Kill City
By 1977, three years after The Stooges split up, band frontman Iggy Pop and guitarist James Williamson had outgrown punk rock (which The Stooges had done first *anyway*) and recorded *Kill City*: an album that mixed saucy rock ’n’ roll with songwriterly sophistication and instrumentation (acoustic and slide guitar!). Iggy had by then streamlined his hyper-reactive personality and mastered the art of the rock ’n’ roll caricature (“Teen magazines won’t let me be/I feel so clean but they’re all digging dirt on me”), and he was *on*. In fact, when his metal-tongued croon met Williamson’s riffs, things got stupidly tasty—from a hit-in-a-perfect-world (“Consolation Prizes”) to a beautiful Stonesy track (“No Sense of Crime”) to a sleazy strut (“Sell Your Love”) to a perfect Roxy Music nod (“Night Theme”). This could’ve been The Stooges had they lasted longer (both “I Got Nuthin’” and “Johanna” are Stooges leftovers). Iggy was still the world’s forgotten boy; remember, The Stooges were an obscure band in their day. And that napalm heart of his? That was kid stuff by 1977.
To say Iggy Pop had hit bottom in 1975 is an understatement; after the final collapse of the Stooges, Iggy sank deep into drug addiction and depression, and he eventually checked himself into a mental hospital in a desperate effort to get himself clean and functional again.