Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  Most impressive of all is his absolute command of the band, whose members pick up cues from his slightest twitch. The endlessly repetitive, one-note riffs of some past shows are gone: now the band teases with bits of familiar tunes, then delivers long, inspirational dance grooves. The Godfather seems to have a formula: the tighter the band, the looser the crowd.

  And the formula works. Score one for discipline.

  A few minutes after the show, Brown is in his hair stylist's room, sitting under a dryer between shows, his hair in bright blue rollers. His glittering cape sits draped over a chair. It's nearly midnight, but he's still got his shades on. He laps up an appraisal of the show, especially the part about his mastery of the band. But some of the follow-up questions I have don't go over as well.

  I show him a newspaper clipping about his testimony a year ago about being broke, about having to eat at McDonald's, and he nods recognition. "The judge said he was broke, too," he says. "Can you name me somebody who doesn't have to pay bills? God bless this country. They can say you owe $50 million, but you got a chance to make $300 million."

  I ask again about his friendship with the Reagans. I'm curious: What do they talk about? "I don't want to get into that," says Brown. He recalls my negative remarks on Reagan, and knows I'm not just curious. His guard is up. "I say one thing. There's so many things he wants to do; everybody needs to get to know the President.... He's not there to stop you; he's there to enhance what you're about.

  "He may not be your style," says Brown, who suddenly shifts gears. "I know whatever you think about James Brown is right, so I'm not gonna fight you; I'm just gonna lay back and let you write."

  "I'm gonna leave you alone," he says, by way of ending the interview. "You want to know too much." Brown flashes a wide, disarming smile. "You're a very observant person, and I'm very fond of you. You came to see me the other day [actually, it was only this morning] and said, 'Wait a minute-I know about James Brown, but I see some more things here.' And after the show, you said, `I see something else.'

  And I don't want to talk about it."

  He smiles again and extends a hand. He can't help asking one more time about the show. Praised again, he shouts over the hair dryer: "I love you, I love you! You're so hip!"

  And I'm glad to leave Brown-Mr. Brown, if you please-on the upbeat. After the performance he's just given, it seems only fair.

  -April 1986

  BAM

  ne sad day in the first month of 1987, Paul Scanlon, my editor at GQ-the guy who'd been a fellow editor both in college and at Rolling Stone-called to say that they wanted to try someone else in my slot. He mumbled something about wanting to have "more classical music." That turned out not to be the case. I'd done a cover story on a singer who didn't have much going on besides a string of hits and a solid frame on which to hang some fashionable clothes.

  That piece, I think, did me in. And although I was plenty busy with work at the newspaper, at other magazines, and on the radio, I was sorry to lose the column. By having to come up with a solid idea every month, I'd been pushed into arenas I'd never visited at Rolling Stone. I mean the territory of the rebels; those who pushed, and burst through all envelopes. Through the GQ column, I'd met Frank Zappa-at just the time that his daughter was enjoying a hit with "Valley Girl"-and David Byrne, who'd moved from Talking Heads into film, and Lou Reed, who'd gone from the wild side of the velvet underground and onto Madison Avenue, with a television commercial.

  And Iggy. Was there a punkier punk? Did he not invent the concept of stage diving, a decade before it became the thing to do? Had he ever been mellow? That's what I set out to find out.

  IGGY POP NO LONGER CLAWS HIS CHEST BLOODY while singing his rock and roll songs. He no longer flies off the stage, throwing himself onto his audience. He no longer invites and incites riots. And he's stopped abusing drugs and women.

  You see, Iggy, who was one of the first all-out punk rockers of the late sixties, is into health these days.

  At Tower Records in San Francisco, where he's signing copies of his new album, Blah Blah Blah, he stops every twenty minutes or so to stand, raise and clasp his arms and stretch left and right, drawing oohs, ahs and Instamatic flashes for that lean, supple body he's shown off on hundreds of stages and a handful of album covers.

  In his sleeveless black shirt and blue jeans, his hair a careless splotch of black, Iggy looks more robust than many of his fans. There is a worn-out look to much of the crowd of about two hundred people. The favored color is black; the mood is blue: the colors of Iggy Pop's past.

