Iggy Pop by Paul Trynka Page B

and didn’t really like people very much,’ he explained. Over the years Glenn had nonetheless attained a basic mastery of the niceties of human behaviour. All Jeep had to do was remove this, ‘to take away all the little things you develop so you can get along with other people’. By the time Quackenbush got in line at the Armoury, Jeep proudly boasted, ‘The lines on either side had a gap of four people, because no one would stand near him, they just knew something was very wrong.’
    Iggy Osterberg’s performance was a little more baroque, but still satisfying. After they had completed a questionnaire, the draftees were required to strip down to their skivvies in readiness for their physical examination. Osterberg duly lined up, but kept his hands down his pants, ‘holding his dick’, only to be admonished by the military police who were keeping order. ‘No one is touching my dick!’ Osterberg yelped, as the MPs counselled him gently, ‘Don’t worry son, no one will touch you.’ Finally two of the burlier MPs grabbed his elbows and attempted to pull his hands away from his genitals. ‘But Jim was a drummer, and he had arms of steel!’ cackled Holland. ‘They lifted him right off the ground, but couldn’t get him to take his hands off his dick! He was out of there in half an hour!’
    Holland calculated that he saved twenty-one musicians from the draft, including most of the future Stooges, the Rationals, and future members of the SRC. Many of their contemporaries were not so lucky. Two of Jim’s close friends, Ricky Hodges and Dennis Dieckmann, were drafted, but survived their tours of duty. Several other Ann Arbor High classmates were maimed or killed in the South-east Asian conflict.
    Liberated from military service, the Prime Movers could dedicate themselves to their mission of converting the masses to their own brand of authentic blues. They were sufficiently evangelistic - or masochistic - to take their music to the heart of Ann Arbor’s tiny black quarter around Ann Street, playing a residence at Clint’s Club every week for over a year. They were tolerated by the clientele, who appreciated that they were making an effort, and any mockery tended to be good-humoured. Often a set would finish in silence until some wag shouted out, ‘Let’s give these guys the clap.’ (‘Meaning gonorrhoea, of course,’ says Erlewine.) Sometimes at the teen nightclubs like Mothers they met with similar incomprehension, but for a select few they were the coolest band around - Chosen Few guitarist and future Stooge James Williamson describes the Prime Movers as ‘the best band Iggy was ever in’. ‘What they were doing was relatively esoteric,’ says Dale Withers, who along with her sister, Janet, and future husband, Larry, was one of the band’s more committed fans. ‘But we thought they would really move on up, like the Stones did.’ The band members were formidable musicians. They would often throw unexpected gospel numbers into their set; Sheff’s adept, inventive keyboard-playing anticipated the sound of the Doors by a full year, while Dan Erlewine was one of the first US musicians to use a Gibson Les Paul to achieve an authentic, overdriven, blues grittiness. Iggy himself was becoming an impressive drummer, and he made a decent fist of the songs on which he sang lead - ‘Mystery Train’ and ‘I’m A Man’: ‘I remember him singing that song as “I’m A Tricycle”,’ says Bill Kirchen, later a revered interpreter of roots music. ‘He did it totally straight, like Muddy Waters, singing out the letters “T-R-I-C-Y-C-L-E”. I was impressed!’
    Notwithstanding such japes, Iggy’s stage demeanour was restrained compared to his Iguanas persona. ‘They were actually quite shy on stage,’ remembers Dale Withers. ‘Not too much banter or extravagance. But they had a mystique about them.’
    The Erlewines’ friendship with the Butterfield Blues Band, who had revitalised the American blues