Salon.com > Iggy Pop

David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s golden years are set for the big screen

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:55:00 +0000

Todd Haynes fantasized about the unlikely friendship and collaboration between David Bowie and Iggy Pop through his fictional "Velvet Goldmine." But now the filmmaker Gabriel Range is directing a biopic about the glam rock duo's time together in the mid- to late 1970s in West Berlin, according to the Guardian. Range, best-known for his movie about an imaginary assassination of George W Bush, is working from a screenplay by Robin French, reports the Hollywood Reporter. French, a TV writer for the BBC3's sitcom"Cuckoo," has tentatively titled the film "Lust for Life," basing the screenplay largely on Paul Trynka's Bowie and Pop biographies, "Starman" and "Open Up and Bleed."

I’m obsessed with being a hipster

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 10:02:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

I am obsessed with hipsterdom. I don't know why, or what to do about it. I am not a hipster. I never have been. But I have always been on the outward edges, knowing what hip is, knowing people who were hip, while remaining nerdy myself.

When I was younger, back in high school, I hung out with the punks and indie rockers, but I myself wore Nikes (instead of Converse) and ran cross-country (instead of skateboarded). At the not-particularly-hip college I attended I dated one of the few indie rockers there, and got a deeper knowledge of rock and punk and post-punk and indie-hip fashion. But I still wore nerdy shoes and laughed too loudly at corny jokes.

After college the indie-rocker and I moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn (before it exploded of course), and I learned to appreciate grit and dives and PBRs and irony. But still, I was a nerd.

While living there I hated Williamsburg because I always felt judged. I hated walking down the street in my dorky clothes with my dorky gait and my dorky smile. And I had no creative, impressive job to justify my presence there. I didn't meet too many people. I became miserable. Eventually the indie rocker and I broke up and I moved to a less hip part of Brooklyn, a part where people do their own laundry and where the sidewalk is not a fashion parade. In this new neighborhood I don't feel self-conscious when I walk to buy groceries.

Blue Glow

Thu, 02 Aug 2001 18:32:00 +0000

Series

Farewell to another house hamster on Big Brother 2 (8 p.m., CBS). Helena Bonham Carter, who traded in corsets for an ape suit, is the subject of a new profile on Biography (8 p.m., A&E). David spends way too much time with the playground activists and Pete continues to brood over his breakup with Jenny on Cold Feet (8 p.m. PT/11 p.m. ET, Bravo). Randy Quaid plays a dead man who gets a second chance at life but doesn't want it on Night Visions (9 p.m., Fox). On a rerun of CSI (9 p.m., CBS), Grissom investigates the death of a jogger who was apparently killed by a wild animal -- a wild animal who later used a scalpel to remove the jogger's organs.

Specials

Private Screenings: James Garner (8 p.m., Turner Classic Movies) features the genial Mr. G. in an interview with Robert Osborne, as well as clips from his movies and TV work. Followed by Garner's films "Up Periscope" (9 p.m.), "The Skin Game" (12 a.m.) and "Marlowe" (2 a.m.). (TCM will air Garner films every Thursday night for the rest of the month.)

Nice rebound!

Wed, 18 Jul 2001 16:47:00 +0000

Do you suppose they lied to us?

For months, Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz have insisted that there's nothing romantic between them. Those loving-looking photos of them from the set of "Vanilla Sky," which they were filming as Cruise's marriage to Nicole Kidman crumbled, were all about being in character, they said. ("You thought those pictures were real?" an apparently incredulous Cruz asked one reporter.) They were, they swore, just friends.

Now it turns out they're friends ... who date. Cruise's publicist, Pat Kingsley, has told Entertainment Tonight that her client "has had a couple of dates" with his Spanish costar since his birthday bash in L.A. on July 6.

"They saw each other a couple of times. They dated last week," Kingsley later told USA Today. "He's allowed, she's allowed."

Fine. But as to whether the romance is really that recent is anyone's guess. And don't expect to get a straight answer out of Cruz.

"It's such an absurd invasion of privacy," she told the Calgary Sun of questions of a personal nature, "which is why actors lie so much about their private lives."

Very cagey for someone facing the distinct prospect of going by the name Penelope Cruz-Cruise.

Iggy never did Ziggy!

Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:46:00 +0000

Remember Iggy Pop?

