I started reading Please Kill Me, again out here in San Fran. Iggy is unstoppable. So are the Dee Dee and Richard Hell sections. And the Patti Smith. Well, the whole book is in my top 10, if that means anything to you. Really gossipy and really greasy. A hybrid iteration of Truman Capote and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Read it. And as Iggy says “keep going and things will get better. Don’t give up.” Don’t Give Up
~rjb
Iggy Pop:: On my twenty-first birthday we opened for Cream. I had spent the day transporting a two-hundred-gallon oil drum from Ann Arbor to Detroit so that we could put a contact mic on it and Jimmy Silver would hit it on the one beat of our best song. I got it up the three flights of stairs into the Grande Ballroom, by myself, and then we discovered that our amps didn’t work. And when we went out onstage everybody yelled, “We want Cream! We want Cream! Get off, we want Cream!”
I’m standing there, having taken two hits of orange acid, going, “Fuck you!” It was one of our worst gigs ever.
I went back to Dave Alexander’s house with him. I was heartbroken. I thought, My god, this is twenty-one? This is it? Things are just not going well.
Dave’s mom served me a cheeseburger with a candle in the middle of it. The idea was to keep going and things would get better. Don’t give up.
