Iggy Pop Born: The Godfather of Punk Rock

Iggy Pop was born James Newell Osterberg Jr. on April 21, 1947, in Muskegon, Michigan, and grew up in a trailer park in Ypsilanti. His father was a high school English teacher. He learned drums as a teenager, playing in local bands before encountering the raw, aggressive sound of Chicago blues musicians that reoriented his musical ambitions entirely. He formed The Stooges in Ann Arbor in 1967 with brothers Ron and Scott Asheton. The band's performances were unlike anything audiences had seen: Iggy performed shirtless, smearing himself with peanut butter, rolling in broken glass, and diving into the crowd before that behavior had a name. The music was ugly, loud, repetitive, and ahead of everything happening in mainstream rock. Their debut album, "The Stooges," released in 1969, and its follow-up, "Fun House," in 1970, sold almost nothing. Critics dismissed them. Record labels dropped them. The band dissolved amid drug addiction and interpersonal conflict. David Bowie, who admired the recordings, helped resurrect Iggy's career in the mid-1970s, producing "Raw Power" with The Stooges and later collaborating on Iggy's solo albums "The Idiot" and "Lust for Life," both recorded in Berlin in 1977. Punk bands formed in New York and London a decade after The Stooges, doing what Iggy had already done. The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Dead Kennedys all acknowledged his influence. He continued performing and recording through the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, outlasting virtually every band he inspired. His bare-chested, elastic-bodied stage presence endured into his seventies, a testament to sheer physical resilience.