Comments GUY DIXON
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
January 9, 2009 at 1:45 PM EST
Iggy Pop is looking at a life change. As he ambled through the dark film set, over clustered power cables, he is obviously no longer the jagged, angular performer he once was. He has already long been drawn to quieter and more varied pursuits, which was partly the reason he took a supporting part in Toronto actor-director Rob Stefaniuk's forthcoming vampire comedy Suck.
“I'm not up for many wild adventures at this point. Not at all,” he said with a smile in his deep, gravel-chewing drawl.
That was before the news this week of the death of Ron Asheton, guitarist of Iggy Pop's legendary band the Stooges. When I spoke with Pop last month while he was filming in Toronto, he was scheduled to tour with Asheton and the other Stooges again this summer and to begin working on a new album for 2010.
The reunited Stooges had been a last hurrah for the band's particular brand of amped weirdness. But in his solo work, Pop has long been gearing down. “The things I want to be able to do, the abilities that excite me, are more technical now,” he said. “They are more obscure. I just managed to do, I think, a good vocal on a Dixieland type of song that's going to come out in French next year. For me, I'm really glad I did that before I kick the bucket.”
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‘I try to be an omnivore,’ says Pop, 61, who was in Toronto to shoot the vampire comedy Suck. (Rafy)
He added: “I'd like to be able to carry a tune on a memorable ballad. I've got a coupla songs that I've been involved in that are memorable to people, and that's a great thing. But on a ballad – I'd like to be able to do that.”
The real Pop, easily the most physical of rock legends even at 61, looks pliant, almost squat. It's easy to see he's dealing with a well-worn body, lost cartilage in his hip and failing knees after a career of stage diving, on-stage self-mutilation and years soaking up the liquid culture of each new city. But that was clearly years ago, as he cautiously descended a set of stairs to a basement below the set, bumping a studio light in the process. “Down to the Batcave,” he said.
Swathed in a shapeless garbage bag of a ski jacket, Pop began the interview with a highly earnest, “Pleased to meet you,” his handshake as padded as an oven mitt, his eyes impossibly wide. The effect is part rock ‘n' roll aristocrat, part deer with a semi racing toward it on the freeway.
And even though his immediately recognizable mug looks a little out of place on a $3-million Toronto-shot comedy, he was one of the first in a coterie of musicians, from Alice Cooper to Moby and Henry Rollins, to accept supporting parts in the film.
Is acting, then, the remaining creative phase for Pop? What's left after decades as garage-rock, proto-punk's icon No. 1? “Okay, there are two parts to that,” he said, settling into his folding, movie-star chair. “I have nothing left to say.” Big laughs all around. “And I like to react,” he added with sudden, turn-on-a-dime seriousness.
“That's the one thing you don't get a chance to do when you spend your entire adult life carrying around the huge zone of your genius,” he said, laughing again. “You don't have time to react to other people. And I, as an artist, find that I like to react and to just forget about my schlamozzle.”
Okay, now, it's important to get the tone of “schlamozzle” correctly. Pop typically bounces between funereal gravitas and a kind of cartoonish, ding-dong intonation. Artistic high-mindedness matched with knuckle-head humour to keep it honest.
“The things I want to be able to do, the abilities that excite me, are more technical now,” he said. “They are more obscure. I just managed to do, I think, a good vocal on a Dixieland type of song that's going to come out in French next year. For me, I'm really glad I did that before I kick the bucket.”
He added: “I'd like to be able to carry a tune on a memorable ballad. I've got a coupla songs that I've been involved in that are memorable to people, and that's a great thing. But on a ballad – I'd like to be able to do that.”
Pop was on tour in Russia when he received a copy of the script for Suck, about an aging rock band with vampires in its midst. Pop, utterly unfazed while filming his scenes, deadpanned his lines through various takes.
One of the film's producers, Jeff Rogers, who has had a career in promoting and managing rock acts such as Crash Test Dummies and Randy Bachman, knew Pop's manager. They then sent Pop an e-mail and a script in October. Rogers had also worked with Moby on the Grammy-nominated Moby: Play – The DVD, hence that connection. Another of the film's stars, veteran actor Malcolm McDowell, knew Cooper, and so one connection fed off another. But once Iggy came on board, it became easier to get the other musicians, according to Stefaniuk.
