The most “advanced” album The Stooges ever made: “No one had done before”
A good record is like a little window into history, a sonic time capsule that transports you to a time and a place we’ve simply only read about and will sadly never get to experience, and some albums bring you as close to that reality as humanly possible.
On Crosby, Stills & Nash’s self-titled debut, you can almost smell the clean Californian air in which it was recorded, and on The Stone Roses, you can feel the bustle of an underground club, amidst the glory of the Madchester movement.
However, there is one album, above all the rest, that acts as an unfiltered view into the raucous worlds of punk, such that when you listen to The Stooges’ Raw Power, you can almost feel the dense air of an underground New York club, feel the beads of sweat that drip inside its walls and heavy boots of its fans stomp on the ground.
It was primitive and aggressive, showcasing the outrageous energy of the band’s enigmatic frontman, Iggy Pop, as well as the blistering guitar work of James Williamson, who never relented on the fretboard, to create a swirling atmosphere of punk goodness.
While you may consider the 1970s to generally be a heady decade of punk madness but the reality is, in 1973, the year of its release, it was somewhat of an infant concept. The decade had only really made room for psychedelic rock to emerge, and the gritty scenes of late ‘70s New York had yet to materialise. With their third album, The Stooges proved that they were the band to pave the way for a generation of acts looking to make music primitive again.
“There are those who prefer Fun House,” Iggy explained, when addressing the brilliance of this punk epic, continuing, “It usually depends on what your musical values are. Personally, I like all three of them equally. I like the first one as well. It’s fresh, and it made certain breakthroughs that no one had ever done before. Raw Power is, by far, the most advanced of all the Stooges albums.”
Advanced is an interesting adjective to use in relation to this album, as the mix was notoriously raw, but quite simply for good reason. The wild energy that laced every performance on the record had to be facilitated, and neither Iggy nor Williamson should have been contained by production efficiency.
But when you switch the lens through which you view the album, the word advanced becomes all the more obvious. The development of punk ideas was the sort yet to be seen in rock and roll at the time, with the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and The Clash all built off the back of what Iggy and Williamson had created with this album, having never quite understood how to articulate their musical ideas in a world that celebrated a chirpier style of rock.
It was an album where aggression and musicality finally merged with great coherence, and it was in doing so that Pop and Williamson created something truly advanced.
