Raw Power

The first thing you notice is the guitar; a virtuoso take on the classic trebly Chuck Berry/Keith Richards axis, but with a difference. It abrades against your ear, it's a little too dissonant to be conventional, it feels like a succession of paper cuts, and it has fought for space and beaten out victorious everything else on the tape -- bass, drums, rhythm guitar are reduced to a dull clatter behind the six string eruption. The next thing you notice is the voice, screeching out the lines that provide the title of this review; mixed co-equal with the guitar, it too abrades against the ear, while on key it sounds like its about to shatter, the sound not of a braggart but a warrior too long out on point and about to bust in a million pieces. It's 1973, and welcome to the first few bars of that most aptly titled record Raw Power.The Stooges story has been told far too many times to be recounted here; suffice to say that by the time of Raw Power they had already broken more barriers in three or four years than any of their contemporaries, fusing psychedelic garage rock, proto-metal,free jazz, and avant-garde performance art out of Artaud's theater of cruelty with an absolute lack of self consciousness, their artier conceits always rooted in the perspective of messed up suburban Detoit high school drop outs too young to buy the false promises of the '60's. To call them punk, which they invented, sells them way short.By the time they recorded this album, the sheer psychic pressure of their epochal live performances coupled with the world's indifference had led the band to snap -- heroin and recrimination had broken them up. Enter superfan David Bowie, then on the cusp of his Ziggy-era fame, who performed for the Stooges the same act of noblesse oblige he demonstrated to Lou Reed and Mott the Hoople, resurrecting their careers and giving them a chance to record. Cleaned up and reconstituted with new guy/virtuouso guitarist James Williamson on board and sharing the writing burdens, the Stooges went into the studio with actual songs, in contrast to their previous method of jamming while Iggy did his thing until songs emerged out of the muck. But what worked for Lou and Mott did not work for the Stooges.On the surface, Raw Power sounded like a conventional hard rock album of '73, not the avant garage of the band's previous work. But Iggy's voice is too terrifying to fit that mold -- and the lyrics all convey the impression of a man in a car with no brakes careening down Dead Man's Curve, they are all about impending death, and celebrating it. Most importantly, there's the sound of the album. Until 1997, when Iggy rebuilt the tracks for reissue from the ground up, the officical word was something went horribly wrong in the mix, with Bowie and Iggy each pointing fingers at the other. The rhythm tracks are way in the background, the vocals are alternately too far up front or too recessed, and Williamson's explosive leads bore a hole through the listener's eardrums, as they are so far up in the mix the album sounds like a free-jazz/metal guitar solo with the other elements darting in and out of the background. Humorously, because a generation of postpunk musicians grew up thinking this sound was not bad, but in fact extraordinary, post punk avant garage groups like Sonic Youth and Black Flag deliberately began to emulate the Raw Power mix in the '80's, and a whole lo-fi No Wave movement was born.Bowie's effort at rehabbing the band was a fiasco -- the record, messed up mix and depraved vision sank like a stone, the band's performances degenerated into fabled brawls with hostile audiences, and the band, ironically clean at the time they made this hellhound-pursued record, sank back into addiction and dissolution, with Iggy eventually homeless and then insitutionalized, with several lost years passing till he rose like a phoenix to reclaim his crown, but now as a solo. Raw Power did the band in, and its very sound forecasts the autodestruction. That's one thing that makes Raw Power specialLike I said, in '97 Ig re-mixed the record for the alt-rock generation, and the result was greeted with hossanahs. Crunching rhythm guitar riffs hitherto unhearable moved to the foreground with the bass and drums; Iggy's voice now had a tremendous presence, and many of his spontaneous grunts, cries, exhortations, vocalise, his famed shamanistic "composing at the mike," was restored. The record now had the sonic ambience of a live band in a room rather than demons clattering in a wind tunnel in one of Hades' dicier neighborhood. Most significantly, Williamson's lead guitar, the elephant in the room on the original album, was restored to parity with the other instruments. The only nay-sayers were the other Stooges, all of whom went on record as saying they detested what Iggy wrought with his tinkering. He made Raw Power into a normal-sounding punk rock record.Now we can judge for ourselves who was right, Iggy or the Stooges. Sony Legacy has released the original 1973 "Bowie" mix. For years, I too thought the new version was a vast improvement, despite the fact I had grown up on my vinyl copy of the caterwauling original. But a couple of days of deep listening and comparison of the two version has restored the Bowie mix to preeminence. This is not, and never was, a normal record. This is an extreme record, a documentary snapshot of a band on a "death trip" (song title), sounding like they are on the ragged edge of nowhere. Only the original version preserves that deviant, demented quality. Accept no substitutes.BTW, Sony has generously added a live show from '73 in Atlanta that adds little to the legacy, except for some prime audience-baiting from the Ig; the double-disc is at single disc price, however.

