RAW POWER (1996 REMIX)
Raw Power is the third studio album by American rock band The Stooges (credited as Iggy and the Stooges). It was released on February 7, 1973, by Columbia Records. In 1996, Columbia Records “invited” Pop to remix the entire album for re-release on CD. Pop says in the liner notes that had he declined, the studio would have remixed it without his blessing. Pop cited longtime encouragement from fans and peers, the existence of Rough Power, his distaste for how the original 1989 CD release of Raw Power sounded, and the fact that Columbia were going to release the new mix on its sub-label Legacy Recordings as factors that led him to go through with the new mix, which was undertaken at New York’s Sony Music Studios in 1996. The remixed edition of Raw Power was released on April 22, 1997. (More from Wikipedia)
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.”
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 1996 remix 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)
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Not long after Rough Power came out, as I mentioned in my last post, a new edition of Raw Power was released in 1997 by Columbia Records with a new mix in 1996 by Iggy Pop, Bruce Dickinson, and Danny Kadar. A short note by Iggy Pop on the back tray card says: “People kept asking me – musicians, kids I would see, ‘Have you ever thought about remixing Raw Power?’ Everything’s still in the red, it’s a very violent mix. The proof’s in the pudding.”
I also found a quote from Iggy Pop in the Wikipedia article that was taken from the liner notes of the new mix of Raw Power that was released in 1997: “Very few people recognized the quality of the Stooges’ songwriting, it was really meticulous. And to his credit, the only person I’d ever known of in print to notice it, among my peers of professional musicians, was [David] Bowie. He noticed it right off.”
(December 2017)
