Following the break-up of The Stooges in early 1974, Iggy Pop seemed hell-bent on self-destruction. The singer’s addiction to heroin and cocaine was out-of-control, he had nowhere to live, and his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic, and increasingly alarming to his friends in Los Angeles.
In 1975, after a number of run-ins with the LAPD for assorted misdemeanours, Pop was given a choice: he could be locked up in a prison cell, or he could ‘voluntarily’ check himself in to a psychiatric ward to seek professional help. He opted for option two, and was committed to UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute under the care of Doctor Murray Zucker. Here he was diagnosed with hypomania, a condition which his biographer Paul Trynka described as a “bipolar disorder characterised by episodes of euphoric or overexcited and irrational behaviour, succeeded by depression.”
“Hypomanics are often described as euphoric, charismatic, energetic, prone to grandiosity, hypersexual, and unrealistic in their ambitions,” Trynka noted in his excellent 2008 biography, Open Up And Bleed, adding “all of which sounded like a checklist of Iggy’s character traits.”
Pleased that Pop was getting the help he so obviously needed, friends – including David Bowie – rallied around the singer, and visited him regularly at the facility.
“Iggy was in a mental hospital when I first met him and so my mum (Bowie’s costumier and fashion designer Ola Hudson) and I and David went to visit,” Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash recalled in a 1991 interview with Q magazine. “He’s such a fragile, sweet, soulful, honest and sincere guy.”
At the time, Bowie was facing his own addiction issues, and wasn’t always given to making the best decisions. One example of this being the day that he and actor Dennis Hopper decided to pay Iggy a visit in hospital to share a selection of hard drugs with the singer. For reasons never explained, the pair chose to undertake this well-intentioned but ill-advised mission while dressed in astronaut suits.
“We trooped into the hospital with a load of drugs for him,” Bowie later recalled. “This was very much a leave-your-drugs-at-the-door hospital. We were out of our minds, all of us. He wasn’t well; that’s all we knew. We thought we should bring him some drugs because he probably hadn’t had any for days!”
As foolish as this this plan was, Pop would later credit Bowie for his help in getting through what was clearly a traumatic and challenging period of his life.
“By 1975, I was totally into drugs, and my willpower had been vastly depleted,” he recaled. “But still, I had the brains to commit myself to a hospital, and I survived with willpower and a lot of help from David Bowie. I survived because I wanted to.”