That Time Iggy Pop Almost Killed Elton John

Elton was not amused.

I have long held that the Stooges’ hair-raising 1970 punk masterpiece, Fun House, is the single most ferocious straight-up rock album ever recorded, bar none. It makes Never Mind the Bollocks sound like Robert Goulet at the Copa. Iggy Pop and his Detroit-marinated brethren—Ron Asheton on guitar, Ron’s brother Scott on drums, and Dave Alexander on bass—were not fooling around, at least when they were making music.

But they fooled around a whole lot otherwise, ingesting acid, uppers, downers, heroin, coke, booze, animal tranquilizers, and anything else they could get their hands on at a pace that was bound to lead to someone checking out early, and it turned out to be Alexander, who died at 27 of pancreatitis brought about by severe alcohol abuse.

Obviously, there were a lot of drugs floating around the rock music scene in the early 1970s. That’s hardly a secret. But the Stooges were unhinged by anybody’s standards. Keith Richards at his scummiest would have been leery of hanging out with these guys.

The Stooges’ excesses were excessive.

I may well write a full column about Fun House at some point, so I don’t want to carry on at length about it right now. But just to hip you to where the Stooges were coming from in case you’ve never listened to them before, here’s an outtake from the Fun House sessions, complete with an hilarious faux professional wrestling intro and Ron Asheton sounding like he’s strangling a wildcat rather than merely playing an electric guitar.

And, of course, Iggy sounds like a psychopath.

So, yeah. The Stooges. They were nuts, but they could focus if they had to.

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Sometimes, though, Iggy in particular couldn’t quite get there.

In fact, one of his journeys to the outer reaches of consciousness is my all-time favorite sex, drugs, and rock & roll anecdote...even though there’s no sex in it. Iggy was never at a deficit when it came to willing partners, though, so let’s just assume that he had been doing something outrageous, giant penis-wise, no more than twenty-four hours before he was attacked onstage by a gorilla.

Well, it wasn’t really a gorilla gorilla. It was actually Elton John dressed like a gorilla, not that Iggy could grasp such minutiae at the time. Iggy, you see, was very, very, very high during the incident.

In his retelling, he was as high as he had ever been in his life, which is probably about as far removed from the crust of the earth as the Voyager space probe is at this very moment. Even more so than the other Stooges, Iggy was forever ready and willing to put it away, with “it” being whatever drug or combination of drugs was currently available. He did not read labels to comply with the proper dosage.

There’s a story about him walking down the street in Detroit and screaming that he could see through the buildings, even when the shades were drawn and the doors were closed...as I’m sure they were if the buildings’ inhabitants saw him coming.

I’m not saying this was a good thing, and it certainly wasn’t a cool thing. I’m just saying it was a thing.

Iggy, who began life as Jim Osterberg and was by all accounts a frighteningly brilliant student when he was in high school, fully recognized that he was in the business of parading his id for public consumption. Interested listeners who had jobs or self-respect or merely wanted to go on living were invited to briefly climb onboard the Good Ship Iggy Pop while watching the band lose its collective shit onstage. But the audience got to go home at the end of the show. Iggy was forever at the wheel, steering in random directions with no land in sight.

He was basically a raving hedonist with a non-existent pain threshold from day one, and as the drugs and carnal pleasures became abundant—and they were very abundant—his fellow band members couldn’t help wondering if he would permanently check out onstage, in the gutter, or in a hotel room.

It seemed like only a matter of time, but, somehow, Iggy kept on going, like a boxer who gets hit in the face so much he eventually drops his guard, dispenses with any concept of “winning,” and becomes a monument to sheer, brutal punishment—Jake LaMotta with a killer collection of old blues 45’s, if you will.

Just to illustrate, this is where Iggy started out with the Stooges...

And this is where he ended up...

That’s a pretty mean trajectory over just a handful of years, not that it bothered Iggy all that much. You have to end up somewhere, so why not on the floor with visions of sugar demons dancing in your head?

At least he got to bang Nico for a while.

Anyway, not long after the 1973 release of the Stooges’ final, gloriously fucked-up album, “Raw Power,” Iggy and the boys were playing at a small club in Atlanta, GA. Small clubs were the only ones that would book them by then, and it wasn’t because of poor management. It had become a common occurrence for people who spied Iggy backstage before a show to wonder out loud whether he’d even be able to perform.

But he always made it, not that he was particularly coherent once he hit the stage.

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In ‘73, Elton John was bitchy-silly-goofy and coked to the gills, and just happened to be the most popular musician on the face of the earth. He may not have always known where he was, but, unlike Iggy, he had a veritable phalanx of handlers who could grab him by the shoulders and point him in the right direction when he got lost.

Remember, this wasn’t the Elton that we’ve all come to cheerfully endure for the past 30 or so years. Back then, he could rock like crazy, albeit with a campy sense of humor, and he was so rich and pampered he even had his own record label, Rocket Records. So, during the Atlanta stopover of the Stooges’ tour, Elton—who forever remained a music fan and openly admired his favorite performers—decided he wanted to give a much-needed ego boost to Iggy by joining him onstage for a number or two, then invite him to sign with his label.

Unfortunately, in what was probably a misguided bid to (if you’ll pardon the pun) ape Marlene Dietrich’s monkey-suited routine in Blonde Venus, Elton also decided that he wouldn’t tell Iggy he was there but would simply walk onstage in the middle of the Stooges’ set while dressed in a gorilla suit.

After the initial shock of it, he’d take his gorilla head off, and everyone would laugh uproariously at his inherent Elton John-ness.

The very extreme catch, however, was that the night before the show Iggy had gobbled up a groupie’s entire supply of Quaaludes, which is the equivalent of chugging several cases of beer in one sitting, and Scott Asheton thought it was funny to leave his band’s front man passed out over a very prickly Mediterranean bush next to the hotel where they were staying.

Har-dee-har-har.

By the time the show rolled around that evening, Iggy was covered in bloody scratches and still didn’t know where he was, so somebody had the great idea of injecting him with a dose of methamphetamine sulfate. They just happened to have it on them.

That got Iggy walking around, as it would pretty much anybody. But it was debatable whether he was actually awake.

At any rate, the Stooges were roaring through their set as well as they could, given the circumstances, when Elton the Ape suddenly made his guest appearance. Surely, members of the audience were wondering why some idiot was interrupting the flow of the show in a gorilla suit, but that’s not at all how Iggy saw it. What he thought was more on the order of, “JESUS CHRIST! I’M BEING ATTACKED BY A GORILLA!!”

That’s right—Iggy was singing onstage in Atlanta and thought a gorilla had somehow made its way into the club and was now intent on ripping his heart out. As he described it years later, “I was unusually stoned to the point of being barely ambulatory, so it scared the hell out of me.”

So he grabbed the mic stand and went into full fighting mode, as did the Stooges’ newest member, James Williamson, who knew he wasn’t appearing in an episode of Wild Kingdom but had no idea the person he was preparing to clock in the head with his Les Paul Custom guitar was Elton John! Luckily, Sir Elton revealed his famous noggin quickly enough to keep from getting murdered.

He did not, however, play a few songs with the Stooges, and Iggy Pop was not offered a contract with Rocket Records.

But was that really “lucky” as far as rock history goes? How great a story would it have been if Elton John had been slaughtered at the peak of his career, before a cheering live audience?! There’s something of that screwed water buffalo in Apocalypse Now about it.

So that’s the story. This just proves yet again that sometimes the only thing that keeps history on course is the speedy removal of a fake gorilla head.