Iggy Pop is an accident just waiting to happen, says Bryan Appleyard in the London Times. The pioneering punk star is famous for his personal injuries. Once, with a quart of tequila and plenty of cocaine under his belt, Iggy drove the wrong way down a one-way street and crashed his car into a stop sign. His body is covered with scars, many of them mementoes of his wild antics onstage. Pop once rolled around half-naked onstage in broken glass and ended up looking like he’d been flayed. “I bleed a lot,” he says nonchalantly. In an effort to outdo Jim Morrison, he started throwing himself off the stage into the crowd, often winding up bruised and bloodied. “If I made myself feel something,” he explains, “I knew I could make the audience feel it. I felt deprived of feeling. I experienced America in the 1950s as a martial camp. It was all very intolerant.” So one night in 1968 at a show in Detroit, Iggy flung himself toward a couple of girls in the front row—and chipped his teeth when he hit the ground. “That was the first dive and I thought, Wait, there’s something to this.”
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