THE STOOGES – Raw Power Reissues
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.
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 Stooges, Fun 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” of Raw Power 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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Before I get into The Iguana Chronicles – the series of albums of Stooges music put out by Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records – I’ll take some time to relate my early acquisitions of albums of this kind. There are records out there which are not authorized that can include recordings that fans cannot get any other way. They are usually referred to as “bootleg” records and consist of music that was never officially released. “Pirated” records are illegal copies of major-label releases, and they are a different thing altogether. That is what got Napster into so much trouble many years ago. Bootlegs exist in a grey area and are generally (if grudgingly) tolerated by the music industry. In the same way, the major record labels almost never try to retake possession of the early promo copies of albums that are supplied to DJ’s and rock critics ahead of the official releases, even though they are typically marked with something like: “Licensed for promotional use only. Sale is prohibited.”
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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)
