Unexpected guidance came in the form of a job with yet another Detroit legend, James Osterberg, who if you know anything about rock music, you recognize as Iggy Pop.
By Michael Zadoorian
My friend Luis is a Grammy and Oscar award winning musician. I lead with that because people tend to pay attention when you mention those two awards. I know I do. At any given time, I have to fight off my instinct to introduce him as “My friend Luis, winner of the prestigious Oscar and Grammy awards, the delicious cream-filled center of the EGOT.” He is a super accomplished guy and it’s hard not to be proud of him.
Aside from being a child piano prodigy and one of the founding members of Detroit’s premier Avant-funk band Was (Not Was), he’s been playing and collaborating in the studio for the past twenty-some years with another of our other local boys who’s done okay for himself, a hip hop artist by the name of Marshall Bruce Mathers III, a.k.a. Eminem.
This is how Luis came to acquire his major awards. Along with Mr. Mathers and Jeff Bass, Luis co-wrote the song “Lose Yourself” from the film 8 Mile. When the 2003 Oscar nominees were announced, and “Lose Yourself” was one of the nominees, no one in Eminem’s camp thought there was a chance in hell that they would actually win. (So very Detroit of them.) Sure, it was cool to be nominated and all, but no one really felt like going all the way to L.A. just to put on a happy face while Paul Simon or U2 walked away with the statue.
So they blew it off.
After everyone else passed, Luis volunteered to go, because hey, how often do you get a chance to go lose an Oscar? It would be fun, he would escape Michigan winter for a few days, plus it would be a good story.
Needless to say, it was a considerable shock when he got to the ceremonies at the Kodak Theater that night and “Lose Yourself” was announced as the winner of the “Best Song from a Motion Picture” category.
He wasn’t the only one that was shocked. Watching the video of that night at the Oscars, you can see the astonishment on Barbara Streisand’s face when she opens the envelope and sees Eminem’s name. At that point in time, hip hop wasn’t winning too many Oscars. The award was usually given to people like, well, Barbra Streisand.
Luis was every bit as stunned as Barbra, maybe even more. He walked up on the stage to accept the award, hair down to his shoulders, black jeans tucked into jack boots, suitcoat flapping open to reveal an unbuttoned shirt of multi-colored stars, numerous strings of African trade beads, all draped over a blue, red and white Detroit Pistons jersey. (When you’re from Detroit, you must represent.) In the video, Streisand clocks Luis as if he was a homeless guy who happened to stumble up onto the Oscar Awards stage, before incredulously asking him, “Are you Luis Resto?” I was surprised she didn’t ask for I.D.
Even before his award-winning career with Marshall, Luis was much in demand for his keyboard skills, but since he had decided to stay in Detroit to live and raise a family, it made getting good gigs difficult. Luckily, his old Was (Not Was) bandmate, Don Was turned out to be a superstar producer, so Luis would often get flown to New York or Los Angeles for primo studio jobs. Consequently, he’s played with or on recordings by many well-known musicians, including Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Jay-Z, 50 Cent and a slew of others. Yet despite these glamourous out-of-town gigs, there wasn’t always enough work for him here in Detroit to fill in the time between them, much less pay all the bills. It was particularly important since he and his wife had just had their first child.
Unexpected guidance came in the form of a job with yet another Detroit legend, James Osterberg, who if you know anything about rock music, you recognize as Iggy Pop. Iggy and his band, the Stooges, were part of the seminal rock scene in Detroit in the late sixties and are now considered one of the most important rock groups ever, one of the bands that created Punk before there was even a name for it. Iggy didn’t really start getting his due until well into the 90s, when all the bands that started because of The Stooges suddenly hailed him as the “Godfather of Punk Rock.”
A quick history lesson: In 1969, Elektra Records producer and self-described “house freak,” Danny Fields had heard about Detroit’s amazing rock scene and had come to the Grande Ballroom, our dilapidated rock palace, to check out the MC5, our other highly influential proto-punk band that wouldn’t be appreciated for another three decades. One of their most electrifying and exhilarating songs started off with lead singer Rob Tyner screaming “Right now! It’s time to…KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!”
“Kick Out the Jams” was the MC5’s rock ‘n’ roll war cry. As the house-band at the Grande, it was often directed at visiting bands, especially prima donna British bands. It was an admonition, a way to tell them, “This is Detroit. You better play your asses off or we’ll blow you off the stage.” And they often did. They humiliated The Cream and many other bands more than once.
