Lust for Life by Iggy Pop

Lust for Life, Iggy Pop's second solo album, came out on RCA in 1977, the same year as The Idiot, and this time the old Stooge grabbed the wheel back. He and David Bowie had taken The Idiot on the road with Bowie hunched over the keyboards, and when the tour wrapped they regrouped in West Berlin at Hansa, the studio by the Wall, in May and June to cut the follow-up. Bowie, Pop and engineer Colin Thurston ran the sessions, and the touring band came along: Ricky Gardiner on guitar and the Sales brothers, Tony Fox on bass and Hunt on drums.

Where The Idiot was mostly Bowie's songbook, Iggy demanded a bigger say here, working up his own arrangements on tracks like "Sixteen", and the record snaps back toward the raw hard rock and proto-punk of his Stooges days. Bowie's hand is still on the title track, though, and that jackhammer beat is pure adrenaline, a manic, grinning shout of a song. "The Passenger" rolls the other way, cool and loping, a ride with the windows down and nowhere in particular to be.

RCA barely lifted a finger to promote it, but it still climbed to 28 in the UK, where no Iggy album would do better until Post Pop Depression in 2016, and reached 8 in the Netherlands. Critics cheered his energy and the fact that he was plainly running his own show, and it has since come to be counted among his best. It was also the last time he and Bowie worked together until the mid-1980s.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.