Iggy Pop – The Passenger

I am the passenger. I stay under glass.

(Iggy Pop, lyric from The Passenger (Lust For Life, 1977))

Covers, films and ads eventually carried the promotion the 1977 week did not. The studio recording still has the circular guitar and the Sales rhythm. Pop looks out. He does not turn the view into a speech. The “la la la” chorus stays a chant, not a shout.

Writers on the label copy are Pop and Gardiner. Bowie and Colin Thurston sit with the production, as they do on the album’s title song. The lyric, as Pop has described it, came from the passenger seat, with the streets going past the window.

Lust For Life is a 1977 album. The Passenger is the track on it that looks out of the car instead of pitching a destination. Gardiner’s guitar keeps a circle. Tony and Hunt Sales lock the rhythm under that circle. There is no solo placed out front to stop the motion. The chorus stays “la la la”, a chant rather than a line that needs translating. Pop has said he wrote the words while riding as a passenger and watching streets pass. The arrangement follows that: forward motion, a window, a voice that reports.

The promotion inside 1977 was small. Covers, films and ads did that job years later, which is how a Berlin album track outlasted the week it was first pushed. The original is still built on the circular guitar and the Sales rhythm. The vocal stays detached. City lights pass. The singer stays in the seat. Bowie and Colin Thurston remain in the production chain that also carried the album’s title song. Gardiner shares the writing credit with Pop. The album is Lust For Life, from 1977.

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