Released - February 1973
Genre - Hard Rock
Producer - Iggy Pop & David Bowie
Selected Personnel - Iggy Pop (Vocals); James Williamson (Guitar); Ron Asheton (Bass/Backing Vocals); Scott Asheton (Drums)
Standout Track - Gimme Danger
Let's talk about punk a little bit, as it's a big topic I'm going to have to deal with at some point. The main chronology of this blog (we're at 1974, remember) is still a good year or so off the peak of punk's impact, but a recent interest in the post-punk movement has made me ever so slightly reappraise, if not punk itself, then at least some of its more significant ancestors. Essentially, punk arose in the mid-70s as a conscious reaction against the established traditions and formulae of rock music. It's also a genre I have always never shied away from saying I have absolutely no time for. Don't get me wrong - its theory is totally sound, in that any form of artistic expression needs always to be challenged to extremes in order to be reinvented and stopped from becoming predictable. In achieving that, punk should be commended. But one of the major things I've always resented about punk is that it successfully created the myth that the traditional, classic, art or prog rock of the early 70s was devoid of any artistic integrity or musical value, that it was either pomposity and showing off for the sake of it (in the case of prog rock and art rock) or that it was turgid, unimaginative recycling of established formulas (classic rock, blues rock, folk rock). It's a myth that too much of the world has taken on as established fact, nodding along to the idea that the traditional rock of, say, Neil Young, was devoid of emotional sincerity, or that the likes of King Crimson were all just bluster and demonstration and lacked any actual musical ingenuity. I'll argue against that lie until I'm blue in the face. Punk sought to burn rock to the ground by reducing it to the minimal ingredients, pushing a homemade, "anyone can do it" attitude of short, amateurish songs that consciously aimed for political comment and social outrage in order to restore authenticity and meaning to music.
Personally, I don't enjoy punk music. I kind of understand the message and ethos behind it, even if I violently disagree with the idea that the music of the early 70s was in the dire need for revolution that they claimed it was, but the music itself just does nothing for me. It's of course easy to forget how fresh and exciting that music must have been at the time, but in a world that has become crowded with uninspired two-chord songs, the clumsy simplicity of punk no longer sounds exciting, it simply sounds slightly dim-witted and inept, certainly to me when contrasted with the more powerful and eye-opening ideas of accomplished and inventive musicians. One also has to raise an eyebrow to the fact that what made punk a "phenomenon" all of its own was more its timing and its marketing than its own ideas, as few of them were genuinely original.
The idea of making music that sounded primal and savage and clumsy rather than polished and accomplished was by no means invented by the artists to spearhead the punk movement like the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. Garage rock had existed for years, and its most notable practitioners were probably the Stooges. Admittedly, punk threw in far more political ire than the Stooges ever bothered to concern themselves with, and also tried consciously to distance itself from the deliberate theatricality and ego of Iggy Pop's stage persona, but in that way I actually feel it's in some way inferior to what the Stooges aimed for. Their music may have been inane and savage, but at least the whole daft cacophony was purely in service to one man's ridiculous ego and sense of intuitive fun rather than trying to make some rather contrived political or social point. The first time I listened to the Stooges about a year ago, it was because of David Bowie's involvement with them, and I didn't like what I heard, finding it difficult to pinpoint much difference between them and the musical genre that left me totally cold. But, in the wake of getting more interested in post-punk music, I've gone back to the Stooges and suddenly felt like there are some great ideas within them, as well as a lot of fun to be had.
In their early years the Stooges, led by the idiot madman born James Osterberg but soon renamed Iggy Pop, established a reputation as one of the most dangerous and borderline psychotic bands around for their ridiculously over-the-top live shows, which made the Who's instrument-smashing antics look decidedly tame. Iggy would leap into the crowd and smear himself with peanut butter, strip naked and cut himself with glass onstage, creating an atmosphere of total riotous abandon that soon made the band legends. Their music was by no means tuneful or, it could even be said, particularly enjoyable, but the idea with this band was clear - the music was a means by which to channel a kind of psychotic energy rather than something that was supposed to be appreciated in and of itself. 1970's Fun House is an attempt to distil the live energy of the band into a record and has a few fun moments on it but also, as is inevitable in any attempt to capture that kind of experience, features a good few songs of nothing but thrashing, primal noise and Iggy's ear-splitting screaming. It's not an album I've ever quite been able to truly enjoy.
