Iggy Pop is looking at a life change. As he ambled through the dark film set, over clustered power cables, he is obviously no longer the jagged, angular performer he once was. He has already long been drawn to quieter and more varied pursuits, which was partly the reason he took a supporting part in Toronto actor-director Rob Stefaniuk's forthcoming vampire comedy Suck.
“I'm not up for many wild adventures at this point. Not at all,” he said with a smile in his deep, gravel-chewing drawl.
That was before the news this week of the death of Ron Asheton, guitarist of Iggy Pop's legendary band the Stooges. When I spoke with Pop last month while he was filming in Toronto, he was scheduled to tour with Asheton and the other Stooges again this summer and to begin working on a new album for 2010.
The reunited Stooges had been a last hurrah for the band's particular brand of amped weirdness. But in his solo work, Pop has long been gearing down. “The things I want to be able to do, the abilities that excite me, are more technical now,” he said. “They are more obscure. I just managed to do, I think, a good vocal on a Dixieland type of song that's going to come out in French next year. For me, I'm really glad I did that before I kick the bucket.”
He added: “I'd like to be able to carry a tune on a memorable ballad. I've got a coupla songs that I've been involved in that are memorable to people, and that's a great thing. But on a ballad – I'd like to be able to do that.”
The real Pop, easily the most physical of rock legends even at 61, looks pliant, almost squat. It's easy to see he's dealing with a well-worn body, lost cartilage in his hip and failing knees after a career of stage diving, on-stage self-mutilation and years soaking up the liquid culture of each new city. But that was clearly years ago, as he cautiously descended a set of stairs to a basement below the set, bumping a studio light in the process. “Down to the Batcave,” he said.
Swathed in a shapeless garbage bag of a ski jacket, Pop began the interview with a highly earnest, “Pleased to meet you,” his handshake as padded as an oven mitt, his eyes impossibly wide. The effect is part rock ‘n' roll aristocrat, part deer with a semi racing toward it on the freeway.
And even though his immediately recognizable mug looks a little out of place on a $3-million Toronto-shot comedy, he was one of the first in a coterie of musicians, from Alice Cooper to Moby and Henry Rollins, to accept supporting parts in the film.
Is acting, then, the remaining creative phase for Pop? What's left after decades as garage-rock, proto-punk's icon No. 1? “Okay, there are two parts to that,” he said, settling into his folding, movie-star chair. “I have nothing left to say.” Big laughs all around. “And I like to react,” he added with sudden, turn-on-a-dime seriousness.
“That's the one thing you don't get a chance to do when you spend your entire adult life carrying around the huge zone of your genius,” he said, laughing again. “You don't have time to react to other people. And I, as an artist, find that I like to react and to just forget about my schlamozzle.”
Okay, now, it's important to get the tone of “schlamozzle” correctly. Pop typically bounces between funereal gravitas and a kind of cartoonish, ding-dong intonation. Artistic high-mindedness matched with knuckle-head humour to keep it honest.
