![]() Even that did not help the band carry on as their pro-punk music was too far from the format of the then popular psychedelic rock. He took the similarly sounding moniker Ziggy Stardust and executed the functions of the producer for the band’s third and last album. The person who saved Iggy’s career at that time was David Bowie. This made Elektra cancel the contract prematurely. The first two albums appeared lame efforts to reach a unique sound and crashed down commercially. Meanwhile, the studio productivity of The Stooges was miserable. Iggy traded curses with the crowd and damaged his body heavily, which made many people later call him the first punk musician. The musicians abused substances and used to come onto the stage half-conscious. ![]() ![]() ![]() The group’s live shows were true scenes of self-destruction and mutilation. Iggy’s singing bore a strong resemblance to Jim Morrison’s one. The musicians made their material as simple as possible emphasizing dirty powerful guitar riffs. In the second half of the sixties Iggy Pop united his efforts with Ron and Scott Ashton to form the legendary group The Stooges. In 1963 the young man joined the rock band The Iguanas that gave him his long remaining pseudonym Iggy. As a student there, he discovered to rock-n-roll and free jazz together with the beatnik poetry. James studied at a prestigious school and then entered a college. He was born in Michigan under the real name of James Newell Osterberg, Jr. Here Jarmusch shows his unconventional way around the edges of genre cinema, as he would later do again with Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai (1999), and the result is a low-key classic of strangely poetic beauty – a western for sleepwalkers and dreamers.Many consider Iggy Pop the godfather of punk rock music and one of the most scandalous figures in the modern culture and there are many reasons why. Depp, ethereal and otherworldly, drifts through the film like a stranger in a strange land, all to the sparsely epic accompaniment of Neil Young's haunting guitar score.Īs a tale of innocence lost, Dead Man is the indie flipside of The Birth Of A Nation (1915), stripping away DW Griffiths' racist triumphalism to reveal a wilder, weirder and altogether more spiritual side to America's national identity. This is a western of a decidedly revisionist bent, playing out its gunfights and scenes of violent brutality with such quiet understatement that it might equally have been called Dead Pan. It's a trip all right, too, with peyote-fuelled vision quests, a cross-dressing frontiersman (played by Iggy Pop!) and Crispin Glover's intense turn as the train fireman all bringing their own oddball textures to the mix. The film's unlikely hero may be a wide-eyed naïf from Ohio (not unlike Jarmusch himself), but his journey will take him through the darkest heart of American history to the place where everyone is headed in the end. So it is that Blake does battle with cannibals and monsters, plays tricks with the name Nobody, assumes the status of a living legend and takes a mystic boat trip home – a latter-day Ulysses skirting the borderland between civilisation and wilderness, male and female, native and alien, sea and sky, life and death. For while it is certainly a quirky take on the oater, shot by Robby Müller in sharply austere black and white to resemble the daguerreotype photography popular at the time in which it is set, it is also essentially a road movie, winding a long, crooked path that can be traced all the way back to the source of all western travel narratives, Homer's Odyssey. Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man begins as it ends – with a journey. With a bullet lodged by his heart, and a posse of hired killers on his tail, Blake falls in with an Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer) who mistakes this "stupid white man" for his long-dead poetic namesake, and agrees to guide his new friend "to the place where William Blake is from." Blake ends up fleeing town after becoming involved in an altercation over a flowergirl (Avital) that has left him gravely wounded and Dickinson's youngest son Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) dead. William Blake (Johnny Depp) is taking the long train journey north to a frontier town called Machine at "the end of the line", where he is to be employed as an accountant at Dickinson's metalworks – but when he gets there, he discovers that the post is long gone, and that the only job going for him, as Dickinson (Robert Mitchum) himself puts it, is "pushing up daisies in a pine box".
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