My Month of Bowie, day 28: Iggy Pop's 'The Idiot' (1977)

David Bowie made some weird friends along the way. Iggy Pop was one of them.

The album: The Idiot (RCA, 1977)

Everybody do the Iggy!

My thoughts: Hooked on drugs and losing what was left of his brilliant mind, David Bowie decamped to Europe in the late 1970s. His life in Los Angeles had gotten too out-of-control even for an androgynous alien rock star. Luckily for us, he took a boisterous traveling companion with him: ex-Stooges frontman and garage rock icon Iggy Pop. Bowie made his famed Berlin trilogy during this very productive era (1977-1979), drawing musical influence from such experimental German bands as Kraftwerk and collaborating with the always-enigmatic Brian Eno. But even while crafting three of his boldest and best-regarded LPs, Bowie still had time to serve as a producer, songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist on Iggy Pop's first two solo albums.

Simultaneously goofy and menacing, Iggy Pop is such a major character in rock history—I think of him as the Bugs Bunny of proto-punk—that it's difficult to imagine there was ever a time when his solo career was brand new. But that's how it was in 1977. The Stooges were on a 30-year break, and Iggy needed to do something with himself to bridge that gap. The result was his debut record, The Idiot. David Bowie's influence on this LP is so great that some critics and fans feel The Idiot belongs to Bowie more than it belongs to Iggy. So it definitely qualifies for this project.

To me, The Idiot sounds like David Bowie and Iggy Pop sequestered themselves in an underground bunker somewhere and tried to figure out what music was, based only on their vague memories of it, while they lived on K-rations. Most of the songs on this album lock into a repetitive, thudding groove and stay there for several minutes while Iggy sings the same note over and over. Imagine an ornery robot trudging through a river of mud. Occasionally, David or Iggy will recall something of life on the surface world. To my ears, for instance, "Sister Midnight," has a lot in common with Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" (1972). And the intro to "Baby" is reminiscent of "Happy Together" (1967) by The Turtles. Just listen to it and think: "Imagine me and you, I do..."

I don't really buy that this is more of a David Bowie album than an Iggy Pop album because the central unifying sound of The Idiot is Iggy's deep, groggy voice. He's very much front and center. At various times he reminded me of Jim Morrison, Eric Burdon, and somebody's dad singing in the shower. There are even times when he sounds a lot like Bowie. (Bowie does contribute some backing vocals.) I wonder if David and Iggy were trying to Single White Female (1992) each other back then.

Lyrically, The Idiot is largely about jaded people who spend their nights partying, clubbing, carousing, drinking, and drugging into the wee small hours. It's fun at first, but it soon becomes empty and ultimately miserable. Iggy Pop sounds like a man who signed a contract with Satan centuries ago and has been mired in an endless loop of debauchery ever since. Did you ever see "A Nice Place to Visit," a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone with Larry Blyden and Sebastian Cabot? It's about a small-time hoodlum who dies and goes to hell, only he doesn't realize it's hell right away because it sure seems like a gangster's paradise when he arrives. The Idiot reminded me of that.

P.S. Before I go, I should point out that this album contains the original version of "China Girl," which David Bowie famously rerecorded for Let's Dance (1983). I'm so accustomed to the Bowie version that the original somehow seems like a cover. But Iggy Pop's low-fi rendition is worth hearing on its own. Iggy sounds like his vocals were recorded on a Dictaphone, and there's this strange clattering sound that I think comes from a toy piano. "China Girl" is also noticeably faster than most of the other tracks on this album. In fact, The Idiot ends with three (!) consecutive dirges ("Dum Dum Boys," "Tiny Girls," and "Mass Production"), two of which break the seven-minute mark.

Next: Lust for Life (1977)