Fields loved the 5 and wanted to sign them to Elektra. The MC5 told him, “Well, if you like us, you’ll really dig our baby brother band, the Psychedelic Stooges.” Fields saw the Stooges and the 5 do a joint show and was blown away. He went backstage immediately afterward and told the MC5 and the Stooges that Elektra was going to sign them both. Which actually happened. (Fields was nothing if not a freak of his word.) Ultimately, the MC5 did only one album for Elektra, called Kick Out the Jams, before getting themselves kicked off the label for taking out an ad in an underground newspaper telling J.L. Hudson’s, a local department store chain who wouldn’t carry their “obscene” record to go fuck themselves. They probably would have gotten away with that, but then they decided to slap the Elektra logo on the ad. Oops. Hudson’s boycotted all of Elektra’s records and the MC5 was unceremoniously dropped from the label. Very Punk Rock.
The Stooges managed to last at Elektra for two albums, The Stooges and Fun House before breaking up, then re-uniting for one more album, Raw Power on Columbia. All are now considered classics and like the Velvet Underground, are responsible for influencing countless musicians and bands all over the world.
In true punk rock style, by 1973 both bands had self-destructed, each in their own messy conflagration of heroin, booze, self-sabotage, personality conflicts and even, in the case of the MC5, political pressure, for they had been targeted by J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. for their alliances with radical activists like the Black Panthers.
Iggy went through his own ups and downs of addictions and mental health issues after the Stooges broke up. His unexpected salvation came in the form of David Bowie, who thought he was a genius and wanted to be not only his producer, but also his back-up musician. Ig and Dave kited off to Berlin where they made two fabulous albums. The first of which, The Idiot, is generally considered to be Iggy’s “comeback” album after the ignominious flame-out of the Stooges. The second one, Lust for Life, was his most critically acclaimed and commercially successful album to date.
Now back to Luis and Iggy. It was 1989 in Los Angeles and they were both working on a soundtrack song for the Michael Douglas action thriller Black Rain. Both long time rockers, both from the greater Detroit area, both from modest upbringings, the two had more than a few things in common. During their sessions together, they got to talking and Luis mentioned that he was having a hard time keeping his home life together, what with the erratic nature of studio work. His marriage was faltering because money was constantly a problem in their household, especially with a new baby. Iggy was sympathetic because he too had gone through many lean years, not the least of which was his childhood, living in a trailer park in Ypsilanti. Things were better for him these days. He was touring, making money and surviving better than he had been for a long time.
The two struck up a quick friendship, the kind that happens when two people are thrown into a situation and expected to create something extraordinary together, or at the very least, something catchy and commercially viable. Collaborating, making music with another person, even someone you’ve just met, can be an act of intimacy. Inner guards and walls must be let down on both sides in order to get to the good stuff, the real stuff. This doesn’t mean that everyone you play music with is automatically going to become your best friend, it just means that sometimes, if you’re lucky, there’s a real bond. If you see each other again, even years later, that bond is still there, along with the musical and social shorthand that goes with it. Over the course of the multi-day session, Luis and Iggy spend time together outside the studio. They have dinner together one night and talk about John Waters’ new film, Cry Baby. It’s a fun hang.
The song that they work on, Livin’ on the Edge of the Night, is good. It’s not the Stooges, but it’s a good song. Iggy sounds like Iggy, which is to say, pretty damned great. There would be a video of the song for MTV, which stars Iggy, languidly vamping and dancing angularly in an Armani suit with no shirt, between Black Rain movie clips of bad guys being shot, sword fights, explosions, and chase scenes. Despite all that, you can’t not look at Iggy when he’s onscreen. He’s that kind of performer.
The session ends. Luis and Iggy exchange numbers. The two go their separate ways. Luis heads back to Detroit to his wife and child, to the home he can barely afford and all the unpaid bills that could be easily taken care of by someone with a steady job, say an accountant or HVAC tech, but not an itinerant rock musician.
A couple of years pass. Luis’ financial problems improve, but not that much. In between session gigs, he starts working part-time for a local music house, creating jingles and music for television commercials. He doesn’t love the work or the crazy hours, and he especially doesn’t love calling on advertising agencies to drum up business, but it pays the bills.
One day, while lying down, his toddler climbs up on Luis and jumps on his chest. A searing pain shoots through his entire body as if his chest is on fire. He almost passes out from the pain. It eventually passes. He can’t tell if it’s all the financial pressures affecting him, but somehow he knows this is not to be ignored. Luis sees his doctor, who tells him that he has Atrial Septal Defect, a hole in the wall that divides the upper chambers of the heart. It’s a birth defect. Babies are often born with a hole in their heart, but the hole eventually closes. The hole in Luis’ heart never did. The gist is that they will need to perform open heart surgery immediately or he could have heart failure or even a stroke.
