We could argue forever over which band wrote the first punk song, but let’s not mince words about one thing: It was the Stooges who pioneered the punk performance. Iggy Pop stomped and writhed onstage like he’d just swallowed a live snake, rocking a dog collar years before Malcolm McLaren thought to package music, nihilism, and fetish gear as a new youth subculture. His naked chest got smeared with peanut butter and pierced by shards of glass. Sometimes he fell face-first into the crowd. And then there were the nights when he was too fucked up to see straight but fought his way through a set anyway.
There are so many vivid anecdotes associated with the Stooges’ few years of underground fame in the late ’60s and early ’70s that even casual fans can rattle off their origin story. They lived in a falling-down house in Detroit, opened for the MC5, and consumed a series of increasingly dangerous drugs. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s classic punk oral history Please Kill Merecounted some of Iggy’s wildest moments, along with that time Stooges drummer Scott Asheton drove a truck full of gear under a low bridge and ripped its roof clear off. But Jim Jarmusch’s new documentary Gimme Danger gives even those of us who pored over that book something we didn’t realize we were missing: an anatomy of the Stooges’ sound and Iggy’s stage persona.
Maybe it’s taken so long to complete the historical record because it seemed impossible, or simply beside the point, to intellectualize music that was so rooted in Iggy’s remarkable body. Even at the Stooges’ 21st-century reunion shows, he was like a frayed, leathery wire, zapping electricity into the crowd with every seemingly uncontrollable gyration. It would’ve been a disappointment to visit him in the green room half an hour after the venue cleared out and find he wasn’t still vibrating.
There is also a deeply cerebral side to Iggy, though, one that he’s never tried to hide. This is a man who named one solo album after Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and took inspiration for another, 2009’s Préliminaires, from a Michel Houellebecq novel. A few years ago he delivered a brilliant John Peel lecture on “free music in a capitalist society.” But his long-standing resistance to attempts at untangling the primal Iggy Pop persona from his core self, the “real” James Osterberg, has made it impossible to reconcile the two extremes of his personality.
Pop’s old friend Jarmusch, a fellow musician who cast Iggy insightfully in his films Dead Man and Coffee and Cigarettes, gets closer to making his halves cohere than any other reporter to date. And Gimme Danger is, first and foremost, an act of journalism—not the kind of high-concept profile you’d expect from a fiercely independent filmmaker whose work often favors free-form philosophizing over straightforward storytelling. Like a standard rock doc, it offers archival photos and performance footage and interviews, new and old, with many important characters from the band’s story. A few of their colorful anecdotes merit the same kind of funny, surreal animated sequences that served Brett Morgen well in Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, for which Jarmusch enlisted James Kerr of Scorpion Dagger fame. Clips from saccharine mid-century TV shows subtly illustrate how shocking the Stooges were when they emerged in the late ’60s, while B-movie montages evoke punk’s love of trash culture.
For the most part, though, Jarmusch avoids stylistic flourishes. Minimizing his own directorial voice allows him to focus on Iggy’s eloquent insights into the construction of a band that only looked like it arrived fully formed in all its ramshackle glory. The building blocks the film identifies aren’t just fascinating footnotes to the career of what Jarmusch calls “the greatest rock‘n’roll band ever”—they’re also the foundation of punk.
Iggy reaches back to his childhood to retrieve influences like Clarabell, the anarchic clown from “Howdy Doody,” and the industrial sounds of the factories in his home state, Michigan. He talks about how lucky he was to grow up in such close quarters—a trailer that periodically resurfaces throughout the film—with parents who gave up their bedroom so he’d have space to practice drumming. His mistrust of the record industry seems rooted in that working-class upbringing.
As a teenage drummer, he sat in with Chicago blues bands and discovered what he describes as “people who in their adulthood had not lost their childhood.” (There’s also a hilarious shot of Iggy drumming with his first band, the Iguanas, on a 16-foot-high riser—the first great rock‘n’roll joke in a career full of them.) When he grew tired of spending whole sets with his eyes fixed on frontmen’s asses and uncomfortable with inserting his white self in the black blues scene, he decided to create something new.