  On his platform, Iggy is all business. He refuses one fan who asks him to sign David Bowie's name to his copy of Raw Power, his 1973 album produced by Bowie. A middleaged woman pleads with him to forward a note to Bowie, thrusting the envelope at Iggy until his voice muscles up: "I'm not the post office, okay?"

  But along with the usual admirers, there are strapping college kids, several stockbroker types, and an Asian postal worker. And it's these folks-the ones who are buying the new albums, not the old mementos-that Iggy is stretching for these days. So Iggy Pop is interested in becoming Iggy Popular; so he's straightened up and flown right. What else is new, in these days of aging rockers' repentance?

  But Iggy was a monster-a real monster, not a cartoon creature like Alice Cooper, Kiss, or Twisted Sister-who, deep down, was also basically no different from you and me. He wanted to do better than his parents; he just wanted to be comfortable.

  I G G Y, HIS JAPANESE WIFE, S U C x I , and I are at breakfast the morning after the record-signing. At the store, one fan had shown up with a yearbook from Tappan Junior High in Ann Arbor.

  Suddenly Iggy becomes Jim Osterberg, 40, of Ypsilanti, Michigan, once voted by his class "the most likely to succeed." His voice is sober, measured, friendly in an earnest way, like an aspiring politician's. "In junior high, I was a very motivated person," he says. "My folks had very little money; we lived in a house trailer. I started going to school with very well-to-do kids, and I saw what they had-not just money, but also social graces. When you're around 13 and you learn about people who are leading really interesting lives that you couldn't imagine being lived on your block, you get excited."

  But the more he got to know the rich kids, the less interested he became in being one. Instead, he turned into a punk, a rock and roller. "But this voice inside me would say, `But you can't make a living at that."'

  Music soon drowned out the inner voice, and Jim formed a band with a few fellow outsiders. He played drums, but gravitated toward front and center when he put together the Stooges (and became Iggy) a little later in Ann Arbor. He kept postponing the band's debut-he was shy and uncertain, he says-until one night in the spring of 1967, when he saw Jim Morrison and the Doors at the University of Michigan. "It was a degenerate show. He had this beautiful long hair, a lacy frock and black leather. He was very stoned. He'd mumble for about fifteen minutes and then he'd sing in a minc ing falsetto. And this was a honieconling dance! With football players. And they were furious. But what I liked was the way he stood there and communicated with that. It wasn't vaudeville. He was present. I realized, Wow! That opened up all sorts of possibilities."

  On his own stage, Iggy Pop was "present" in his own way, and he quickly became too much for most rock fans and critics. He ascribes his fury, his self-destruction, to simple differences of opinion about his music. He thought the music was good.

  But "I realized there were a lot of people who took what I did as a joke-took offense, even. And I struck back by exaggerating my behavior. As a performer, I knew the one thing that's death to a career is to let anybody come to your show and go away with the feeling that nothing has happened."

  In other words, it was show business.

  When the Stooges went defunct in 19 72, Iggy Pop himself was in a shambles. For most of the ensuing decade he would be rebounding from and relapsing into the addictions he'd developed-to groupies and to drugs, including heroin. He kept making music, thanks prima
rily to David Bowie, an early Stooges fan who picked Iggy up when he was broke, who helped him on Raw Power and the 1977 records, The Idiot and Lust for Life. Bowie was Iggy's one regular visitor when he institutionalized himself in Los Angeles in 19 74. Bowie helped put together Iggy's comeback tour in 19 7 7, and played keyboards in the shadows of every stage. Iggy had clearly inspired Bowie, who paid tribute in 1972 with his song about a glam-rock star, "Ziggy Stardust." Together, they wrote songs like "China Girl," for the Idiot album. When Bowie had a hit with it in 1982, Iggy's share of the royalties pulled him out of deep financial problems. It was Bowie who encouraged him to try acting (he's had bit parts in The Color of Money and Sid & Nancy). Now Bowie has given Jim yet another running restart by producing several tracks on the latest album.

