In September, Pop will release “Free,” his eighteenth solo album. In early August, the eponymous début album from the Stooges, which Pop helped form, in 1967, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. He discovers new music for his show by taking the recommendations of friends and opening acts, by reading the shortest, most obscure reviews published in the Guardian, or by looking through the upcoming concert listings published each Friday in the Times. “Wanna go outside and warm up?” he asked. “He reminds me a little of Bruno Mars and Sal Mineo.” Between shows, Pop emerged from the cool, dark booth, shirtless and looking for sunshine. After cueing up “ Dream Baby Dream,” by the experimental punk duo Suicide, he sat up in his chair and adjusted his spectacles. As a d.j., Pop is good at revealing the connective tissue between seemingly incompatible numbers. Pop’s selections that morning included songs from contemporary acts such as FKA Twigs, Bill Callahan, Cate Le Bon, and Tyler, the Creator, along with “ Hot Chile,” a single that James Brown and his band released in 1960, using the pseudonym Nat Kendrick and the Swans. “Comparing my patter when I started the thing and my patter now, I sound nearer and nearer to my expiration,” Pop said.
Earlier in the day, at a small studio in Coral Gables, Pop had recorded two episodes of “ Iggy Confidential,” the BBC Radio 6 music program he began hosting in 2015, after finding that he enjoyed the experience of acting, as he put it, as “a kind of atmospheric bartender.” His broadcasting voice is deep, slow, and pleasantly wobbly. Pop is a voracious and enthusiastic student of American music, from the Ronettes and Dave Brubeck to Link Wray and Bob Dylan. Earlier, he had suggested that he didn’t know very much about country music, but then he spoke thoughtfully and at some length about the careers of Doc Watson, Hank Williams, and Waylon Jennings, before putting his head underwater and starting a vigorous swim-a mixture of freestyle and backstroke-to a buoy about fifty yards offshore. As he waded in, Pop told me that he’d once stayed at a Holiday Inn in Tallahassee, missing a Merle Haggard performance in the hotel bar by a day. One shoe had been customized with a platform sole, to correct for an inch-and-a-half difference in the length of his legs, a condition he attributes to arthritis combined with an old football injury. He kicked a pair of striped Gucci slides onto the sand. Periodically, his face will collapse into a benevolent grin.
In conversation, he is nearly guileless, and he listens intently and carefully. He has retained a bit of a round, Midwestern accent from his upbringing, outside Detroit. Though he has had Lasik surgery-“In Colombia, before it was legal here”-his vision is still imperfect, a malady he chalks up to doing too much intravenous cocaine. His hair is blond, shoulder length, pin straight, and parted in the middle, and his eyes are an oceanic blue. In recent years, his midsection has relaxed a bit, but he assured me, while patting it, that it remains quite firm. He is lithe, sinewy, and deeply tanned, with a torso that, for decades, has appeared so exquisitely and minutely muscled that an onlooker might reasonably assume it was painted on. I quit smoking here.”įrom afar, Pop resembles a bronze statuette. I tried to build myself back up from twenty years in harness-New York City, the modern American record industry, gruelling economy touring. “I’d go to the beach and come home, go to the beach and come home. After he moved to Miami, he started swimming every day. The extremity of the place-it is both environmentally tenuous and aesthetically vulgar-seems to suit Pop, who, in the late nineteen-sixties, as a member of the Stooges, helped invent and refine punk rock, a genre of music so menacing and physically savage that it is sometimes shocking that Pop has made it to the age of seventy-two. In 1995, he had bought what he described as “a very seedy condo” in Miami, and he has had a home in the city ever since.
#IGGY POP SHIRT PROFESSIONAL#
In late July, in a brief window between professional appointments, Iggy Pop drove to the mouth of Biscayne Bay, so that he could bob in its tropical waters.
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