Bassist Michael Page – who grew up in North Park and Kearny Mesa - was still a teen when he joined the King Biscuit Blues Band and the Fly People. He then formed a group called Ruby and the Snakes. While in L.A. with his girlfriend Lisa, he met Iggy Pop and, unbeknownst to Page, his girlfriend invited the rock star down to her house, where Pop and Page got along well. For the most part.
"Then Iggy came down a second time. He’d never had any intentions of stealing my girlfriend away, but he didn’t know what the situation was. See, I was living at her place but had this other place in La Jolla so that we could give each other space. Her dad would come into town, and I would often vanish when he showed up. Then at one point, my girlfriend told me that she was falling in love with Iggy. And that wasn’t going to work, because Iggy, right then, had just gotten hooked up with David Bowie again. David, I think, had taken him to a mental place and checked him in. David was a key guy in Iggy’s life many times. And vice versa."
"Anyway, David [Bowie] picked him up and swept him off. But it probably did Iggy incredible good to come down to La Jolla, because he got to dry out a bit in San Diego. He got to relax. He got away from all that L.A. stuff. He was really confused about everything that was going on, and my girlfriend probably gave him support. He read good books, lounged around the pool, got his health together, and people were kept away from him. That was her intention, and she did a really good job of it."
Page would end up being best known for his stint with Iggy Pop (1979 to 1984), though he also performed and recorded with David Bowie, Chubby Checker, Jerry Lee Lewis, and New York Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain. “Iggy introduced me to Johnny Depp around ‘92,” says the Kearny High graduate (1968), “and Johnny put me in charge of throwing a band together with him, the Vipers. However, that project ended up clashing with his movie shooting, so that’s when I bailed on live road gigs, in favor of working at home, scoring for films.”
Page ended up back in San Diego years later, living near Banker’s Hill and working for a local visual production firm, PassmoreLab, where he converts standard photos, film, and video into 3D. A horror-themed music video was just shot in 3D for the song “Magnetic Baby” by Semi Precious Weapons, featuring “taxidermy and glam ghouls spewing metallic body fluids,” according to Page.
Regarding other PassmoreLab 3D projects, Page says “We teamed up with rock photographer Bob Gruen, to convert his well-known iconic images to a format that can be viewed on stereoscopic displays.”
Gruen was the personal photographer for John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and served as tour photographer for the Clash and Kiss. His extensive photo archive includes the Rolling Stones, the Ramones, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, the Talking Heads, Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters, Patti Smith, Bo Diddley, Blondie, Bob Marley, and the Sex Pistols.
As for why PassmoreLab made the investment in a Semi Precious Weapons vid, Page says that - because of the production - "MGM came down from L.A. to meet with us...Warner Brothers followed in the afternoon. Yup, right here in sleepy lil Dago, they came to us. We're all about the art, about being a futuristic cutting-edge experimental lab, not a production company...We don't need no stinkin' badges. Or motives."