Garbage Days Revisited #10: Iggy Pop - "Naughty Little Doggie" (1995)

 

"The tools I see on my TV, can't stand it when they fake. A prick's a prick at any age, why give one a break?" - Iggy Pop, I Wanna Live

I mentioned in the Jesus & Mary Chain GDR a couple of weeks ago how as a teenager I very much considered myself to be living in the here and now when it came to music. Very little from pre-1990 or so was on my stereo back then apart from maybe a couple of Hendrix, Doors or Queen albums that I'd copied off my parents and the odd Smiths, Mary Chain and New Order track that cropped up on the odd compilation etc. To be honest, it would've taken something pretty damn special for me to start following any music from outside my time frame that my youthful arrogance considered to be "old git music".

Something, for example, like this.

I watched the Iggy Pop TV performance above round at a mate's house one Friday night from a taping of the Channel 4 music show "The White Room" presented by Mark Radcliffe. I knew of Iggy at the time as he'd undergone a bit of a renaissance in 1996 - bit of a weird time as he couldn't have been further away from the '60s reverence of Britpop if he'd tried but lest we forget Lust For Life and The Passenger had both been back in the Top 40 that year on the back of being featured on the Trainspotting soundtrack and on a car ad. The next day I was in Leeds and ended up buying an Iggy "Best Of" which was next to his then new-ish album Naughty Little Doggie which I picked up as well. So I guess you could say that album was pretty much my gateway into the Detroit Madman's output.

This album always seems to get short shrift when Iggy's back catalogue is mentioned - in the excellent biography Open Up And Bleed, Paul Trynka dismisses it as a dull retread of past glories while even an article in Vive Le Rock magazine on Ig's early '90s output a year or two back pretty much skipped over it entirely. For me though, maybe it's just sentimentality but it's one of my favourite albums of his. After two records (1990's Brick By Brick and 1993's American Caesar) which saw him break out the celebrity guest spots and big production, this was the sound of him stripping things right back to basics with a group of untried young gunslingers. And it absolutely rips.

Kicking in with the traditional Iggy defiance of I Wanna Live ("Step back, it's fight time/Kick, scratch and bite time/Ain't talkin' 'bout no more fun/But that don't bother my bad ass none") and the sleazy Pussy Walk as seen on the White Room clip above, it's an album which is equal parts anger and regret. While Knucklehead ("Life's turning up the pressure, it's making me aggressive, the radio sounds like dead ham, the DJ is a conman") sees Iggy unleashing plenty of venom, the more downbeat likes of Innocent World ("There ain't no reason to tell no lie when you're young and you've got a lot of pie/Nowadays I slink around like a killer, the things they say are just a load of filler"), To Belong and Outta My Head ("He knows he's a target, everyone is, strangle that rock 'n' roll star and make him eat jizz") are the sound of Iggy realising he isn't getting any younger and looking back at some of his past mistakes. As someone now on the wrong side of forty, it does seem a lot of the songs on Naughty Little Doggie get more depressingly relevant every year.

Although Heart Is Saved does see Iggy trying to put the past behind him and look towards the future with a bit more optimism ("Personally I like midwestern towns/I like the girls there and even the clowns"), it's the desolate Look Away, a tribute to his late friend Johnny Thunders and the girl both of them shared in the '70s, notorious LA groupie Sable Starr (also now no longer with us) that closes things and sees Iggy putting some incredibly stark lyrics out there, especially for those of us who ended up having to drop out of being active in the rock 'n' roll game due to circumstances for a standard life - "So now I've gone straight and settled too, I eat and I drink and I work just like you/I've got lots of feelings but I hold 'em down/That's the way I cope with this shitty town/I look away..." If you had Iggy down as all booze, drugs and brutality, this really does represent a side of his character you don't see very often...

I've had an up and down relationship with Iggy's music since then - of course, as time went on I'd discover the sheer brutal glory of the Stooges' three albums (four if you count the Kill City era material on whichever compilation you got it on) as well as the likes of Lust For Life, New Values etc. His musical output's had its ups and downs since Naughty Little Doggie but I really enjoyed the Skull Ring album, the two Stooges reunion albums and Post Pop Depression a few years back. I did finally get to see him back with the Stooges at Download in 2004 and they were one of the best bands of the weekend - seeing half the crowd invading the stage at Ig's behest on Real Cool Time was one of those awesome moments you never forget. The reunion produced two good albums in The Weirdness and Ready To Die before the deaths of the Asheton brothers sadly curtailed that whole operation. We'll just quietly gloss over those truly regrettable car insurance and holiday adverts (which, I have to be honest, upset me way more than Johnny Rotten advertising butter did - with Rotten there was always kind of the whole "cash from chaos" thing anyhow but Iggy was the guy who sang I Won't Crap Out which makes it doubly disappointing on the occasions that he does).

But anyway, the guy's a legend for a reason and I'll continue to roll with him until the day I die. With so many of our heroes having fallen by the wayside in recent years we need to treasure the ones we've still got left.