DISGRACELAND - Iggy Pop: Mad Artistry, Mental Wards, and Gaping Chest Wounds

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

Iggy Pop pushed rock further than anyone before him, committing to live acts of sex, sickness, and rumored suicide on stage. From his cocaine fueled bromance with David Bowie, to his search for inspiration in the voodoo rituals of Haiti, Iggy Pop never just crossed the line between art and madness. He bled all over it, and danced on the stains. This episode was originally published on October 15, 2019.   To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership.   Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTER   Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: Instagram YouTube X (formerly Twitter)  Facebook Fan Group TikTokSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about Iggy Pop are insane. He bloodied himself in public, taunted dangerous bikers into a violent beatdown, committed himself to live acts of sex, sickness, and rumored suicide on stage.

He was addicted, arrested, and committed to an insane asylum. He terrified and enthralled audiences, accidentally invented punk rock, post-punk, and of course, was the originator of the stage dive. Iggy Pop pushed rock and roll further over the line than anyone before him and ushered in a new era of musical nihilism that was perfectly suited for the cynical malaise of the 1970s.

And Iggy Pop made great music, some of the greatest music ever made as a matter of fact. That music I played you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Mello Submarine Slog, BK, 1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to thank you for letting me be myself again by Sly and the Family Stone. And why would I play you that specific slice of Coke's sole cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on February 21st, 1970, and that was the day Iggy Pop. played New York City for the first time, announcing in earnest to the world the arrival of a new

kind of rock star, one who would push it further than any other musician before him, both on and offstage. On this episode, Submarine Slogs, Coke Soul Cheese, Iggy Pop, and pushing it over the line. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. He looked down at his chest, the image of the blood torrenting out, clanked. against the many hyper-real images rapidly firing throughout his brain, so fast it was hard to tell if he was awake or dreaming. Iggy was in his temporary room.

The walls weren't rubber, but they were institutional green. Drab enough to make you want to kill yourself, but just the same, Iggy Pop, known to his close friends as Jim, and to authorities as James Osterberg, was not wearing a straitjacket. He was dressed the same way he dressed before checking into the mental institution. No shirt, no shoes, low-slung pants, pajama bottoms. It wasn't the woman's dress he was wearing when the pigs picked him up wandering down sunset, looking like one of Charlie's girls

blotto in the midst of a dark drug psychosis, but it was still typical Iggy. His skin like leather, his chest impossibly cut, his hair long, dirty, perfect. He sat cross-legged on his unmade bed, his vainy hand fingering the space between his first two toes, sleepily shaking off the cobwebs of another night of tough heroin detox. The dreams hit him hard, so hard that waking was a restless, confusing endeavor filled with fear, paranoia, in the dreadful sense that this, this was going to be the day when he would finally slip over the line and never come back.

Reality was tenuous at best and played tricks on him whenever it could, particularly in the minutes after he awoke from a fevered dream. Iggy blinked his eyes open. He could see out beyond the door's iron bars that kept him, rock and roll animal that he was caged. His eyes scanned down the long 15-foot-wide corridor, its linoleum gleaming in parts cracked and neglected in others. He leaned back on his bed, more of a cot, really.

He'd slept in smaller rooms, hell the trailer he grew up in with his parents back in Ann Arbor, Michigan was tighter than this place. He opened his eyes. He was in the fun house now. The grimy single family turned drug den that Iggy and his bandmates lived and rehearsed in at 2666-6 Packard Road in Ann Arbor. He could tell from the blood on the ceiling. Jackson Pollocked across the room from dirty syringes. Post-heroine shots splattered onto the cheap acoustical ceiling. The blood was dried, browned, caked, gross, and not going anywhere, just like he and his bandmates, the Stooges. For a minute, there was promise, a record deal, real excitement, more than a couple great songs and performances that were immediately the stuff

of legend. Plus, they sounded new and were on to something that up to that point no other group of musicians had locked into. They were too experimental to be considered pop, too rocking to be considered R&B and too raw to be called rock and roll. They had it going on, but now there was just squalor, grime, junk, and disillusion. His bandmates bassist Dave Alexander and the brothers Ashton, Ron and Scotty on guitar and drums, respectively, were survivors. Tough like the steel frames that clanging together on the assembly line in the Ford Motor Company plant they'd grown up around in nearby Dearborn Michigan. Ron and Scotty, the Dum Dum Boys, There was something else, Icky thought.

