Still baring all, Iggy pops at SXSW
Leather-lunged and -faced rocker Iggy Pop gives all in SXSW performance and on new album. Hes due at the Academy of Music April 15.
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-pmn.s3.amazonaws.com/public/4XHF7KQRQRDPJJOYHJL7OLRCSM.jpg)
AUSTIN, TEXAS - Battered, bruised, and still shirtless, Iggy Pop is 68 years old. And in its 30th year, the South by Southwest music festival is getting long in the tooth itself.
But the sprawling industry conference that took over the Lone Star State capitol last week - on the heels of its Interactive tech conference that brought President Obama to town, and coinciding with the SXSW film festival - and that is making a show of rededicating itself to "music discovery" after growing swollen with too many Kanye- and Gaga-size names in recent years, has in fact always embraced leather-faced legends.
Way back in 1994, it was at the punk rock club Emo's on Sixth Street that Johnny Cash launched the Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings, which became the final act of his illustrious career and remains the blueprint for introducing black-clad young'uns to old-head icons as a signifier of cool.
Along with Iggy - almost never known as James Osterberg, his given name - this year's SXSW has its fair share of geezers. Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant played the Austin Music Awards on Wednesday with a band that included Charlie Sexton and Jimmie Vaughn in tribute to the late Austin DJ Paul Ray. And on Thursday, octogenarian country music firecracker Loretta Lynn was set to perform at Stubb's BBQ, bringing her new album Full Circle to the influential crowd of industry insiders.
And more than the music itself, after all, SXSW is about careerism. It's a gathering for people to find a way to achieve a modest, though not so easy goal: How to get a job, and keep it, in an ever-changing music industry known for exploiting artists' passion without fairly compensating them for it.
On Wednesday night at the downtown venue known as Austin City Limits Live at the Moody Theater - where he did a taping of the titular TV show the night before for future broadcast - Pop was backed by a stellar band led by Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, who will also accompany him at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia on April 15.
The son of an English teacher who started out as a blues band drummer in the early 1960s clearly has his status as a music-making longtime jobholder much on his mind. That's apparent on his new album, Post Pop Depression (Loma Vista ***), a collaboration with Homme partly recorded on that stoner-rocker's home turf of Joshua Tree, Calif., and it carried over to the Moody Theater.
"All my life I've been worried about employment," said the protean rocker, who often reveals a philosophical side beneath the aggro caveman exterior if you look and listen hard enough. "And I imagine that since we're all here at a certain kind of convention, you're worried about it, too."
Post Pop's angular, brooding sound takes as its starting point the singer's first two solo albums, Lust for Life, whose vibrant, ready-for-anything title song opened the show, and the Dostoevsky-inspired The Idiot. Both were released in 1977, after Pop hit drug-addicted rock bottom following the breakup of his legendary proto-punk Michigan garage rock outfit, The Stooges, and both were produced by David Bowie, who, Pop recently told the New York Times, "resurrected me."
Pop is still a marvel of unrestrained energy on stage, a gyrating, shimmy-shaking, world-class frontman who is, as one elder statesman in the crowd said out loud at the end of the sweat-soaked show, "an inspiration to old men everywhere."
His sonorous voice sounds great, too, working a low range with undiminished raw power, inspired by the assistance of a terrific five-piece band that also includes guitarist Dean Fertita (who plays with Jack White in the Dead Weather) and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders.
In a set that included no Stooges songs but that drew heavily on the two Bowie-produced albums, exploring alienation in songs like "The Passenger" and "Mass Production," and including rarities like his title song to the 1984 Emilio Estevez cult movie Repo Man, the band swaggered with well-rehearsed sex appeal. And Pop, bare-chested after the second song, a man confident with his body image if there ever was one, taking to the crowd to press the flesh with his people in one of the festival's most anticipated moments.
But the showcase was by no means a nonstop party. "Times so tired, closing in," Pop sang on Post Pop's lead track, the determined romance "Break Into Your Heart." And in "Sunday," he described his life's work as "a masquerade of recreation / Like a wreck, I'm sinking fast," letting on that decades spent rolling around in glass and unleashing one's id onstage takes its toll on the mind and body.
Iggy has said Post Pop will be his final album. And though retirements in pop music are never to be trusted, from Frank Sinatra to Garth Brooks to Jay Z, Pop's 17th studio album is suffused with a contemplative weariness that makes you think he may mean what he says. Without ever growing tiresome or succumbing to self-pity, it gains power from its frankness, as its creator honestly wonders whether he's passed his sell-by date, and if, with more than four decades on the books in a young man's game, he has anything more to offer.
At SXSW, most performances last 40 minutes or so and are frequently shorter. This plays to shrinking attention spans and gives the next band time to set up while badge-holders trot or pedicab or Uber over to the next must-see act.
By contrast, Pop's showcase ran just over two hours. Nobody was disappointed by that, but the lank-haired gentleman rocker apologized anyway. "I'm sorry," he said. "The show is long, because the life is long." And so he kept at it and remained on stage, jumping and twisting around at the very end, even after his decades-younger bandmates had exited. Enlivened, perhaps, by one more memorable night's reminder that even after all these years, he's still pretty good at his job.
215-854-5628@delucadan