Iggy Pop reveals why half of ‘Raw Power’ is “just filler”
When you’re a massive rock star with an extensive back catalogue, it’s inevitable that not everything you put out you will go on to love in the same way years or even decades later. But what’s worse is when those songs you’d rather let drift to the graveyard end up being fan cult favourites – and that’s exactly the predicament Iggy Pop found himself in when it came to The Stooges’ third album, Raw Power.
Despite the record’s revered appeal to diehard fans, it seems that the Michigan-born musician doesn’t hold his own work in the same esteem. Having been released in 1973, he claimed in an interview seven years later, “I think about half of Raw Power is really good, and about, there’s four really good songs on it, is what there is.”
So, what were the tunes that escaped the cutting room floor of Iggy’s mind? “There’s ‘Raw Power’, there’s ‘Shake Appeal’, there’s ‘Search and Destroy’, and one other one, I can’t remember, but there’s one other really good – well, ‘Gimme Danger’ is fair.”
Whatever the boss says goes. “The rest,” he proclaimed, “is just filler.” Clearly this was a contested sentiment at the time of the album’s recording because the finished product was not what the self-proclaimed godfather of punk had initially had in mind. “See – the original Raw Power, oh, what songs that had on it! I-yie-yie! That was the album before ‘Raw Power’ which had a bunch of other songs –‘I Gotta Right’, and ‘Tight Pants’ and ‘Gimme Some Skin’, and this was really up tempo.”
However, don’t get your hopes up too much for these gems from The Stooges’ vault – they have never fully seen the light of day; Iggy lamented that, “To this day, they’ve not been released properly, you can get them around on bootlegs and funny little anthologies.”
We get the picture. Raw Power was never his favourite, and there were legitimate reasons for it coming to be so. He said that his manager, Tony DeFriese, told him regarding the original songs: “‘I’m ashamed to release this stuff, James. You’ll have to go in and just do something else’.”
Even if the album wasn’t to be in Iggy’s perspective, it didn’t mean there weren’t others that he was all too happy to give praise: “I think I’ve made better records. I think The Idiot is an awfully good record and way ahead of its time.”
He has a point. The Idiot signalled Iggy breaking away and proving himself in his own right, what with it being his debut solo album following the disbandment of The Stooges. With its star-powered strings attached – in the form of David Bowie taking lead on the production – it garnered him critical acclaim and a new lease in his career from which he would never come down.
All in all, even if half of Raw Power was “just filler”, it didn’t seem to stunt the chances of this rock god too much. Both within The Stooges and as a solo artist, Iggy Pop is widely regarded as one of the best musicians of all time; a mammoth legacy you would be hard-pressed to have tarnished, and the impact of which we still see transcend the landscape of rock and roll, and music at large, to this day. What’s one dodgy album when you’ve done all that?
