How does it feel to finally comeback to Brazil after all this time?
I was really pissed off for years that the brazillians never invited me to 'Rock in Rio'. I thought like: "well you plastic, superficial fuckers... fuck you". I was really bitter about that...I played here once, these little wierd-ass gigs and very few people showed up.

When was that?
1989, in Sao Paulo, in a University gymnasium or something like that. I guess there was a thousand people watching, students mostly, they looked like. Then, here, in Rio, I fucking loved it - a little crummy club,  I don’t know the name... Copa something... I remember it had a cat and a rat in the dressing room and I loved it.

How did feel like playing here this time?
I got a very good vibe. I felt like people really enjoyed it. I had no idea whether they would know us or anything. I thought: “well maybe they just like Billy Idol’s rock and roll here where you just wear a lot of leather jackets and shit, and you are pretty”. I knew that Sonic Youth was coming, they are very... artsy. I also know there’s this tradition down here of the "coddled latin american intellectual" [laughs]. I kind of follow that kind of shit. You have a little bunch of these people in each country who are university educated and not really threatened with too much work or anything... I thought: "Well, they will all like Sonic Youth... so, what are we going to do?". Then suddenly people were so receptive. There was a nice feeling in the people here, there was an open vision. I did not really know or care what people were bringing to our show in terms of expectation, but you could see, as we were playing, open eyes and ears and then you started seeing people reacting to the beat. Those are very basic things, but they are the most important things, you know?

Do you ever consciously feel a presence, like a sort of possesing entity when you take the stage, like you are sort of channeling something that isn’t exactly "you", you know what I mean...
[laughing] Well... that’s exactly what lord so and so asked about... He actually used the same words. Is that what you see?

I know you as Jim and we sit around and talk, and laugh, and have dinner with the girls... Jim is a pretty nice little guy... Then he gets up on stage and here comes this fucking Iggy... from mild mannered, soft spoken Jim to... raw power.
Is it that different? Really? I don’t know much about how that goes on. I just usually don’t express myself too much... But at that particular moment when I’m doing this thing, working a stage or recording, if it’s something in that sort of whatever this music thing is, then I will say “ok, this is where i must.”. I don’t know, choose your cliche, “express my humanity stand up and be counted, jump to the next dimension”, whatever the fuck, you know, be a baboon, whatever it is I’m up to.

Do you feel like you’re serving some higher force?
I  don’t know about that... it could be a lower force.

What you used to do in the 60's...
I would do things... For example, once we got a house together to try and make our music... I would take acid, turn on like an electric organ I had in the basement, turn an amplifier on 10 with the organ coming thru it. I just put my feet up on it for eight hours. I would just lay there on acid with my feet up on the fucking keys and I would not move them... I didn’t have to, because it was all moving, you know? So I went through all that silly shit... I remember once I was with the band and we all smoked DMT, and I saw a huge, finely detailed Buddha appeared on the ceiling. I realized it wasn’t really there, but I noticed it was too detailed and I realized that was more detailed than I thought my mind was capable of handling. At the same time I thought  that it would be my higher mind or the lower mind and I said: "I got to take off my clothes."....I was living with three young guys but they understood me, they didn’t mind. "He's got to take off his clothes." So I was nude, with my band, for a year. [laughs]

What about the people from little Muskegon, where you were born, what did they think abou that?
They felt really sorry for me. We played a house party for our friends -- we weren’t fully formed. I was an instrumentalist still and everybody was embarrased for us. That was on halloween 's 67... and they didn’t give up. After that we got some press we didn’t expect from a college newspaper... and they only knew my name as Iggy. It came from a band I was in, years before as a drummer, called the Iguanas. I hated that, I was like, fuck that, who wants a name like IGGY, you know? Try getting a date in 1968 and saying "Hi, my name is IGGY." People make a face, beat you up, you know?. It works now. People are like, "hey, Iggy" and all smiles... somethings changed.

Sometimes I think of  “Search and Destroy” as like the soundtrack for the apocolypse...
As soon as we started playing again, me and The Stooges, somebody said to me:  “This is great because there was Vietnam, now there is war in Iraq and you are back. This is a perfect time for The Stooges!". So, yeh, maybe there is something to that: war band... you know, could be...