Pop grows up

Iggy Pop is finally acting his age, said Andrew Goldman in The New York Times. Two years ago, the 65-year-old punk rocker announced that he was giving up stage-diving. “I said that after doing a concert for Tibet at Carnegie Hall,” says Pop. His guitarist “was playing too damned slow, and I just ran out of ideas and I thought, ‘Well, let’s just stage-dive.’” Unfortunately, the crowd backed away as Pop leapt off the stage. “Nobody caught me, because it was the Carnegie Hall–Tibetan–whatever audience. I was a little miffed,” he says. “We’ve done two gigs this year, and I haven’t done [a stage-dive] yet. Stages are getting higher and higher, and I’m getting older and older.” Still, considering his longtime heroin abuse and various performance-related injuries, Pop is in pretty good shape. “I’m a little bit damaged in about 15 different ways, and it’s nice that no particular damaged area has become a major issue.” However, he has noticed that his once-rampant sex drive has diminished with age. “I would characterize it sort of like a powerful interest group within a political party at this point. It used to be the entire political party.”

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