  By 19 7 7 Iggy had kicked heroin. On the road, though, he still needed at least three crutches: booze, pills, and women. "The groupies became a problem and an obession at the same time," he says. "You don't have to take heroin to be screwed up; you just drink too much, constantly."

  In 1982, he decided to reshape his life and career. First, he needed a woman-one woman for more than one night. Performing in Tokyo, he spotted Suchi in the audience and, in time-honored rock-and-raunch tradition, sent a roadie to fetch her. He liked her eyes, he remembers, and as they got to know each other, he also found her "supportive and modest and loyal... helpful to have around." While she was a rock fan, she also had "all the Japanese qualities that are imbued in young girls there to make them a fit center of home when they grow up."

  They married in 1984 and settled in Manhattan, where Iggy planned his comeback. "I researched radio. I swallowed it and tried to get a feel for `How can I get on it?"' He was onto this line of thinking, he says, well before Bowie came into the picture. "I made it clear to Steve [Jones, of the Sex Pistols, who cowrote several tracks, including "Cry for Love"], `I want this to be radio-ready stuff, so we're talking melody, we're talking some nice chords that have emotive, provocative qualities to them.' Then David, who has a genius for that sort of thing, came in and it snowballed from there."

  Blah Blah Blah, with its grown-up brashness and computer-disc precision, is getting Iggy the most radio play of his career. But he's taking few chances. So he's on the road, headlining at clubs or appearing as an opening act for the Pretenders. And he visits the record shops to make the retailers happy.

  At Tower he stayed until the last customer had received an autograph. By the time he got up for a final stretch, he was late for his sound check. But he paused for a photo with the Tower Records staff, and when someone handed him a long-stemmed rose, he took it, placed it between his teeth and bit down-hard.

  -March 1987

  GQ

  Joni Mitchell Rocks Again

  F- wenty years into writing about music, I found myself coming full circle in several different ways. I had returned to San Francisco State-only now as a guest instructor. I had reunited with the first radio station I ever worked for, KFOG. (In my post-college years, it dispensed what was called "beautiful music." Now, it rocked.) For a column for GQ, I had even gone back to my teenaged passion for Top 40 radio, and done an hour of high-energy deejaying on KFRC, which, in its prime, beginning in the mid-sixties, was called "the Big Six-Ten." Now, in the early eighties, its ratings drawn and quartered by FM and other competition, it was "the Amazing AM," and breathing its last before switching to an oldies format.

  There would be more full circles to come, but in 1988, the most pleasant circle game involved Joni Mitchell, whom I'd met in 1969, and who'd been my first Rolling Stone cover story.

  Now, we were meeting again, in Los Angeles. Only now, I was on assignment for Chatelaine, a Canadian magazine. And Mitchell, needless to say, had gone through a few changes of her own.

  Jo N I MITCHELL SITS BEHIND THE WHEEL of a brand-new, black Mercedes-Benz 560 convertible, and she is not happy.

  She's in this car, a rental, because her own car has just been stolen. Mitchell feels as if she's lost a pet or a best friend. The car was a Mercedes-Benz she called "Bluebird." She bought it brand-new in 1969, with her first royalty check from Warner Bros. Records. It was beautiful, powerful, a survivor.

  Now, she's got to contend with this new car her management company has leased for her and which feels.. .not quite right. On our way to a photo shoot for Chatelaine, she's jerking along the street until she discovers the brakes are on. We consult the manual to find the brake release.

  We do, and Mitchell gets rolling-for about 300 meters. She pulls over. Both the left and right turn signals are flashing. A parking attendant from a nearby restaurant pops up at her side. "Oh, sorry, we're not going here," a flustered Mitchell tells him. "We're having car trouble." She locates the signal switch.

  "We're back in the flow," she says, as she pulls out. "We're back in the flow."

  She could be speaking about her career. In the last decade, it's been a series of stops and starts. Now, she hopes, with her new album, Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, she is back in the flow again.

  An hour before our joyride, she had been in the Hollywood offices of her managers, Peter Asher and Barry Krost, chain-smoking Camels and doing press interviews. Dressed in a simple black suit by Comme des Garcons, her blond hair defrizzed and once again draping her shoulders, the 44-year-old Mitchell didn't look so different from when I had seen her last, in 1969. She had one album out then and she had just settled in Laurel Canyon, folk-rock's answer to Beverly Hills.