Ron and Scott Asheton (top), Dave Alexander and Iggy (bottom). (Photo by Joel Brodsky, courtesy of Amazon Studios/Magnolia Pictures)
It took shape when Iggy moved to Ann Arbor, where he met the Asheton brothers, Scott and Ron, and Dave Alexander—three long-haired rock guys who would soon become the Stooges’ drummer, guitarist, and bass player. “I went to Detroit with a tab of mescaline and a shovel,” Pop drawls in a typically dry interview clip, by way of explaining how the band ended up inhabiting an abandoned house in Motor City. There, they got stoned, listened to a lot of Sun Ra and Harry Partch under Iggy’s eclectic influence, and christened themselves the Psychedelic Stooges.
Iggy gives ample credit to his bandmates, for their musical contributions and for what they inspired in him. He recalls that Ron wrote the down-drilling riffs of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “No Fun,” from their first album, soon after phoning Moe Howard of the Three Stooges to ask if it was OK to drop the “psychedelic” from their name. (Howard’s response: “I don’t give a fuck.”) He points out that Alexander’s idea to build “We Will Fall” around an “om” chant helped distinguish the band from other garage-rock acts.
But you can detect Iggy’s genius in his offhand accounts of how his one-of-a-kind brain reacted to its surroundings. He attributes his animalistic stage persona to the energy he discovered he could wring out of Scott and Ron by jumping around like a chimp preparing for battle: “In the Ashetons, I found primitive man,” he says. If you look at it that way, the Iggy Pop we know seems to owe as much to their ids as to his. What Jarmusch bills as “the invention of the stage dive” turns out to have been Iggy’s attempt at mimicking a toddler’s temper tantrum. There’s even a hint of brilliance in the moment he spotted a red dog collar in a Los Angeles pet store and decided it would be a cool thing to wear onstage.
The Stooges defined themselves by the things they rejected, too: namely, hippie ideology. When John Sinclair, the poet-turned-manager of their “big brother” band MC5, tried to force the Stooges into adopting his radical-chic schtick, Iggy demurred because he didn’t want to be an activist. Although he doesn’t mince words about David Bowie’s notorious early manager Tony Defries, who also signed an exploitative deal with Iggy, his harshest assessment is of his flower-child contemporaries, like Crosby, Stills & Nash. “Some of the biggest peace/love acts of the California five years of love were created in meetings,” he sneers. “The stuff smells.”
Gimme Danger is most thrilling at moments like this, when we can see clearly enough into Iggy’s sensibility to understand why he was so revolutionary. It is by no means an immaculate film. I’m not sure Jarmusch even intended it to be one, because what’s remarkable is the way even its flaws mirror the Stooges’ messy career: It gets a bit too long after skipping three decades of Iggy’s solo career to follow the band’s reformation in the early aughts. As their reunion albums—2007’s The Weirdness and 2013’s Ready to Die—suggested, it’s kind of anticlimactic to watch pioneers tread old ground. And the Stooges’ breakthroughs will always be more exciting to watch than even Jarmusch’s astute account of their influence on later generations of musicians, which has been so thoroughly documented as to feel redundant.
If you came to this film looking for rollicking tales from a legendary wild man, then you might see Iggy’s calm, well-reasoned recollections of a time when he was often in some altered state as another flaw. His interviews may even make each stage of the Stooges’ emergence look more deliberate than it actually was. But by getting Iggy to talk about his art rather than his antics, Jarmusch performs the delicate feat of elucidating a beloved rock‘n’roll persona without exploding it. And in telling the Stooges’ story with such clarity and insight, Iggy reveals that punk was always rooted in intelligence just as much as instinct.
Gimme Danger screened this week at New York Film Festival and opens October 28.