JAMES WILLIAMSON
James Williamson (born October 29, 1949) is an American guitarist, songwriter, record producer and electronics engineer. He was a member of the iconic proto-punk rock band The Stooges, notably on the influential album Raw Power and in the reformed Stooges from 2009 to 2016. Between his stints in music, Williamson worked in Silicon Valley developing computer chips. Most recently he continues as a solo artist. (More from Wikipedia)
There was some turnover in the band in 1971, with a key member joining at that time, James Williamson. Eventually the Stooges quit playing together and basically broke up.
Continuing in the Allmusic article, Stephen Thomas Erlewine talks about the genesis of the Stooges‘ third album: “Early in 1972, [Iggy] Pop happened to run into David Bowie, then at the height of his Ziggy Stardust popularity and an avowed Stooges fan. Bowie made it his mission to resuscitate Iggy & the Stooges, as the band was then billed. Iggy and [James] Williamson were signed to a management deal with MainMan, the firm guiding Bowie's career, and the new edition of the band scored a deal with Columbia Records. Temporarily based in London and unable to find a suitable rhythm section in the U.K., Iggy and Williamson invited the Asheton brothers to join the new group, with Scott [Asheton] on drums and Ron [Asheton] moved to bass. Iggy produced the third Stooges album, Raw Power, and Bowie handled the mix. Released in 1973 to surprisingly strong reviews, Raw Power had a weird, thin sound due to various technical problems . . . [with] many Stooges purists blam[ing] Bowie for the brittle mix.”
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But Iggy Pop and his compatriots could find no takers among the major labels that had so willingly released the Stooges albums, or anyone else. When James Williamson showed up at the Bomp! Records office one day with the Kill City tapes in hand, Greg Shaw jumped at the chance to get the album pressed and in the stores: “Even though I had to almost sell my soul to raise the needed cash, I wasn’t about to let this deal pass. To this day, Kill City is the single most important item in the Bomp catalogue, but what made it extra nice is that James [Williamson] also threw in a big box of unlabeled tapes that turned out to be mostly demos and rehearsals from the Raw Power days onward – hours and hours of stuff that became the foundation for my long-term Iguana Chronicles project of documenting the unreleased side of this incredible band.” Elsewhere, Shaw describes the Stooges as “the world’s greatest rock ‘n roll band of the century”.
(December 2016)
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After Ron Asheton was found dead in January 2009 of an apparent heart attack, James Williamson was brought back into the line-up, and the Stooges continued to perform concerts around the world until June 2016, when James Williamson announced: “The Stooges is over. Basically, everybody's dead except Iggy [Pop] and I. So it would be sort-of ludicrous to try and tour as Iggy and the Stooges when there's only one Stooge in the band and then you have side guys. That doesn't make any sense to me." One last album was released by the Stooges in 2013, Ready to Die that was better received by the critics than The Weirdness.
(March 2017)
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The Iguana Chronicles is not really a series of bootleg albums; as related by Greg Shaw, James Williamson brought a box full of tapes of music by the Stooges for him to do whatever he wanted with, in exchange for his agreeing to release his new album with Iggy Pop, Kill City on Bomp! Records, when major-label record companies would not. The name The Iguana Chronicles is taken from Iggy Pop’s first band, past UARB the Iguanas (I doubt that I will ever get used to the idea of the Iguanas being in the UARB roster).
As Greg Shaw put it in the liner notes for the label’s retrospective double-CD Destination: Bomp! (1994): “To this day, Kill City is the single most important item in the Bomp catalog; but what made it extra nice is that James [Williamson] also threw in a big box of unlabeled tapes that turned out to be mostly demos and rehearsals from the Raw Power days onward – hours and hours of stuff that became the foundation for my long-term Iguana Chronicles project of documenting the unreleased side of this incredible band.”
Iggy Pop had moved on and had previously released two solo albums in 1977, The Idiot and Lust for Life; but Kill City was the music that Iggy had created right after the third Stooges album came out, Raw Power. As it happened, James Williamson stayed until the end; besides being in the 21st-Century tour with the Stooges, he was in the line-up when the band created its last album, Ready to Die (2013).
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According to Greg Shaw, James Williamson was instrumental in saving the Stooges’ musical history; besides the treasure trove given to Shaw as part of the Kill City release deal, he had saved the tapes that became Metallic K.O. (1976), from live performances by the Stooges at Michigan Palace in Detroit on October 6, 1973 and February 9, 1974 – the album originally purported to be entirely from the 1974 show, which was purportedly the Stooges’ last live performance until reforming in 2003, but later releases of Metallic K.O. cleared up the confusion on the dates. The same thing said about Metallic K.O. in Wikipedia – “Considering [James] Williamson’s involvement, and the endorsement of Iggy, it was considered a ‘semi-official’ bootleg, when released on the Skydog label in 1976” – would apply to the albums in The Iguana Chronicles as well.
(September 2017)
