298. Iggy & The Stooges - Raw Power (1973)

















Track Listing

1. Search And Destroy
2. Gimme Danger
3. Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell
4. Penetration
5. Raw Power
6. I Need Somebody
7. Shake Appeal
8. Death Trip

Review

Iggy gives a big middle finger to the music industry with this album, and what a great thing he does. It is hard to find an album as noisy as this in the whole of the 70's. A lot of the noise is just due to sloppy production, but this same sloppiness gives the album a lot of it's power.

The title of the album is really a perfect description of the contents. An album could hardly be more raw or more powerful than this collection of tracks. Actually it is noisier than anything that the Stooges had done before. It is not surprising his record company refused to release the album until David Bowie was called in to try and salvage it. David Bowie did the great job of basically doing very little, he was faithful to the vision of the album, although Iggy has gone back to clean up the songs for a new CD edition this was really unnecessary.

The album sounds rough, primal and raw, and for this it really cements Iggy's position as the grandfather of Punk. Actually this is messier than many Punk albums, it outpunks punk. The New York Dolls are actually much closer to the sound of Punk as it would be some 5 years later, but for raw undestilled anger you really can't beat this. And what a cool cover! Get it form Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Search And Destroy
2. Gimme Danger
3. Raw Power
4. Penetration

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Iggy Pop had been signed by MainMan Management, who handled David Bowie, as a solo artist, but Pop was hellbent on reforming the Stooges. Signed to Columbia Records, he was sent to London to write and record their album with his new collaborator, James Williamson. Pop insisted that his fellow ex-Stooges Ron Asheton and Scott Asheton participate in the recording sessions. Ron Asheton switched to bass (having played guitar on the first two Stooges album) while Williamson played all of the guitar parts.

Pop produced and mixed the album by himself. Mainman demanded that the album be remixed due to Pop's botched first attempt having mixed most of the instruments into one channel, and the vocals into the other, but Pop refused. When Mainman offered to let David Bowie attempt to rescue the album through a remix, Pop agreed—having been told by Mainman that the album would not be released otherwise—on the sole condition that his own mix for "Search And Destroy" be retained. Bowie reportedly remixed the other seven songs on the album in a single day in a cheap Los Angeles studio.

"Search and Destroy" and "Shake Appeal" were both pulled from the album and released as singles.

Iggy Pop said that the label insisted on two ballads for the record, one on side 1 and one on side 2. These two "ballads" are "Gimme Danger" and "I Need Somebody".

Such was the controversy over Bowie's mix that low-fidelity copies of Pop's original mixes circulated among fans for years. In 1995, a selection of these original mixes was released by Bomp Records as Rough Power. Fans and critics generally agreed that the original mixes were interesting, but not necessarily superior to Bowie's efforts.

Raw Power peaked at #182 on Billboard's Pop Albums chart. In 2003, the album was ranked number 125 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Search And Destroy... the image is just the album cover: