Iggy Pop has earned his honorific as the "Godfather of Punk" for so many reasons.

Songs like "I Wanna Be Your Dog," "Lust For Life," "The Passenger" and "China Girl" have long been considered formative pieces of the canon — despite missing widespread commercial success upon release. Collectively, they helped earn the Stooges legend major accolades like an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, and veneration from the Recording Academy as a GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award honoree in 2020.

Just as memorable as his timeless, anarchic catalog is Pop's unforgettable onstage presence. His electric, aggressive performance style influenced a generation of alternative, rock and punk performers, from the Sex Pistols to Nirvana. As his career progressed, he would move towards a more considered, experimental performance style; at the beginning, however, his strategy onstage was raw, rough and largely improvised. And, naturally, crowds ate it up.

In from-the-vault archival GRAMMY footage, Pop traces the origins of that style, detailing how he had a "secret hand signal" that he and his band used onstage as a marker for when they were transitioning from a particular riff.

"At the hand signal, they would fade off that riff — but [not] stop playing — and go to the next riff," Pop recounts. "The reason not to stop playing was not to give the audience a chance to disapprove. But the unexpected side effect was it kinda helped mesmerize them."

"Again, something about those two boys — the brothers had a very primal groove," Pop adds, referring to the Stooges' lead guitarist Ron Asheton and drummer Scott Asheton. "And there were certain things that I was doing to enhance that." 

With the crowd-captivating groove going on in the background, Pop would improvise rhymes with preconceived titles: "I'm Sick," "Asthma Attack," "Goodbye Bozos," and more. Freestyling allowed him to lock more cleanly into his fast-developing primal rock style, but it had another benefit, too: Pop says he wasn't ready to release an official song quite yet.

"I wasn't ready to write a good, memorable song yet," he reasons. "But I didn't want to write a bad one."

Press play on the video above to delve into Pop's legendary performance style, and keep checking GRAMMY.com throughout the month for more episodes of Sound Bites.

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