3.26.2014

IGGY POP TALKS ABOUT GROWING UP IN COACHVILLE TRAILER PARK


Iggy Pop just did an interesting interview in Playboy Magazine...
the full interview is HERE

Iggy talks about growing up in a small trailer park and the stigma he had to contend with in Jr High and High School.  I have always thought that Iggy's rebellious nature came from that odd childhood. 

If I ever meet Iggy, I have one question that I would like to ask...Why when both of his parents had good jobs, did they choose to live in such a "frugal" fashion? 

My mother was a nurse, single mother and yet we had a small home which was 13,000 dollars brand new. I grew up not far from Iggy in Ypsilanti Township on the east side of the country club and west of Hewitt Rd. 

Iggy had to go to Tappan Jr. High which is still considered the "rich kid" school. It had to be horrid for him to carry that stigma around with him. 

I  traveled out to Coachville Gardens a few years ago to show Heather Harris, a serious Stooges fan, what a tiny park Coachvile remains.  The park is now on the east side of a very busy 5 lane business thoroughfare..not out in the boonies. 


PLAYBOY: When you were growing up in Michigan as James Osterberg, your family lived in a trailer. Is that fact relevant to the kind of music you make?


POP: In certain ways. It was a little trailer camp out in the boonies, by U.S. Highway 23, a two-lane blacktop. It was beautiful, surrounded by a stone quarry where you could go swimming and some deep forest where there were animals, and also bean, corn and wheat fields. I always felt different because I lived in a trailer and the other kids lived in houses.


I went to junior high in Ann Arbor, and my close friend there was Kenny Miller, whose dad, Arjay Miller, was running Ford Motor Company at the time. Kenny would take my workbook during class and write, “Osterberg blows dead dogs,” then give it back to me.


A few of the meaner kids came out one day to visit and shook my trailer up a little. It caused a sort of anger that I keep. The strange thing was, people who didn’t know me would later say to guys in my band, “That guy’s a rich kid, right? Because he walks around like he owns the place.”


PLAYBOY: Was there any privacy when you lived with your parents in a trailer?


POP: No. Much later I realized that the big advantage of living in a trailer was that I learned to be civilized. Three people, day and night, in a 500-square-foot trailer—and that was the biggest one we ever had.


Before that it was 400 square feet. My parents were very restrained people. There was no alcohol in the house. In fifth or sixth grade I got into music. If that hadn’t happened, I’d probably be a fundamentalist preacher right now, a Jimmy Swaggart. “Send your dollars to me!”


 A neighboring resident told me Iggy lived in very small trailer on Lot 110


This is the current trailer parked on Lot 110


The view as you head to Lot 110 at the back of the park. The fields and woods that Iggy describes in the Playboy Interview are long gone...Yuppie subdivisions have sucked up all the nature

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