22/02/2023
Friday Classic Rock Album
RAW POWER by Iggy & The Stooges Turns 50!
Writer Marc Myers at www.wsj.com hails this breakthrough disc!
As the Doors took the stage at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Oct. 20, 1967, lead singer Jim Morrison was drunk. Wobbling around and howling instead of singing, he taunted the front rows and sent many of the 5,000 in attendance to the exits. Jim Osterberg, a student and drummer, took notice. Menacing an audience had its virtues.
Mr. Osterberg soon formed the Psychedelic Stooges, became known as Iggy Pop (the first name was short for Iguana, and Pop was an adaptation of a friend’s last name), and gave up the drums to become the lead vocalist and frontman. In March 1968, he began appearing at gigs with his face covered in white paint. Drug-fueled, self-mutilating shows came next. At year’s end, the band dropped “Psychedelic” from its name and signed with Elektra. Two albums followed, in 1969 and 1970—“The Stooges” and “Fun House.”
But it was the band’s third record, “Raw Power,” released 50 years ago this month by Columbia, that had the biggest impact on rock. Though the LP reached only No. 182 on Billboard’s album chart, its high-volume and raunchy instrumental attack and Pop’s primitive, snarling vocals inspired a new generation of artists.
David Bowie was an early admirer and saw something of himself in Iggy Pop (his Ziggy Stardust character was partly inspired by Pop). In 1971, Pop’s deepening he**in habit and weak album sales allowed Bowie’s manager to take him on as a client and extract him from his Elektra deal. At the manager’s urging, Pop met with Columbia Records’ president, Clive Davis. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Pop was signed after leaping on Mr. Davis’s desk and singing the 1960s movie theme “The Shadow of Your Smile.”
What separates “Raw Power” from the band’s first two LPs is the inclusion of Bowie as producer, the addition of guitarist James Williamson, who had played gigs with the band in 1970, and a new level of muscular savagery. After Pop signed with Columbia, Bowie had him record in London. In addition to Mr. Williamson, Pop brought along Scott Asheton on drums and his brother, Ron Asheton, on bass.
In 1972, when the album was recorded, the Stooges’ lack of pretension and embrace of heavy chugging riffs were new and ahead of their time. The eight songs co-written by Pop and Mr. Williamson come off as organized chaos fed by dark rage. To celebrate the album’s anniversary, Columbia/Legacy has just released an expanded set of its original 2010 digital edition with nine bonus tracks and remasters of the 1973 Bowie mix and Pop’s 1997 mix.
“Raw Power” is still a fireball of rock innovation influenced vocally by Jim Morrison and Lou Reed and guided by Bowie’s ear for unrestrained emotion. Pop has referred to the opening song, “Search and Destroy,” as the album’s masterpiece, akin to the Who’s “My Generation.” Perhaps, but the song defies comparison. The lyrics here and elsewhere aren’t true narratives but flaming arrows: “I am the world’s forgotten boy / The one who searches and destroys.”
Pop’s reverence for Morrison can be heard in his low-voice croon on “Gimme Danger,” a song reminiscent of the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”: “There’s nothing in my dreams / Just some ugly memories.”
“Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” has the rushed frenzy of Bowie’s “Suffragette City,” shoved forward by pounding drums, a wailing solo by Mr. Williamson and Pop’s demonic growling: “If you wanna make a buck, boy / You gotta be a tease, uh huh / And that ain’t all.” On “Penetration,” reverb is cranked up to fatten Pop’s ominous, meowing vocal.
The title track is the album’s most iconic prototype for the stripped-down punk sound that would surface two years later. “I Need Somebody” is as close as the album comes to a ballad, featuring Ron Asheton’s strolling bass riff. And “Shake Appeal” feels influenced by Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” with Mr. Williamson using a guitar effect that emulates sparks.
The album’s closer, “Death Trip,” is a grim ripper that finds Pop in full-throated hysteria: “See me through on my death trip / Keep me safe, keep me sane.” But it’s Mr. Williamson’s lengthy guitar solo that turns the song into a metallic tantrum.
Leading rock critics could hear the album’s merit: “You may find yourself repulsed by them, you may not be able to abide a single note of their music,” wrote Lester Bangs in Stereo Review in 1973, “but they are undeniably the sound and look of the future.” Simon Frith added in Britain’s Let It Rock magazine: “It’s unmelodic, clumsy and mostly flat [but] it’s mean and it’s magnificent.”
While most other critics and FM radio DJs just heard noise, the album in hindsight radiates with nervous sophistication and teenage irrationality. Pop’s vocal style differs on each track, and the punch the music delivers remains both industrial and beckoning: Mr. Williamson’s guitar often sounds like knives dragging across an electrified cyclone fence, Ron Asheton’s bass notes are wonderfully swollen with distortion, and his brother, Scott, seems to be drumming with baseball bats.
In 1973, few could stomach the Stooges’ 100-proof rock. But Mr. Bangs was right: “Raw Power” was the future. The album bristles with animalistic energy and at the time shattered existing rock formulas. Its slashing reductionism rubbed off on proto-punk artists who included the Neon Boys with Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, the New York Dolls, Television and the Patti Smith Group. “Raw Power” was an unfiltered celebration of outcast indignation, and Iggy Pop was among the first rockers to make ugly pretty.
Photo by Douglas Gilbert - Chicago 1970
