Iggy Pop On Living Like Dogs

[Song: Iggy Pop & The Stooges - “I Wanna Be Your Dog”]

David Gerlach: That’s Iggy Pop singing with The Stooges back in the late 1960s: “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” Over 40 years later he is still talking about dogs, and specifically what they can teach all of us about living life. Our contributor Josh Baron caught up with Iggy Pop over the phone.

Iggy Pop: Josh as we speak I’m sitting with my feet up overlooking the sea in the Cayman Islands. So… (laughs)

Josh Baron: Not bad. Not bad, sir

Iggy Pop: Right, Right.

David Gerlach: So we jump into their conversation with Iggy Pop talking about this French author. This guy who wrote a book called “The Possibility of an Island.” Well his thoughts on the zen of dogs had a really big influence on Iggy Pop and in particular a song of his, a new one called “Machine for Loving.” This is Blank on Blank.

Iggy Pop: Yeah somehow dogs keep coming up with me. “Machine for Loving” is text from the book. He says: “What is it about dogs that make them such terrific company?” And it is a pseudo-scientific novel, so it is kind of sci-fi. And he just says: “Well, it’s really that they have such a small ego. And hence can be satisfied with a simple and genuine pleasure.” And I think that’s something that has always appealed to me since I was a child. Something in my experience that I’ve been missing and I’ve noticed that others are missing as kind of a shitty side effect of humanity. “Wait, you’ve got a beautiful girlfriend, you’ve got a good job. You’ve got a nice house. It’s a beautiful day. Are you happy?” “No.” “Are you satisfied?” “No.” “Are you miserable?” “Yes.” You know, so… somehow when I wrote the first one, the one in the 60s, this was a classic rock ‘n’ roll, boy-addresses-girl song to me. How am I going to sum up… okay, you’ve got six words and four and a half seconds. You’re not Bob Dylan here. (laughs) How are we going to sum up the suggested relationship? Well, “I wanna be your dog.” There it is, you know?

Josh Baron: Are you in fact a dog owner?

Iggy Pop: Yeah. It wasn’t my idea. It’s my wife… we have three. Yeah. I’m in a branch of the entertainment business. Like most people that do what I do, I like the idea. You know how they always pose with their children and then you notice they have nannies to wipe up the poop. (laughs) So it was kind of like that at first, but it’s still… I don’t do the poop. But I’m real tight with the dogs and there are three of them.

[Music: Iggy Pop - “The Passenger”]

David Gerlach: That’s Iggy Pop on what we can all learn about life and living from dogs. And this is Blank on Blank. I do want to thank Josh Baron, the editor-in-chief at Relix magazine, for adding this interview to the archive. Now for more interviews you can hear nowhere else, head over to BlankonBlank.org. I’m David Gerlach. Keep listening.