An Annotated History of Iggy Pop’s Body.

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An Annotated History of Iggy

Pop’s Body
The story of punk's most physical performer,
told through rock's most famous physique.

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By Matthew Singer
August 15, 2017 at 11:36 pm PDT

Iggy Pop's body is a wonderland. Or,

depending on your perspective, a house of
horrors.

Either way, there isn't another quite like it in

rock 'n' roll, much like there has never been
another performer like the man born James
Newell Osterberg Jr. in a Michigan trailer park
in 1947. And really, those two things are
inextricable from each other. Like Hendrix and
his Stratocaster, or Kiss and their makeup,
Iggy's physique—lithe and leathery, less
carved from marble than chiseled into flank
steak—is integral to his legend. It's the punk-
rock Rosetta Stone. At a time when hippies
were making "head music," he and his cohorts
in the Stooges were making music for every
other part of the anatomy, a visceral
cacophony he quite literally embodied—sex
and violence rolled into one tight, thrilling,
frightening package.
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And though he's grown less fearsome over

time—appearing in insurance ads and The
Rugrats Movie will do that—his body remains
a natural wonder, as much as he remains a
force of nature. It's a work of art unto itself,
and has been studied as such: Last year, Iggy
modeled nude for artist Jeremy Deller's life-
drawing class in New York, the resulting
sketches forming an exhibition at the
Brooklyn Museum.
As Deller told the media, Pop's body "is central
to an understanding of rock music," and it is
imperative to understanding Iggy Pop. Here
we present a physical history of the eternally
shirtless Godfather of Punk.

EYEBROWS
They're probably the last thing you'd notice on
him, but the story of Iggy Pop starts at his
eyebrows. Actually, it officially starts with his
high school band, the Iguanas, which inspired
the first part of his stage name. But the
second part came just before the Stooges'
debut at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit in
1968. "Iggy had shaved off his eyebrows," late
drummer Scott Asheton recalls in the oral
history Please Kill Me. "We had a friend
named Jim Pop who had a nervous condition
and had lost all his hair, including his
eyebrows. So when Iggy shaved his eyebrows
we started calling him Pop." That's also the
show where the newly christened Mr. Pop
sustained his first self-inflicted injury. "Iggy
started sweating, and then he realized what
you need eyebrows for," Asheton said. "By the
end of the set, his eyes were totally swollen
because of all that oil and glitter."

ADVERTISING
FACE

Iggy was always smarter than he looked and

acted, but if you were making a movie about a
depressed Midwestern town and casting for a
sweet but dim gas station attendant, young Ig
would've been your guy. While certainly
handsome, with his large eyes and gaunt
features, it was an odd kind of handsome, a
fact he seemed to recognize. "Here comes my
face/It's plain bizarre," he sang on 1977's Lust
for Life, an album in which he appears on the
cover posed as if he'd shown up to take his
senior photo after a three-day coke binge.
With age, he's added extra crags and creases,
lending him a certain weatherbeaten dignity.
But haters remain. A few years ago, a U.K. poll
voted his the worst celebrity face, above Cher,
Mickey Rourke and Donatella Versace. Harsh—
but, for the guy who once snarled "Your Pretty
Face Is Going to Hell," probably fair.
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SHOULDERS

Although Iggy gradually shed his various

stage stunts as he grew older and less out of
his mind on drugs, he kept stage diving into
his 60s—he invented the move, so why not?—
until 2010, when he launched himself into the
audience at Carnegie freaking Hall and
splatted on the floor, dislocating his shoulder.
It was the punk equivalent of Michael Jordan
blowing a dunk on his third comeback with
the Washington Wizards. He decided right
then that his days as a human projectile were
over.
CHEST

Adam's rib. Achilles' heel. Iggy Pop's torso. On

a body scarred with history, this is where he
carved his legend—and that's meant 100
percent literally. He started with a splintered
drumstick at a college gig in 1969 and kept
going from there, using whatever sharp object
happened to be on hand at any particular
show. Self-mutilation soon became his version
of Pete Townshend's windmill or Mick
Jagger's rooster walk, the rock-star move fans
would come out expecting to see. (As Iggy
admits, his early fans were sketchy weirdos.)
One particularly insane instance, at a
particularly insane point in his career, involved
slicing an X into his chest with a knife after
failing to entice someone in the audience to
stab him. Thankfully, he put away the cutlery
long ago, allowing his long-suffering pectoral
region to wrinkle with dignity. Well, he tried
anyway—Google "Iggy Pop sad torso" for a
reminder that age, and the internet, comes for
us all.

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ABS

Last year, when images from Deller's life-

drawing project emerged, Vogue salivated
over Iggy's washboard abs, noting that they
appear "inexplicably unaffected by time or
gravity" and pondering how they've held up
despite years of extremely bad living. Plenty
of others have wondered the same. Men's
Fitness seemed to call bullshit on his
professed regimen of tai chi and light
swimming. But that's more than he was
apparently doing in 1980, in the dregs of his
heroin addiction, when Creem asked what he
did to stay so fit. "Rock does it all for me," he
responded. Smack is a hell of a wonder drug.
PENIS

A British magazine once described Iggy Pop

as "a hyperactive packet of muscle and sinew
straight out of Michelangelo's wet dreams."
But given how he imagined the biblical David,
not even the master could've dreamt Il
Stoogio with the correct anatomical
dimensions. Stories of the Stooges' most
prominent, um, member aren't just the stuff
of groupie legend but documented fact. While
the signature hip-huggers and bikini briefs he
wore onstage left pretty much nothing to the
imagination, Pop often went ahead and
removed all doubt. "Iggy took out his dick and
put it on the speaker," Steve Harris, the former
vice president of Elektra Records, recalled of
one early gig in Please Kill Me. "It was just
vibrating around. He was very well-endowed."
He mostly keeps Not-So-Li'l Iggy sheathed
these days (well, mostly), though that hasn't
stopped the curious from investigating the
myth. At Keller Auditorium last year, a fan
reached out of the crowd to grab a handful for
themselves. Slightly Bigger Iggy, naturally,
didn't flinch.

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LEGS

Iggy Pop doesn't move like other rock stars.

Writhing, whirling, contorting himself at odd
angles, he more often resembles an untrained
ballerina trying to improvise a routine while
high on ayahuasca. Part of that's by design,
and part of that is how he's designed. As he
told Rolling Stone, he got "run over by a big
guy" playing football in junior high, resulting
in his right leg being an inch and a half
shorter than the left, which explains why he
seems to naturally curl into a sort of S shape.
Other maladies include a bad hip and what he
calls a "twisted spine" brought on from years
of pratfalls and cramped flights. And yet, here
he is, at age 70, still standing, still shirtless,
still putting his body through the wringer
every night he's onstage. Whenever Iggy
finally kicks off, his cadaver will hopefully get
donated to science—or, at least, the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame.

Iggy Pop plays Aug. 26 at 8:20 pm.

MusicfestNW presents Project Pabst is Aug.

26-27 at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. Get
tickets here.

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