Kurt Cobain consistently called this the best hard rock album of all time. I'm starting to suspect he was right.Raw Power is not simply a great album, or even a classic piece of hard rock; it's one of those rare albums that's so incredible you'll find yourself wondering how you survived without it. Like most everything that I've gone stark raving mad over, I've found myself enthusing about it with other apostles and fervently preaching its merits to the unconverted. I was in such a conversation with one of my buddies when he said, "Lemme guess...it's raw and it's powerful."Well, yes and no.It starts out just the way you'd expect an album called "Raw Power" to start: with a hard charging guitar riff, and one of the best opening lines in all of rock: "I'm a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm." Iggy and the Stooges tear through "Search and Destroy" (probably the best song about the Vietnam War ever) with a frightening intensity, but it is the second track that really sealed the album for me; there's a delicacy here--and on "Penetration" and "I Need Somebody"--that is truly delightful. Yes, it's raw and powerful, but it is also many other things besides; the musical texture is both consistent enough to be cohesive and varied enough to be interesting. The guitars go from smoky and slow to fast and furious, but Iggy's a charismatic enough frontman to stay in front of it all; he's growling feral dog one minute and a wailing banshee the next, and throughout it all, there's an intensity and emotion and hook you in and keep you there.That's not just sharp musicianship; it's sharp writing, too. Iggy's not just out to just skewer easy targets, but to express complex truths, and to take a critical look at himself as well. "Hallucination, true romance, I needed love but I only dropped my pants," he wails on "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell." Three tracks later, he moans, "I need some money, baby. I need somebody, too. I need somebody baby, just like you." Lyrically (if not musically) it sounds like just another lost soul singing the blues; he grumbles about how "you bring me to the end," but then--unlike so many others--he's man enough to admit: "But still I don't mind it!"For whatever reason, it took me a long time to check this out, and like some of my favorite albums, I didn't get into it right away. (As many reviewers have commented, this version, remastered by Iggy in 1997, is a rough, abrasive mix; the Bowie-mastered Legacy Edition's a little smoother, and I tend to like it more on the louder songs and less on the softer songs. Still, that's not a commentary on the idiosyncrasies of this master, but on the overall strength of the album. It's an essential work, and essential works are not frozen in perfection but are instead the result of a long creative process involving multiple people; sometimes what emerges is a singular definitive version, but often one gets mixes and remixes and alternate takes, and critical opinion that doesn't gel around any one version but instead settles into opposing camps.) As for me, I got the Bowie version when it came back out, but I still listen to this one more frequently; it's one of my go-to albums, particularly when I'm at work and I get some unexpected urgent task from the boss and need a little musical motivation to get me going. I blast it to the point that one of my co-workers will hear it over my earbuds and warn me about hearing loss; "But still I don't mind it!" I say, until I ponder the fact that destroying my eardrums with this album will deprive me of my ability to destroy my eardrums with this album. Is it a case of destroying them to save them from the mediocrity of other music? Perhaps. "Raw power got a healing hand, raw power can destroy a man," Iggy raves on the title track, and he's right on both counts.