Well, he's back from wherever the hell he's been and promoting a new album. And while he's at it he'd like to take this opportunity to clear up a rumor that has apparently been dogging him since before some of us were born: He never, ever had sex with David Bowie or Mick Jagger, he tells Germany's Der Spiegel magazine. Not even once. Not even when no one was looking. Not even real quick-like.

Which doesn't mean he doesn't admire Jagger's prowess in the sack. "The one thing that I am jealous of Mick for are the young things he always hangs out with," the wrinkly rocker says. "Just how does he do it?"

The way Pop figures it, the Rolling Stone's got nothing he doesn't have, and yet he manages to boff women like Luciana Morad. "I mean he is older than me, and my arse is still really tight," Pop points out. "I would have happily got that Brazilian model pregnant."

As for Bowie, well, he has a thing or two to say about that "arsehole," too.

"Bowie and I met up at a TV show recently," Pop tells the magazine. "Bowie clapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I was still alive. He is still an arsehole, but a damned nice one."

Sharps & Flats

Mon, 13 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Wouldn't this be a more interesting world if Melissa Etheridge had picked Iggy Pop rather than David Crosby to sire her love child? Were popular culture subject to Darwinian principles, natural selection alone would seem to favor a lean, mean rockin' machine over an overstuffed walrus with a liver transplant. Yet Etheridge's choice is the same one that rock itself made in 1970 -- the year that the music went so terribly wrong. Climbing the utopian tower of sweetness and light was "Deja Vu," an album which elevated the whiny warbles of Messrs. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young into the harmonies of post-hippie solipsism. Down a darker alley was the Stooges' "Fun House," a switchblade howl from the trailer-trash abyss. The first album topped the charts; the second went straight to the toxic dump of oblivion.

Or so it seemed at the time. Thirty years later, "Fun House" still has the rabid bite of a junkyard dog, as Rhino's unleashing of "1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions" attests. Reviled by critics and ignored at the cash register, the album initially dismissed as a demented novelty has resurfaced as an expensive collectible, limited to a numbered edition of 3,000 (available only through the Rhino Web site).

Real Life Rock Top 10

Mon, 18 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Oct. 18, 1999

1. Stan Ridgway "Anatomy"
(Ultra Modern/New West)

Coming out of the old L.A. punk scene with Wall of Voodoo, Ridgway has always peeked around corners as a kind of detective ("of the heart," I think you're supposed to add). Here the liner art plays off the '50s moderne credits of the 1959 movie "Anatomy of a Murder." But unlike other detectives, Ridgway has all the time in the world. He's not going anywhere; he doesn't solve anything; he just takes notes. The slowness in his singing is like the slowness in the way Dwight Yoakam's trucker moves in "Red Rock West." He misses nothing and he keeps his mouth shut. That's a hard trick for a singer, but that's the feeling you get: In Ridgway's songs, not a word is spoken out loud. They all take place in his thoughts as he tries to figure out what he's seen. The music is muscular, but all restraint: You don't raise your voice if you're not really using it. "Wrong, so wrong, we're wrong," Ridgway says in "Mission Bell"; he winds the words around each other until the song they cast back to, a 20-year-old Elvis Presley's "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone," has grown up without ever announcing it's there at all.

Vocal coaching for the Hanson brothers, Iggy Pop and President Clinton

Thu, 23 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

In the introduction to Roger Love's upcoming Little, Brown book "Set Your Voice Free," Dr. Laura Schlessinger gives the Los Angeles vocal coach the divine nod. "It is a fact that his many years of experience with thousands of voices, combined with his G-d-given abilities, make Roger the incredible voice 'therapist' that he is," the radio-talk-show host intones. Over the past 26 years, Love has had a clientele stretching from the sacred to the profane -- from Dr. Laura to Iggy Pop.

Love says that Pop -- the former Stooges vocalist who has been known to roll around on broken glass in concert -- was surprisingly well-behaved when Love worked with him, around the time of the singer's 1990 album "Brick by Brick," "He was absolutely one of the most conscientious students I've had -- ever," Love said. "He was very diligent. He was like a sponge. He also had zero percent fat content."

