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)
As I have written about previously, the first LP released by Bomp! Records was Kill City, representing music that Iggy Pop and James Williamson put together right after the Stooges broke up. As Greg Shaw tells the story in the liner notes for the double-CD compilation album, Destination: Bomp! in the entry for the Stooges song “I Got a Right”: “In 1976-77, Bomp was about the only established label in America that was actively pushing the new music. For a brief time, I could have had virtually any band that I wanted. It couldn’t last of course, but while it did, it was a real rush.
“But I never dreamed I could have the Stooges, until James Williamson showed up one day with a tale of woe: Iggy, fighting to kick drugs, had finished most of a great new album, but his rep was so bad no label would touch him. Even Sire [Records] had passed on Kill City. Was I interested?
“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 catalog; but what made it extra nice is that James 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.”
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Besides the Kill City CD and a Kill City LP on hand-mixed colored vinyl in the stack of albums that I am currently playing my way through (this pressing presumably uses a 2010 remix of the album from the original multi-track tapes by James Williamson and engineer Ed Cherney), I have other copies of Kill City around here, including a copy on purple vinyl and even a 10” vinyl release of Kill City – that one has 8 cuts rather than 11 and omits the two “Night Theme” tracks at the end of Side 1 and the beginning of Side 2, with the only full song omitted being “Master Charge”. I thought that I had ordered many years ago a package that included a copy of the original 1977 album on green vinyl (that would be one of the LP’s pressed and sold by Jem Records) plus a later copy with a better sound mix, but I cannot seem to put my hands on the green album.
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As I might have mentioned already, the album that became Raw Power started off as a collaboration between Iggy Pop and James Williamson also. Iggy Pop had been signed with MainMan Management, the company that handled David Bowie. They were recording in England, and after many auditions for a rhythm section, James Williamson suggested that the Asheton brothers be flown over from the U.S.; Scott Asheton sat in on drums, while the Stooges’ founding guitarist Ron Asheton reluctantly agreed to become the bass guitarist. Only at that point did it truly start to become a Stooges album.
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Although it took me a while to warm to Kill City, it has become one of my favorites among Iggy Pop’s albums – even with the truly wonderful first album by the Stooges, The Stooges (1969) that is in the same current album stack. Considering Iggy Pop’s state of mind at that time – he had checked himself into a mental institution in an attempt to clean himself up and become functional again – the demos that he and James Williamson put together at the home recording studio of Jimmy Webb (!) in 1975 that became Kill City are remarkably self-assured and remind me of the feel of his triumphant solo album, Brick by Brick (1990).
The Wikipedia article notes some of the critical reaction to Kill City: “Nick Kent of New Musical Express called it ‘a great album’. Mark Deming of Allmusic called the album ‘a minor triumph’, writing: ‘The music is more open and bluesy than on Raw Power, and while [James] Williamson’s guitar remains thick and powerful, here he’s willing to make room for pianos, acoustic guitars and saxophones; and the dynamics of the arrangements suggest a more mature approach after the claustrophobia of Raw Power.’ Martin Aston of BBC Music praised the album, calling it ‘Iggy’s most underrated album’ and one that ‘helped him get back to real life’. The Wire placed Kill City in their list of ‘100 Records that Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening)’.”
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The Iguana Chronicles are by no means the only albums by the Stooges that have been released outside of the five major-label albums: The Stooges (1969), Fun House (1970), Raw Power (1973), The Weirdness (2007), and Ready to Die (2013). Because the music was supplied by a Stooges bandmember, James Williamson with the blessing of frontman Iggy Pop, I would view the albums in The Iguana Chronicles as legitimate releases.
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I have a copy of I’m Sick of You that was autographed by James Williamson when he stopped by the Bomp! Records office not so long ago. Suzy Shaw told me that James signed a box of original sleeves, though the discs themselves are newly pressed.
