estebanana -> RE: Sustain (Mar. 20 2016 12:19:36)
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You might be interested to know that one of my relatives was Ig's girlfriend. He wrote the song 'Ordinary Bummer' about her and also, it is said, the song made famous by Bowie, 'China Girl' was written about her. As much as songs can be about one person. The song Ordinary Bummer is on Zombie Birdhouse, my favorite Iggy record. My favorite song is 'Angry Hills'. My relative is a part of rock history too, family legend has it. She was on tour with Iggy and the Stooges. When Mr. Pop started popping other women at after show parties she got pissed off and grabbed the huge bag of coke the band bought. She bribed the driver with money and coke to drive her from some crap hole city in Alabama back to NY and gave him the bag of coke as payment. Many years after this transpired I was in Oakland at a recording studio and I overheard someone talking about this story and I said hey I know who that woman was. She came back from that tour and somewhere in NY in the late 70's early 80 's she got out of control and she became addicted to heroin, contracted HIV from shooting up with dirty works. She died, I recall in 86' or maybe 87' summer time, I'm a bit misty on details. One funny thing that my sister told me about what happened after she dumped Iggy on the tour is that she was working as a cocktail waitress in a posh NY bar where stars dropped in and Ig showed up with a woman on each arm. He saw her, pushed them off, and he practically fell to his knees asking her to take him back and she told him to go 'F' himself. She was no saint either. She was also very beautiful, she modeled for Playboy magazine. I don't know what this means, but when someone brings up Iggy pop twice I feel like sharing this story. When she, LJ, died my dad was very sad. He told me she had fallen in with bad people. Late at night in the 80's I lived at my dads on and off I used to put Zombie Birdhouse on the hi fi and then listen to classical music ,then Coltrane tor Yuseff Latif. My dad would rumble out of his room and chat with me about music. He was stoned usually, but he was most enjoyable when he was stoned. The more stoned the better. He was great when he was really high because he was super funny and that's when he was most able to communicate that he loved us. He was like Lenny Bruce and Robin Williams rolled into one, but much weirder. Of course once in while one of his old buddies visited and brought pharma grade coke up the hill where we lived in Big Sur. More coke than Keef Richards could get up his schnoze in a year, and I have to admit once in a while I did some. Wow you don't even know you are high when you have coke like that and for that reason 90% of the time my dad was stoned on heroin because coke makes you crazy. He was not crazy, just a hyper intelligent drug addict. He was sad because he was a survivor, he felt bad that our younger relative died because she was not as professional as he was. Iggy is a survivor too, he played the odds and amazingly lived. I always liked his music and turned my dad onto Zombie Birdhouse, because he turned me onto the jazz sax players like Sonny Rollins, we had a lot of fun talks about art and music, because that is all we ever had together. He was a great artist, but his drug problem prevented him from making it in that profession, I mean he was high end, a great painter. It is painful to watch someone kill themselves little by little, like Celine wrote in the title of his book 'Death on the Installment Plan'. My life is like a reliving of watching my dad kill himself over 30 years and knowing that if he had been able to turn it around he might have been happier. Our styles of being in the world are different. I like to bluster about and write my way out of my demons, and you are a tough terse son of a bitch, but we are shaped by similar pain. You and I could probably get nice and drunk together and work it out. But in the mean time I think Iggys's 'Angry Hills' is also a good song for you.
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