Weekend Tunes: Iggy & The Stooges - The Passenger

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/08/weekend-tunes-iggy-the.html

4 Likes

Not the Stooges

7 Likes

Iggy! Use your sonic fireball power!!

5 Likes

What I came here to say.

The good old 70’s where pretty much every musical lead was higher then a fucking kite. I miss the 70’s, not that I could ever return to that lifestyle (family, kids, career, reputation, etc).

1 Like

The trick is not to give a damn.

I have a funny story about “The Passenger”; I first heard the song as a college DJ, back in the late-90’s. Good song, driving beat, jangle-y lyrics, catchy in a dark sort of way. I was just getting into punk and proto-punk, and I remember discussing it with another music-head at a party (we probably both didn’t score with any chicks that night, thus sat on the porch-couch and smoked cigarettes, man). He claimed with authority that the song was about heroin. Iggy had gone through a serious addiction to the stuff, and “The Passenger” was about how you feel on a heroin nod - just riding through life, looking at stuff, feeling incredible but knowing the end and the feeling of need would arrive and wipe out all the beauty you’d seen earlier. Cool, right?

A few years ago I’m reading “The Guardian”‘s online archives, and they have an interview with Iggy where he says that the inspiration for the song was riding around with David Bowie when they toured together, that he didn’t have a drivers’ license but Bowie did. So, uh, “The Passenger” is just a song about being the passenger. D’oh.

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.