FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
I Need More
Iggy Pop
2.13.61, 127 pp.Slim & disappointing, Iggy Pop's I Need More (the 2.13.61 reissue mysteriously, unceremoniously deep-sixes co-author Anne Wehrer) is the loudest one-man rock 'n' roll love-in since John Lydon's Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. Like Lydon, Pop is head-over-heels in love with his self-described genius. Autofanzine dressed up as autobiography? NO.
The kooky junked-up antics of Iggy and his Stooges were arguably the highlight of McCain & McNeil's sleaze sensation Please Kill Me (1996), and even though I Need More details those same halcyon daze of vomit and peanut butter, the thrill is gone. Iggy told many of the same stories with greater eloquence in Please Kill Me, and I Need More lifted Please Kill Me's better stuff verbatim, so what's the point?
Iggy suffers from the lost-at-sea impression that he alone was The Stooges, and I Need More flops accordingly. Stooge Ron Asheton's unruffled eyewitness account of punk rock Gomorrah made Please Kill Me a gutter classic; in I Need More, every time Iggy struts his supposedly massive intellect, every time he flaunts his supposedly massive cock (11 inches by one-and-three-quarter inches, "at approximately a 94 degree angle," by the by) (there's a photo, too) the happy-go-goofy, jackbooted Stooge guitarist is missed that much more.
There's some good trash in I Need More (e.g. the saucy bedroom secrets of Iggy & Nico), but Please Kill Me consistently outdistances it (e.g. how the saucy bedroom secrets of Iggy & Nico left Mr. Pop with Mr. Clap).
Rock (auto) biography is a dingy, underachieving little genre, but whenever it coughs up the occasional diamond - like Ray Davies' 1995 "unauthorized autobiography" X-Ray, a book closer to Auster's City of Glass than, say, a Tiger Beat factsheet - the punkdits cheer that a renaissance is nigh. In the world according to Iggy, there's no such luck.
James Martin
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