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Pro Audio

Iggy Pop’s rider is a stage manager’s worst nightmare

You don’t have to be told that Iggy Pop is a lunatic eccentric, but if you ever needed some written evidence, his rider would probably do.

When you’re as legendary as Iggy Pop, you tend to get away with a lot, especially when it comes to riders. We’ve all heard tales of performers requesting ridiculous items, such as Van Halen’s ‘no brown M’n’M’s’, or Madonna requesting a brand new toilet seat at every venue.

However, when it comes to Iggy Pop’s rider, his latest effort isn’t so out there in its demands, but in its running commentary, which is both bizarre and surreal, and I’m sure it’s bamboozled many a stage manager in the business.

The rider, titled “Marvellous and Most Instructive Information Document- Including Utterly Confusing Comments and Asides,” takes the piss in the best way possible, and I’m sure it will be both a career highlight and challenge for many venue owners – or maybe they’ll just end up splitting their sides.

Take this batch of amp, cab and rack requests:

“ALL OF THIS LOT FOR A START.
2 X MARSHALL VBA 8 X 10 CABINETS (There’s lovely)
3 X MARSHALL VBA BASS AMPLIFIERS Please make sure they’re good ones or we’ll all end up as wormlike web-based life forms in the bass player’s online literary diahorrea. Honestly. He’s like a sort of internet Pepys or Boswell, except without the gout and the syphilis. For all I know.
1 X KORG 2000 DIGITAL RACK TUNER. Digital in the sense that it works via an electronically generated number system, not digital because it only works if someone holds it together with their fingers
3 x JCM 800 SINGLE CHANNEL MASTER VOLUME MARSHALL AMP HEADS 100 WATT
that have been tested recently. And when I say “recently”, I don’t mean “Sometime in the three weeks preceding the occasion when it fell 3 metres off the top shelf in the warehouse as we were fork-lifting it back up, after it came back from that Inane Clown Pussy gig where they had the ‘Piss On The Live Marshall Amplifier Competition’ (If you make smoke and sparks come out, and you are still alive afterwards, we’ll give you a bottle of Miller Lite. And a go on the band’s skateboard. And some clown make up.) The sound it made as it hit the concrete!! BAD-OI-OI-OING!!! How we laughed”
No! I mean recently. Within living memory. Preferably that of a goldfish.”

Umm I’m lost already. Or what about this ‘monitor man’ request:

“We need: one (1) monitor man who speaks good English and is not afraid of death.
{Only joking…. or am I?}.

“Also, he needs to know a little bit about monitors. This may seem a little obvious, but believe me….
(For example, in Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia in Northern Spain, they appear to think – if they just ignore riders like this, then supply a fat, bearded, ignorant hippy with a digital monitor desk (doh!) who doesn’t know shit about eq-ing, and monitor wedges that would be better suited to wedging doors open, and a load of stage managers and PA geezers and promoters reps who shout a lot – that this is the same as actually providing what the band needs in order to do a gig to the best of their ability. And that if they deny that their gear is no good, it will suddenly, mysteriously, become good.
Well I would just like to say that the next time the Stooges get booked for their festival, I’m going to turn up with some pickled eggs, a small blue vibrator with a jelly dolphin balanced on the shaft, a set of dog-eared encyclopedias with the volume E-G missing, and a screwdriver that’s been accidentally dropped in a lavatory
And then, when they say, “That’s not the Stooges”,
I’m going to say, “Yes it is!”
And then they’ll say “No it isn’t”.
And I’m going to say, “Yes it IS!!!”
See how they like it, the fuckers!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes…
We do not have our own monitor man, because in the future robots will work for us and make the world a better place.

Sorry about that rant about Santiago, by the way. I just wanted to get it off my chest, and killing people is just sooo 1980s, don’t you think?
The next page contains the information you require. Bear with me. Not a real bear, of course.
By the way, our guitar roadie, Chris, assures me that the panda does not belong to the “Bear” family, but is actually a part of the “Pig“family. Could this possibly be true? And if it isn’t, why would he risk telling me, when he must realise that I will tell the whole world his half-baked theory?
Unbelievable.”

Wow that was strange. God help that poor monitor man.

Check out the full rider here.