Back in 1970, Iggy Pop sparked one of the most thrilling and inadvertently hilarious moments in rock history. The singer and provocateur was performing with his raucous proto-punk act The Stooges at the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival—a major event that also featured giants like Alice Cooper, Traffic, Mountain, Grand Funk Railroad, Bob Seger, and Mott the Hoople, among others. Two songs from The Stooges’ set were filmed and broadcast as part of a locally produced TV special titled Midsummer Rock, documenting what some sources consider the possible invention of crowd surfing.
The whole thing is even more iconic because of the unusual culture clash on display. The special’s buttoned-up presenter, a reportedly 58-year-old TV announcer named Jack Lescoulie, documents this wild stage spectacle with a perplexed but admirably cheerful detachment, as if gazing at an entirely different species. Before the performance even starts, he summarizes his “amaze[ment]” at how the artists conduct themselves: “For instance, when someone says, ‘Here’s an act’ and announce the act, they may very well tune up for 10 or 15 minutes before they ever play the first number that they’re going to play. And the kids don’t seem to mind. They watch it all and listen to the tune-up, listen to them check speakers.”
His running commentary also adds an uncanny hilarity to the scene, covering Pop’s maneuvers with the sturdy voice you’d expect to find narrating over war footage, a photo-finish horse race, or a presidential address. “I think we’ve got some action coming up now,” he says, as the band launches into the bone-rattling “T.V. Eye.” Pop is, naturally, the focus of the report: shirtless and sinewy; decked out in a dog collar, blue jeans, and silver evening gloves. At one point, he drops the mic and hops into the churn of fans. Lescoulie interjects, “There goes Iggy right into the crowd!” before cutting out to “a message.” When the broadcast returns, he adds, “Since we broke away…Iggy has been in the crowd and out again three different times. They seem to be enjoying it, and so is he.”
As they launch into a wailing “1970,” Pop heads back into the crowd, where he gestures for them to raise him up. He ascends onto their hands, flexing his biceps and pointing toward the stage. At one point, someone hands him a snack that he proceeds to smear on his torso. “That’s peanut butter,” the announcer says, as the rocker proceeds to throw chunks of it around.
So was this the actual invention of crowd surfing? No one seems to know for sure, but it’s clearly an early example—and arguably the point where it became an art form. Bruce Springsteen was known to crowd surf back in the day, as documented in a 1980 performance of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” from The River tour concert film. Peter Gabriel also put his unique spin on this stage staple that same year, often falling into the audience in a “crucifix” pose and being passed around by the audience. (You can see him positioned in a similar fashion on the back cover of his 1983 LP Plays Live.)
Regardless of who popularized that move, Pop always strived to “make contact” with his crowds, as he explained in a clip from Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 documentary Gimme Danger.
“We were opening for the Mothers of Invention, and that was the best group, in my estimation, that we’d ever opened for,” he recalled. “Near the end of our set, I was not sure we’d really reached across. There were a couple of girls—big ones. They moved up right in front of the stage, and they just were laying there on their backs, making themselves very comfortable, relaxing. I got to the edge of the stage, and I did what I’d seen little kids do sometimes when they want attention from their parents: I thought, ‘I’m just going to fall forward, and they’ll catch me.’ They moved. [Laughs.] My front teeth, which I’ve since had repaired, went straight through one of my lips. Sometimes it was eventful. Sometimes it was—listen, I was a guy, very young, in a rock band, and having beautiful summers in the Midwest. So sometimes I’d just go down there, see some chick, and go, ‘Hey, what’s your number?’”
Pop even addressed the mysterious peanut-butter surprise in a 2013 interview with ABC News Australia, wisely reflecting that “things just happen” sometimes. “I’ve always felt it was OK—or even better than OK—to let something happen if it gonna happen, even if it became comic or negative,” he said. “Either one. I was crowd surfing in a baseball stadium, and somebody handed up a jar of peanut butter. I didn’t ask it. I didn’t plan it. You know what I’m saying? Things just happen.”