Hanson, the group of wholesome adolescent brothers famous for their 1997 single "Mmmbop," proved more difficult to coach. "There were a lot of parents and record execs hanging around," Love said of the recording sessions for Hanson's album "Middle of Nowhere." "There were too many people stirring the pot." The group's label, Mercury, had recruited Love to contend with a breaking crisis: The voice of lead singer Taylor Hanson -- "so high it had a prepubescent sound, like a boy soprano" -- had changed in mid-recording. "We had to reattach the whole top part of his voice," Love recalled.

Love's book comes packaged with a 73-minute CD of vocal advice. He offered Salon Books a sample of the kind of techniques he might suggest to President Clinton: "He's a mouth breather, which means that his type of inhalation drains the vocal cords, which gives his voice that itchy sound. But not having slept at the White House, I can't tell you for sure."

The glam that fell to earth

Fri, 06 Nov 1998 20:00:00 +0000

"Velvet Goldmine" tries to be lots of things at once, but it's successful at only some of them. By turns joyous and maddening, it's a tribute to the short-lived but glorious glam-rock era, an exploration of what pop music can mean to kids who feel alienated because of their sexuality, a fable about the way stardom and the opportunities that come with it can tear people's lives apart. "Velvet Goldmine" is weighed down with self-important messages, but it's also splashily opulent. It's as if Todd Haynes had plunged his hand into a pile of clothes at a jumble sale and come out with a handful that was half velvet finery, half polyester rejectables.

Sharps and Flats: We Will Fall

Wed, 29 Oct 1997 20:00:00 +0000

Why is it that people take tribute albums as lightly as they do? They're a wonderful thing: the standardized fitness tests of the rock academy. While any band that's worth sneezing at can cobble together a set of original songs that'll play up their strengths and paper over their failings, many can't pull off more than a selected cover or two without risk of exposure and ridicule. All the Scotch tape and wires become visible, you see. When Stone Temple Pilots did "Dancing Days," it was instantly clear what Led Zep were by comparison, and who came out better in the final measure. When Moby did Mission of Burma -- well, the blood's not dry on the floor even yet, and as good as Moby is when he's doing his own thing, there are places he'll never be allowed again without professional escort. We learn from moments like these.

Punk forefathers Iggy Pop and Lou Reed show their age

Thu, 01 Aug 1996 19:00:00 +0000

It's hard to imagine what the landscape of rock would look like today had Lou Reed and Iggy Pop not had a hand in shaping it. Reed and the Velvet Underground's drone, klank, and burble set the stage for everything from Siouxsie and the Banshees down through Nirvana, and Iggy and the Stooges practically created punk rock 'round about '69. Rock 'n' roll owes a great deal to Iggy and Lou; unfortunately, they're calling in their debts now.
"Naughty Little Doggy" (Virgin), Iggy Pop's latest, is definitely a dog of an album. Iggy tries to create a rock anthem with each cut, and ends up with a mostly homogeneous series of radio-friendly snoozers. He starts with "I Wanna Live," an upbeat, state-of-the-career address that recalls the depths of the Ramones' "Pet Sematary," followed by a Cramps-like ode to chickenhawking called "Pussy Walk."

"Shoeshine Girl" is a gorgeous anomaly here, a mellifluously seedy, country blues acoustic gem about a goth chick he ogled in an airport. After that, though, Iggy reverts to hype with "Heart is Saved," a power-pop sock hop ditty to the (cranked-up) tune of "Ballad of the Green Berets," and brings it on home to a crooning, burbling finale with the get-out-yer-lighters rock ballad "Look Away."

The Awful Truth

Mon, 08 Jul 1996 19:48:00 +0000

sure, People magazine has the Sexiest Man Alive contest, but that only exists to satisfy and publicly vindicate the masturbation fantasies of older, unhappily married women in the Midwest. Besides, the editors' taste generally runs to smug white idiot actors with bleached hair and teeth and paint-on tans, like Costner or Pitt. Someday, I hope, the co-opting of all forms of sub-pornographic imagery and teenage rebellion by MTV may prompt America to find less adolescent criteria for "Cool" and "Sexy."

In order to hasten that day, and provide a different lens with which to view the parade of waterbed breasts and stripped hair and crotch pumps so amply provided for us by the popular media, I have thoughtfully assembled my own list. Fortunately, Legends of REAL Cool still exist. Not cool because of poolside hard-on Hollywood sexiness, either, but Scary Legit and Street-Credible Cool. TRUE SEXY, in other words.