Released
on February 7th, 1973, Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges is celebrating
half a century on the shelves today. Despite struggles to get a proper
mix of the album, it continues to stand as one of the most ferocious
proto-punk albums of all time. It’s fierceness and savage intensity have
made it a high water mark for aggressive rock & roll and kept it as
a template for bands who aspire to ascend to its brutal heights.
By
1972, The Stooges were in a shambles. With their first two LPs failing
to garner any serious record sales, the group had fallen into despair
and substance abuse, with Iggy slipping deeper and deeper into his
heroine addiction. The group had functionally ceased to exist and Iggy
had gone off to London to try to dry out under the wing of David Bowie.
Bowie had long been a fan of Iggy’s and was appreciative of the
Stooges’ song writing abilities, far more than most of Pop’s peers of
the time. While in London, Iggy was planning on working with guitarist
James Williamson, who had handled second guitar duties on the last
Stooges tour, and Pop had even negotiated a solo record deal with CBS.
As he and Williamson began to try to get the ball rolling in the UK,
they soon found themselves struggling to put together an acceptable
rhythm section from the local talent available to them. It was at this
point that Williamson suggested recruiting original Stooges, the Asheton
brothers, Ron and Scott, with Ron reluctantly agreeing to move over to
bass so that Williamson could handle all the guitar duties. This
effectively reconstituted the Stooges, albeit in a modified
configuration, but the solo contract with CBS would still necessitate
the band being identified as “Iggy and the Stooges”.
With
Williamson on guitar, the songwriting took on a different feel than the
first two albums, moving away from their funkier grooves into a more
anthemic hard rock kind of sound, though the label insisted on including
two “ballads” on the new album to act as counterpoints on each side of
the record. Recording took place at CBS’ London studio, occurring from
September 10 to October 6, 1972, with Iggy acting as producer. After
this, an initial mix of the album was done by Pop, but the results of
that were rather botched as he mixed most of the instruments into one
stereo channel with the vocals mixed into the other, with little regard
for balance or tone quality. Because of budgetary constraints, they had
little to work with to remedy that situation, but they were able to
hire David Bowie to come in for a day and do a mix of the album. Bowie
recalled:
“(It was) the most absurd situation I encountered … the
first time I worked with Iggy Pop. He wanted me to mix Raw Power, so he
brought the 24-track tape in, and he put it up. He had the band on one
track, lead guitar on another and him on a third. Out of 24 tracks there
were just three tracks that were used. He said 'see what you can do
with this'. I said, 'Jim, there's nothing to mix'. So we just pushed the
vocal up and down a lot. On at least four or five songs that was the
situation.”
However when Morgan Neville's documentary film on Raw
Power was released in 2010, they demonstrated that each individual
instrument was indeed recorded on its own track on the original
multi-track tapes, suggesting that Bowie was either mistaken or working
with a copy that had mixed down the instruments on to the same track,
likely the rejected mix Iggy had done before Bowie’s arrival.
What
Bowie achieved with those limited resources has always been debatable,
with some liking it while most found it murky and lacking in low end.
Thus began the long, sordid story of alternate mixes of the LP. The
original rejected Iggy mix was eventually released as “Rough Power”, and
then, in 1997, Iggy himself created a brand new mix from scratch using
the original multi-track tapes. This version, while addressing some of
the issues with the Bowie mix in terms of lack of bottom end and buried
drums, ended up creating its own issues as Iggy brought back in a lot of
bits Bowie had cut out and pinned the levels on everything to such an
extent that it introduced a layer of digital distortion which unsettled
many purists and fans of the original LP’s mix. Personally, I find the
Iggy mix more listenable overall, though the saturation caused by the
excessive loudness does obliterate any sense of dynamics in the
recordings. Therefore, it remains a flawed album no matter how you
slice it, but a landmark, nonetheless.
Upon its release, the LP
received a lot of critical high praise, but commercially, it was simply
too extreme for any radio play and barely grazed the bottom of the top
200 LP charts in the US. That failure was a final nail in the coffin
for the Stooges and, though Iggy and Williamson did attempt what would
become another aborted project together, subsequently released as Kill
City (1975), Pop would end up returning to Bowie’s care for a far more
successful solo career with his back to back albums, The Idiot and Lust
for Life (1977). The legacy of Raw Power, however, like the previous two
Stooges LPs, would grow over the decades to enshrine all three of these
albums as precursors to, and fundamental foundation stones for, the
punk revolution to come.
