raw power

The Stooges broke up and reformed as Iggy and the Stooges for the ironically muted menace of this potent proto-punk postlude.  After the triumphant failure (critically lauded but never charted) of 'Fun House' the band had dissolved in a haze of heroin.  Iggy Pop met David Bowie who brokered him a deal with Colombia Records through MainMan management.  Pop had brought guitarist James Williamson from the last incarnation of the Stooges to take part in the sessions; and, after having trouble finding a rhythm section there, they invited the Asheton brothers to reform the band with Ron moving from guitar to bass.  'Raw Power' was recorded at CBS Studios in London with Iggy handling the production himself.

Iggy remembers:   "The way that the ‘Raw Power’ stuff went was that we were jumping ahead already after ‘Fun House’ to something heavier - that period of song writing is now available on Easy Action Records on this box set called ‘You Don’t Want My Name’. We’d done that, Elektra had rejected it - ‘I Got A Right’ was one of those songs; it was all heavy, fast stuff ... I mean, music was getting heavier - we weren’t the only ones. Led Zeppelin had come out redoing Howlin’ Wolf and calling it ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Things were getting heavier. And then when I was looking around for support - nobody wanted the band, people only wanted to talk to me and everybody wanted me to get rid of The Stooges and do something with sensible people. So I just, really, out of everyone who approached me, the most artistically convincing and colourful and smartest people were David Bowie and his manager, Tony DeFries, who I met. So they got the prize! We ended up, little by little, they had some ideas about me working with some English musicians and blah, blah, blah, but eventually they gave up on me and let me bring The Stooges over. We proposed one album - actually, DeFries did us a big favour. He said it was just not good enough, too noisy, too extreme. That was the songs from the Easy Action album, and then the things that have come out on many bootlegs like ‘Gimme Some Skin’, ‘I Got A Right’, ‘Scene Of The Crime’, that kind of thing. So we did something maybe just one step closer to what we thought the going reality game was, maybe just a little bit closer to the Chuck Berry-based premised that everybody was working with, you know? Everything from what Marc Bolan was doing then, to the ‘Exile On Main Street’, to Led Zeppelin, to even the rock tracks by Mott The Hoople and David Bowie at that time - it was all recycled Chuck Berry. Those were the basic premises: Chuck Berry or Little Richard. So we took Chuck Berry and Little Richard and we filtered it through who we were, and that’s kinda ‘Raw Power’."

Tony DeFries told Pop that the mix had to be redone or the label would not release it; so Bowie was tapped to do the new mix in one day at Western Sound Recorders.  Pop reveals:  "On a very, very old board, I mean this board was old! An Elvis type of board, old-tech, low-tech, in a poorly lit, cheap old studio with very little time. To David's credit, he listened with his ear to each thing and talked it out with me, I gave him what I thought it should have, he put that in its perspective, added some touches. He's always liked the most recent technology, so there was something called a Time Cube you could feed a signal into -- it looked like a bong, a big plastic tube with a couple of bends in it -- and when the sound came out the other end, it sort of shot at you like an echo effect. He used that on the guitar in 'Gimme Danger', a beautiful guitar echo overload that's absolutely beautiful; and on the drums in 'Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell'. His concept was, 'You're so primitive, your drummer should sound like he's beating a log!' It's not a bad job that he did...I'm very proud of the eccentric, odd little record that came out."

Bowie considers:   "The most absurd situation I encountered when I was recording was 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, including Search and Destroy. That's got such a peculiar sound because all we did was occasionally bring the lead guitar up and take it out."

'Raw Power' only made it to number one hundred and eighty two on the US album chart and to forty-four in the UK.  Although the flat sound of the album has been the subject of considerable controversy over the years, it also was an inspiration to the punk movement that followed.    






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'Raw Power'
full album:



All tracks written by Iggy Pop and James Williamson.

Side one
1. "Search and Destroy" 3:29
2. "Gimme Danger" 3:33
3. "Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell" (originally titled "Hard to Beat") 4:54
4. "Penetration" 3:41
Side two
5. "Raw Power" 4:16
6. "I Need Somebody" 4:53
7. "Shake Appeal" 3:04
8. "Death Trip" 6:07