Their playing was the essence of raw power, pummeling drums and slinky proto-punk riffage. They came off sounding more like the big bad roar of the 69 Mustang boss fresh off the line than they did their Detroit contemporaries in the MC5 or the silver bullet band. The Ashtons were greasy, grassy mill, stunt doubles, rock and roll Hanson brothers,

too dumb to be anything else and too smart to care. And as much as he didn't care to admit it, Iggy needed them. The stooges, on stage anyway, helped it down while Iggy, the frontman, did anything but. As a performer, Iggy Pop was an untangled mess of spontaneous self-expression. Live performances were a physical manifestation of boundary-bending madness. Nobody took their live show further. Iggy Pop confronted the audience, unlike any performer reform.

His bony body and undeniable good looks writhed and undulated across stages in a way that made even the hardest Midwest hillbillies question their sexuality. He confronted audience members with self-mutilation, nudity, public intoxication, and just about anything he could think of, anything that would bring him closer to the edge, to the line. For some, it was the edge of artistic expression. For others, the edge of madness. Iggy would cut himself on stage.

Iggy would vomit on stage. Iggy would pass out on stage. Iggy would leave the stage, enter the audience, have his close. Clothes ripped off and willingly allow audience members to fillet him during the Stooges' sets. Nothing, it seemed, was over the line. As mad as he was and as crazed as his band seemed, Iggy and the Stooges were moved by serious music. Even if attempting the greatness of their heroes, Miles Davis,

Sun Ra and Bo Diddley among them, meant playing beyond their ability, the Stooges would live out on that fragile limb of risk or die trying. And by the time, 1969, world's life. around, it was clear that the stooges were an aberration, the first musical love child of the failed hippie experiment. The stooges were the result of a broken promise, almost like a kid born to divorced parents who, while coming apart, got together for one last fuck, and oops, nine months later, a little baby that no one wanted shows up, and he's pissed, and he's looking

for attention, so he grows up to be a delinquent, a fuck-up, a stooge. The Holy Union of Peace and Love peaked two years earlier during the summer of love, but peace and love didn't last. It was all bullshit. The revolution was over, the bums lost, the squares won, and America was now being ushered out of the once promising decade into the darkness of the 70s by Charles Manson, Altamont, and Vietnam. And if you really wanted to know what all that sounded like,

this new burgeoning era of nihilism and anarchy, All you had to do was put on a Stooges record. Peace and love. Fuck that. More like, Jim Osterberg, aka Iggy Pop, knew what time it was. Time to push the limits, the limits of your music,

tease madness to make great art. The trick was not getting caught on the wrong side of that line. And all of it took its toll. Heroin and LSD lay speed and cocaine and pills and of course weed and alcohol, and anything and everything else, he could get his hands on to come down after a show.

Years of hardcore drug use turned into a serious heroin and cocaine addiction before his band broke up. Just after two records, one great, and a third as a solo artist's fronting a Frankenstein Stooges lineup. A battered reputation and police-mandated stint in a mental institution was all Iggy Pop had to show for it. That and scar tissue. He looked down at his chest, the bleeding had ceased,

The scar tissue snapped him back. He remembered Max's Kansas City, 1973. It was supposed to be Iggy and the Stoge's triumphant return to New York after recording their latest album Rob Power in London. What it was instead was a bloody mess. The sound of Scotty's snare, big like a shotgun, or a rifle, a 22, like Chris Burden's 22, and boy howdy did it ever. And the cut on stage from the glass was in tent.

tended to be like the cut from the bullet, Burden had fired at himself and as much talked about 1971 performance art piece, shoot, the one where he filmed a friend shooting a 22 at him from just 15 feet away. Imagine that, having a gun fired at you on purpose and taking a bullet in the name of art.

