Iggy Pop: Thinker, Lecturer, Balladeer : Music: The prototypical punk rocker is on a search for a new creative ideal. But he hasn’t left his wild past behind.

First impressions last. And when the impressions are as extreme as those that Iggy Pop made early in his career, the images become indelible.

“I’m the world’s forgotten boy, the one who’s searching to destroy,” the manic, Michigan-born rocker sang in one of his early signature pieces, “Search and Destroy.” Iggy (whose real name is James Osterberg) didn’t bother looking too far afield for targets in his search-and-destroy mission. Emerging from Ann Arbor with the Stooges in the late ‘60s, he turned rock concerts into acts of self-affliction.

Iggy became notorious for cutting himself with pieces of glass, smearing his body with peanut butter or raw meat, and otherwise jeopardizing his well-being. Prolific drug abuse was just another part of the package for this performer who, in order to escape being forgotten, was courting the distinct possibility of being gone in a moment.

Today, a 43-year-old Osterberg acknowledges that his image as a hellbent, out-of-control punk rocker will probably never leave him.

“Because American society has to eat so much stuff so fast, it tends not to digest what it eats,” he said on the phone this week from a concert tour stop in Arizona. So the old Iggy image remains, a bit of gristle to be chewed over whenever his name comes up. But much of the music on his latest album, “Brick by Brick,” is at odds with that image, rising from reflection and craft rather than from impulse and mania.

Osterberg, who plays Saturday at UC Irvine, says his fans know better now than to come expecting the old, self-destructive Iggy to appear. “They’re ahead of that. They may or may not be aware that I have done things in the dim past.

“They expect something to happen, something ‘pretty wow.’ And that’s what I try to give ‘em,” though without recourse to self-flagellating behavior. These days, Osterberg is giving listeners a complex mixture of the hellbent (his shows include most of the best-known songs from his Stooges days) and the considered.

The tear-it-down anger of “Search and Destroy” has its place in the set, but so does the title song from “Brick by Brick,” in which he sings about building up a life on a foundation of creative idealism:

I wanna live in peace, quietly.

I wanna have a place of love and safety....

I’m building a house where I can think

And have some balance and dignity.

On the way to that almost Utopian, album-ending vision, Osterberg surveys today’s musical and social landscape. A longtime operative on the commercial fringe of cultdom, he indicts the complacent mainstream where, he sings at one point, “to be a total phony is the winning design.” As the album goes on, a dialogue emerges between opposing psychological drives: the desire for security, and the creative need to take risks. In the spoken intro to “Main Street Eyes,” Iggy admits that he hasn’t fully resolved that conflict in himself:

This whole country is scared of failure.

My head keeps trying to sell me ambition,

but in my heart I want self-respect.

Having lived near the edge of personal disaster, Osterberg said he knows what it is to fear for one’s own security.

“In 1975 in Los Angeles, I institutionalized myself voluntarily,” he said. “In the hospital, I met the sort of people who end up on the street. A lot of people have a fear of cracking in our society, and they feel they’re one step ahead of being friendless and homeless. You have isolationism and competition--’throw out the old people, I’m young.’ It’s terrifying to think about living here unless you’ve got youth or a bunch of money.”

These days, living in New York, Osterberg said he has a measure of security. He has been married for five years to a woman he met while on tour in Japan; he says that songwriting royalties ensure that he will be “financially solvent” for the foreseeable future, and he has a developing sideline as an actor with recent roles in “Cry Baby” and “Hardware.”

“I feel stable enough to handle myself and get along in the world,” he said.

On the other hand, too much stability can be deadening. “Struggle builds character, and we are growing soft,” Iggy intones during “The Undefeated,” a song bewailing artistic and cultural complacency. “I want to roam and be challenged, I want to grow.”

In his own life, Osterberg said, that has meant trying new things--including a series of three lectures he gave earlier this year on college campuses in the Midwest. “I was terrified. The scariest part was to play my songs alone. I’d never done that in my life. I had to organize a presentation of what I had to offer to other people. It was really good for me as an artist that I did that. It opened wider perspectives for me as a musician. I already have incorporated it a little bit on this (tour), and I will do more.”

If the idea of Iggy Pop, campus lecturer, seems a little unusual, so does some of the musical company he keeps on “Brick by Brick.” The presence of a couple of Guns ‘N Roses members, guitarist Slash and bassist Duff McKagan, comes as no surprise. But it’s something of a shock that guitarists Waddy Wachtel and David Lindley, with extensive pedigrees in the Jackson Browne-Linda Ronstadt axis of sensitive Southern California rock, also are on hand.

“The position I’m in now, the recording had to meet certain standards that people have come to expect of a rock recording in this day and age,” Osterberg, an old master of grungy, basic rock, said with a strong shading of irony in his voice. He knows he can’t get away with any more albums like “Raw Power,” a 1973 release that sounded as if it had been cut with an industrial drill bit.

Actually, part of Iggy’s aim on the new album, given its more reflective material, was to be cleaner and sometimes quieter than he had been before, in a marked departure from the heavy metal direction of “Instinct,” his previous release. “Truth be told, (with ‘Instinct’) I tried to make too much of a dogmatic metal album. I was getting a bad case of the bitters at the time. I heard a lot of people I felt were making inferior records in that genre, doing an inferior job of projecting attitudes I had projected more genuinely earlier.”

The use of Lindley, Wachtel and John Cougar Mellencamp’s drummer, Kenny Aronoff, “was something (‘Brick by Brick’ producer Don Was) had to talk me into. I resisted the concept of sharing a musician with Jackson Browne. I compromised with Don on it, and in the end I was not disappointed by it.”

Putting together a stage band was another matter, though.

“For me, there’s no bigger waste of time than to listen to most professional musicians play live,” Osterberg said. “What I wanted on stage was a very edgy, very hungry, very naive--in the good sense of the word--band. I didn’t want professionals.” Consequently, Iggy has been touring with a lineup of three young, unknown players he recruited on the Los Angeles hard rock scene.

Osterberg said neither he nor his fans have any problem alternating the in-concert current between the raw power of his early nuggets and the more elegiac or reflective cast of such songs as the recent “Candy,” or “China Girl,” the romantic croon he co-wrote with David Bowie in the mid-1970s.

“I think inside every beer-swilling, coke-snorting, metal-clanging, leather-dripping, suds-head driving around in Los Angeles with a skull and crossbones on his biceps is a mushy guy who likes ballads,” Osterberg said. “There’s more to people and humanity than can ever be caged into one little trip.”

Iggy Pop and Alice in Chains play Saturday at 8 p.m. in Crawford Hall, off Bridge Road on the UC Irvine campus. Tickets: $20. Information: (714) 856-5547.