Drummer Clem Burke first met Iggy Pop while out on road in 1977 with Blondie – but that wasn’t his most memorable experience.
“I later toured as part of Iggy’s band for six weeks promoting the Party album in ’81 and he was basically out of his mind,” Burke tells Classic Rock. “There was no food allowed backstage, only drugs and booze.”
Pop memorably smashed a microphone into his own face at one point during this tour, dislodging a front tooth. Fans got a peek into the onstage madness with 1983’s Live in San Fran 1981, recorded in November at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco. A DVD version followed in 2005.
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“It was ‘no blow, no show,'” Burke added, “and his only mandate was: ‘Play as loud and as fast as possible.'”
Even if a good time was had by all, Party became Pop’s last album on Arista Records after stalling at a paltry No. 166 on the Billboard Top 200. That was quite a tumble from Pop’s commercial peak in the late ’70s with The Idiot, the David Bowie collaboration which hit the U.K. Top 30.
Pop invited Blondie to open on the Idiot World Tour in 1977, just after Burke and company released their deeply underrated debut album. “Blondie’s first national tour of the States was with Iggy, with David Bowie on keyboards,” Burke said. “The night before the start of the tour we did a gig at Max’s Kansas City [in New York], got straight in an RV, drove to Montreal overnight [and] went to the venue.”
Everyone was “still crashed out in a funky dressing room backstage when the door opened and in walked Bowie and Iggy,” Burke said. “They couldn’t have been nicer.”
That’s just when Burke noticed something: “Iggy and I both had Anello and Davide Beatle boots on, which I’d got on my first trip to the UK in ’75.”
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