FUN TIME
ON April 15, 1977, Iggy Pop made his first appearance on American national TV. Stripped to the waist, he was introduced on the syndicated daytime chat show Dinah!. After brief hallos – in which the host, former singing star Dinah Shore, noted that she didn’t much care for the sound of this punk rock thing people were talking about, Iggy and his band launched into a full-bore rendition of “Funtime”, from his debut solo LP, The Idiot, released the previous month.
Once completed, Iggy and his keyboard player – a healthy-looking David Bowie – joined Dinah and guest Rosemary Clooney on the sofas, with Iggy putting on a jacket to at least partially cover his rippling torso. “I’m gonna call you Jimmy, if I may,” Shore said to her guest. “Sure,” Iggy replied, smiling. “I appreciate it.”
Over the next 20 minutes or so, Iggy (and Bowie) proceeded to charm Shore, who expressed quaint maternal concern for Iggy’s troubling behaviour. “Sometimes I would give up and resort to simple violence,” Iggy told them. “Usually on myself because I hated to take it out on people, because I thought that was wrong.”
“That’s considerate,” Shore replied, consolingly. Finally, she noted the ease with which Iggy was talking about his grisly past. “I can talk about it, if required. It’s not my preferred subject,” he said, politely signalling he was focusing on the future.
The forward-looking Iggy Pop of early 1977 was a very different man from one who had ended the Stooges amid a hail of bottles thrown by bikers at the Michigan Palace on February 9, 1974. Gone was the heroin, the self-destruction, the commitment to oblivion at any cost. For one thing, after years in which he was known only to those screaming from the very edges, Iggy Pop was now a hero to a new generation. The Sex Pistols played “No Fun” in concert, while The Damned covered “1970” as “I Feel Alright”. Siouxsie Sioux, meanwhile, recalls seeing Iggy play the Hippodrome de Pantin, a big-top venue in the north-east of the Paris, in 1977. “I remember us turning up and hearing the riff of ‘The Passenger’ over the fields and feeling so thrilled to be at this event.”
You could see the relaxed Iggy a lot that spring. It wasn’t just Dinah Shore who was being presented with
