Raw Power (Legacy 2CD Edition) [Original recording remastered]

DISC 1

The first disc features the long out-of-print Bowie mix of the album and it never sounded better; certainly, this re-mastering is a vast improvement over the previous CD version, being far clearer and with a better lower-end response than before. Of course, it could never reach the bass intensity of the more up until now readily available Iggy Pop remix from 1997, but this version was way overdue for a face lift and it has finally come to pass.

Which version (Bowie or Pop) is better? The answer to that question will always lie with the beholder. To my mind, both versions are indispensable and now they are both available (if purchased separately) in the best sound possible to date. Sony really dropped the ball on this however. Raw Power clocks in at 34 minutes and only the Bowie version is provided here making for a first CD that is only a little bit over a half hour. With all the space necessary and no licensing problems involved, why is the Pop version not featured here for comparison?

DISC 2

No complaints for this one. So very little of the early live Stooges survives. What does is generally from acceptable to point-blank awful in quality and have been issued as bootlegs or semi-legal releases. This new set finally brings a well-recorded live show into the light after all these years of collecting dust in the Sony warehouse. While it is not quite a 'soundboard' super-sounding live recording, it is close enough to hear what the original Stooges sounded like back in the day... far better and best available of any 70s live Stooges recording to date (so stop your bitching). It is a most excellent concert, lasting nearly an hour with Iggy Pop in confrontational fine form. On a technical note, there were some problems with James Williamson's guitar that night during the first 10 minutes or so, but they were resolved and his slash-and-burn pyrotechnics never sounded better.

This disc is finished out with two unreleased tracks: Doojiman and Head On. The former is truly an outtake; recorded at the time the rest of Raw Power was and probably omitted because it didn't 'flow' with the rest of the album. That said, the acrobatic Iggy Pop vocal work on this track is probably the most extreme and enjoyable of all studio tracks he ever recorded. The latter track is an outtake from one of the famous CBS sessions with Scott Thurston on piano, recorded subsequent to the release of Raw Power. It does not sound like it has been issued before on one of the many bootlegs from this time period. While a little out of place, it rounds out a fine disc.

Highly recommended to all, completists, fans and newcomers.

FYI

For completists, there is yet another CD entitled Rough Power on Bomp Records and featuring very early, pre-Bowie/pre-Pop mixes from early 1972. While the sound quality on this is merely adequate, if you have to have it all, get this too.

Iggy And The Stooges are a band that outpace everyone else I've ever seen. A harnessed explosion. A targeted, directed force of power. The songs, the sound of angry twenty somethings at the edge of poverty and trading on the fag ends of battered dreams of escape from conformity, sound still true. There might be nothing but old songs, but the passion and the integrity with which they are dispatched - both on record then and live now - makes this nothing more and nothing less than a ferecious statement that some things never change, the dreams we had in our youth are often still the ideals we hold after decades of experience, and that this is not nostalgia, but the essential consistency of the human condition.

"Raw Power" is an amazing album, let down by poor recordings. . There's poetry in this electricity, in Pop's vocabulary of a ruined, post-Vietnam world, which resembles a state of war and poverty. Therefore, these songs sound utterly of this present moment as well in an age of spiritual austeurity. And each song is a diamond, a nuclear weapon, lead by a voice that is part animal, part Sinatra, and verbally the match of any superior wordsmith.

At last, the `original' Bowie mix is back in print after thirteen years in the doldrums. With Iggy's aggressive - and brutal - digital remix being the only version most people have heard since 1997, what frabjous day it is to see the original mix back in print.

Where Iggy's mix pushed everything into the red, added every last bark and scowl from Iggy, and plundered the mix with surfeits of guitar whilst pushing the barely audible rhythm section into a fried, radioactive mess, the Bowie mix is far superior. Undeniably, the Bowie mix lacks the relentless anger and sonic roar of the Iggy mix : but the Iggy mix is widely acknowledged as one of the most compressed, and unlistenable examples of the loudness wars taken to its extremes. This has, at last been rectified. There's fierce debate as to which is better. To my ears, the original Bowie mix is a clear winner, it resembles the sound captured on vinyl by the band in their original incarnation, and has the added benefit of being clear and concise. To a Stooges devotee, one requires both, as the mixes are so different as to resemble two separate albums to all intents and purposes.

The Legacy Edition adds a second, live disc : barring the full final concert available on the 2-CD reissue of "Metallic KO", this is the essential Stooges live document, as the band perform for a frantic hour through the majority of "Raw Power" material and a handful of songs never officially recorded. It's wonderful to hear gems such as the obscure "Heavy Liquid", "Open Up And Bleed" and "Cock In My Pocket" in pristine quality. They deserve to be better known. The live performance also captures the "Raw Power" songs live in the finest quality known at the time.

The second disc is appended by a previously unreleased version of "Head On" which is not particularly good or well recorded, and the holy grail of out-takes, the not even rumoured "Doojiman" - which, despite sounding absolutely brilliant in production terms - is also utterly rubbish ; a four bar jam repeated endlessly whilst Iggy barks and howls, an angry seal with a bucket over his head.

Overall, this version of "Raw Power" is the album as it was always meant to, and always should have been heard, alongside an excellent live set taken at the apex of the bands live work of the time. It's a great album made even greater. Absolute, Raw Power.

Over to my Stooges-mad husband: I first bought the album in 1973 and it was never off my turntable for months. The first CBS cd release was tinny and awful, including an odd take of "Search and Destroy" that sounded almost like a demo or outake. Iggy's late-90s attempt to turn this classic into a grunge album was, in my opinion, a disaster. By wacking up the levels into the red, he created so much disortion on some tracks that two of my three cd players cannot handle this disc all the way through. Extra vocals and guitar bits, and guitar parts dropping out of sight as in "I Need Somebody" - it simply wasn't the same record. Now this double set comes along, infuriatingly stuck with that weird "Search and Destroy" mix. Four months ago, I recorded the original album onto disc and I got it out, playing that and the new cd side-by-side. The original "Search and Destroy" is a lot heavier with more depth and thundering guitar work - even my wife noticed the difference. Having got that off my chest, "Raw Power" is still one of the all-time greats, an ageless one-off, with Williamson's rampaging guitar and the Ashton Brothers' pumping rhythm section providing the perfect background to Iggy's demented whooping, screaming, shouting and crooning - if only today's wet-sounding dross (it's not rock, is it) had one tenth of the in-your-face energy exhibited on the Stooges' masterpiece, they would be all the better for it.
Disc 2 is a 1973 live show from Richards, Atlanta, a recording marginally better than most Stooges' semi-official releases on the market today - Iggy's vocals are clearer, as are the instruments; you can actually turn the volume up and almost be there! Also included is a forgettable outake from "Raw Power", "Doojiman" and a rehearsal of "Head On" which has unofficially been released before. A great reissue, then, marred slightly by that "Search and Destroy" opener, but there's no-way this album warrants anything less than 5 stars.