It’s a Saturday evening in Oakland, and I’m staring in awe at a naked, leather torso writhing around onstage. It belongs to none other than Iggy Pop, and without him — or his wild antics — punk rock wouldn’t be what it is today.
At 79 years old, he prowls across the stage, snarling and cursing amid a chorus of overdriven guitars, screaming brass instruments and rabid acolytes who outstretch their arms toward their crude idol. I’m at Mosswood Meltdown, and Iggy Pop is finally headlining after eclectic punk groups like the Spits, Otoboke Beaver and Mannequin Pussy took the stage. Aptly described as a music festival for people who hate music festivals, Mosswood is the anti-Coachella in the sense that it’s rugged, dirty and devoid of major corporate advertising and godforsaken “product activations.” This Saturday night, thousands of us are gathered at Mosswood Park to watch one of punk rock’s most enduring and iconoclastic figures.
Like a chain-smoking siren, Iggy pop’s gravel voice is both brutal and hypnotic. When he begins to croon the smoldering lyrics to “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” a person in front of me looks to the stranger next to them and says it’s their favorite love song of all time. Then, suddenly, Iggy vanishes from the stage, and I hear nothing but squealing and feedback from the mic. At first, I wonder if there’s some sort of technical issue, but then I realize that it’s because Iggy Pop flung himself into the audience.
What I love most about this festival crowd that he draws is that it’s intergenerational: Some fans are gray-haired and aided by walking sticks; others wear spikes in their faces and tread through the mud in furry platform boots. But when Iggy Pop first started to make the rounds in local newspapers, he was a divisive — and even somewhat derided — cultural figure.
Born James Osterberg in 1947, Iggy Pop first emerged as the frontman of the Stooges, a primitive punk group born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the late 1960s. A 1969 article from the Cincinnati Enquirer describes the “pout mouth” singer’s voice as both tender and vicious, while others sneered at him, saying that he looked more like Grace Slick as opposed to a traditional rock ’n’ roll star. In 2011, he would go on to pose for T Magazine in a black cocktail dress and Dior bag, stating, “I’m not ashamed to dress ‘like a woman’ because I don’t think it’s shameful to be a woman.”…