Richards. You need a band that can do a range of music that's palatable to a large group in a nation of three hundred million. That's that's the nature of our of the USA. And you know that wasn't what we were ever going to be good at. But but that's how they felt, you know, what Ron felt about it, not Scott. Scott was a little more savvy than that. But that's what I would say, Yeah, there was. I had a particular once I got into it with them, and you know, you look, you start out where you are. So there we were in Detroit. Our contemporaries were Bob Seger, tedw Detroit Wheels were more earlier than all of us, but still there was an influence. There was the MC five, of course, Scott Richard Case, various local bands, and then later when they were exposed to our seeing Alice Cooper moved from Phoenix in the Detroit So those that was your competition and also your colleagues. So we kind of worked from that and tried to find our own niche that worked for us. And I was thinking about it twenty four to seven, as you do when you're young. But were you friends with all those guys? Yeah? Friendly, absolutely, yeah, Oh yeah, yeah. Bob Seeger was the guy who really boy that he put the nail in any chance of my straight life when he came to my high school and he had a band called the Decibels. At the time, they were what people called a greaser band, and they'd grease their hairback, wear batching suits and they played mostly in instrumentals beautifully and I heard him in my high school auditorium and then way had sounded coming out of those amps and I was like, yo, just did something to me, electrified me, you know, And they're playing like ventures that sort of music and wow, you know. And then later we'd play the same place as he did, and I'd listened to his singles as he was trying to develop a style, and I knew him and we got along nice, and yeah, of course I got along great with Alice Cooper and all the guys, Glenn Buxton and all that whole bunch and the MC five were like, we could go over to their house and eat a peanut butter sandwich. Their girlfriends would sow my leather pants. You know. Was very very collegial like that. Ted was a little different, but at one point I remember talking to him about he was curious about maybe having me do vocals for him, and it wasn't going to be the right fit for me. But it was a really nice scene where you felt that you could get things done and go out and play and enjoy life and enjoy your music. Within the southern Michigan area, there was also an interesting guy named Terry Knight, and he was a DJ on CKLW in Detroit, and he had a band called Terry Knight in the Pack and he would imitate the look and the sound of the top English bands at the time, and it was a crack band. And that band was later what became Grand Funk Railroad Terry when he did him make it said Okay, I'm not the cigarette he wore, I'm the manager. Yeah, and that was that was them. And they were a crack three piece boy Wicked, Wicked, what are great? They were great players, really really great, you know. And question Mark that was a huge, yeah, huge influence when I when I was yeah, I was still a drummer and I went to play Saginaw where he's from. Saganaw. His people picked the cherries. A lot of people from Mexican descent came up and would picking cherries there in Saginaw Valley. And these girls came to gag. They said, well that was pretty good. But have you heard of question Mark? And I was like, no, wow, And then I heard him. It just boy blew me out. You know. He so that particular number, but he also had other cool numbers he added down by the railroad tracks and a lot of good numbers. We're going to pause for another quick break, and then we'll be back with the rest of Rick Rubin's conversation with Iggy Pop. We're back with Rick Rubin and Iggy Pop. Why do you think there was so much good music going on in Detroit at that time. Like everyone you mentioned, you talk about your group of contemporaries, use to the local artists at the time, and every one of them, whether you like them all or not, doesn't matter. Every one of them is great. There was a positive energy because it was the heyday of the Detroit muscle car culture. They were making beautiful cars that were exciting and fun and looked great and sounded great and were great to drive, and in a wide range. There was a lot of work for everybody. There was some urbanism but also a lot of open space. And there was a very, very large migration from the mid South Tennessee and Kentucky to the Detroit area during the Second World War to bolster the auto plants for the war effort. And it never really ended. It just kept on right up through the sixties. I grew up my trailer camp. Where I grew up was on the side of that road. It was a two lane blacktop YS twenty three, also known as the Hillbilly Highway, and went from Tennessee right up to Detroit, and there was a natural hands on power without There were similar things going on out here with the Oki culture transported to southern California, especially Orange County, you know, so you had people who you didn't have to have. You didn't really have to graduate high school to get a good job somewhere and have a good time, and then your kids might start playing guitar in the garage and would have an optimism that would allow them to go do things. That's what I would say, and that that existed there in Michigan. In Chicago or New York, those were bigger cities, so