Fun Fun Fun Fun With IGGY!
Here is Iggy Pop, in 1977, not only alive and kicking but out on tour with a new album.
"The aesthetics of failure are alone, durable. He who does not understand failure is lost. The importance of failure is capital. I do not speak of what fails—if one does not understand this secret, this aesthetic, this ethic of failure, one has understood nothing, and fame is empty."
The above passage comes from Jean Cocteau's Opium, which Iggy Pop is reading aloud from as we sit in his hotel room the day before his appearance at New York's Palladium, part of his first tour since 1974. "I or* iginally got this book from David Bowie—but I lost it," says Iggy. "I was over in England and I got it from Giavanni Dadamo. It's been great inspiration to me onstage. Here, listen to this," he says as he thumbs through the pages. "'It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after taking opium, to take earth seriously and, unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.' Which is the position I find myself in now because I'm not a saint and I don't take earth seriously and, having known opium and, uh,...it is difficult."
