Raw Power

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.

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 special Like 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.

This review is of the Sony Legacy remastered vinyl double LP version of Raw Power. Firstly, the production values are top notch, the cover photo is beautfully presented on high grade card and the additional track listing for the Iggy re-mix is tastefully added on the back cover. The 16 page colour booklet is of the same high standard and has large print so those of us that are getting on can read it without reaching for the glasses. The content in the booklet is fairly light on and will be common knowledge to Stooges or Iggy aficionados but the glossy pictures are great. Both the LP's I received were very cleanly pressed and had no popping or tracking problems. I would go as far as saying that I consider these 120 gram pressings sound a lot better than most of the 180 gram re-issues around at the moment. This is due in no small way to the care and attention to detail that Sony has applied to every aspect of this product. Or maybe it's because the only other copies of this album I've ever seen were the battered and tattered treasure of a hard living loon. Now to the music. The original Bowie mix of this album is often derided or scoffed at by fans and critics alike, however, it is the version I grew up listening to and learned to love for all of its so called flaws. The most common of these complaints are the tinny sound and the absence of bass. The remastered version is still trebly and not very bassy but has a much better separation of the instruments than the original vinyl pressing. So if you are familiar with this album you will not be disappointed it still is the Raw Power we know and love. If you aren't familiar with the album you may prefer the more standard rock mix of the album by Iggy. Either way it's a win win situation because the songs of course are great

Raw Power a mio avviso va considerato nel novero dei dischi rock più influenti di sempre; ha fatto da ponte tra lo stile comunemente inteso come garage rock, le cui radici in realtà risalgono ad almeno 10 anni prima specialmente negli States, e il punk rock che esplose alcuni anni dopo anche in Inghilterra. La musica di Raw Power e' un magma sonoro di chitarra abrasiva, voce sguaiata, basso pulsante e batteria tribale; in particolare, la sezione ritmica dei fratelli Asheton, pur restando in secondo piano in entrambi i mix del disco presenti in questa doppia ristampa su vinile, fa da sfondo ipnotico, quasi ossessivo, ai due elementi che restano in assoluto in maggiore evidenza: il canto sulfureo, malsano, isterico di Iggy e gli straordinari riff di James Williamson, eruttati da amplificatori portati al limite di saturazione. Il disco inizia con l'assalto al napalm di Search And Destroy e termina con la discesa agli inferi di Death Trip, una dichiarazione di guerra dal primo all'ultimo istante, dove il finale fa pensare a Iggy and the Stooges circondati, ormai spacciati ma ancora sfrontatamente pronti a morire assieme a tutti quelli che hanno abbastanza fegato da farsi sotto per prenderli. Raw Power è un capolavoro di musica Rock grezza, claustrofobica, volgare, orgiastica, belligerante, tossica, nauseabonda. È un disco senza compromessi, o lo ami o lo detesti. Questa ristampa mette a confronto diretto il mix originale di David Bowie e quello anni Novanta di Iggy; potrà piacere più uno o più l'altro, ad ognuno la sua scelta; secondo me, come ha detto James Williamson (uno dei chitarristi rock più sottovalutati di tutti i tempi), non conta tanto il mix quanto l'unicità della musica e dell'atmosfera in cui è stata concepita, suonata e registrata. Raw Power ha la caratteristica unica di trasportare l'incauto ascoltatore casuale e l'accanito appassionato di grande musica nell'inferno rock'n'roll che lo ha generato, lasciando agli anticorpi di ognuno di noi il compito di digerirlo intossicandoci o vomitarlo nella tazza del cesso della copertina di Beggars Banquet.

Met Iggy Pop zit je altijd wel goed, ook met dit dubbel album dus.

Imprescindible tener esta joya si te gusta el Punk / Rock, me encantan todas las canciones y esta edición está espectacular

自分的には、名前だけは知っているけど実際の音はあまり聴いたことのないミュージシャンの筆頭格みたいな人でしたが、これは凄い作品です。一聴して大興奮すると同時に、今までこれを知らなかった自分のリスナー人生は何だったんだと大きな後悔に苛まされました。一曲目のイントロから完全に振り切れて最終曲のエンディングまでパワー全開で突っ走ってます。全てのパンク、メタルを凌駕する頂点と言っても過言ではないと思います。

One of the best albums ever recorded by one of the best bands ever. The title "raw power" fits this album perfectly.