Instinct: The Grandfather of Rock in My Living Room

 

The first time I saw a video of Iggy Pop was in 1988. I was with my father in the living room. The video was for the song “Cold Metal,” from the album Instinct. The VJ introduced Iggy as “the grandfather of rock,” and that left both of us silent for a moment. If Pop was the grandfather, then Lennon, McCartney, Jagger and Richards… were they the great grandfathers and great great grandfathers?

Instinct was a kind of comeback. It arrived after Blah Blah Blah, his most commercial album, which had conquered the charts but left many people puzzled. There aren’t many photos of the enigmatic haute couture designer Martin Margiela, but I remember one in which he’s wearing a shirt from that album. That image stuck in my mind. Margiela is one of the boldest designers there is.

At the time, Billy Idol dominated MTV. He had been the singer of the English punk rock band Generation X, and now he was selling a clear formula: hard rock with a punk attitude. Pop seemed to be following the same path, as if on recommendation. Instinct was a strictly hard rock record, with attitude and with the punk rock image still intact. To reinforce that image, Steve Jones, the former guitarist of the Sex Pistols, was playing with him. Jones was also in a phase where hard rock interested him.

I always thought Rick Rubin would have been the right producer for Instinct instead of Bill Laswell. Rubin would have done something very interesting with Pop and Jones. Although more than exploiting the punk roots of both, it would almost certainly have been more unsettling to place them in a hard-rock context. Rubin had just done Electric with The Cult, a record that defined the hard rock of those years. In 1986 he had produced Reign in Blood by Spayer and Licensed to Ill by the Beastie Boys. His new obsession was building the perfect hard-rock band. First he convinced The Cult to abandon post-punk and record Electric in 1987. Then he produced Danzig’s debut in 1988 and Wolfsbane’s in 1989.

Blaze Bayley was singing in Wolfsbane. Later he replaced Bruce Dickinson in Iron Maiden in 1994. I always thought Bayley would have been a better substitute for David Lee Roth in Van Halen than for Dickinson. Sammy Hagar, on the other hand, might have worked better in Iron Maiden. The Maiden were big, avowed fans of his legendary band Montrose.

Instinct is the hard rock album that Mick Jagger and Lou Reed still owed us in the 80s. Jagger approached that territory a little late, with Wandering Spirit in 1993, not by chance, with Rick Rubin. Lou Reed, as expected, went even further. Nearly "heavy metal". In 2011 he recorded Lulu with Metallica as his backing band. Greg Fidelman, sound engineer and Rubin’s right hand man, was present at the sessions. Rubin and Fidelman had already worked together with Metallica on Death Magnetic in 2008, a somewhat unbalanced album, but one I like a lot.

In 1988 Bowie made a similar move. Unexpectedly, he formed Tin Machine and recorded a strange, rather tense hard-rock album. We already know Bowie likes to use alter egos, but this time he went further. He created a band. Bowie was obsessively listening to Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth and the Pixies at the time. In Tin Machine he was accompanied by the Sales brothers, the bassist and drummer who had played with Iggy on Lust for Life in 1977, and Reeves Gabrels, who later became the guitarist of The Cure. In the late 60s Pop had already played with another pair of brothers, the tremendous Ron and Scott Asheton, in the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in history, The Stooges.

That night in the living room, with the video of “Cold Metal” playing on the television, my father and I had no idea we were watching the strangely named “grandfather of rock” taking a second wind and picking up a career that is still sounding hard.