Who influenced Iggy Pop?

Answer 1

Iggy began his musical career playing drums in a blues band called the Prime Movers, and was heavily influenced by black blues musicians. Iggy says, "Once I heard the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, and even Chuck Berry playing his own tune, I couldn't go back and listen to the British Invasion, you know, a band like the Kinks. I'm sorry, the Kinks are great, but when you're a young guy and you're trying to figure out where your *alls are, you go, 'Those guys sound like ***sies!' ...What I noticed about these black guys was that their music was like honey off their fingers. Real childlike and charming in its simplicity. It was just a very natural mode of expression and life-style. They were drunk all the time and it was all sexy-sexy and dudey-dudey, and it was just a bunch of guys that didn't want to work and played good. I realized that these guys were way over my head, and that what they were doing was so natural to them that it was almost ridiculous for me to make a studious copy of it, which is what most white blues bands did...I thought, What you gotta do is play your own simple blues. I could describe my experience based on the way those guys are describing theirs... So that's what I did. I appropriated a lot of their vocal forms, and also their turns of phrase -- either heard or misheard or twisted from blues songs. So 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' is probably my mishearing of 'Baby Please Don't Go.'" (pp 36 - 37, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk)

One of those musicians, a drummer named Sam Lay, was particularly influential to Iggy. As Ron Asheton (one of the Stooges) says, "[Iggy] decided that Sam Lay, the famous black blues drummer, was going to be his mentor, so he went to Chicago," (p 36).

Jim Morrison and the Doors were also somewhat of an influence to Iggy. He says, "...I went to see [the Doors] at this gymnasium, and the concert was the homecoming dance for all these big, butch American clods and their girls. They were going there to see the band that did 'Light My Fire.' The band got onstage first, without Morrison, and they just sounded like pure s***. It sounded awful...Finally, Morrison lurched on the stage...When Morrison opened his mouth to sing, he sang in a **ssy voice -- a falsetto. He sang like Betty Boop and refused to sing in a normal voice. I think they got near the end of the song and then just stopped. Morrison went over to the guitar player, and said, 'Hey, my man, play that one...' I think it might have been 'Love Me Two Times,' and it was happening. Until Morrison started singing in the Betty Boop voice again. Basically the concert proceeded like that. I was very excited. I loved the antagonism; I loved that he was pissing them off. Yes, yes, yes. They were all frat people, football killers, the future leaders of America -- the people who today are the rock stars of America -- and not only was Morrison pissing them off, but he was mesmerizing them at the same time... That's when I thought, 'Look how awful they are, and they've got the number one single in the country! If this guy can do it, I can do it. And I gotta do it now. I can't wait any longer," (pp 39 - 40).

For more information on Iggy Pop and the origins of punk rock, see Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's book, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. William S. Burroughs says, "This book tells it like it was. It is the very first book to do so."