The piece was meant to protest the absurdity of America's obsession with guns in the Vietnam War, and it worked. Shoot was all the smart set, could talk about. Iggy was obsessed with it, and here he was, on stage at Maxis, Kansas City, the epicenter of downtown Cool, the venue that set the bar for the rest of the world on what was happening in front of said smart set. Iggy had burden on the brain. He'd show the audience. It would be just a flesh wound, just like in shoot, but it would be raw, powerful, and unlike anything

to happen before in rock and roll. Iggy was pushing himself closer and closer over the one. He could see them now. All in their seats there in front of him, Beebe and Todd, Nico and Fran, Andy, Lou, Alice, and Danny. The band now with Master of Dark Arts, glam, Satan himself on lead guitar, James Williamson, kicked into search and destroy. And Iggy laid into the first lyric, possibly the greatest opening line in the history of long-playing rock and roll record. Crowd was wrapped instantly. Scotty tore the ass out of the beat. Ron recently demoted to bass, but still holding it down on stage, wearing his Nazi essence. S-choker ran rough over the crowd with his low-slung guild. James ate up all of the sonic space, utilizing every square inch of his worn out Les Paul's

neck. Iggy reminded them all of who he was, the one who searches and destroys. And they kicked it up a notch, pushed themselves further toward the line. Iggy headed into the crowd, stood on the tables in front of the stage, space walked his way over low tops, stomped on downtown Glitterati, horrified and excited every last one of them along the way. James hit the solo. Iggy dove back onto the stage and landed on a mess of broken beer bottle glass. The cut didn't feel like anything special. Just another shard of glass penetrating his tough Midwestern skin. But when he looked down at the blood, he knew he was in trouble.

This was no grazed 22 Chris Burden flesh wound. This was penetration. Iggy stretched himself out and pumped his right arm to test the pain. And when he did, blood spurred it out on his wound and into the audience like a squirt gun. It was too good to be true. Iggy pumped his arm again. More blood. Shrieks from the audience. Not one to be outdone, James made his guitar squeal with feedback like a stuck pig.

Booze smack and adrenaline masks the pain. The blood from Iggy's chest gushed out. The audience freaked out. Iggy kept pushing. The band kept chugging. The staff feared the worst, imminent death by one of their performers. Iggy Pop feared nothing. Alice Cooper rose out of his seat in the audience and rushed the stage.

Iggy collapsed. The band stopped. A stagehand dragged the bloodied singer off stage. Alice called for an ambulance for his old Detroit buddy Jim. Ron dropped his bass and pulled his friend out of the melee. Iggy could hear them all chattering. He could hear the audience squeal of the feedback and the siren from the ambulance. It was soundtrack now to the eerie melody for Miles Davis' as Miles runs the voodoo down.

Iggy loved that song. His subconscious would call upon it often. It was so unlike Miles, but then again, Miles was Miles. You never knew what he was going to do. Miles was backstage with Iggy now. But they were no longer at Maxis. They're at Anganos, sight of the Stoge's very first New York show. Miles was in on the blow.

Iggy and Ron were hoovering up before their set. Miles Davis. He liked the band, vibed on their spirit. He'd recommend them the next day to whoever would listen. sure of it. More likely than not, though, Miles Davis would forget all about the stooges as soon as his hangover passed. Iggy could hear his horn. Iggy could hear the shot from Chris Burden's 22. Iggy could hear that voodoo running down. Iggy could hear the feedback from the Les Paul, and Iggy could hear that heavy clanging from the Dearborn line. It was all there, along with the

sound of a familiar laugh and paranoid whispers from a cocaine tongue. The sound of a friend, Iggy's friend, Jim's friend, actor, Dennis Hopper, up in Iggy's dream high as a bird on cocaine. In the dream, Hopper was playing the role of Jack Nicholson's Randall Patrick McMurphy from one flew over the cuckoo's nest and shuffling through the same mental institution that Iggy was now locked up in. Hopper made a better McMurphy by Iggy's estimation. He was more paranoid and as such better suited to maneuver around the wicked ways of Nurse Ratchet. But Iggy's nurse was no burly serge.