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In addition to Kill City, the earliest release that could be grouped in The Iguana Chronicles is probably a single by Iggy and the Stooges, I Got a Right, i.e., “I Got a Right” b/w “Gimme Some Skin”. These songs were part of the package acquired from James Williamson, but the single had already been released in 1977 by a small French label called Siamese Records; this company had also been bidding for the rights to Kill City.
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For whatever reason, although Bomp! Records received the box of tapes from James Williamson in 1977, and even though both “I Got a Right” and “Gimme Some Skin” were included on The Best of Bomp, Volume One (1978), the records in The Iguana Chronicles series itself were apparently not started until the early 1990’s. The 45 release on Bomp! Records with these two songs is dated 1991 (although Discogs shows a copy with a white label that has a hand-written date of December 21, 1990). The entry on “I Got a Right” in the liner notes of the 1994 compilation album Destination: Bomp! refers to the single that was released in 1977 on Siamese Records.
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A 12” single called I Got a Right was also released by Bomp! Records in 1991; Side 1 had the songs from the original Siamese Records 45, “I Got a Right” and “Gimme Some Skin”, both identified as “Final Mix”. Side 2 had the same two songs from the James Williamson box that appeared on The Best of Bomp, Volume One, both called outtakes, plus a second outtake of “I Got a Right” that was previously unreleased.
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The liner notes for Wild Love, which sound like they were written by Greg Shaw, lay out the process that Bomp! Records went through to sift through the box of tapes that James Williamson gave them. The box included rehearsal tapes from Detroit, CBS Records in New York, and probably Los Angeles that evidently date from 1973, plus others made in 1972 that included demos for some songs that wound up on Kill City. However, there was no way to know for certain when much of the music was recorded, since the tapes were mostly unlabeled or incorrectly labeled. Among the bandmembers in the Stooges, only Ron Asheton was forthcoming with information about the tapes, and he was unclear on many of the details or wasn’t present at all.
After pulling the finished studio masters that provided the songs on the Kill City, I’m Sick of You and I Got a Right albums, and also the live concert performances that make up a third to a half of the Iguana Chronicles releases, the remaining tapes were almost all post-Raw Power rehearsal sessions. Greg Shaw mentioned that songs like “Johanna” and “Head On” were practiced seven or eight times in a row, often with stops and starts. Many of these songs were taken out on the road after Raw Power was released and often show up on the Iguana Chronicles concert albums. The best of these rehearsal performances were pulled out and assembled, along with selected live versions of other songs, for the hypothetical fourth album by the Stooges that was released as Open Up and Bleed!.
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Some of the cuts on Wild Love are jams by the Stooges (with or without vocals). The sketchiest ones, shown on the song listing as “Delta Blues Shuffle” and “Old King Live Forever”, were extracted from a 30-minute jam by the band with Iggy Pop beginning to mumble ideas as James Williamson tried to follow them on the guitar. “Old King Live Forever” really isn’t a song yet, though it could have become one if the band had given it more attention.
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One tape that was found in the James Williamson box is from the only known show by the Stooges in San Francisco (at Bimbo’s in January 1974). The liner notes by Frank Meyer say that there are only four songs on the tape, with “Open up and Bleed” being incomplete, so the other three songs – “Wet My Bed”, “I Got Nothing” and “Head On” – are included here, with the versions of the last two songs never being previously released. The California Bleeding album closes with three songs from the September 15th show at the Whisky, “She Creatures of the Hollywood Hills” and “Heavy Liquid” / “New Orleans” (the Gary U.S. Bonds classic) – the first concert performances of these songs ever.
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The Michigan Palace 10/6/73 concert was performed at the Michigan Palace in Detroit about four months before the supposed “last live show” of the Stooges there on February 9, 1974; and this is the other concert that the Metallic K.O. albums are taken from. While some of this music has been included as bonus tracks on some European albums, this is the first time that these songs have been released in the U.S. The short liner notes call this the best of the tapes of Stooges concerts, as recorded by James Williamson (the famous February 9th concert was actually recorded by an audience member).
(December 2017)
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