Is everyone aware how revered Iggy Pop was by the first wave of punk rockers, New York and London especially? Bands such as The Sex Pistols, The Damned, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, The Dictators, Dead Boys, Blondie and others all covered his band at least live and rightly so. Just about the most underrated musician of the 20th century by my calculations ‘cause he’s one of the best, (my favorite rock singer), but he doesn’t get that much acclaim from the mainstream.
I was lucky enough to get a free ticket to see Iggy and the Stooges (thanks Mr. Bang!) last summer and though I saw the Stooges with guitarist Ron Asheton and his brother Scott a few years back at the Orpheum this time it was with James Williamson who played guitar on Raw Power. Who do I like better? Well, Funhouse is my favorite Stooges album that Ron played on so I’ll pick him but that doesn’t deface the greatness, fury and annihilation of the album Raw Power, which is what I want to write about today.
But first some words on James Williamson. I was a guitar player before I switched to bass, eighty odd years ago, so I’m acclimated toward judging a guitarist and easily explaining why or why not I like or dislike them. Williamson is the only guitar player I can think of whom I seem to dislike everything about his style but when put in the context of a Stooges song just sounds better than anything I could imagine. (And I imagine some strange things if you know me). I hate Williamson’s tone, I think it’s too thin and sharp, I think his style is too metal for punk, I think he overplays and is tasteless and I think he plays fuckin’ great! I would never want to hear anything else but what he plays on these tunes and I would only want him to play it. I’m just thinking of his solo on “I Got A Right” with the scrambling, almost nonsensical notes climbing upward into some high squeals until he falls back down into the brutal rhythm guitar part. Awesome, as the young folk say.
But this rant is about “Raw Power”, pretty apt title, only eight tunes but no lemons. Starting with one of Iggy’s best known songs “Search And Destroy” (used in a commercial once for a car or something) it has great lyrics- “I’m a street walkin’ cheetah with a heart full of napalm, I am the world’s forgotten boy the one who searches and destroys.” It has vocals that are sometimes whispered or talked until building up at the end with the guitar setting off sky bombs and Iggy’s voice rising to a hysterical pitch. This song is from 1973! Find something from that time that matches the intensity; better yet find something from now!
“Your Pretty Face is Going To Hell” by title alone I consider this the first punk song. Find another song from that year with a title like that. Iggy says the song is about him laughing to himself about all the bitchy, beautiful young girls and how they’d be out of luck once their beauty fades (much like my own sad story). I like to think he wrote it in L.A. amongst the Hollywood starlets, the vapid sex symbols of the day.
Listening to this album theirs always a sense of menace or doom hanging over it, like something very bad is about to happen but instead you get something wonderful and joyous, the music- kind of like the exact opposite of life. The two slow songs “Gimme Danger” – “Give me danger, little stranger, and I’ll feel your disease. Theirs nothing left to life but a pair of glassy eyes,” and “I Need Somebody,” –“I am dying in a story, I’m only living to sing this song,” are just as intense as the fast ones. And the song “Penetration” is a groovin’, spooky, hypnotic song with snarly lyrics over a grungy guitar riff punctuated with an underwater organ lick never varying throughout. “Penetration” is the kind of song you should listen to when you’ve taken some drug you’re regretting and when you listen to this it will seem alright.
Owwwww
Get Back
Hey Hey Hey
I said Hey Hey Hey
Ah honey, honey, honey Yeah Yeah
I said a Yeah Yeah Yeah
Owwwww
“Death Trip” is the final song on the album and my favorite Stooges song along with “I Got A Right.” It starts with a staggered jungle beat with Iggy yelling the above words like a deranged Orangutan running through the jungle and just before the verse comes in he let’s out a scream/howl and cuts his own head off with a machete. This is what I imagine listening to this song and if all songs started this way the world would be a better place. If by law you had to start your song with this introduction it would be impossible for anyone to revert to some bullshit, they’d just have to keep it real no matter what harm it would do to the wildlife.
Recently, Iggy has been quoted as saying this song referred to the commercial suicide he knew this album would meet but he felt compelled to do it ‘cause he knew the music was so great. He was right on all accounts but for me the song conjures up suicide and murder. Listening to this makes me want to start a religious cult in California, brainwash the people, take non stop acid and speed and then go up into the hills of Los Angeles randomly killing famous celebrities. Any song that brings up such wonderful, heartfelt, family feelings is obviously a great one!
“I’ll rip you, you rip me. It’s all right,” he sings with a voice staring into the void and smiling. My favorite part is when he sings the line, “Turn me, Turn me, Loose on you,” repeating it four times, each time increasing in intensity until his throat is being ripped to shreds and he’s literally screaming his fucking head off! And all the while James plucks the wrong notes in the wrong way in perfection while the Ashton boys beat away.
Raw Power was ahead of it’s time; it foretold what was to come in music while at the time it was mostly ignored. The album contains lyrics of desperation, depravity, decadence and defeat but also of desire, defiance, fearlessness and belief. One of the last lines on the album is “We’re going down in history,” and that prediction was right. It’s one of the best albums of the 20th century and hugely influential.
When I die I imagine I’ll be speeding along the Pacific Coast Highway, right below L.A., at night, high on many things but none of them life. And the rear of my vehicle will suddenly, unexplainably, become engulfed in flames. As I veer off the highway to crash into the Pacific Ocean, the clear white moon above, jagged brown rocks below, I believe “Death Trip” will be playing in the car on my cd player and if it is, as I pray this happens, I know I’ll go smiling, happily, peacefully into my own perfect, watery demise.
(Jim Slimedog)
