A look back at The Stooges’ 1973 release ‘Raw Power’

Contributor

Raw Power is an unmerciful album to get through. It chews you up and spits you out once everything is done. It punches and slashes your ears with hard guitar riffs without warning; it’s a trip into someplace more dirty than Sin City.    

The opening track of Raw Power, Search and Destroy, sets the tone of the whole album. The guitar forces its way through with a smooth-hard riff. Stooges frontman, Iggy Pop, opens with the most menacing statement, “I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.” The whole lyrical content of the song is filled with the thoughts of a wicked person. Yet, it’s no surprise given the song was inspired by the search-and-destroy tactic used during the war in Vietnam.

Out of all of the hard-hitting tracks on Raw Power, the most soft listen is the song, Penetration; but despite the easiness of the track, its lyrics are explicit. Raw Power’s lyrical content is unforgiving, in fact, it doesn’t care about any repercussions. It dives into violence, self-decadence, pitiful wanting, and an appetite in sexual indulgences. In other words, it pushes buttons and also the envelope.

Now, with all the hard rock madness in the beginning of the first half of the album, the most intriguing choices come at the second half of Raw Power.  Here, the Stooges begin to wear their influences boldly on their sleeves. The track, I Need Somebody, is a hard-rock roadhouse tune that was inspired by the Doors, which made Iggy want to start a band in the first place (interestingly, after the passing of Doors frontman, Jim Morrison, Iggy was offered to join the Doors, but declined).

On the other hand, two cuts mirror the Stooges’ love for 1950s rock n’ roll. The album’s main cut, Raw Power, and its skeletal sibling, Shake Appeal, both make a good wild dance rock (both songs very fitting for Iggy’s onstage savage dance moves).   

Despite the legendary status that Raw Power holds today, it has suffered through some mixing problems. The problem stemmed from the studio putting its main focus on David Bowie (who managed to reform the Stooges after their first break-up).  The Stooges, were left on their own to record and mix the album. James Williamson, the lead guitarist on the record, described it as “being left without any adult supervision,” on Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 love letter documentary, Gimme Danger.

Iggy took on mixing for the first time and the final result ended in a nasty mix. When their record label, MainMan, took notice of the mixing disaster, they sent in Bowie as “Mr. Clean-up”. Despite Bowie’s support on the mix, he only had one day to fix up the madness and it was not enough to save the album. Bowie’s mix of Raw Power would be blamed by Stooges’ fans for the album’s flopped release.

It would only be in 1997 that the album would get the mix that it deserved. Iggy was called in by Columbia Records to remix the album for a CD re-release. Even without Iggy’s approval, Columbia would have still went through with the remix.  Iggy hopped on to the remix project, ending in the most distorted and violent mix ever. By contrast, the Bowie mix is weak sounding and does not live up to the album’s boundary pushing and savage content.

Yet, for an album that slashed the boundaries of rock in the early 1970s, Raw Power only peaked at the 182nd spot of the Billboard 200.  The release of Raw Power was an outright disaster for the Stooges. It wasn’t long after its release that the legendary forefathers of the punk movement were dropped from their record label, broke up, and once again took a deep dive into the ruins of their vices. Raw Power was the messenger that warned rock audiences of the ruthless sounds of the punk movement that was not far from arriving soon; no one listened.

However, Raw Power would go down as one of the most influential rock records of all time.  Artists such as the Ramones, the Clash, and even Nirvana took inspiration from it.  Raw Power, paved the way for the next generation of savage artists; and it serves as a reminder to any artist not to be afraid of pushing the limits nor failure.

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