TORONTO - Punk pioneer Iggy Pop is legendary for his live shows - a frenetic explosion of energy in which his wiry, half-naked frame shoots across the stage and back again, with an occasional trip to the edge of the stage to berate a lethargic onlooker.
But Pop, now 61, says the unbridled frenzy of his youth has been tamed with sobriety and age. Despite that, the veteran rocker, along with his band the Stooges, heads to Canada this weekend for a couple of shows in Montreal and Toronto with promises he'll offer more than most performers half his years can muster.
"I do as much as I can do," Pop says in a deep, gravelly voice from his home in Miami.
"Gosh, I don't climb the 30-foot speaker stack anymore - you do what you can do, you know. But the basic idea is to try to deliver something other than a corpse, basically, which is what I find at most rock shows. You basically get a funereal experience disguised as fun."
The wild recklessness of his youth is well documented, but these days Pop is drug-free, with a regular workout regime that centres on 40 minutes a day of qigong, a series of movement and breathing exercises akin to tai chi.
"I do everything my mom used to tell me to do, I'm just 50 years too late," he says, cackling during a telephone interview from his memorabilia-packed office.
It's been a long road from the Stooges' drug-fuelled days in the late '60s and '70s, when a life of excess eventually tore the band apart and contributed to the death of original bassist Dave Alexander in 1975. Brothers Ron and Scott Asheton reformed the band in 2003 with Mike Watt on bass. They were soon joined by "Fun House" saxophonist Steve MacKay.
This time around, age has settled in for their manic frontman, but so has a new prosperity that sees the rock 'n' roll guru, sometime actor and pop culture icon more famous today than he ever was.
"Emotionally, I've been kind of lucky, maybe, that I didn't really begin to get worldly success until later in life," says Pop, born James Newell Osterberg Jr.
"I'm still experiencing for the first time things that my contemporaries were experiencing when they were in their late 20s and finally making it in rock 'n' roll. ... People, instead of coming up to you and saying 'You owe me $40!' - they're coming up and saying to me 'You're great, you changed my life.' "
In the past seven to 10 years, Pop says things have "gotten to be where they're really very nice," affording him a comfortable home on a walled, acre-sized property filled with trees. The privacy allows him to take naked strolls on his tennis court, as he says he did right before this interview.
"It's kind of like an Eden, you know? So, I don't wear clothes a lot here."
Pop credits advertisements, alternative radio, the Internet and movie and television licensing for many of his recent hits, which have found high-profile placement in underground feature films including the heroin flick "Trainspotting" and the glam rock "Velvet Goldmine."
"Those have all been very good for me," he says of the myriad of new revenue streams that have opened up in recent years. "In fact, they're even starting to play some of the stuff at commercial radio."
"I'm still not that big a deal, but this is the most, if you want to say, as far as numbers and all that, I'm more popular now than ever. ... For that reason, I'm still kind of like, 'Wow! Cool! Whoa! Yea!"'
Nevertheless, his reputation as the "godfather of punk" has caused some ire. Pop says he used to find the moniker embarrassing. Now he just ignores it.
"It means nothing," he says. "I'm wary of titles. The music that I was playing in the '60s and '70s bears little or no resemblance to what's called 'punk music' at the turn of the century or in this new century."
"It's pop music, that's all. It's pop music done with a certain kind of hair gel."
But citing an odd Canadian connection, Pop admits that his own musical origins weren't necessarily punk. He says his time with the Stooges was preceded by a short stint in Toronto at age 19, when he came up to visit friends and decided to try to pull together a blues-rock band. He says he lived on french fries from a 24-hour cafe, jamming in a room above a "hot dog joint" on Yonge Street. It didn't work out.
Iggy Pop and the Stooges play the Osheaga Music and Arts Festival in Montreal on Sunday, and Toronto's Massey Hall on Wednesday, Aug. 6.
