Iggy Pop & The Stooges the 'Peanut Butter' incident

Iggy Pop & The Stooges the 'Peanut Butter' incident

Iggy Pop has had many known stage antics, the one that would be most known would be the peanut butter incident. The incident took place at a concert in Cincinnati in 1970. Iggy walked into the crowd. Someone strangely handed him a jar of peanut butter. Iggy responded with smearing it onto himself and throwing bits into the crowd.

You can see the scene from Jim Jarmusch's documentary about the impact of Iggy and The Stooges called Gimmie Danger. It's a great doco and it's streaming on Foxtel Now and Apple TV. At the time of the premiere of the doco Iggy Pop spoke of his time in The Stooges “I was on acid in more than several of the clips in the movie when I was young. I would go from feeling very aggressive to breaking out in laughter.”

Iggy & The Stooges Cincinnati Pop Festival

Photographer Tom Copi who took the iconic Iggy Pop crowd walk photo spoke about to The Guardian. "The Stooges were in some heavy company that day, with Traffic, Alice Cooper and Grand Funk Railroad all playing too. It was already dark when the Stooges came on. Even though they were hot, the crowd was in a jovial mood, having put one over on the cops. During the Stooges’ set, Iggy dived off the stage into the crowd. He was lifted up by his fans and stood above them in triumph."

"I had a good vantage point on the right of the stage. When he rose up out of the crowd, I just kept shooting. Someone handed him a large jar of peanut butter and he smeared some on his chest and threw much of it into the crowd, to their mighty amusement. When he was leaving the stage after his set, Iggy wiped the peanut butter from his hands on to the fancy shirt of the emcee as he passed."

Iggy Pop & The Stooges Merchandise

He continued "After the show finished and thousands of fans headed for the exits, all hell broke loose. The police and their dogs had been waiting in the wings to clear the field and proceeded to chase everyone off into the stands. The inevitable rain of bottles and trash was thrown at the police from the upper decks in what later became known as the Cincinnati Cop festival. I knew I had got a lot of good shots that day, and by then I had already witnessed many street battles between the cops and America’s youth, so we split and drove back to Ann Arbor. When I looked through my pictures, I knew this one was special."

Rolling Stone magazine named this picture as one of the best rock photos of 1970.