Summer 2007
I Wanna Be Your Dog
It was during an infamous midnight record sale at the Beacon Shop on
North Main St in Providence, Rhode Island, that I put my hard-earned
teenage dough down and bought the Velvet’s Loaded and their first (Warhol
Banana Cover) album and both Stooges records. All of it knocked me out,
and turned me around, both the Velvet’s heady mix of avant
sophistication and spooky irony and the Stooges assaulting, virtually
infantile propulsion were like nothing I 'd ever heard before.
One song stood out, reached down and grabbed my adolescent testes and
lyrically held me in a peculiar, hypnotic sway—strangely enough, it
wasn’t the neo-literary songwriting I was slobbering about elsewhere in
my ever-growing record collection. It was primitive, and
simplistic, yet it seemed to resonate with meaning to me, a song filled
to the brim with yearning, but bent over backwards in fury, kicked off
by a psychedelic guitar flourish, bounced along by pounding piano keys,
fueled by the unmistakable sound of a wah-wah petal, and ridden by a
singer whose half nude, writhing body I'd seen already, doing some
sorta monkey stomp in magazine after magazine, with a voice that
sounded like a teenage Eric Burdon, or Mick Jagger with added snarl,
playing blue collar, dark-side-of town, high-school drop out to Jimbo
Morrison’s hazy-eyed leather clad poet.
As years went by and the Stooges transformed to Iggy and the Stooges,
then just solo Iggy. I found out his real name was James Osterberg, but
that didn’t stop me from latching onto new faves—most of Raw Power, but especially “Search
and Destroy,” “Kill City,” “Cry For Love,” “The Passenger,” “Lust for
Life,” “China Girl,” ‘Five Foot 1,” “Candy,” “Cold Metal.” But somehow
the 3:09 minutes of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” stuck between the similarly
themed and equally switchblade-like “1969,” “No Fun,” and “Real Cool
Time,” came across as the ultimate male teenage wolf yelp, the
unleashing of a monumentally churlish war whoop.
Iggy’s finest lyrics throughout his various line-ups and multiple
labels have all followed the blueprint of his very first efforts:
sing-songy, teen-like, highly tenebrous declarations of desolation,
disconsolation, and self-immolation, often underscored by a savage wit
lifted directly from the Beats but squeezed through the broken filters
of industrialized Detroit, the false promise of the sixties, and a
warped showbiz aura of inveterate nihilism.
As I caught various Iggy tours over the years, this after Iggy was
somehow tagged the Godfather of Punk, again and again I noted the
resolute demonstration of on-stage ferocity during the performance of
this signature number (Iggy as indomitable laser-eyed preacher,
festering with the onslaught of a Parkinson-like condition), perhaps
even imagined or romanticized by me, sweating and alone, a hard fought
few feet from the stage.
One of the highlights of my concert-going career was a hitchhiked trip
to New Yawk with a roomy to see Iggy at the Palladium. We heard he'd be
joined by the Thin White Duke, David Bowie. The actual sight of the
ever effete Bowie banging the keyboards with his long thin
fingers as Iggy spit out the lyrics as defiantly and mischievously as
evuh, almost made me swoon with a strangely homoerotic fervor (“Now I wanna be your dog”), as
fearful and transfixing a feeling I'd ever experienced during a rock
performance. All of this without even focusing onto Iggy’s one
concession to on-stage accoutrements, his highly special genital
endowment, long known to his fans and even Mr. Osterberg himself as
“Iggy’s Biggie.” (“Well c’mon!”).
Even during some of the raggedy shows I witnessed as the years
progressed, Iggy’s world and mine always appeared to right itself as
he hurled himself into the song’s excruciatingly primal sonic wave.
And, yep, I’ve spun this song on vinyl, cassette and CD’s repeatedly,
during moments of cowpoke drunkenness, teeth-rattling highness, and
general personal breaches of temporary madness, stomach-churning
defiance, and fingernail-stretching desperation. Hanging out with my
retinue of real musician friends and band buddies during my period as a
local rock scribe, I urged them all to do countless cool-daddy covers,
but never got gone or stupid enough to suggest they take on the sacred
“I wanna be your dog” text.
One of my longtime divining rods when it came to romantic connections,
was a brief but thorough Iggy tolerance test, and if the girl of the
moment couldn’t see Iggy’s essential coolness, pug ugly sexiness, or,
quite simply, his position as anointed by me and a few other
off-the-wall nitcrits and wacko fans, as an Absolute
One-of-a-Kind-Rock-n'-Roll-Original, she was losing points
from the start. Still, I never, that I can remember, got down and
dirty to the song; it was far too special for that. It was an easy
exercise in judgment, right outta the High
Fidelity handbook, to divide females and even so-called music
fans into three easily defined worlds: the pro-Igster, the anti-Igster,
and the who-the-hell-is Igster? I had my own romance with Iggy, mostly
hetero, I hoped, but tinged with that weird-assed sexual ambiguity that
was at the heart of so many outré rock and roll gods and
goddesses.
During Iggy’s recent reuniting with original stooges Ron and Scott
Asheton, he’s come to perform the song twice during his show, once
amidst the set, and once during the encore. Seeing him stride into the
mic, with that wah-wah refrain filling the open spaces behind him, I
see the song, my own strange, hard-to-explain, anthem, from yet
another, possibly more mature, perspective.
At my fairly recent 50th birthday, my talented brother Mark guested
with my musician pallies and delivered a take that was simultaneously
strangled, threatening, and life affirming. When Iggy and the
boys currently double up on the song he seems to wrestle maliciously
through the first version, stretching it out as an iconic and somewhat
ironic stage bit, complete with an audience participation chorus.
The encore version, on the other hand, comes across as decidedly more
fierce, streamlined, and brutal, with him, the self-proclaimed “street
walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm,” the very own “runaway son
of the nuclear A-bomb” unleashing it upon a world peopled with suckers
and seekers, a child’s ditty fermented into an adult paean, a sly
modernist attack-ballad, a cry for self, for love, for a brief moment
of blood tingling clarity in a world gone amuck. It’s a magical
invocation and a down and dirty invitation, a clarion call for lust,
for poetry, an uncomplicated attempt to claw one’s way to a heightened
state of consciousness, the kind of rock and roll number spun by a
master primitivist that evokes time, space, and a whirligig of
memories.
Scott Duhamel is
a Rhode Island College grad, longtime freelance pop-cult writer, the
man behind the curtain at www.culturevulturetime.blogspot.com, ex-film
and rock nitcrit with The Providence Phoenix, current film columnist
with Providence Monthly, lyricist and social coordinator for The Dino
Club, 21 year rank and file member of the International Union of
Painters And Trades, currently Labor Kingpin (or Business
Representative) of LU 195. longtime worshipper of Sam Shepard, Carl
Yastrzemski and Lee Marvin
When you worship at the altar of rock and roll for as long and hard as
I have, you come to grips with the fact that many of your favorite
records and artists don’t stand the test of time. Much of pop music is
transitory. Some of it gleams with magic as the years pass by; some of
it gets washed away in a tidal wave of musical or genre sameness. And
some of it sounds sublime years and years after its initial release.
Much of it is pure guilty pleasure. Iggy Pop, The Stooges, or Iggy and
the Stooges, it doesn’t matter—all stand the test of time, relevance,
hipness, and (oh yeah) sound.