#Iggy and stooges raw power full

Williamson’s final flourish comes as his virtuosic yet barbarous soloing envelopes the six-minute closer Death Trip, the album’s longest track. Iggy thought it sounded like the inside of “a bordello” and his celesta part is a seductive counterpoint. The album’s other ballad is the Doors-esque I Need Somebody, a moody blues vamp in G written on an acoustic guitar by Williamson. As slow songs go, it’s pretty demonic, simmering with sexual tension as Iggy broods, “there’s nothing left alive but a pair of glassy eyes” before careering into the bloodthirsty chorus, Williamson’s lead playing and an insistent piano tangling lustily before the guitar wins out with a corking solo. Gimme Danger, with Williamson’s menacing acoustic riff in E♭ tuning, is there to fulfil the label’s demand for a ballad on each side of the album.

You can hear the influence of Chuck Berry on Williamson’s rock-solid rhythm and histrionic soloing on Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell, while the heroin horrors of the title track and the swaggering Shake Appeal also have their roots firmly in 50s rock’n’roll, the latter enabling Pop to “get to my dream of being Little Richard for a minute”.

#Iggy and stooges raw power full

Iggy may have overdosed and been out cold for 14 hours at one point while writing the lyrics for Raw Power, but how about Search And Destroy’s “I’m a streetwalking cheetah with a hide full of napalm, I’m a runaway son of a nuclear A-bomb” for an opening couplet? And the frantic lead playing from Williamson, based around the C♯ minor pentatonic scale, is nothing short of blistering, the song a furious rallying cry for the anti-Vietnam war movement. David Bowie came to the rescue, finding Iggy a label and management deal and setting up the recording sessions in London. Plugged into a cranked Vox AC30, it sounded like… well, raw power.īy the time the Michigan band regrouped in England to record Raw Power they’d already hit rock bottom, splitting in 1971 due to a combination of Iggy’s voracious appetite for heroin, extreme poverty, dangerously violent gigs and the lukewarm response to their first two albums. Throughout the narcotic mayhem of the Raw Power sessions, Williamson played a Cherry Red Les Paul Custom that Iggy had encouraged him to trade in an SG and Jaguar to buy. His raw, bluesy style was instrumental in Raw Power having a harder edge and more adrenal tempo than predecessor Funhouse, and he co-wrote all eight songs – much to the chagrin of Asheton, who felt he’d been usurped. “He finds every corner of a musical premise and fills it up with detail.”īorn in Texas, Williamson joined The Stooges in 1970 aged 19, initially as second guitarist, before Ron Asheton switched reluctantly to bass. “As a guitarist, James fills the space as if somebody’s just let a drug dog into your house… and it’s big,” is how Iggy describes his bandmate’s playing. He’s both demonic and intellectual, almost how you would imagine Darth Vader to sound if he was in a band.”

Johnny Marr said of Williamson: “He has the technical ability of Jimmy Page without being as studious, and the swagger of Keith Richards without being sloppy. Sex Pistol Steve Jones famously admitted he learnt to play by taking speed and listening to Raw Power. Playing the Keef to Iggy’s Mick was a guitarist whose influence is threaded inexorably through the development of punk rock, James Williamson. And as its chief creator James Newell Osterberg Jr, aka Iggy Pop, recalls: “It was done with drugs, youth, attitude and a record collection”. It remains one of the most visceral, electrifying pieces of musical savagery you’ll ever hear. Released in 1973, it set the bar for a wave of punk bands to try and, in most cases, fail to eclipse. If ever an album was wholly encapsulated by its title, it’s The Stooges’ incendiary third album, Raw Power.