July 30, 2007
Its funny to think of raw rock pioneer and ex-Stooge Iggy Popwriter of immortal gems like Search and Destroy and I Wanna Be Your Dogrepresented by this staid, polite audiobook. Nonetheless, the combination mostly works. After all, what audiobook reader would want to go head to head, energywise, with Iggy Pop? Dufris knows better than to even try, and puts Pops antics in starker light by studiously avoiding the kind of antics that defined his career. Dufriss voice is invested with meticulousness, weighing each word carefully and swooping to a near-baritone halt at the close of each sentence. Dufris is the anti-Iggy, polite and modulated, and it is his counterexample that allows the light to shine more brightly on Pop himself. While some music would have been nice, in order to flesh out the context of Trynkas biography, this production is solid enough on its own merits. "A Broadway hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 19). (Sept.)" .
Starred review from April 1, 2007
Iggy Pop, rock's own "streetwalkin' cheetah with a heart full of napalm," should be either a smear on the pavement or a drug casualty. But as he nears his 60th birthday on April 21, he's clearly a survivor. Journalist Trynka ("Mojo" magazine) landed a dream gig with this biography of one of the most unhinged and influential figures in American popular music. He deftly walks the line between fan boy and dogged researcher, spinning every myth to thrilling effect (e.g., Iggy's calling out a motorcycle gang onstage in a pink tutu) but fleshing the book out with hundreds of interviews (including with Iggy himself). The result is a complete portrait of the man and his workfrom the mayhem in mid-1960s Detroit with the Stooges to making albums with David Bowie in Berlin. And with the recent, feted Stooges reunion, the fraught life of Iggy Pop is given a storybook ending. This is the definitive word on Iggy, elbowing past even his autobiography, "I Need More". Enthusiastically recommended for all libraries. [See the Q& A with Trynka on p. 92.Ed.]Matthew Moyer, Jacksonville P.L., FL
Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 1, 2007
In the last throes of the 1960s, Jim Osterberg, a charming, hyperintelligent, ambitious boy from a trailer park near Ann Arbor, Michigan, teamed up with two miscreant brothers to form the band the Stooges, single-handedly presaging the entire punk, new wave, metal, and alternative rock movements. His alter ego, Iggy Pop, perhaps the greatest rock front man and sex icon ever, was exalted with unbridled enthusiasm on the one hand yet reviled as an abject failure, a joke, and a loser on the other. A true survivor, Iggy Pop is today a respected elder statesman of rock, known as the Godfather of Punk, but his road was famously brutal. Trynka reminds us that this legendary shamanic performer, epitomized as the ultimate rock 'n' roll god, is a human being who struggled with the distinction between Jim, the sensitive poet, and Iggy, the outlandish child-man who must outdo himself at every turn. This fitting biography from a former editor of " Mojo" magazine finally tells the full story of Iggy's life, rescuing coherence from a tale of thrills, contradictions, debauchery, betrayal, and (ultimately) redemption.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)
Starred review from February 19, 2007
Turning 60 in April, "Godfather of Punk" Iggy Pop still displays the body and energy of a 20-year-old, and in this volume Trynka (Portrait of the Blues
) captures Iggy's debauchery in an obsessively detailed and compulsively readable biography that is as high-energy and entertaining as its subject. Trynka covers all phases of the "driven, talented, indomitable creature" born James Newell Osterberg Jr. in 1947, with special attention paid to how his band the Stooges roared out of Detroit in the late 1960s, then crashed in a "slow, painful" drug-addled disintegration in the early '70s. While he expertly details Iggy's many comebacks, especially those involving David Bowie, Trynka is most sympathetic to how the Stooges' "brutal, monotonous riffing" was the perfect musical support to Iggy's outrageous gender-bending performances, in which "the blood running down Iggy's chest would become a defining image in his career." Ending with a look at how the Stooges' 2004 reunion shows attracted both older fans and younger postpunks, Trynka shows how every aspect of Iggy's work has now become "an integral element of today's rock and alternative music."
October 29, 2007
It’s funny to think of raw rock pioneer and ex-Stooge Iggy Pop—writer of immortal gems like “Search and Destroy” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog”—represented by this staid, polite audiobook. Nonetheless, the combination mostly works. After all, what audiobook reader would want to go head to head, energywise, with Iggy Pop? Dufris knows better than to even try, and puts Pop’s antics in starker light by studiously avoiding the kind of antics that defined his career. Dufris’s voice is invested with meticulousness, weighing each word carefully and swooping to a near-baritone halt at the close of each sentence. Dufris is the anti-Iggy, polite and modulated, and it is his counterexample that allows the light to shine more brightly on Pop himself. While some music would have been nice, in order to flesh out the context of Trynka’s biography, this production is solid enough on its own merits. A Broadway hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 19).
July 30, 2007
It\x92s funny to think of raw rock pioneer and ex-Stooge Iggy Pop\x97writer of immortal gems like \x93Search and Destroy\x94 and \x93I Wanna Be Your Dog\x94\x97represented by this staid, polite audiobook. Nonetheless, the combination mostly works. After all, what audiobook reader would want to go head to head, energywise, with Iggy Pop? Dufris knows better than to even try, and puts Pop\x92s antics in starker light by studiously avoiding the kind of antics that defined his career. Dufris\x92s voice is invested with meticulousness, weighing each word carefully and swooping to a near-baritone halt at the close of each sentence. Dufris is the anti-Iggy, polite and modulated, and it is his counterexample that allows the light to shine more brightly on Pop himself. While some music would have been nice, in order to flesh out the context of Trynka\x92s biography, this production is solid enough on its own merits. A Broadway hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 19).