Iggy Pop Died For Our Sins
       

Or so Sid Vicious believed when he said
he wanted to live hard and die young
like Iggy, a martyr for rock and roll.
He would not be persuaded that Iggy was
thirty by then, living in Berlin, working
with Bowie on his third or fourth comeback.
A friend who grew up in Ann Arbor lived
for a while in the trailer park where
Iggy—who was Jim in those days—grew up.
He recalled Iggy shuffling around
in torn jeans and gold lame slippers
like your grandma might wear when
her bunions hurt. I've never had
a chance to see Iggy in concert,
and Sid and the Sex Pistols came and went
so quickly they were done almost as soon
as we heard about them. My wife got
to see Iggy before we met and so have
various friends over the years; they have
their stories though Iggy never spit at them
the way Henry Rollins did at me (he missed),
and as long as Iggy and I are alive
there's hope. The fact is, Iggy was always there,
never fully in the limelight or completely
obscure. I was fifteen when
Raw Power came out. I looked for it
but never found in stores overloaded with
the Allman Brothers and Steely Dan.
So Iggy Pop has not died and at 70 can
still go shirtless in public, a move
most men avoid after 50 or so.
I began to hate The Sex Pistols when
a neighbor who fancied himself
a devil worshipper began putting
his speakers in the window on Sunday mornings
and blasting Never Mind the Bollocks
at inhumane volumes. That was in the years
I claimed "Better living through chemistry"
and believed it. Young men behaving badly
need role models so we had Keith Richards,
Harry Crews, Bukowski. Iggy was already
an anachronism by then, a name
mentioned only in conjunction with
Bowie's Berlin albums. He had not died
for our sins, so we had to forge
our own paths to redemption. The romance
of the drug life evaporates and then
it's just the drug and the withering veins.
And I was never so in love with
my own demise that I planned anything
other than a long life. Eventually
the drugs slipped away and I had to grasp
that I couldn't drink as I did in my twenties.
In fact, I couldn't drink at all.
About the time I sobered up, I began
to listen to Iggy and now I heard
not a role model but a fellow survivor,
someone whose tracks I could follow
even if he walked in gold lame slippers.
Some I knew never found that path,
others hang on in bodies older than they are.
More than once my buddy Tom has said
he wonders why he was able to unwrap
the tie from around his arm, to put the cap
on the tequila bottle and walk away.
Sometimes when it's too late to blast
The Stooges or the MC5, I feel it too,
and run down that list of the missing,
aimless notes you might hear from
the band as they twiddle knobs, test
chords, pretend the audience isn't there.
Iggy always knew the audience was there.
Why else would he stage dive, smear himself
with peanut butter, roll in broken glass,
taunt bikers into beating the shit out of him?
Why else if not to bring people who hoped
he would do those very things
so they could tell stories about it later?
Sid Vicious died not long after saying
he wanted to be like Iggy. I wish
he could have been. Destruction requires
an effort, as well as someone
to monitor the wounds, to warn
how close you came this time
and tell you not to do it again. But
you always would. We had to kill Iggy Pop
so we both could walk away.

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Copyright © 2022 Al Maginnes All rights reserved
from Birmingham Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission