Iggy Pop Read Free Page B

into the night, haunt internet chat rooms or get loaded on Class A drugs to numb their boredom.
    Although these days Ypsilanti rather grandly terms itself a city, in reality it’s overshadowed by its much bigger neighbour, Ann Arbor, which since 1837 has been defined by the presence of the University of Michigan. The university was celebrated for its diverse curriculum and liberal ethos and, together with the presence of General Motors and Ford in nearby Detroit, it would attract a constant influx of new residents to the city and stimulate thriving local industries in engineering, pharmaceuticals and electronics.
    It was the influence of the university that ensured Ann Arbor was a classy town. People who lived there drank espresso, formed arts groups and took dancing lessons. In contrast, people from Ypsilanti were often regarded as Midwestern hillbillies. The two towns weren’t totally uneasy bedfellows: plenty of academics might dispense intellectual wisdom at the university and then return home to a sprawling isolated farmhouse in Ypsi’s beautiful countryside, but the divide was perceptible for anyone who crossed the city limits: the gap between people whose salary was generated by their intellects, and those whose weekly paycheck was earned with the rude labour of their hands on a farm or in a factory; between people of culture and rural rubes. It was on that divide that Jim Osterberg and Iggy Pop grew up.
    As a rock star, Iggy Pop would often refer to his upbringing in a trailer park, the definitive blue-collar home. But as a schoolboy, Jim Osterberg was regarded as the middle-class boy most likely to succeed. Other kids admired, and some of them envied, his elegant dress, his parents’ house in Ann Arbor Hills - an elegant enclave peopled by academics, architects and the nation’s most significant captains of industry - and a confidence that seemed unshakeable.
    In the late 1940s, Ann Arbor, along with most of Michigan, was undergoing an economic boom. Money still flowed in from military contracts, while industrial giants including Ford and General Motors were readying themselves for a huge expansion in demand as a million ex-servicemen prepared to spend their government home loans. In the east of the state, all the way over to Detroit and its huge River Rouge Ford plant, new factory buildings sprouted in once green and peaceful locations with resonant Native American names. Multi-storey buildings shot up on the Michigan University campus, and although housing was being developed all round the city, there was still a severe shortage. In 1948, a small group of businessmen headed by Perry Brown, who managed a machine shop in the city, and the Gingras brothers - Irv, Leo and George - developed a small trailer park on Carpenter Road, which they named Coachville Gardens, aiming to attract workers at the Ford factory and the local telephone company. Among the first people to move in, in the fall of 1949, were James Newell Osterberg, his wife Louella and infant son James Newell Junior, who had been born, prematurely, in Muskegon’s Osteopathic Hospital on 21 April 1947. The unconventionally small family would become well known around Coachville Gardens: ‘It was a small trailer with a very large mother and a very skinny tall father,’ says Brad Jones, who lived nearby, ‘like something you’d see in a cult movie. The trailer was very small, and the dad was an Ichabod Crane kinda guy, real tall and thin, and mom was just a square body. But you know what? They connected alright. Somehow it worked.’
    Jim Osterberg’s earliest memory is of being in Louella’s lap, playing a game where ‘she’d recite a kind of a chant, in Danish, then on the last word almost drop me to the floor and pick me back up. And I wanted to do it again and again.’ Jim Junior grew up in the presence of his mother’s warm, nurturing love, and his father’s baseball accoutrements (‘He had played some semi-pro baseball; he had an enormous