It is major surgery. Serious surgery. The kind of surgery that you make sure all your affairs are in order before undergoing. The surgeons crack Luis’ chest open from his sternum on down. He’s on the table for 9 hours straight. He makes it through okay, but there is a long recovery period afterward, months and months. It reminds him of when he had TB as a kid and had to be sequestered in a special ward of the hospital with all the other tubercular children. He didn’t see his parents or his brothers and sisters for the better part of a year. He waited in isolation to get better. It took a long time.
There was no isolation this time, just the waiting. Waiting and worrying about what he was going to do with his life, whether he could go on living the life of a musician, barely surviving from session to session, but also not sure if he could survive working at the music house. That work was soul-deadening to him. Maybe it was time to find something that would make some real money. The financial burdens would just get heavier as their family grew.
At some point during his recouperation, Luis gets ahold of Iggy’s latest album, American Caesar. When he opens it up to play, he notices that on the back side of the actual compact disc, there’s a printed, but hand-scrawled message from Iggy to his fans.
25 years I & been sittin’
in my bedroom, thinkin’ stuff up,
and thinkin’ how I feel. You tell how you
really feel, you get burned. I’m ready to go down
in flames, but I don’t want to. In normal life, I bottle
things up and smile. Only in this world,
the music world can I deliver something
worth living for to my life. I tried to make
this album as good as I could with no imitations
of other people and no formula shit. This is
individual expression. If you want to
know more about me, write me
and I’ll reply. IGGY POP
There was an address in the CD booklet. Luis wonders what’s going on with Iggy. He liked playing music with that dude. The man was a rock star, even if most of the world didn’t know who he was at that point. To the people who did know, he was Iggy. There was no one like him. Luis’ older brothers, Mario and Dee Dee, had seen him with the Psychedelic Stooges at the Grande Ballroom in the 60s and idolized the guy. Luis had heard the stories from them. On stage, Iggy was insane and intense and mesmerizing. He bashed his head with the microphone, painted himself silver, rolled around on broken glass, smeared peanut butter over his chest, stage-dived before anyone even called it that. To them, he was legendary, a rock ‘n’ roll god.
That was different than what Luis had had with Iggy. They’d had a musician connection, the collaborator vibe. There was something else as well. The man who said that “the best rock music is dumb,” actually seemed, well, wise. With all Iggy had been through, it was apparent that the man knew things. Things that Luis didn’t know. Maybe he could give him some ideas about how to persevere in the rock ‘n’ roll business.
Luis sat down and wrote a letter, hoping Iggy would remember him, telling him about the operation, about the financial pressures at home, of how he wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to keep playing music for a living. He had to do something. He asked Iggy not only how he had figured out a way to be a full-time musician, but also how to survive. He apologized for going on and on. He’d had too much time to think during his recovery.
Luis sent it off the letter. Probably nothing would come of it. The man was busy. He was a working and touring musician. Still, it had felt good to get some of these things off his now heavily scarred chest.
Weeks passed in the hazy fast-slow way they pass when the body is recovering from physical trauma. Eventually Luis started feeling better, getting some of his strength back. Not all of it, but it was happening. The long incision in the middle of his chest now felt itchy and tight, which meant it was healing. At least now, he could sneeze without having to crush a pillow to his body to keep the pain from splitting him in half.
A month later, a letter shows up in the morning mail with a strange foreign stamp and postmark on it. It’s from a hotel in Bali. The name over the address is Osterberg. Luis can’t believe it. He knew Iggy’s real name. He had asked Luis to call him “Jim.” Luis opens the letter. It’s short, a scrawl of random capitalizations, cross-outs, misspellings, and near-illegibility. Still, Luis is thrilled. He can hardly believe that Iggy wrote him back.
hey Luis,
good to hear from you man, hope the patch-up went cool.
Kind of know what you’re goin’ through w/ ROCKIN’
- eatin’ conflict, but don’t be too hard on yourself,
cause everybody has to learn to compromise—
I think there’s an art to it which can be improved as
one learns to be comfortable with the humility of it—
I’m just figuring that out a little bit now for myself
—anyway, I had a good time playing w/ you & I’ll
remember to give you a call If I need K.B.’s sometime,
I never heard you playing git. I’m in Bali, sitting
this morning listening to some trance music from Java.
This country, Indonesia, is something else. I’m back
on tour in 2 weeks for another 4 months.
Love & Take Care,
Iggy Pop
“K.B.’s” are keyboards and “git” is guitar, for those of you who don’t speak Iggy.
In any case, you know how the story ends at this point since I told that part first. Luis does figure it out, but it takes time. Luis and his wife stay in the Detroit area. They have another child, a girl. He keeps working for the commercial music house for a while, a job that pays the bills, though he’s not crazy about it. He doesn’t give up on the session work though. He still loves it and makes it work within his schedule whenever Don Was gives him a call.