“At the time, I totally thought it was a crazy long shot, that we weren't going to get him. But he read the script and decided to do it,” Stefaniuk said. “We just thought it would be cooler, rather than to get one major actor person, to hire musicians to be the actors. There's no compromise there: It's perfect for the film. It's what we always wanted to do. When I wrote the script, I wrote in rock cameos for these parts.”
The plan is to have the film ready in time to submit to this year's Toronto International Film Festival, where Stefaniuk's previous comedy Phil the Alien premiered in 2004, and then for a theatrical release in the fall.
“I was looking for something conversational, mainly verbal and anti-physical,” Pop said during a break in filming. “It was not the first vampire movie I've been asked to do, but the others had me climbing chain-link fences – you know, eating barbed wire, violently killing my victims, that sort of thing. That wasn't really going to do anything for me in terms of what I want from being in a film.”
Other filmmakers were obviously hung up on what Pop's image once was. Culminating in the 1970s, his stagecraft included vomiting, oral sex and resting his much-flaunted private part on a vibrating amplifier. All perfectly natural in that context perhaps, and all part of the legend. At one gig, he apparently asked audience members for money to score drugs and subsequently slumped into a stupor on stage. Most famous was the time he shimmied on the floor over broken glass, requiring serious medical attention and stitches.
But Pop always saw it as putting on a good show. There's a fantastic old clip on YouTube of a semi-comatose Pop reviving himself right on cue to sing the first verse of Lust for Life. He once drolly encapsulated the era in a MuchMusic interview by saying how, during most of that time, he was considered a “no-no.”
“I try to be an omnivore,” says Pop, now older. “I try to go right across the board. I have no particular flag that I want to march under or uphold in any way. So I do advertising too. And I do very extreme music. I do a little soft jazz. I sang a coupla things in French.”
Those French songs refer to the work Pop did for the soundtrack of a documentary about French author Michel Houellebecq and the film adaptation of his novel The Possibility of an Island. Known for his particular brand of nihilism, Houellebecq is “the last relevant novelist,” according to Pop.
Pop is well aware that most have preconceived ideas about him. “Certainly it's a prerogative of an audience member to organize who you are in their mind, according to whatever set of criteria they care to adopt.” But he added: “At this point, my little nose tells me that I'm kinda like a guy who broke out of jail the day before yesterday, and they just found out, and I'm too far gone. I can't be caught at this point. I can pretty much do what I want. And if somebody doesn't like it, so what. I'm already mature, and I'm already full-founded – shall we say – as a person. I'm pretty confident that I can do as I please as long as it's done well.”
To sustain himself, Pop is a devotee of qigong, breathing exercises that he learned from a tai chi master. “I do that for an hour a day, 40 minutes if I can,” he said.
“That makes it possible for me to be among the living. It's the antidote for being me for so many years.”
Pop doesn't see his younger self as a separate person, even though he now lives in self-imposed exile in Miami. He simply had to get out of New York. “Every third person in Manhattan was a VIP,” he explained. “They all had a way to get your phone number. You're getting couriered delivery of dinner invitations, for Christ's sake. People camped out at my apartment to tell me that I wasn't down with the revolution if I didn't give money to their squatter band.”
Miami became the unplanned, the alternative. “It was serendipity. A shady friend needed some quick money. He owned some cheap real estate there, and I started going down. I didn't get killed,” he added in apparent seriousness.
“I just feel like I'm the same person, but I have a different instrument. A different choice of tools. I still have a very fast classic car” – he's talking about his own body – “that needs a great deal of care and upkeep, and I can bring it out of the garage and blow your mind a few times a year. And then I have to put it away,” he said.
These days, excess has been traded for polish. And the death of Asheton and perhaps the end of the Stooges may push Pop into the subtler, quieter work he has been pursuing. “I could continue the show right around the clock in your town until I drifted off elsewhere. That doesn't happen any more.”
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Thu Jan 08, 2009 4:26 pm
