Raw Power 2

RAW POWER – Later Releases
 
 
If all you ever buy are major-label record albums or CD’s, then you’re stuck.  You have the choice of those three Stooges albums – The StoogesFun House, and Raw Power – and that’s it.  And those albums are not always in print, and used copies are a tough find as well.  As an example, for the third album, Raw Power, there was a 1989 CD release on Columbia Records – 16 years after the original vinyl edition in 1973.  (The other two Stooges albums came out on Elektra Records). 
 
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. 
 
Then there was a “Deluxe Edition” in 2010 – after the Stooges had reformed and began touring worldwide – on Columbia’s Legacy Recordings label that included a second CD of live recordings made at Richards in Atlanta in October 1973; a third CD entitled “Rarities, Outtakes & Alternatives from the Raw Power Era”; and a DVD featuring a documentary by Morgan Neville and additional live recordings made in November 2009 at Planeta Terra Festival in São Paulo, Brazil.  Deluxe Editions tend to be pricey though, and many fans cannot afford to pay that much for music.  The Raw Power Deluxe Edition is currently available on Amazon for $99.97 and up and was probably no cheaper when it originally came out. 
 
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.” 
 
So how did Let it Be . . . Naked go down 33 years after the original release of Let it Be?  The same sort of muted comments that greeted the new version of Raw Power were in evidence here as well; Wikipedia lists some of them:  Allmusic notes that Let it Be . . . Naked “is overall slightly stronger [than Let it Be] . . . a sleeker, slicker album”; Pitchfork notes that Let it Be . . . Naked is “not essential [. . .] though immaculately presented”; and Salon commented that Let it Be . . . Naked “stripped the original album of both John [Lennon]’s sense of humor and Phil Spector’s wacky, and at least slightly tongue-in-cheek, grandiosity.” 
 
(September 2017)
 
Last edited: March 22, 2021