Eventually, Luis gets a session gig with Eminem and something clicks. The two of them hit it off, that special collaborator vibe. Marshall brings Luis back for more sessions, and more after that, and the two end up working on many songs together. Songs which sell millions worldwide. Oscars and Grammys are won. Luis and his wife eventually divorce.
I’m not even sure how or why Luis shared the letter with me so many years after the fact. I was probably laying my own tales of woe on him about the publishing world and how hard it is to get the next book out there. Me, wondering if I should give up writing, knowing that I won’t, but wondering what I will do next.
“Have you ever seen my letter from Iggy?” I remember him asking.
“Iggy? You have a letter from Iggy? Iggy Pop?” I was instantly fascinated. “No, I’ve never seen it. Can I see it?”
Luis sent me a copy the next day and I’ve been enthralled by it ever since. He gave me permission to share it with anyone who might be interested, who might be going through the same artistic dilemmas that he had been going through. Consequently, I’ve sent it to a lot of artists, often Detroit artists, who are forever searching for ways to make the things they want to make, but to also survive in the world we live in. It’s something a lot of artists around here go through. From birth, we Detroiters are taught to hustle to survive. Art is fine and dandy, say our parents, but Art probably ain’t going to make the nut on your house or car. Got to make that money. Our sensible factory-town nature is our artist’s curse. Hence reading a letter from Iggy Pop, telling you that you need to learn the art of compromise is like a glittering ribbon of wisdom unfurling from the heavens.
What’s great about this letter, aside that it’s from a genuine rock star, is its sagacity. If you look at the crude handwriting and punctuation, you’re not expecting much, but what it says, is to me, as it was to Luis, a revelation.
For one thing, from the year 1993, the man essentially foretold the future of the music industry as it relates to the artist. He foretold his own future as well. In 2003, Iggy would sell the title song from Lust for Life to Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines for their television commercials. This of course, sparked much chatter amongst rock critics, pundits and fans, calling Iggy a “sell out” for allowing his music to be used to pimp a cruise ship line. What those pundits did not know was that twenty years later, young musicians and bands would make more money from licensing their music for films, TV, commercials, and online content, than they do from downloads, radio airplay, record sales or touring. And certainly more than what they make after getting a good review from some snide rock critic.
They have learned the fine art of compromise as foretold by the Oracle Osterberg.
Learning the art of compromise is something that we all need to do. I’m sure there are artists that think compromise is the death of art and perhaps in some way it is. Still, I think about some of my favorite music. So much of it was created to make money. Hank Williams Sr. comes to mind. The man created his incredible songs just so they would become hits and he would make money and he could survive in the world. There were no prima donna illusions about “I can’t compromise my art.” He wanted to survive as a musician and though he did not survive past the age of twenty-nine, his music did. He created songs that were and still are timeless and sublime.
Ultimately, anyone who does something creative for a living goes through the “ROCKIN’ vs. eatin’ conflict.” How you find your way past it may very well be the true creative act. And that’s what many of us never learn. Yet Iggy knows that one just has to be comfortable with the humility of it. Is the idea of the “starving artist” really that essential to the creation of art or music or writing? I don’t think so. It’s just ballyhoo that we’ve been fed by people who don’t make those things. Maybe it’s the suits at the record companies, the film studios or the book publishers, the ones who benefit most by keeping artists indigent and agreeable, just on the off chance that every now and then we will come up with something they can actually sell. Knowing what needs to be done and being humble enough to do it is power. In Iggy’s case, it was selling his song to a cruise line and making some decent bank for a change.
The world according to Iggy: Be comfortable with the humility of it all.
This is its own guide for living, something that can be applied to virtually everything. Once we become comfortable with all the humility that life hands us, even the humility of death, we can then be grateful for what we do have. The art that we can make and the joys that come of it. Humility in the face of our own creativity. We can appreciate every day we have here, not be too hard on ourselves and perhaps make something that will give the rest of humanity joy or insight or solace.
And if you’re lucky, one day you may find yourself on the porch of a villa in Indonesia listening to Trance music, amazed by the wonder of it all.
MICHAEL ZADOORIAN is the critically praised author of The Leisure Seeker—basis for the Sony Pictures Classics film starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. His other books are Second Hand, Beautiful Music, The Narcissism of Small Differences, and the story collection The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit. Zadoorian is a recipient of the Michigan Author Award from the Library of Michigan, a Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts, the Columbia University Anahid Literary Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the GLIBA Great Lakes Great Reads Award, and two Michigan Notable Book Awards. His fiction and essays have appeared in The Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, American Short Fiction, Witness, Great Lakes Review, North American Review, Literary Hub, The Millions, Huffington Post and others. His work has been translated into over twenty-five languages worldwide.
