I Need More: The Stooges and Other Stories Book

With his collection of personal vignettes, I Want More, Iggy Pop gives us a highly charged and stylized view into one of rock music's more colorful and important characters. Ranging from a few terse paragraphs to several pages, the book's sections chronicle the patchwork of Iggy's early life, following Jimmy Osterberg as he makes the complete transformation into Iggy Pop. While detailing the escapades in his life and career up to the 80s, Iggy's nakedly autobiographical style bridges the public view of the rock innovator (first famous for rolling in glass onstage) with the private man from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who swore that "I will not let myself disappear." We see Iggy high on coke, stabbing himself with drumsticks, and living through what most people can only read about. But by the end of the book, Iggy has become more than a punk rock icon; he has become a real person with a tangible history. The anecdotes and philosophical musings in I Need More are surrounded by a wide variety of black-and-white photographs as well as lyrics from songs written throughout Iggy's rise to international stardom. The photos are diverse, with baby photos of Jimmy Osterberg and Iggy's first bands, The Iguanas and The Prime Movers, set next to ones taken during Stooges years and during Pop's collaborations with David Bowie. Many of the photos are live and candid, though there are also a number of professional rock portraits familiar to Rolling Stone readers. I Need More provides an open, honest view into one musician's life at the beginning of the punk rock movement, a musical and political period both inspired and influenced by Iggy and his best band, The Stooges. The book's raw prose manages to capture the excess and power that marked punk rock's rebellion against the establishment, drove the Stooges' sound, and propelled the man and the band to a rock-and-roll recklessness that had been lost in popular music.Read More