WABX
WABX is a radio station in Evansville, Indiana, owned by Duey Wright, through licensee Midwest Communications, Inc. From 1960 to 1984, WABX ("The station that glows in the dark") was the call sign of a widely influential freeform/progressive rock radio station in Detroit, Michigan. The current 107.5 WABX logo is substantially similar to the Detroit WABX logo used during that station's 1970s' heyday. The former Detroit WABX now broadcasts a country format as WYCD. (More from Wikipedia)
But that’s not all; as I have said before, when you get an album from Bomp! Records, you get your money’s worth. Rough Power also includes the complete broadcast in early 1973 by WABX radio of Ann Arbor, MI (including commentary by DJ’s Mark Parento and Dennis Frawley) after they were furnished with some very early recordings of some of the Raw Power songs that had apparently been smuggled out of the recording studio. The broadcast was made prior to the release of Raw Power. The songs and portions of the broadcast had been previously released on bootleg records in Europe, but this is the first presentation of the entire broadcast, as taken for the first time from the original master tape.
As given on the middle portion of Rough Power, presented during the WABX broadcast, and interspersed with discussion (and a lot of apologies about how bad they sound), six of the songs from Raw Power – “I Need Somebody”, “Hard to Beat”, “Death Trip”, “Raw Power”, “Search and Destroy”, and “Shake Appeal” – are followed by “Not Right”, with the latter song identified as a “previously unknown outtake”.
To call these recordings “mixes” of any kind is probably a compliment that they do not deserve; much of the music is almost unintelligible, and in more than one case, I could not recognize the song at all even though I had the song listing to go by. However, they are a fascinating glimpse into the earliest versions of these amazing songs; and at least for the people in Ann Arbor – the hometown of the Stooges – getting to hear any new Stooges material three years since the previous album, Fun House came out would be considered a blessing.
(December 2017)
