IGGY POP – Raw Power Remix
Continuing the overview of Iggy Pop and his seminal proto-punk band the Stooges from earlier in the year, here is a band that (until the present century) left behind just three studio albums, with a total of only 23 songs. By comparison, the Beatles’ Abbey Road album alone has 17 songs. For those who are fans, that can be extremely frustrating – and I know that all too well as someone who writes about Under Appreciated Rock Bands who often (though not always) don’t have a recorded output that is even that large. Iggy Pop started his prolific solo career quickly enough, but Iggy’s solo albums are as different from his work with the Stooges as Elvis Presley’s music after he got out of the Army is from his early rockabilly sides at Sun Records and RCA.
Several more editions of Raw Power have been released more recently, however – most famously, an alternate mix of Raw Power supervised by Iggy Pop in 1996 came out in April 1997, in response to the frequent complaints about David Bowie’s mix that was used in the original 1973 release. Iggy felt pressured to participate; he figured that if he blew them off, the record company would put out a remixed album anyway, and who knows what it would sound like.
I have purchased recent vinyl pressings of the other two Stooges albums, but not Raw Power; and my copy of that record has not yet surfaced among the hundreds of albums that I have cleaned up from Hurricane Katrina. There was, however, a limited vinyl edition of Raw Power that came out on Record Store Day 2012 that featured one disc with the original release of Raw Power using David Bowie’s 1973 mix, and another with Iggy Pop’s 1996 remix of Raw Power, along with a 16-page commemorative booklet. I’m keeping my eyes open.
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Ultimately, a revised edition of Let it Be came out in 2003, due to the hostility by many to Phil Spector’s production efforts on the original album. It was called Let it Be . . . Naked and purportedly stripped the additions and corrections made by Spector to the original Beatles recordings. As with the Iggy Pop remix of the Stooges album Raw Power, however, successfully redoing an album that has been heard for many years by basically everyone having any interest at all in the music is easier said than done. Mark Deming notes in Allmusic: “In 1997, when Columbia made plans to issue a new edition of Raw Power, they brought in [Iggy] Pop to remix the original tapes and (at least in theory) give us the ‘real’ version we’d been denied all these years. Then the world heard Pop’s painfully harsh and distorted version of Raw Power, and suddenly [David] Bowie’s tamer but more dynamic mix didn’t sound so bad, after all.”
(September 2017)
