IGGY
Iggy Pop (born James Newell Osterberg, Jr.; April 21, 1947) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and actor. Osterberg became known as “Iggy” in high school, when he served as drummer for a local blues band, The Iguanas. He is vocalist of influential protopunk band The Stooges, who reunited in 2003, and has been known for his outrageous and unpredictable stage antics. Many of Pop’s songs have become well-known, including “Lust for Life”, “The Passenger”, “Real Wild Child”, “Candy” (a duet with Kate Pierson of The B-52’s), “China Girl”, “Nightclubbing”, “Search and Destroy”, and “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. (More from Wikipedia)
Mark Deming, again from Allmusic: “Kill City never hits as hard as the manic roar of the Stooges’ Raw Power, but the songs are very good, and the album’s more measured approach suits the dark, honest tone of the material. The sense of defeat that runs through ‘Sell Your Love’, ‘I Got Nothin’’, and ‘No Sense of Crime’ was doubtless a mirror of Iggy’s state of mind; but he expressed his agony with blunt eloquence, and his sneering rejection of the Hollywood street scene in ‘Lucky Monkeys’ is all the more cutting coming from a man who had lived through the worst of it.’”
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Some months back, I included a story on the Prime Movers, yet another Michigan band, which numbered among its members Michael Erlewine, the man who started All Music Guide (now Allmusic), along with All Movie Guide and All Game Guide; and James Osterberg, better known today as Iggy Pop. He started out as a drummer, as he was for this band; and the other bandmembers started calling him “Iggy” because he had previously been the drummer for a band called the Iguanas, this month’s Under Appreciated Rock Band. The band name also gave Greg Shaw the name for his long series of Stooges albums, The Iguana Chronicles.
(December 2016)
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Ten years ago, in December 2009, I wrote the first of my 82 posts on Under Appreciated Rock Bands, i.e., rock bands (and artists) who did not have a write-up as yet in Wikipedia. It wasn’t much to look at, just four short paragraphs, but I got a lot wordier and more wide-ranging as the years went by. I had hoped to keep this up for at least 5 years, if not 10 years; as it happened, my last post was dated December 2017 – 8 years later, and 2 years ago.
For two of the Under Appreciated Rock Bands – the Rip Chords (who had a major hit in the surf era with “Hey Little Cobra”) and the Iguanas (punk icon Iggy Pop’s first band, and the reason that he came to be called “Iggy”) – I managed to write my post literally the month before someone started a Wikipedia article on them. For another two – the Piltdown Men and Haymarket Square – it turns out that there was already a Wikipedia article on them; for the latter band, I just plain forgot to look! And one of the UARB’s, Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters was not even a rock band – and I just found a Wikipedia article about them also, so I suppose I didn’t look closely enough when I started that post either. But I don’t care at this point: They are all Under Appreciated, from one end to the other, even for the handful who do have a Wikipedia article these days.
(Year 10 Review)
