“Trying to be free,” Iggy Pop told host Stephen Colbert last night on The Colbert Report, when asked what the Stooges, a punk band before “punk” existed, were trying to do.
Colbert actually missed an opportunity here: The personal liberation championed by rich baby-boom rockers turned out to be part and parcel of their generation’s drift toward the libertarian economics of Reagan and Thatcher. But the 66-year-old, semi-shirted frontman chatted so affably with Colbert — about a young Iggy’s first arrest, about why he takes his shirt off during shows, and about how Link Wray inspired him to sound “bad” — it would’ve been pointless for Colbert to go too far into his faux-conservative pundit mode.
Longtime Stooges fans shouldn’t expect any revelations, but it’s still a charming clip (watch below). Above, see Iggy and the Stooges blast through their horn-skronking “Job,” from new album Ready to Die. Iggy goes into the crowd, giving a couple of pumped dudes a chance to shout along with the refrain. Those fortune tellers might be right about Iggy’s commercial prospects, after all; you can also stream Ready to Die in full now, and find out why Iggy and the Stooges were one of the 50 Best Things We Saw at SXSW 2013.
