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Sun 5 April 2026 20:15, UK
Just James Newell Osterberg Jr back then, in the mid-1960s, Iggy Pop was on the hunt for inspiration as a kid looking for a sign that maybe, just maybe, he could be someone too.
At this point in time, our protagonist was in Detroit. Having not yet travelled far from his hometown, he was basically your classic burnt-out teen. He’d drummed in a few garage bands, had just had his first taste of booze, and was spinning his first rock and roll records that were beginning to change everything. More and more, the dream was becoming an undeniability: young James wanted to be a rockstar.
It was in 1965, when he was 18, that he gained the nickname ‘Iggy’, which would be one of three hyper-important things that happened that year, the first of which was the name, and the other two came in the form of concerts. Now that he was old enough to go wandering, Iggy and his friends would travel to Detroit, the bigger city compared to their smaller hometown of Ann Arbor, to see touring bands, and in 1965, one Bob Dylan came to town.
It was one of those moments that Iggy Pop, even now, can remember well, writing in an op-ed for Vinyl Writers, “In autumn 1965, he came to Detroit. At the first half of the evening, he stood there with his acoustic guitar for about an hour. It was absolutely magical”.
But crucially, Iggy was seeing Dylan right as he was going electric. “He left the stage, and when he came back, he was wearing a Beatles suit and winklepickers, and a Fender Stratocaster. He made a real show out of his return to the stage: he walked backwards, jumped up and turned around within the move, and then instantly started to play,” the artist recalled, enamoured by this showman version of Dylan. It’s easy to see the impact of that, given the type of performer Iggy was destined to become.
So in that way, Dylan became a kind of blueprint, an inspiration or a goal to work towards. He seemed to appear to Iggy with a message of ‘you could do this too’.
The third vital moment of the year sits on the exact opposite end of the spectrum from that, though. “A few months ago, I had seen The Beach Boys at the very same place. They had impressed me so much that I immediately bought the same shirt that they were wearing,” he wrote as he looked at the band in complete and utter awe.
However, awe was all it was. “Bob Dylan, The [Rolling] Stones or The Kingsmen made me think: OK, why don’t I do something like that, maybe just a little more simple?” he thought, but when face to face with Brian Wilson? “I knew that I would never sing as high and clear, let alone understand anything about diminished nine-chords or such stuff.”
“They hadn’t given me any hope that I could ever be like them,” Iggy said, drawing this line between the bands that encouraged him and gave him hope, and then this other tier of artists that inspired him in ways he knew he could never even hope to replicate.
