Iggy Pop by Paul Trynka Page A

Prime Movers into Mothers Teenage Nightclub. He regarded Iggy as a ‘solid, sound’ drummer but was staggered by some of his antics, particularly one evening when he checked the stage at showtime, only to see it empty but for a cheesy-looking cardboard phone booth. Then he saw the drummer, dressed in some kind of superhero outfit, break his way out of the ludicrous contraption, climb up a rope to the balcony where the entire band was set up and get to his kit just as the band fired into the intro. ‘We were just going, Jeez,’ remembers Andrews.
    After dropping out of the University of Michigan by the second term of his anthropology course - he claimed he learned more as an autodidact, researching in the university library - Jim moved on from his apartment share with Dan Erlewine behind Herb David’s guitar shop to a room across the road in Blakely Court, and finally to an apartment in the basement of a rundown Victorian building, which he shared with Scott Richardson. Lynn Klavitter, his girlfriend from high school, had moved to California, but went to search him out on her return in the summer of 1966. She was shocked at the transformation from the boy she knew from the previous summer: ‘I’m sure he was heavily into drugs, he was wrapped in a blanket, the place was a total disaster.’ Lauri Ingber, who’d served on Jim’s High School election committee, saw him around the same time, and is convinced to this day that the previously clean-cut school kid was by then on heroin. But his dishevelled state was more to do with poverty than the marijuana that was the drug du jour , and which he only smoked ‘when force-fed’, as it exacerbated his asthma. By now he was living on his meagre earnings from the Prime Movers and Discount Records, along with handouts from his parents. ‘We were poor, and we were starving half the fucking time,’ says Scott Richardson. ‘We had our clothes hanging on the water pipes, newspapers on the floor, we were living like Kurt Cobain underneath a freeway. But I remember laying with him all night and talking about stuff. It was such a tremendously exciting time. And it was that painful period when you’re young, don’t know who you are yet, with all these influences around.’
    For a short time, the Ann Arbor svengali Jeep Holland took control of the Prime Movers. His control freakery was excessive, and the band began to bridle at his insistence that they perform dressed in suits. But Jeep’s megalomania was a godsend in a genuine crisis, notably the spectre of military service in the Vietnam war. Ominous letters started dropping on the doorsteps of many of Ann Arbor ’s musicians from 1966 - by which time Iggy, who’d dropped out of university and therefore lost his student deferment, was vulnerable, as was his friend Ron Asheton. Fortunately Jeep saw the military’s predations on his musical empire as a personal affront, and he masterminded a counter-attack that was inspired in its audacity and frightening in its attention to detail.
    The guiding principle, Holland explained to Ann Arbor ’s apprehensive musicians, was psychology. Creative, vulnerable psyches were by their nature incompatible with the rigours of a military campaign or the claustrophobia of life in a platoon. Jeep’s tactics were to accentuate the charming personality foibles of his charges, and even amplify them, often with the use of his favoured drug methamphetamine, until the establishment was compelled to view these innocents as deranged psychopaths.
    Jeep would work closely with his subjects for a week before their fateful draft examination at Ann Arbor Armoury (the cheek of the Army, subverting a rock ’n’ roll venue for this charade!) and his evangelistic fervour would help all their fears evaporate. One example he liked to cite was that of Glenn Quackenbush, keyboard player with greaser band the Fugitives, and later the Scott Richard Case, or SRC. ‘Like most organ players, Glenn felt superior,