Why Iggy Pop started diving

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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