Middle-Age Iggy Can Still Pop With Best of Them

Back in 1967, during the so-called “Summer of Love,” such San Francisco rock bands as the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead were urging everyone to follow Timothy Leary’s advice to “tune in, turn on and drop out.”

Meanwhile, in Detroit, Iggy Pop (nee James Osterberg) was already out, way out. He didn’t need any encouragement to turn on, either. His music was on, way on. It was so on, it was deafening. While his contemporaries on the rock scene were lyric-tripping on psychedelics, Iggy and the Stooges were mainlining pure, undiluted anti-social stuff. A decade before the Sex Pistols, they gave birth to punk rock with such nihilistic tunes as “Search and Destroy” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”

Today, a decade after the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop -- minus the Stooges -- is determined to keep punk rock alive. His new solo album, “Instinct,” has just been released by A&M; Records, and he’s in the midst of a national tour that will bring him to San Diego on Thursday night for a concert at the California Theater downtown.

Has rock’s original bad boy mellowed with time, and with age? No way, says Iggy.

“I’m exactly the same as I was 20 years ago,” he said, by phone from his hotel room in Edmonton, Canada, where he performed last Friday. “If you go back and listen to the first Stooges album, and then listen to ‘Instinct,’ you won’t find very much of a change.

“Even though I’m 41 years old, I still have plenty of problems. I still play music that’s highly uncommercial, I still don’t own a home, and I’m still doing hard time on the road, playing little clubs where people spit in my face and throw things.

“I’ve always used music to express what I’m going through, and most of the things I’m going through now, I’ve been going through for the last 20 years. I am what I am.”

Still, there are a few differences between the angry young man of 1967 and the angry middle-age man of 1988.

For one thing, he commands a lot more respect in the music industry because of his 15-year alliance with David Bowie, with whom he has toured, recorded and written songs. For another, it has been five years since he kicked the drug habit that had hampered his career throughout the ‘70s and early ‘80s.

“In order to survive, I created another person who lives inside of me, a guy who looks after me and makes sure I don’t go out there and take a big hit of smack or cocaine,” he said. “To continue making good records, to continue touring as often as I do, I had to stop playing the role of the raving lunatic--the seer in the Ides of March--and learn some discipline.

“In the five years that I’ve been clean, the only thing I’ve been putting into my work has been straight energy.”

At the height of England’s romance with punk rock in the mid-’70s, five blokes from Birmingham decided to form a reggae band instead of playing follow the leader.

“Our parents had come from Jamaica, so we grew up on that vibe,” said David Hinds, the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for Steel Pulse. “And, when punk came in, reggae became a lot easier to do, because the hip thing for punk bands playing the clubs was to have reggae bands open for them.”

Still, it took Steel Pulse three years to land a recording contract with Island Records and three more years, until 1981, to crack the American concert market.

“Until recently, reggae was never recognized and never respected,” said Hinds, whose band will be appearing Saturday at the Starlight Bowl in Balboa Park. “People considered it a gimmicky type of music coming from a bunch of island people; I still remember this salesman in some boutique telling me reggae reminded him of a series of hiccups.”

Steel Pulse deserves plenty of credit for reggae’s recent upsurge in popularity. Through incessant touring and American chart albums like “State of Emergency,” their latest, Steel Pulse has been proselytizing reggae to non-Jamaican audiences by employing a lyrical approach more down-to-earth than ethereal.

“Our style is more in tune with the urban society in which we were raised, the concrete environment of America and England instead of the miles and miles of seascapes in Jamaica,” Hinds said. “So, Anglo audiences can relate a lot more to our subject matter because we come from the same culture, not a different one.”

SIDESHOW: Waylon Jennings’ Sept. 18 concert at Humphrey’s on Shelter Island didn’t break any attendance records. That’s because the show was held in the country outlaw’s dressing room, before an audience of one: promoter Kenny Weissberg. “At 4:30 p.m., I went down to the facility and nothing had been set up,” Weissberg recalled. “I went to Waylon’s dressing room . . . and he told me he had caught some strange germ in Flagstaff. He then proceeded to demonstrate what songs he could and couldn’t sing. He was really sick.” As a result, Weissberg agreed to reschedule the concert for Oct. 2. But five days before, Weissberg received word that Jennings’ condition had worsened, and the date was postponed again--this time, to next summer.

BITS AND PIECES: The Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach celebrates its 14th anniversary Monday night with a concert headlined by two local rock ‘n’ roll favorites from the past, Bratz and Jerry McCann. . . . Just added to the fall lineup at the California Theater: new wavers Siouxsie and the Banshees on Nov. 6, and soul singer Robert Palmer on Nov. 7.