Venerable pre-punk maniac Iggy Pop, who started kicking around Detroit almost exactly 40 years ago right now, is still alive and kicking, so writes Travis Hay of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. New tracks he sang with Northwest retro-garage grungies The Boss Martians will soon be flung up on the band’s MySpace page, so the rumors have it.

It also looks like there’s photographic evidence of the Iggster on The Boss Martians’ page, but the guy pictured could also be Neil Young after going through a simlutaneous hunger strike, electrocution, and colonoscopy.

Wait a second. The Neil young scenario is highly unlikely. That’s gotta be Iggy Pop in them thar pictures.

Iggy was insane on stage back in the day, with the Stooges, screaming, sneering, cutting himself, preening, writhing, and in general being what Perry Farrell wished he could be in his prime. Here’s a shot of “TV Eye” live in 1970—the best part of which is the play-by-play announcer trying to make sense of what was going on onstage. Give Iggy props for being, as high tech people like to call it, an “early adopter” of crowd surfing. This is unbelieveable stuff, when you consider it was filmed in 1970.