the groups had to be more realistic about everything, had to be very professional, and it was harder to get everything together for your rehearsal. It's that sort of thing, but not quite so in the Midwest. But you can't list ten great artists that came out of New York at that time, musical artists, it doesn't exist. No, no, you can't because it was too just too tight. Everything was too tight. And until the synthetic music came along, disco worked for New York people because they had a more Latin and Afro American energy to it, but it was harder. I mean the Young Rascals that was a very great barband, you know, killer barband that and then they get professional writers and work with them and make a great record, but it's different. The big City's great. In another way, I think it worked for duopop from him, of course, because because you could just get together on the street corner. And then there was all the music that came out of the playgrounds later of the Bronx and you know Brooklyn and all that, because you could steal some electricity and suddenly there were boomboxes and things change. Did you know Johnson Claire? I knew John. Tell me everything about okay. John sycclair was a guy. He learned his music really in the joint. He'd done it. He'd done something. I don't know what he did. He spent a year or two in the joint, and he there he learned about all the great Atlantic records and all the great jazz records. And he was a kind of a kind of a Henry the Eighth character. He had. He was a very large man, like a large knockkneed man with a large girth, knock knees, and wild hairdo and was very interested in promoting free love, free everything, free food, free music. We don't need songs, we don't need money, we don't need this and this and that. And he started several communes in the Detroit area. One was called trans Love Energies, another was the God I can't remember what he called the MC five. He had a musical commune two which centered around the MC five and then finally culminated in something called the White Panther Party. And they were going to be you know. He also had a cider. He liked to be tough, and so they there are MC five roadies were all big and tough, and I remember Fred Smith told the story once that early in their gestation, to prove your place in the band, to make sure everybody was a worthy band member, they all had to fight each other, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, to make sure, okay, there's no whips of this bad right. So so they were they were really interesting on that like that, and John would egg them on in a certain direction. And he was also doing poetry. And he liked to get up with the band about halfway through their live sets when he and play alto sacks and he didn't play any melodies or any Yeah, he'd get up and really liked to show. But his big the big thing that blew my mind about John was that at one point they no longer could stay in Detroit because the police were coming around trying to bust them for marijuana at that time, trying to bust them for LSD parties. So they moved to ann Arbor, which a little college town, and this is nineteen sixty nine, and they rented an old fraternity house type of house, right, one of these big old Victorian houses that are on every college campus with like twelve bedrooms, run down and somebody wants to rent it. And they lived there, and they called at the White Panther their headquarters, and they printed a postcard, you know, a regular cardboard postcard like people used at the time to send notes in the mail. And one side of the postcard was purple with a white springing panther and on the reverse side it said White Panther Party, our program rock and roll, dope fucking in the streets. And you know that, boy, you know, holy shit. I mean when they we had a police department, and you know that attracted their attention right away, you know, So he would push the envelope. He was a provocateur jon and had a sense of humor about everything and liked to like to smoke dope and make love with his He had a wonderful partner, a girl from Germany who was a very dogmatically artistic person named Lenny Sinclair and is as huge as he was. She was tiny and slim, but Lenny was a good photographer and also took super eight footage and really good photos of everything happening at the time, and her stuff is the real best document of Michigan rock at that time. And she's still she's still living there in Detroit. John at one point, I think he was in Amsterdam for quite some time and I'm not sure where he is now. He was doing poetry. He's just a very h He's one of the most righteous people I've ever met, without making a big deal about it, but he's kind of shocked me at certain times. And there was a one time when the MC five We're going to go to Chicago to play during the big showdown at the convention I think was the Republican or Democratic convention in Chicago that resulted in the police beatings, and they went to play in the park and he wanted the stooges to come and do it, and I said, no, I'm not that's not that's something I'm not doing that He said, well, you're with us or you're not, you know sort of thing. And I said, well, I'm not going to say I'm not, but I'm not going. So there was a little difference there. But he's a good man, but there seems to be certain unbending things there. And he was a force in Michigan rock. There was him, and then on the other hand, there