Iggy Pop, Fuse Play Nice Backstage at ‘Hall of Fame’

By Kent Gibbons, Mike Farrell and John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 3/22/2010 10:19:38 AM

Iggy Pop of The Stooges presented some challenges for whomever at Fuse worked the “bleep” button during last Monday’s (March 15) live telecast of the 25th annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. The Wire was in attendance, at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and not monitoring the tube, but Fuse says it caught and erased all the F-bombs. Including Pop’s exclamation: “Let’s [F-bomb] it up!” He also gave the crowd a double middle-finger salute.

Apparently Pop and his bandmates would have preferred going in before this: Hall voters rejected them seven times. Pop said guitarist Ron Asheton, who died a year ago, was deeply unhappy not to be in the Hall. (He used a different phrase for deeply unhappy.)

Backstage, though, Iggy was a pussycat, shaking hands with Fuse general manager Gavin Harvey and posing for photos with cable affiliate executives.

“His speech was all about who are the cool people, and I shook his hand and said thanks for making time for the uncool people,” Harvey told The Wire, referring to himself. “He was such a gracious person.”

Harvey said Pop was “savoring the moment” and being playful with his speech.

Pop definitely was playful during the Stooges’ performance when he urged the “rich people” in the crowd to join them on stage. “Let’s get the Upper East Side up here!” he said, and a few folks (including Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder) accepted.

The ceremony ran about four hours. Also inducted were Abba, Genesis, The Hollies, Jimmy Cliff , David Geffen and seven songwriters whose heyday was the ’50s and ’60s.

This was the second Fuse live telecast of the induction and the first for Harvey, a former Versus exec who joined the MSG-owned music channel last August. The event will be back on Fuse next year, too, he said.

Fuse would not disclose the rating, but according to Nielsen figures the 238-minute telecast averaged 74,000 viewers, a 21% improvement on the Fuse average in the time period a year ago. Viewers in the 25-to-54 age bracket (36,000) were 9% ahead of the year-ago average, but the 18-to-49 figure (30,000) was down 40% from the year-ago average. The telecast averaged just 5,000 viewers in the 18-to-34 demo, down 80% from the 2009 Fuse schedule in the period — a reflection on the honorees’ vintage status, perhaps.

Harvey said the event was great for Fuse. “It has a life a lot bigger for us” than the rating, he said. “The buzz around it. The knowledge that everybody in that room, the royalty of music, knows that we’re the ones broadcasting it live: That serves a lot of agendas for us.” Hail, hail rock ‘n’ roll.

Fuse is focused on tie-ins between the channel and MSGowned venues, such as Madison Square Garden.

Two-hour versions of the induction ceremony were scheduled to air on Fuse on March 21 and March 27.

MATT FREI SPINS NEW TUNES

BBC America’s BBC World News America crew hosted a party at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., on March 17, after the annual Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner. Many media, Hill and administration types attended, and the program was happy to fete BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet, recipient of the RTCA’s David Bloom Award for her reporting on maternal mortality in Afghanistan. But the real highlight was anchor Matt Frei getting schooled on tune spinning by DJ Pitch One. Rock on, Matt.