But, personally, after spending the past 13 years having my ears ravaged by the '97 Iggy mix, I find it difficult readjusting to the leaner, original version- even with the remastering, the '97 version far outstrips it in fidelity and sheer brute force, and remains a better entry point for younger listeners seeking to understand the album's impact. The new remaster certainly enhances the ambient details in the mix- like the tense acoustic underpinning of "Gimme Danger", or the echoing beat in "I Need Somebody" that illustrates Bowie's intention of making Scott Asheton's drums sound like a lumberjack chopping wood. This is understandable from an historical-preservation perspective, but then why not also include the '97 mix and allow fans to compare and contrast? Instead, the main impetus is bringing a remastered version of the original Bowie mix back to market. However, this reissue- available in a 2xCD, budget-priced Legacy Edtion set and as a more elaborate $60 4xCD Deluxe Edition- doesn't attempt anything quite so ambitious. So, for an album that runs a mere 33 minutes, Raw Power should provide ample fodder for deluxe-reissue treatment and an opportunity to streamline all that bootlegged ephemera into an official storehouse of all the songs the Stooges produced between 1972-74.
Over the past three decades, the number of bootlegs that have attempted to collect all the unreleased material from this period- from the Rough Power comp of de-Bowie-fied mixes to the notorious last-gig document Metallic K.O.- have amounted to a mini-cottage industry that's been as vital to sustaining the band's legend as their four official releases. There's no denying that the Raw Power era was the band's most prolific: the album's eight songs account for just a fraction of the music Iggy & the Stooges produced between their 1972 reformation and their unceremonious 1974 dissolution.
(Case in point: When J Mascis and Mike Watt hooked up with Ron Asheton for some 2001 dates, they only performed songs from the first two Stooges albums when Guns N' Roses and the Red Hot Chili Peppers covered the Stooges, they did songs from Raw Power.) It speaks volumes about the songs' pure immediacy and charisma that, even in its original mix, Raw Power became the album most responsible for giving the Stooges a life after death. Where the primordial caveman blues of The Stooges and the proto-metallic grind of Funhouse made them touchstones for future grunge, stoner-rock, and noise artists, Raw Power provided a mainline for first-generation punks and the 80s hard-rockers that followed in their wake. And in accordance with those changes, Bowie's infamously treble-heavy Raw Power mix thrust Iggy's vocals and Williamson's searing solos miles out in front of the rhythm section, to the point of practically writing Ron and drummer/brother Scott Asheton out of the set.Īll of which has made Raw Power the most contentious release in the Stooges catalog, a fact that Iggy himself effectively owned up to in 1997 when he issued an exponentially louder and beefier new mix that took the album's title to literal extremes (and, in the process, horrified audiophiles with a distaste for digital distortion). With the Stooges dropped from Elektra, Iggy exploited a solo-artist deal with David Bowie's management to reassemble his band around new guitarist James Williamson, pushing Ron Asheton to bass and re-branding the Stooges as "Iggy & the Stooges".
Because the Stooges heard on Raw Power were not the same band that produced 1969's self-titled debut or 1970's Funhouse, but rather some mutant, zombie version. When Iggy Pop commanded a generation of glam-rock kids and biker-bar burnouts to "dance to the beat of the living dead" on Raw Power's totemic title track, he wasn't just talking B-movie nonsense- he was heralding his band's back-from-the-grave resurrection.
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