She was slight and sexier than any astronaut's wife. That nurse's uniform hugged tight in all the right places. Her hair red and Gestapo-like authoritarian vibe pushed all of Iggy's buttons at once. And the feedback in his head swirled, the institutional green walls split into psychedelic waves of rich, verdant beauty. Hopper McMurphy's cocaine-tonged snakeed its way around Iggy's waist and extended itself to ginger-nurred. ratchet, coiling them together. Iggy's cock pulsed up against her uniform. He could feel

himself swelling inside. The rush, the line was in sight, about to be crossed. The deafening clang of American steel, the crowd chanting, and then a familiar whisper in his ear, calming. The voice was that of another friend. It sounded

supportive, superior, English, safe, deep in knowing. Iggy felt the fevered dream breaking. The familiar voice gave him the confidence to come out of the dream, to open his eyes, to jump back into reality. So he did. And now, once emerged from the dream and safe inside the drab green walls of his insane asylum bedroom, Jim Osterberg, aka Iggy Pop, could see that he had company in real life. Hopper McMurphy had gone full Dennis Hopper, the actual Dennis Hopper, Iggy's old friend in the flesh, sitting in front of him along with Ginger Nurse Ratchett sitting at his side,

and Ginger Nurse Ratchet had gone full, thin white Duke. Right there in Iggy's room seated next to Dennis Hopper, Ginger Nurse Ratchet, the thin white Duke was none other than Davy Jones, aka the man who fell to earth to save Iggy Pop, aka David Bowie. Bowie opened his mouth and said, well, Jim, how about a line and we blast out of here? you right back after this word, word, word. David Bowie had no cocaine, which was an oddity. The show at the Rochester War Memorial in upstate New York earlier that evening was great. Bowie and his band were on fire, perhaps buoyed by the touring presence and competitive spirit

of David's new friend and co-conspirator Iggy Pop, or as he called him, Jim. The two met back in 1971, in New York at Max's, before all the blood. Bowie was keen on producing a record for this uniquely American artist who represented what Bowie could never be, raw, uncalculating, exciting in a manner that eluded Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy could never be Iggy, but he could at least help Iggy. And Bowie, of course, represented something Iggy could never be, refined, creatively disciplined, driven, business-minded.

Despite their differences, their genius was obvious to one another. They had an easy-going dynamic and almost instantly formed a real. bond. David Bowie was steadfast in his support of Iggy Pop in his flailing career at a time when his own career was exploding and making him one of the biggest stars on the planet. At first, Bowie secured a management deal for Iggy, which led to a record deal, which led to the recording of raw power, an album that Bowie mixed, and soon the two were nearly inseparable, which was why Iggy was on the road with Bowie in 1976. What else was he going to do? The Stooges were broken up, again, so the plan was to hang with Bowie and steal time on the road to work on new material that Bowie would

eventually produce. Iggy needed Bowie, and Bowie needed Iggy, and right now they both needed cocaine. But the after-party wasn't panning out. Rochester wasn't Manhattan. Drugs, the pottery kind anyway, did not flow as freely here as they did in the city. And there was something weird about the company, the women they'd picked up at the show. Two of them, Bowie had signaled to from the stage and was keen on meeting afterward, but there were two others pretty, athletic, but kind of square-looking, who were off. And they were super concerned with scoring, more specifically with scoring cocaine from David Bowie himself, which was, of course, seen as being gauche. Still, there was the matter of the lack of drugs. Grass and wine alone wasn't going to cut it.

Bowie did a lap through the suite at the Americana, Rochester. The four seasons December in 1963, oh what a night, crackled through the cheap bedside clock radio. The vibe was low-key, Iggy Pop sat quiet, spectacles resting atop his nose, casually perusing the local newspaper, absent-mindedly hitting joints as they were passed his way. The walls of the Americana were thin, and as mellow as the party was, it was anything but quiet. The two plain-closed cops on the other side of the suite's wall were listening intently. There were no bug, no mics or anything approaching a high-tech listening device. Just two donut eaters with cheap hotel tumblers

pressed between the wall and their ears, desperately listening for drug lingo to hopefully slip from the lips of the rock stars and their groupies partying on the other side of the wall, where David Bowie stood bored and annoyed but too polite and aloof to let it show. One of the square girls had him buttonhold, talking about nothing, such a bore.