  Her early albums are still remembered by millions for their witty, whimsical, literate, and true-confessional songs. After a string of snappy hit singles that gave her popstar status in the early seventies, she embraced jazz and released the exotic and challenging The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Her last jazz album, in 19 79, an immersion into the music of avant-garde jazz bassist Charlie Mingus, was a commercial and critical flop. Around that time, she visited Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico, and her painting blossomed. (Mitchell has since exhibited her work twice in New York and plans a show in Tokyo this year.) In 1982, she was back to pop and rock with Wild Things Run Fast. Having married Larry Klein, a bass player thirteen years her junior, Mitchell waxed romantic. But radio wasn't listening to Joni any more. Dog Eat Dog, in 1985, reflected her disenchantment with the American government-but the timing was all wrong. "It was released in a rah-rah America-is-wonderful time," she says.

  For Mitchell, making albums in recent years has not equated with making money. Which explains why she hasn't gone on costly tours to push her new one and why she's spending days on end, here and on the road, meeting the press.

  "The first feedback you get is with reviews," she says, "and my reviews for years now have been incredibly disappointing.

  "I've done good work. Any worker in any field needs the encouragement that her work is good. Otherwise she gets another job. So, if I don't get some enthusiasm somewhere soon, I'm done in this business. It's as simple as that."

  "That sounds like something she says just prior to the release of a record because she's expecting another barrage of criticism," says Larry Klein.

  Chalk Mark has a chance, if radio's response to the track "Snakes and Ladders," about a love affair fueled by materialistic aspiration, is any indication. It got heavy air play as a pre-album single release. Ed Rosenblatt, president of Geffen Records, Mitchell's label, says: "I think we're at a time when radio's perception of Joni is that she's hip. Perhaps it's based on the older artists selling."

  On Chalk Mark, Mitchell writes and sings about her parents' courtship in Regina during World War II, about war between nations; and as a devoted environmentalist, she writes movingly in defense of the land. But the album's not all gloom and doom. It has a clean rock and roll sheen to it with guest musicians like Peter Gabriel and Tom Petty, and includes an unlikely but raucous duet with Billy Idol.

  The rapport she felt with Idol was the same feeling she got when rock and roll was born, and she was Roberta Joan Anderson, an itchy kid, full of art and energy, in Sask
atoon. (Mitchell, an only child, was born an Air Force brat in Fort Macleod, Alberta.) "Rock and roll," she says, "was the call of the wild. It was the thing that split a generation." She lived for weekend dances. She also got a ukulele and a Pete Seeger instruction record and, during her one year at the Alberta College of Art, in 1963, sang for free in the local coffeehouse.

  Her songwriting began in the mid-sixties, after she had migrated to the Yorkville folk scene in Toronto and formed an act with folk singer Chuck Mitchell. They married and lived in Detroit but divorced after a year as her star rose and such artists as Judy Collins and Tom Rush began recording her material. Mitchell moved to New York in 1967 and connected with Warner Bros. Records. To sign her contract, she went to California and never looked back.

  In Laurel Canyon, Mitchell lived with musician Graham Nash and was, indeed, the lady of the canyon. When she became involved with James Taylor and, later, other musicians, she fueled her notoriety, alluding to various friends and lovers in her songs. "I'm not a kiss-and-teller," she says. "I never named names." In the early seventies, Rolling Stone magazine published a diagram of rock stars and their various amours. Mitchell was connected to a long list of musicians, managers, and media stars. She swears the list was "padded.. .with men I barely knew-and never dated."

  Larry Klein, she says, entered her life in 1981, at just the right time. Dating had become "nerve-wracking.... I read a magazine article called `The End of Sex,' and the thing the writer said that sticks in my mind is: If you want repetition in a relationship, see other people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one person."

  Since getting married six years ago, Mitchell and Klein have been homebodies at Mitchell's house in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. Says Klein, "We're both compulsive creative types. We'll stay home, and Joni will be at one side of the house painting, and I'll be working on a song. Maybe later we'll go to a movie."