As the band's heroin habit began to destabilise their performances even further, they were soon dropped by their label and left in limbo, at which point Iggy ran into David Bowie for the first time. Bowie had been aware of Iggy for a while and, while their music was a million miles from one another, had taken Iggy's who-gives-a-damn, Messianic vision of himself in his stage persona as a model for his Ziggy Stardust alter-ego (as well as being an obvious inspiration for the name). Iggy has also gone on to say that Bowie was the only person at the time to actually recognise any genuine quality in Iggy's songwriting rather than just his live performances. Hoping to help Iggy's career to continue, Bowie brought him and Stooges guitarist James Williamson to Britain and helped secure them a deal with Columbia Records, eventually also bringing Stooges Ron and Scott Asheton to complete the lineup and record a new album. Bowie himself wasn't involved in the sessions, but ended up mixing the final album after Iggy attempted to do it himself and made a total mess of it.
The result was Raw Power, a record which sees Iggy, perhaps inspired by Bowie's confidence in him, focus slightly more on songwriting and less on primal savagery. Not that this is suddenly an album full of grandiose ballads or anything like that - the mood is still one of plodding, angry, noisy rock played with maximum energy and very little finesse, and there are still some songs that descend into fairly tuneless, thrashing onslaughts of noise, like the fairly numbing closer "Death Trip" or "Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell." But Iggy really did channel a lot of time and energy this time into writing memorable hooks and riffs and vocal melodies (even if his swaggering, crooning, wailing vocal style makes it difficult to really call any of this tunes "melodies" as such). "Search And Destroy" sees Williamson thrashing out a vicious and raw guitar riff over which Iggy rants and raves, and "Gimme Danger" is an uncharacteristically slow and menacing song built around Williamson's strummed acoustic guitar. It also sees Iggy, for perhaps the first time, discovering some nuance and variation within his own vocal delivery, not leaping straight to furious, raging wails but simmering down into quiet menace. "Penetration" similarly sees Iggy hissing and panting his vocals over an insistently threatening riff, and "I Need Somebody," another unusually slow number, has him run the whole gamut from a rich, deep crooning verse to a hoarse, screamed chorus in a wonderfully sleazy, slow rocker that sounds like the aural equivalent of strutting through mud.
For me, the songs that work less well are actually the ones that stick closest to the Stooges' established template of high-tempo, thrashing noise rock, but then I'm not much of a one for tuneless aggression. It's not a perfect album and does occasionally fall victim to the same noisy failings as Fun House, but when it finds time to slow things down slightly and focus more on songcraft and dynamics than on pure aggression it actually manages to sound pretty cool. And, while this pits me against a huge number of people, I feel that music like this, that's chaotic and anarchic, is so much more enjoyable when that chaos is in service to theatricality and showing off than when it's in service to an overly principled, political ethos as in punk, a movement that started out with an agenda and quickly burned itself out as it immediately became a marketing-led phenomenon just as that which it had set out to replace had done.
As for Iggy and the Stooges, they formally disbanded not long after Raw Power due to Iggy's ongoing heroin dependency and increasing unpredictability and erratic behaviour. Having created the primal, noise-based template that punk could draw upon in order to stage its scorched earth approach to rock music a few years later, Iggy then retreated into rehab along with Bowie and emerged with an album called The Idiot that, along with Bowie's solo album Low, to which Iggy also contributed, would become a key template for the far more imaginative, inventive and exciting music of the post-punk scene, a movement that tried to look at the rubble of what punk had attempted to achieve and to transform its failures into something more constructive. But more of that another time. For now, suffice it to say that Raw Power, while imperfect, is a good testament to how fun the Stooges were able to be when they managed to reign themselves in a bit. It's easy for me to resent them for seeding an idea for the punks that enabled them to destroy my favourite genre of music, but ultimately they were just a bunch of idiots messing around and having fun with music, and it's impossible for some of that energy and madness not to come through on this album.
Track Listing:
All songs written by Iggy Pop and James Williamson.
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
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