Henry Rollins played this for me the other night (on his radio show…..) and he was right in proclaiming it’s some of Iggy’s better lyrics. It’s not the amped up Iggy of early Stooges days, rather it’s an insightful and wacky one. I’d never heard this song before but Rollins said it was all over the radio, like every hour, when he first moved to L.A.
You can listen to Rollins’ broadcast HERE, which I suggest you do. He opened with this track and one other, “Your Electric Guitar” by a band called Empire made of former Generation X members, which absolutely owns. Check it out.
In the newest episode of This American LifeScott Carrier tells a beautiful story of a job he took interviewing schizophrenics. These are people possessed and on an entirely different plane from us normals, which gives them intense insight into a world completely different from ours…
“A person’s soul should be like an ocean, but a schizophrenic soul is like a pool of rain in a parking lot,” he says.
One seemingly normal 19-year-old boy he interviews starts starring at him intensely during the interview “like he’s trying to pull me in and trap me,” says Carrier. “He says he hears voices, satanic voices and that he worries a lot about his shoes, that they’re not the right kind. Not the kind he sees on MTV.”
This all reminded of an unsettling interaction I had with a schizophrenic man probably five years ago. I was working for an arts organization during college and we would give several tickets to each event to a nearby halfway house for the mental patients. Talking to one man before a concert he stopped mid-conversation and starred right into my eyes with an absolutely horrifying expression.
“Do you ever see people dead?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?” I asked with what must have been a noticeable discomfort.
“I see people dead,” he said.
This disturbed me horribly. Perhaps more than it should have. I was troubled by the incident for several days after. Maybe weeks after. Looking at someone living, imagining them dead, seeing through this reality and into one gruesome and demented–that’s where schizophrenics live.