Finally, he politely interrupted. I'm sorry, isn't there anyone you know in this town who you could trouble for some cocaine? And with that, the handcuffs came out. That was all the square girl slash undercover cop needed. The ask. David Bowie, along with Iggy Pop, were both cuffed and they in the suite were searched, whereupon no cocaine was found but a half pound of marijuana was. The two, along with all the other people in the suite,

were arrested and hauled off to jail for the night. It was small-time stuff, small-town stuff. Bowie had everyone bailed out, including the partiers he didn't know. In Iggy Pop was excited he could now buy a suit for court. Bowie's high-paid, high-powered lawyers eventually got the case thrown out, and after finishing his station-to-station tour, he and Iggy split for Europe, Berlin, to be precise, to get down to the business of making an Iggy Pop record. The apartment was not befitting of an international pop star in his wild frontman.

collaborator. It was small, bleak, and sat above an auto parts store, and there was little to do during the day, which was great. It meant time for making music. Nighttime, on the other hand, and Berlin in the mid-70s was another story entirely. The post-war party had never burnt out in this city, and the bars never closed, and the women never got old, and the drugs were never in short supply, and the conversation was always stimulating, and the sex was always all over the place but never stale, and the party rolled on and on and on night after night, except on Thursday nights. Thursday night for Iggy Pop and David Bowie was TV night. It's when they hunkered down in their apartment and watched their stories, took a night off.

Iggy fried German sausages. They stunk up the place something awful, but they hit the spot. He and David sat on the floor waiting for the U.S. Armed Forces Network to air Starsky and Hutch. The buddy copse cereal was where it was at as far as Iggy Pop and David Bowie. we were concerned. Most television sucked, especially German television, but not Starsky and Hutch. High-speed chases, tight corduroys, cable-knit sweaters in the summer, and I mean, come on, huggy bear.

While they waited for the broadcast, Bowie stretched out on his back on the floor, reading a dog-eared copy of Dostoevsky's the idiot. Iggy sat cross-legged on the floor, fingering his cheap ukulele when the TV set snapped from white noise and static snow to technicolor and the sound. of the familiar Morse code-like call signal that the American military network began every broadcast with. The rhythm of the call signal coming from the television reminded Iggy of Detroit,

the Supremes you can't hurry love. Iggy started plucking out a little riff on his yuk to the call signal. Bowie perked up, began tapping his foot on the creaky floor, which rattled the near empty plate of German sausage and silverware resting on the floorboards. Iggy began strumming his yoke. Bowie approximated a kick and snare sound using his other foot and his thigh, body drumming. The call signal had morphed into a full-on Benny Benjamin beat.

Iggy strummed his way into a core progression. Bowie swung like a motherfucker. Iggy was now standing up, pacing, pounding on the yuk. Bowie was yelling, Jimmy! Jimmy! Two were rocking out now. Hard. Iggy was banging on the yuk and started improvising lyrics on the spot. Here comes Johnny Yen again.

liquor in the drugs, and that's like hypnotizing chickens. Well, I'm just a modern guy. The chorus I've had it in my ear before. They knew immediately that they were on to something. The next day they were in the studio recording what would become Iggy Pop's most recognizable song, Lust for Life. A song whose infectious, totally swinging rhythm is owed as much to the U.S. Armed Forces Network

as it is to Hunt and Tony Sales, the rhythm section in Iggy's new band. band, another pair of Dumbumb boys whose madcap energy rivaled the delinquent doom of the Ashtons from Iggy's previous band. Hunt and Tony were the sons of Iggy's childhood TV hero, comedian, soupy sales, and their behavior was just as insane as their dads. But when they got to their instruments, the fucking around ceased, as can be heard in the rhythm to Lust for Life. It is serious business. Real rock and roll clowns need not apply. Lust for Life led off Iggy's second solo effort

