Iggy Pop by Paul Trynka Read Free Book Online Page A

drums in a ‘professional rock ’n’ roll band’, namely the Iguanas, an expanded version of the Megaton Two. Whether it was the fact he was aiming for higher office, or that he was regarded as slightly more left-field than was the case at Tappan, this year his political talents proved inadequate to the task, and he lost the election to David Rea, a tall, handsome, football-playing, valedictorian BMOC - Big Man On Campus.
    In a time of conflicting influences, the academic pressure from his parents, the lure of politics and the excitement of The Beatles, whose arrival in 1963 attracted his attention, Jim’s desire to achieve was obvious but still unfocused. Jannie Densmore was Jim’s girlfriend at the time, and she recalls ‘vague memories of his home life not being that great. And he was an overachiever, I remember his devotion to his music and also political things, being a leader. I always thought he would do something larger than just grow up, marry, live and die in Ann Arbor.’
    In the months that she went out with Jim, before she left to join her mom’s new husband in New Orleans, Jannie was never invited back to Jim’s trailer. The same applied to his other two or three girlfriends from junior high and high school. For some reason, Jim had been nervous about asking Jannie out in the first place, enlisting Clarence ‘Rusty’ Eldridge as a co-conspirator and raiding the Eldridge family’s drinks cabinet before their first date: ‘We got an empty Miracle Whip jar, poured a little bit from the top of each bottle into the jar, filled it up with orange juice, went over to Jannie’s house and ended up getting plastered,’ remembers Rusty.
    One evening, after telling his parents he was going down to the Colonial Lanes bowling alley with his friends, Jim headed instead for a romantic tête-à-tête at Jannie’s house. He raided the drinks cabinet, only to be caught as her mother returned early. The half-loaded Osterberg and girlfriend fled for the bowling alley, where they ren dezvoused with their alibi, Jim McLaughlin: ‘He was totally drunk, and he loved it. He was smiling, giggling, off in his own little world. She wouldn’t even look at him or me - she was so mad she couldn’t even sit still!’
    With both Jannie and Jim McLaughlin, Jim Osterberg seemed to maintain a certain degree of separation, of control; both were aware of his incredible ability to be different things to different people. It was possibly instinctive and, engagingly, sometimes had no other purpose than to entertain. For in an environment where ‘jocks’ would mock weedy kids in the shower, or a ‘goon squad’ would victimise kids with long hair (sometimes, according to Ann Arbor High pupil Scott Morgan, administering forced haircuts on the spot), Jim Osterberg was increasingly seen around the corridors and classrooms in the guise of ‘Hyacinth’, an alter ego developed from a poem he’d written, in which he had imagined himself as a flower. ‘It would just crack you up,’ laughs classmate Jimmy Wade. ‘He would walk out, have his arms outstretched, and just look at you like he was a flower, bend a little, shake his arms as if there was a slight breeze, do it in a manner that you had to laugh!’ Lynn Klavitter concurs. ‘It was pretty crazy! But that’s the way he was!’ By 1965, the 18-year-old Jim’s hair was just a little bit longer and flopped over his forehead. It wasn’t long enough to identify him as a greaser or rocker, but just enough to mark him out as not purely an aspiring schoolboy politician any more.
    Fortunately, Hyacinth’s eccentricity was complemented by Jim Osterberg’s position within the school hierarchy, and his role on the executive committee organising the graduation talent show meant that his alter ego was engaged as MC for the event on 10 March 1965. Ricky Hodges (whom Jim describes as ‘a very funny black guy, not unlike a local Chris Rock’) was co-presenter, but he claims his role was