Tactful Cactus wrote:Grey Error wrote:Tactful Cactus wrote:
I loved it -- especially his crazy Haiti hiatus in the 1980s
That was INSANE. I was crying with laughter.
Trynka's Bowie bio is a good companion.
I just finished the Iggy bio - really perfect summer reading, and I'll move onto the Bowie bio as well - as you say it seems to make for a good companion piece. Someone else mentioned (regarding the Bowie bio) that Trynka was strangely mute on the subject of the actual music - and I found this very much to be the case for the Iggy bio as well. He mentions that Fun House is one of the best albums of all time many times - but never explains why or what specifically. To the extent that he examines the music, he spends one paragraph on the debut album talking about where each riff came from - which actually I found quite interesting as I didn't know any of them (for example that some of them came from The Byrds, which hadn't connected with me before at all). I'd have liked more of that, and while he is good at grappling with the Iggy versus Jim Osterberg conflicts and has researched his life admirably, there are very occasions where we actually hear Jim/Iggy's own voice - interviews etc - which makes him seem quite remote.
Probably my biggest qualm otherwise is the lack of insight gleaned on Ron Asheton. Yes, it's a bio on Iggy, but Trynka repeatedly mentions that the key to understanding Iggy is to understand Ron - but then he never proceeds to examine Ron in any meaningful way. For example, I've always found Ron's fascination with nazism to be difficult to deal with - and goes very contrary to the "gentle" image that he generally had (versus the more demonic James Williamson). Trynka essentially dismisses it as harmless fun - and makes jokes at how Ron kindly refrained from wearing one of his gestapo uniforms at Iggy's first wedding to a jewish girl (and wore a German army one instead, or something like that). But even the recent Stooges doc gleans some more interesting insight into this than Trynka does (which is pretty damning considering a documentary only has an hour or so to cover it's territory) - it makes the connection between this fascination and the Ashetons' father (which still doesn't really explain it, but at least it opens a door to understanding it).
Sometimes find the jokey tone about underage sx to be difficult to deal with - it's a difficult subject, and should be handled as such. But otherwise, very well-researched and written (sometimes needed tighter editing - Danny Sugarman gets weirdly introduced twice).