that David Bowie produced long player of the same name. And the album was great, making it too creatively solid record releases in a row by the famously inconsistent Iggy Pop. After the release of the Dostoevsky-inspired album, The Idiot released earlier that year in 1977. Berlin was paying off. Iggy and Bowie were on a role,

creatively, if not commercially. Iggy's records were received well critically, but compared to Bowie's record sales, they were flops, which was ironic given that at that exact same moment in time, there was a revolution happening in music. In New York and in London, a young wave of nihilistic rockers were pummeling growing audiences with fast, jagged stooges-like riffs, and grabbing headlines with behavior Nick directly from the Iggy Pop playbook. The Ramon, sex pistols, heartbreakers, the clash, Generation X, and others, were all making noise with a new type of music called punk. And they sounded and acted a lot like the original nihilist,

the free-spinning Detroit wheel, hold up in Berlin, singing loudly and proudly about his newfound lust for life. Some punk saw Iggy as the musical godfather he was, but others thought he was over, the past, fatigue. After taking in the opening show to mark the release of the idiot, Heartbreaker Johnny Thunders, the ex-New York doll, disappointingly proclaimed that Iggy had gone cabaret.

However, Iggy Pop wasn't the past. He wasn't out of time. He wasn't too old for punk. He was just too busy inventing post-punk. Once again, ahead of his time. The idiot and lust for life, despite their critical failings, would go on to heavily influence the next wave of punk artists to follow, Susie and the Banshee's Joy Division and, of course, Public Image Limited.

But Iggy Pop didn't know or care about any of the same. that at the time. He was preoccupied, per usual, with David Bowie, who was on an epic cocaine tear at the moment, uncharacteristically angry, behind the wheel of his Mercedes and ramming it maniacly into the rear end of a German economy that Bowie believed belonged to a local drug dealer who had ripped him off. Bowie kept ramming the gas, violently surging the car ahead and into the dealer's car, pushing it up against the parking lot wall again and again and again. Bowie's vengeance was inspired and the dealer's car wasn't going anywhere. Soon enough, after he'd slowly turned the crooked dealer's car into an accordion,

Bowie lost interest. Through his Mercedes in reverse, its front end nearly totaled and took off for the apartment. Vengeance, no matter how inspired at first, is always a dead end. Kind of like Berlin. Iggy and Bowie bounced. Iggy Pop's relationship with David Bowie was and always would be solid. But by the early 80s, Bowie was off again and on his own, selling out stadiums, collaborating with Queen, working with Sheik's Nile Rogers, and writing and releasing stone cold hits. Let's Dance, Modern Love, and the Iggy Pop pen, China Girl.

Bowie was embracing his pop side and there was no room in this phase of his career for his old friend Iggy who accidentally invented punk Iggy's career was dead a string of albums New Values, Soldier and Party flopped he was uninspired

with Blondie's Chris Stein he produced the album Zombie Birdhouse an unfocused droney stab at post-punk world music mania Imagine Paul Simon's Graceland produced by John Zorn and peppered with out-of-tune vocals.

That's kind of what zombie birdhouse is, but despite its obvious failings, it is compelling. It's the sound of Iggy Pop getting closer to that line, that demarcation that separates madness and ordinary life that so many other artists, Van Gogh, Beethoven, Sylvia Plath, crossed and never came back from. Who was Iggy kidding? He could never be like David Bowie and produce great art

while simultaneously maneuvering through the straight world. Ambition, focus, Iggy did not understand these things. For him, it was madness or nothing at all. You can hear that on Zombie Birdhouse. And perhaps sensing it himself, after the album was recorded, Iggy decided to double down on the insanity of that record sounds and seek out that line, maybe even cross it, and see what true madness could do for one's creative spirit.

So in search of inspiration, Iggy Pop headed to Haiti, the land of the real zombies. Baby Doc de Valier, Haiti's brutal dictator and his murderous Tantame McCutts, didn't go in for all that voodoo jive. Baby Doc's regime outlawed the ancient practice, made it punishable by death. So naturally, Iggy Pop needed to get in on that action. The porter-prince bar was dark, the music unrecognizable, but then again, most things for Iggy Pop and Haiti were unrecognizable.

