Skip to content
News

Watch Iggy Pop and Thurston Moore Cover Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” in New Documentary

Rough Trade named Iggy Pop’s Post Pop Depression its album of the year for 2016, and to commemorate the occasion, the record store produced a short film titled I’ve Nothing But My Name, featuring Pop in conversation with Thurston Moore.

After talking briefly about Post Pop Depression and the inspiration behind one of its songs, the two punk elder statesmen discuss the experimentation of the Stooges’ early days, when Pop and the rest of the band would play oil drums and vacuum cleaners onstage. Moore asks Pop when he decided to start incorporating proper rock’n’roll into their sound, and Pop answers that the band always sort of wanted to play rock music, but was “absolved of an entire life of mediocrity” because they couldn’t figure out how to play basics like “Johnny B. Goode” at the beginning of their career. Then, Moore and Pop make their own brief, whacked-out attempt at the Chuck Berry classic.

Watch I’ve Nothing But My Name below. The Chuck Berry conversation starts at about 15 minutes in.