was just an eccentric school teacher named Russ Gibb who just liked kids and liked music, and he was the one who put together the Psychedelic Ballroom and did things like, you know, the kind of guy mortgages his house to run the club, that kind of thing, and made a lot of things happen for people. And then there was a third force who's still a big manager to this day of Michigan people. That was a guy named Punch Andrews who had a Punch Kid rock for a while. Maybe still does, I don't know, and he did he still does, Bob Seeger, I believe, and Punch just was a very sensible guy who had a string of clubs called the Hideouts in nicer neighborhoods where the kids could have money, you know, and those are nice places to play. We played there, and we were we were proud to be able to get up to where you could play one of Punch's clubs. It was Johnson Claire older than you guys are same age, Yeah, a little older, like two years, three years. I'm not sure I would say maybe more. I'm just guessing maybe five six years. Maybe just that edge that next you know when you're when you're very young, or I would say in music in general, five years or a generation. So maybe like felt like that, I felt like five and did He'm not sure did he put the MC five together or were they already a group when they were listen they were guts interesting, they were good cover band. They were really effing good cover band. And I saw them at the ann Arbor Armory covering stones and pretty things and motown songs and they were just already very, very good. And Wayne Kramer tells me, I don't remember no recollection on this, but apparently they asked me to drum for them at one point and I didn't. I said no, I'm going to try to do my own thing. But I don't remember that. But yeah, no, they were good covering. They were writing and it was a much different thing. But They were already tight and good in a similar way to the members in Grand Funk Railroad, Mark Farner and those guys Great Drummer and Grand Funk. It's very very good. Also were a good cover type band originally. And then how did they switch into being the MC five we know. I think that had a lot to do with John Wow. I think it was John in coming in in the way. I don't know that you hear stories anyway about Andrew Oldham, who I met years ago, sort of telling the Rolling Stones you need to write songs, you know, add listen, the Beatles are the good guys. You're going to be the bad guys, you know. So yeah, you know so I think there was a little bit of that, you know. And then the songwriting their point a departure of writing a song, it was a little more dogmatic and it had to generally be something that was acceptable to the whole group. You know. That's tough to pull off in songwriting, you know, And they did it a couple of times to kick out the jams is you know, and that's there's a dogma to that. Okay, this is what I'm doing, this is what it means. Let me do it, get out of the way and everything, and the guys, know, the guys are all having fun, that sort of thing, you know, you know in the dressing room, getting hazy and etc. Etc. That was their particular way, and then they carried it. Eventually. They had some songs like a Human Being lawn Mower was sort of a social critique type of a rock song, you know, so they went more over there. I would say American Ruse was one of their songs. You know, hey, hey, hey, take a look around. You know, I finally caught out of the American ruse. You know, you want to have fun, they won't let you that sort of thing. We're gonna pause in a Rick's conversation with Iggy right here and pick back up next week, where Iggy will talk about the artist who inspired his frontman style, working with David Bowie, and the first time he ever bled on stage. But before we jump to the credits, let's hear a song from Iggy's new album Every Loser. Here's the song, strung Out Johnny and see open Overkid, Come on out. It's help the Loveday comes composer. It's wis a little too saying no God Man me your jung keeping. But Setan told me so you're strong out Johnny and you can't get away. You're strong out Johnny, and now it's time to pay the first time to do se down. First time it came again like that. I'll don't all from dumb. You'll start up, john You'll start up joy rolling, said to Donning Sell bad Boys spooming, don't feel like a hero will be forgotten soon. I'm strong out on me and I can't get away. I'm strong outarmy and now it's time to pay. It's time to second time, time out all fun. You're strong Johnny. You're trying out Johnny and you can't get It's trying out Jo and now it's time to day. It's try Jolene. Nobody loves your soul. You ry Choline, that's no yours on strong mind. I'm strong mind you joy about Jolin. That was strung out Johnny from Iggy Pop's new album Every Loser. You can hear the rest of the tracks from his new album and other songs we love on a playlist at Broken record podcast dot com. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast, where we can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrell, Ben Holiday, Eric Sandler, Jennifer Sanchez. Our editor Sophie Crane. Our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad pre listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for push com Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and if you like our show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast staff. Our theme musics by Henny beats On Justin Richmond