Debbi: Let’s go do some crimes.

Duke: Yeah. Let’s go get sushi and not pay.
     –Dialogue from the 1984 cult-classic movie Repo Man

I called it a cult-classic. For the past thirty-seven years I’ve called it a cult-classic, but I just watched it. Nothing classic about it at all. Truthfully, it kind of sucked. Repo Man is a heavily quoted movie. Obviously, there’s the sushi line. There’s also the character Miller’s absolutely loony plate of shrimp soliloquy¹, and Duke’s deathbed diatribe², but beyond a few good lines, nothing really happens. Except, of course, when they roll the credits. The movie begins and ends with Iggy Pop’s punk rock banger, Repo Man.

It took forever for Iggy Pop to catch my attention. Sure, I was only five when his band the Stooges hit the scene in 1967, but by the end of my college career, I’d been listening almost exclusively to punk rock for four years. Iggy who?

My freshman year, a close friend with a longish shock of hair so orange that everyone at my college called him O, wore a Stooges t-shirt three days a week. It never occurred to me to ask him about the band. O came from New York City. I guess I figured the Stooges were too hip for a fledgling suburban punk like me. O transferred at the end of the school year, and Iggy remained in the shadows until I watched Repo Man in 1985. Five seconds into the running time of the film, his theme song drops like a shovel-load of cinder blocks dumped from a second-story balcony.

A game many devotees of punk rock like to play is to pinpoint the first punk bands. Possible selection choices date back into the fifties, but after extensive and careful research (which consisted of reading the Timeline of Punk Rock page on Wikipedia), I’d say things really heated up in the punk world around the mid-sixties. The Stooges aren’t the first punk band, but launching in 1967, they still qualify squarely as among the first.

Nowadays, everyone knows Iggy Pop. He’s the guy who sings the cruise ship song. In 2005, Royal Caribbean made the unlikely selection of his song Lust for Life to advertise their cruise line. Remarkably, the campaign worked. It’s a fun song with pulsing energy and Iggy’s powerful delivery.

Here comes Johnny Yen again
With the liquor and drugs
And a flesh machine
He’s gonna do another striptease.

No, those lyrics aren’t in the commercial, but in a published complaint I once read, one critic states “Nothing says maritime comfort like a song about shooting up junk.”

The Repo Man theme was lost to me until recently. Ten years ago, despite the back-to-back f-bombs near the end of the song, I used it frequently in a punk fueled spin class I instructed. But once I gave up the class, I stopped listening to the song. A recent podcast on the Stooge’s second album Raw Power, reminded me to add Repo Man to my Radio Jeff Spotify playlist. Now the song is back in my life.

Give Repo Man a listen. Prepare to bang your head and toss your hair. And when you’re done, please read the original post I wrote when I first heard about Jim Adams’ Christmas day Song Lyric Sunday punk theme two months ago: People Who Died.

Lyrics below the footnotes.

¹ Miller: A lot o’ people don’t realize what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch o’ unconnected incidents ‘n things. They don’t realize that there’s this, like, lattice o’ coincidence that lays on top o’ everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you’re thinkin’ about a plate o’ shrimp. Suddenly someone’ll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o’ shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin’ for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconciousness.

Otto: You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?

² Duke: The lights are growing dim Otto. I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am.

Otto: That’s bullshit. You’re a white suburban punk just like me.

Duke: Yeah, but it still hurts.

REPO MAN LYRICS

I was riding on a concrete slab
Down the river of useless flab
It was such a beautiful day
I heard a witch doctor say
I’ll turn you into a toadstool
I’m looking for the joke with a microscope

A muscle twitch, an auto, it swerves
You want to speak, you lose your nerve
Infinity throws you a curve
Dumps you in shit you don’t deserve
As life roars by you in a blur
Leaves you murmuring a dirty word

A page out of a comic book
A chicken hanging on a hook
A reverie, a babbling brook
A sermonette, a TV cook
Shaking my hand at your fake head
A suicide, a certain look

A microphone, a blues guitar
Piques a feeling near and far
Stupidity, a mental scar
Cruel cruelty, oh cruelty
Harboring no inspiration
An alcoholic at the bar
Every insult goes too far

I was pissing on the desert sands
When the desert whispered to me
It said, isn’t this a shame?
Things will never be the same
I’ve learned this gets me so edgy
Now I’m looking for the joke with a microscope

I was a teenage dinosaur
Stoned and obsolete
I didn’t get fucked and I didn’t get kissed
I got so fucking pissed
Using my head for an ashtray
Now I’ll tell you who I am
I’m a repo man

And I’m looking for the joke
Yeah I’m looking for the joke
I’m looking for the joke
Looking for the joke
Looking for the joke
Looking for the joke with a microscope
I’m a repo repo repo man
Repo repo repo man…

Happy Christmas to those of you who celebrate.