One after another, the stars of American alternative music are going to Moscow. At the beginning of September, Patti Smith thundered, at the end of the month the legendary IGGI POP with the Stoogs group appeared
It was customary to talk about Stooges for a long time - "great losers." From 1969 to 1973, the group recorded three records; They were sold out of hand. But now they enter the lists of "best rock albums of all time." And as for IGGI himself (from IGUANAS - this was the name of one of his previous teams), his solo career for many years was an example of a “brilliant” commercial failure.
“We had our own sound, all-freeing, like a Tatar-Mongol cavalry, thousands of small Mongols with sabers at almost unbearable frequencies,” IGGI is proud of. In the era, when the rock groups tried to play complex and sophisticated music, Stooges performed a rough, dirty, sharp tre-chord rock. And the texts of the songs were not about love and beauty, but about the dark sides of life. It is not surprising that this music was not to the court in the Hippie era.
“What was good in Stoogenes-we lived almost without money, even when we had contracts with a record label. Nobody invested in us, did not support. We were fanatics. Any obstacle turned into laughter, ”IGGI later recalled. And he added: “In my opinion, friendship as a musical style is much more important than this: we play blues or not blues ... We were a group of friends.”
The musicians were friends not only with each other, but also with all the substances “expanding consciousness” at that time. IGGI fell on the stage of the neglect, dead drunk or pumped -up drugs. He cursed with the public, beat the bottles and cut himself with fragments, jumped from the stage to the hall and rode in the hands of the audience (many rock groups were now adopted). Stoogenes just ahead of time: nearly ten years later, the punk style will enter the fashion, whose godfathers will be written down by IGGI with comrades ...
Salvation of the drowning man
They say that everyone has their own guardian angel. Iggi was lucky: David Bowie, another pillar of modern rock music, became his angel.
They are insanely different. Bowie is a British esthete, brilliantly educated; Musical chameleon, who over the years has discovered a new style of rock music with every album. Pop is a rowdy and a bully from the American Middle West, which grew up in a trailer on the city outskirts and really did not receive education; His universities were groups of black blues from Chicago, in which he played on drums.
Yes, and where did David know about Stooigs at all - it is incomprehensible. But after the first success came to Bowie in 1972, he flew to America, found IGGI, brought him to himself, and then to the studio. He financed the first revival of the Stoogenes decaying by that time and the record of their third, still commercially failed album.
The group broke up again. IGGI went to the clinic to be treated from heroin addiction, escaped from there, bomzhevvo on the streets of Loassylees ... But the guardian angel did not forget about him: in 1975, Bowie took the IGGI as a musician in a concert tour. At the end of the tour, they traveled together around the world (even in Moscow), then settled in Berlin, renting one apartment for two. David then also fought with drug addiction, and the musicians understood each other well. Bowie at that time defiantly experimented not only with music, so Iggy ass still has to be rejected from suspicions of love with a friend.
Together with David (the co -author of the songs), IGGI recorded his first two solo albums The Idiot and Lust for Life. Albums repeated the fate of Stoogenes-lost on store shelves, but over time became a classic of rock music.
IGGI either broke out of the anesthesia, then again fell there ... And then David Bowie went the other way: in the early 80s, he performed their joint song China Girl, which became a global hit. The ass went to part of the impressive copyright fees. The following year, Bowie repeated the trick, having recorded two more joint songs - and IGGI was able to financially get to his feet. He needed a couple of years to tie with drugs. And in 1985, Pop, with the help of the same Bowie, released a new record. Single Real Wild Child was the first hit of IGGI, and was later used in the soundtrack of the megapopular Hollywood comedy "Beauty".
Correction of a bully
Since then, Bowie’s help was no longer required. If not the name of the IGGI of the SPA, then some of his works are popular even outside the audience of “alternative” music: this happened after he sang several songs for the film by Emir Kusturitsa Arizona Dream. And in 1995, the young British director Danny Boyle used the Lust For Life song in the movie “On the Needle”, which became a world sensation.
Pop records very hard, then delicate and lyrical albums. But the success or failure of a separate disk no longer play a role: Iggy entered the world rock pantheon, became a cult figure. A generation of musicians who grew up on his songs and reverers for honor appeared to record a song or two with him.
On the recording of his next Skull Ring album in 2003, IGGI POP called the surviving comrades from Stooges - the brothers Ron and Scott Estonov. Soon the group went on a world tour: for the first time in the history of the group - full stadiums, the enthusiasm of critics. In 2006, the new, fourth album of Stooges was released.
IGGI is now in sixty, but he is amazingly awake, despite a more than a stormy life. Having tied up with drugs and drunkenness, he switched to mineral water and vegetables, became interested in oriental health practices. “I became very, very strong. I was enough nourished qigong, 1 to live in show business, ”he says. And it confirms this at every speech: he jumps over the stage worse than other young ones, and starts the hall from half a turn.
