Free Iggy Pop by Paul Trynka Page A

acid; guitarist Dan was a skilled musician (a guitar-playing ‘machine’ according to the Iguanas), who was friends with Chicago’s Butterfield Blues Band - the musicians who had backed Dylan’s first excursions into electric music. Sheff was an intriguing, eclectic musician who epitomised the new artistic atmosphere blossoming in Ann Arbor. Born in San Antonio, Texas, he’d won a BMI Student Composers Award and been offered a scholarship at Juilliard, but rejected its stuffy academic ambience and caught a bus to Ann Arbor. Intellectual, gay, schooled in Texas and Delta blues, he had already performed in, and in some cases premiered, works by John Cage, La Monte Young and Yoko Ono, and was soon a key member of the Once Group, an avant-garde multimedia art collective, led by architecture lecturer Joe Wehrer, with architect Harold Borkin, film-maker George Manupelli, painter Milton Cohen and composers Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma.
    With their talk of the Beats, vanguard art and Hegelian philosophy, and a purist blues set list drawn from songs by Little Walter and Junior Wells, the Prime Movers saw themselves as a bunch of intellectual heavyweights compared to British-invasion bands like the Iguanas: ‘We didn’t care for them much,’ proclaims Michael Erlewine. And they let the Iguanas’ drummer know it, every time they bumped into him at Discount Records, or clubs like Mothers; like Jeep Holland they teased Osterberg, calling him Iguana, or Iggy for short. ‘It was derogatory at first - Iguana,’ says Erlewine. ‘Then when we became friends it became Iggy.’ By November 1965, when the Prime Movers’ first drummer Spider Wynn left the band, Michael Erlewine had no problem in persuading Osterberg to leave the Iguanas and team up with his pioneering outfit. Jim played a big University of Michigan freshman orientation dance with the Iguanas before informing McLaughlin and the others that he was leaving. Although he had once been Osterberg’s closest friend, McLaughlin was not surprised: ‘Jim was hard to get to know - he kept himself to himself. Over the years I guess our conversations had been limited to music and the band. He didn’t give me much information about why he was leaving, but it wasn’t a shock. I knew he was getting bored and frustrated with our conventional sound and approach.’
     
    In the Iguanas, Jim had definitely been a leader. In the Prime Movers, he was ‘very much a follower,’ says Michael Erlewine. But his year with the band was crucial for two reasons. First, it would teach him about commitment. Second, it would give him a name.
    The Iguanas had been an intimate, cosy outfit, all clanging chords and major-key optimism. But by the end of 1965 their music was comparatively archaic; the Prime Movers’ cynical, bohemian attitude was in tune with the zeitgeist, as music got heavier and druggier. This attitude encompassed more than just music, for the Prime Movers’ social circle included witty, intellectual quick-thinkers like David ‘Panther’ White - who arrived from Shaker Heights, Cleveland that autumn - and Lynn Goldsmith, later to be a celebrated photographer. Panther was a natural comic with a wicked, freewheeling Lenny Bruce-style wit, who made prize-winning art films and would soon, with his friend Jesse Crawford, become involved with the White Panther party and MC5 operation. Ron Asheton, Jim’s old high-school acquaintance, started hanging out with the Prime Movers too, auditioning on bass guitar and surviving for a couple of gigs before being demoted to roadie and general helper. Ron and others observed that Iggy ‘was in total competition with Panther’, but Panther was usually prepared to go further than the Prime Movers’ new drummer, such as the time he told Dan Erlewine he had scored some especially fine weed and handed him a pipe. Panther, Ron and the rest of the band watched Dan take a deep toke and then freak out: ‘It was DMT - a terrible fuckin’ drug,