Pop's continuous death-defying acts also worried the label, whose decision to drop the band led to the Stooges' breakup the same year. The Stooges were dropped from their record company in 1971 due to the public's disinterest and the group's growing addictions to hard drugs. Although both records sold poorly upon release, they've since become rock classics, and can be pointed to as the official catalysts for what later became punk rock. Elektra Records signed the quartet in 1968, issuing their self-titled debut a year later and a follow-up effort, Fun House, in 1970. Using this moniker, Pop became a man possessed on-stage, going into the crowd nightly to confront members of the audience and working himself into such a frenzy that he would be bleeding by the end of the night from various nicks and scratches. It was around this time that the group shortened its name to the Stooges, and Osterberg changed his own stage name to Iggy Pop. Although it would take a while for their sound to jell - they experimented with such non-traditional instruments as empty oil drums, vacuums, and other objects before returning to their respective instruments - the group fit in perfectly with such other high-energy Detroit bands as the MC5, becoming a local attraction. In 1967, he hooked up with an old acquaintance from his high school days, guitarist Ron Asheton, who also brought along his brother, drummer Scott, and bassist Dave Alexander, thus forming the Psychedelic Stooges. He tried to find musicians who shared his musical vision: to create a band whose music would be primordial, sexually charged, aggressive, and repetitive (using his early electric razor/car plant memories for reference). This time, he would leave the drums behind and be the frontman, taking inspiration from the likes of the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed and the Doors' Jim Morrison. His heart remained with rock & roll, however, and shortly after returning to Ann Arbor, Osterberg decided to form a rock band. When a brief stint at the University of Michigan didn't work out, he moved to Chicago instead, where he played drums alongside the city's bluesmen.
Via the Rolling Stones, he discovered the blues and formed a similarly styled outfit called the Prime Movers upon graduating from high school in 1965. Intrigued by rock & roll (as well as such non-musical, monotonous, and mechanical sounds as his father's electric razor and the automobile assembly plants in and around Metro Detroit), Osterberg began playing drums and formed his first band, the Iguanas, in the early '60s. After the end of the Stooges, Pop collaborated with Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age for an album that recalled his work with Bowie, 2016's Post Pop Depression, and he explored new musical avenues outside the boundaries of rock music on 2009's Euro-pop-inspired Preliminaires, the ambient guitar and electronic soundscapes of 2019's Free, and an experimental collaboration with composer Catherine Graindorge, 2022's The Dictator.īorn on April 21, 1947, in Muskegon, Michigan, James Newell Osterberg was raised by his parents in a trailer park close to Ann Arbor, in neighboring Ypsilanti. Into the 2000s, Pop sought to blend a new level of social commentary with impassioned hard rock, which climaxed with a Stooges reunion in 2003 along with extensive touring, the revived band cut a pair of new albums, The Weirdness (2007) and Ready to Die (2013). Through much of the 1970s and '80s, Pop explored a variety of musical avenues for his iconoclastic world view, but found a successful middle ground between the expressive and the commercially viable with 1990's Brick by Brick, which even produced a hit single, "Candy" (a duet with Kate Pierson of the B-52's). After the original collapse of the Stooges, Pop launched a career on his own that was every bit as uncompromising and significantly more diverse, and his first two solo albums, produced by David Bowie (1977's The Idiot and Lust for Life) helped blaze a trail for post-punk. There are few bands in punk (or any sort of left-of-center hard rock) that didn't draw influence from the three studio albums the Stooges released between 19 (especially 1970's Fun House and 1973's Raw Power). Often called the Godfather of Punk, Iggy Pop created a Dionysian performance style and a variety of street-smart primitivism that made him one of rock's most influential figures when he co-founded the Stooges in 1967.
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