Iggy Pop's 'Great Expectations' Shirt & Photograph

ROBERTA BAYLEY (B. 1950)

Iggy Pop and the Ramones at CBGBs

signed and titled 'Iggy Pop and the Ramones at CBGBs Roberta Bayley'; numbered 'A.P.' (on the reverse)

photograph

10 7/8 x 13 7/8 inches (27.6 x 35.2 cm)

Executed circa 1976. This work is an artist's proof.

By the spring of 1976, Iggy Pop had already given punk its template. As the frontman of the Stooges — whose albums The Stooges (1969), Fun House (1970) and Raw Power (1973) established the sonic and physical vocabulary of what was coming. The Stooges never achieved commercial success proportionate to their influence: dropped and picked up by multiple labels, they had played their final shows in early 1974. The Sex Pistols' Steve Jones cited "Search and Destroy" as a direct influence; Kurt Cobain called Raw Power his favourite record of all time.

By 1976, Iggy was in New York, circling the downtown scene centered on CBGB and Max's Kansas City — the one that had already produced Television, Patti Smith, the Heartbreakers and the Ramones. David Bowie, touring Station to Station, took him along as companion and collaborator. In late March 1976, the two were arrested for marijuana possession in Rochester, New York; the charges were later dismissed, but not before Bowie had bought Iggy a suit for the court appearances. As Pop told an interviewer later: "David was always looking out for me. He bought me a suit. I paid back everything I ever owed him later on, but at the time I just didn't have enough dough."

Roberta Bayley photographed Iggy at CBGB in the weeks before his departure for Europe — he had come to see the Ramones, the Queens band who had taken the Stooges' three-chord fury and sharpened it to something faster and harder. Pop arrived in the suit Bowie had bought him for Rochester: platinum hair, dark glasses, surrounded by Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy Ramone, Sire Records founder Seymour Stein and Ramones co-manager Danny Fields. The accompanying photograph captures the moment two generations of New York's underground stood in the same room.

The 'Great Expectations' T-shirt — reputedly sourced from a hairdresser on 8th Street — was left at Bayley's apartment as Pop packed to leave. Within weeks, he and Bowie were at work on The Idiot, recorded principally at the Château d'Hérouville in France and given its final mix by Tony Visconti at Hansa Studio in West Berlin; the album was released on 18 March 1977. Lust for Life — written and recorded in eight days at Hansa by the Wall — followed in September. Together the two albums mark the moment Iggy Pop stepped out from the wreckage of the Stooges and reinvented himself, under Bowie's guidance, into something that would shape post-punk as decisively as Raw Power had shaped punk itself.

PROVENANCE:

From the personal archive of Roberta Bayley