The punk album Johnny Marr calls “strangely beautiful”
Part of the beauty of The Smiths was that Morrissey’s morbidity formed a startling juxtaposition with the silken guitar tones of Johnny Marr. The tremolo trembling sound gave an airiness to the tracks, and then Morrissey swung dark lyrics like a bludgeon right through the sonic mirage. Whether it was car crashes, ailing girlfriends or serial killers, if it was dark then Morrissey was willing to go there—and Marr was willing to shower it in a shimmer of secretly precise half notes.
It was “strangely beautiful” in its own regard, which is not surprising considering he uses that phrase to describe the record that both Marr and Morrisey cite among their all-time favourites. It all started when Marr was a teenager hanging around with Billy Duffy, who would later form the Cult. He heard Marr play a riff and commented that “it sounded like James Williamson from The Stooges, who I had never heard”. But he was curious enough to find out.
Marr made note of this comparison, raided his piggy bank, and raced to a record shop. The price tag of £3.50 that adorned Raw Power was initially perturbing, but nearly as much as the stark cover, which gave him “an actual physical jolt”. So, he reluctantly parted with his hard-earned cash and ventured off back home to embrace the unease he felt.
This is a common theme in music discovery. It was Sam Fogarino of Interpol who once described Pixies as the most influential band of the last 25 years, explaining that he first listened to them, he said: “I felt vile, then I felt violated, then I thought it was the most brilliant fucking thing since sliced bread, and that hasn’t changed because it’s ageless music and that’s a very rare thing to stumble upon.”
Marr’s corroboration of encountering Raw Power for the first time would be much the same. “What first struck me about Raw Power was a beautiful darkness to it,” he told Spin, “A sophistication almost. It delivered exactly what was on the cover: other-worldly druggy rock’n’roll, sex, violence, but strangely beautiful somehow. From then on, I just climbed into a world with that record.”
It proved transformative for the schoolboy. “I spent an entire winter playing guitar along with the album in my bedroom, in the dark, orange streetlights coming through the windows, when I was sixteen. Its influence came out on the Smiths album The Queen Is Dead,” he said, in a vignette of how original music continues to unfurl.
Raw Power still continues to inspire new bands to this day. As Charlie Steen of Shame recently told Far Out: “The Stooges changed my life. Only three albums to their name and these three records seem to have altered the fate and direction of so much that came after them. The list of artists that cite this band as the reason they picked up an instrument is endless.“
Lou Reed summed up that influence when he wrote in testimony to their output on the liner notes for Metallic K.O.: “I have always loved Raw Power. I like the sound – the honest sound of young guys trying to break the barrier of stilted, moulded, sterile rock. And they did. Great guitar and wonderful vocals from Iggy. An inspiration for young men to this day.”
As one of those young men, Steen continues: “It seems as if this band has nothing to lose when you listen to them. No willingness to sacrifice their sound in hopes of achieving a high rank in the charts. No sign of trying to mould themselves to be something they were not. Nobody had seen anything like them at the time, and nobody has seen or heard anything as real as them since.“
