Before My Chemical Romance hit the Comerica Park stage for a “Black Parade” revival on Friday night, Aug. 21, downtown Detroit got a shot of home-brewed proto-punk courtesy of Iggy Pop.
Less than a year away from 80 and six decades after the Ypsilanti-raised rocker surfaced on the Michigan scene, Pop was an unapologetically bare-chested, wriggly and leathery presence as he served up a 45-minute opening set ahead of MCR’s headlining performance.
“It’s good to be back, same as it ever was,” he told the crowd inside the Tigers’ ballpark.
Backed by a seven-piece band that included a trumpet-trombone combo, Pop brought ragged-voiced renditions of definitive songs from his catalog, including a hot salvo of Stooges numbers right out of the gate: “T.V.
Eye,” “Raw Power,” “I Got a Right” and “Gimme Danger.”
Indeed, the bulk of his show was made up of material from that groundbreaking four-piece he led out of Ann Arbor at the turn of the 1970s, with just two solo tunes (“The Passenger,” “Lust for Life”) tucked in.
Pop has played some supersized Michigan dates before — there was the Goose Lake rock festival in 1970, and he opened for the Rolling Stones at the Pontiac Silverdome in ’81 — but Comerica Park marked the biggest venue he has ever played in the city of Detroit.
He made his way down to the pit to interact with front-row fans for the reliably menacing rumble of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” before the careening abandon of “Search and Destroy” set him up for the closing one-two punch of the Stooges’ “1970” and “1969.”
Nearly every date on My Chemical Romance’s tour has featured a distinct, standalone opener, and Friday’s Michigan visit belonged to Pop, his only show on the run.
MCR took the CoPa stage at 9:30 p.m. to launch a newly conceptualized take on “The Black Parade,” 20 years after that much-loved album’s release.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Iggy Pop detonates a few hot classics in rare Detroit stadium show