He was Blotto, nearly the insombed, entire time, taking full advantage of the permissive drug culture, living off of a $2 a day opium tincture from the local pharmacy that he would mix into his pinocaladas. The jukebox blasted. It reminded him of Miles runs the voodoo down. The melody was always there, always swirling around his head. Miles' horn went cell, low, and took the shape of another familiar melody, Iggy's own, the passenger. Iggy was out of the bar now. In the back of the seat of an unrecognizable shipbox riding through the city's backside, seeing the stars come out of the sky. Something about some cash to some local girls to bring him to see the priest.

And the shipbox slowed to a stop. There was a small fire, a gaggle of locals, eerily quiet. Iggy and his guide joined the larger group under suspicious eyes. Then, drums started pounding, pounding. The men in the group stood. Women from the shadows emerged. Most wearing little to no clothing. The drums broke into a warp speed rhythm,

and the women began their dance, and the men began chanting. Iggy Pop could not resist. He sprung up and joined in. Shirtless, long hair. Tezozo, Idiot, whispered in Crea, along with the other whispers growing louder. A chorus backtracking the ceremony's rhythm. Iggy vibed. Miles ran that rudu down.

Opium and Creococo stirred him closer to that line. That damned line. Was it madness on the other side? For once in his life, it occurred to Iggy that maybe it was something else. Maybe it wasn't madness. Maybe it was mystical. Another dimension. Not death.

Rebirth. The syncopated drumming grew more intense. A woman fell to the ground, gyrating, convulsing. The whispers grew louder. A priest was suddenly present. Giant headdress, bone necklace, big, big eyes, and even bigger mouth. He stepped to the convulsing woman, raised his fist to his fist to his chest to his chest. His face, opened his palm, and blew the dust in his hand onto the woman.

Her body stopped moving. Dead. Iggy Poppet found the line. The priest, the humgown, was the conduit, the guide. Iggy, the passenger. The woman lay still, and the music picked up. The dancing intensified. The fire roared.

Iggy stopped dancing entranced by the priest who held his gaze, eye to eye, all menace. The priest raised his other hand. His fist gripped tight around the neck of the chicken, hip, Iggy watched the priest raise his other hand, the gleam of the blade, the chicken screamed as it was pierced just below its neck. The blade split it right down the middle of its chest, blood torrented out, and the chicken flapped its right wing incessantly. And the blood splurred it out all over the priest's audience as they danced, enraptured, held. Now with sacrifice, they were connected to the other side, to the spirits, to the mystic world.

And there was no madness, there was no curse, there was union, connection, inspiration, and that voodoo had been run down. And for Iggy Pop, that line had been crossed, finally. And the result, rebirth. Upon returning from Haiti, Iggy's old friend, David Bowie, would record five more of their co-written songs from their Berlin days, resulting finally in financial security for Iggy, the artist who had contributed so much culturally but seen so little for his efforts.

Iggy would then see success via his musical contributions to various films and through collaborations with Lou Reed and the Sex Pistol Steve Jones. In the 90s, Iggy scored a legit hit with a song, Candy, and appeared alongside Johnny Depp and John Waters' film Crybaby and Jim Jarmouche's Dead Man. Eventually, Iggy Pop would successfully reunite and tour with both Stoge's lineups, and in 2009, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At long last, Iggy Pop had become a cultural icon and recognized the world over as the great contributor and artist that he was.

And this is something that really happens, an artist who pushes it harder and further than anyone else who gets to live to tell, to enjoy his spoils. Iggy Pop crossed the line, and when he did, he emerged, reborn. For him, somehow the madness did not consume him like it did Van Gogh, Beethoven, or Plaque. And the music didn't drive into a two-sumption.

soon grave like it did to his brothers, Ron and Scotty, his hero Miles, and his friend David Bowie. Diggy Pop is still standing. And I'm Jake Brennan. And this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All-Axist member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of disgrace land ad free.

Plus, you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month. Weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelampod.com slash membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at DisgracelamPod. and on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at Disgraceland Pod. Rockerola.