Dancing To the Beat of the Living Dead: The Stooges’ Raw Power at 50

After The Velvet Underground & Nico and Marquee Moon, the Stooges’ Raw Power is the most influential rock album ever recorded. It came out on a Wednesday, which feels odd now, though release days were much more lawless back then. The recording of Raw Power was a mess; touring for the album was even messier. By the time 1973 came around, the Stooges—or Iggy and the Stooges, or the Psychedelic Stooges—were pioneers, the definition of proto-punk. Peers like MC5 and the Sonics were excellent at making garage rock raucous, but they didn’t abolish the foundations of musical presentation like the Stooges had. In retrospect, they were the blueprint of punk rock. And, under the leadership of Iggy Pop, the Stooges brought theatricality to rock ’n’ roll that wasn’t avant-garde or esoteric. Like a cauldron of blood, sex and anger, Raw Power is the antithesis of delicate. A monolith of brash.

There’s a reason that the entire band graced the cover of The Stooges in 1969 but only Pop is featured on the cover of Raw Power four years later: By that point in their career, Pop was the muscle of the band, hence why they changed their name to Iggy and the Stooges. Original bassist Dave Alexander had bounced after Fun House in 1970, and James Williamson and Ron and Scott Asheton became set pieces behind Pop’s kaleidoscope of chaos. Pop was the shirtless, psychotic wonder on stage, baring his toned-yet-scrawny torso to all of his disciples before transforming into some mythical kind of crucifixion. He won the favor of Miles Davis by puking on stage and dragging Geri Miller across the excrement. Later he’d arouse concert-goers in Cincinnati by tossing peanut butter on them. While touring for Raw Power, there was an incident where Pop got all carved up after falling on a table of glass while wading through the crowd. When he returned to the stage, every contortion he made with his body sprayed blood on fans. The story goes that medical staff tried to patch up the cuts with gaffer tape, but he almost bled out by the night’s end.

Along with pulling his dick out on stage from time to time, Pop was a big fan of carving X’s into his chest with shards from glass bottles. Dinah Shore would later ask him about it on her daytime talk show, to which Pop replied, “I’ve had treatment for that sort of thing.” He often sought to provoke the people in attendance, begging them to throw beer bottles at his half-naked body or hurl vulgar heckles at him while singing. At the band’s final show in 1974, he was pummeled with eggs and punches from the Scorpions, a Detroit biker gang. Self-flagellation was a part of the spectacle for Pop. In 1973, there was talk that he was going to kill himself live on stage at Madison Square Garden. When those rumors got to Andy Warhol, he rebuffed them, only to pose that Pop was going to commit suicide at the New York Academy of Music’s New Years Eve gig instead. When Pop snorted a cocktail of coke and PCP, he tumbled around the stage, fell into the audience and arose from the pit with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich smeared against his chest, which bandmate Scott Thurston initially mistook for cut up flesh.

After the Stooges’ first two records made no money, the band broke up and Pop quickly descended knee-deep into a debilitating heroin addiction. Around that time, Pop had signed with Columbia Records and was soon tasked with making a solo album with Williamson, a guitarist he met at a frat party show almost 10 years earlier and remained close with. But when Pop became dissatisfied with how the search for other players was going, he called upon the Asheton brothers. His debut record was postponed when the four guys decided to move forward as a Stooges’ offshoot, dubbed as Iggy and the Stooges, who would soon make Raw Power. It’d be the only record the four musicians would make together, due significantly to the animosity between Williamson and Ron Asheton, who held a grudge against the former after reluctantly switching from lead guitar to bass. Raw Power would become, and remain, Pop’s opus.

During the album’s sessions in late 1972, Pop was doing everything himself, especially the mixing. The songs rocked, but his mixes were rough, as he struggled with how to make stereo recordings work. The instruments went through one channel while the vocals floated through another. This wasn’t like the Velvet Underground’s experimental success “The Gift,” where the instrumental could be heard through one speaker and John Cale’s words through the other. No, everything sounded like dogshit. That’s how David Bowie ended up saving Raw Power. According to Pop, Bowie was one of the only people who saw the Stooges as something more than a rowdy band. He took Pop seriously as a songwriter, and thus was able to step in and try to recreate the frontman’s vision, even if his version did come out less punchier than Pop’s.

However, Pop was adamant that his own mix of “Search and Destroy” remain on the record, and Columbia Records gave him the greenlight. Bowie remixed the rest of the record, adding a beautiful echo effect to the guitar on “Gimme Danger” and gleaning more emphasis on the drums in “Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell.” “It’s not a bad job that he did,” Pop later said of Bowie’s efforts. “I’m very proud of the eccentric, odd little record that came out.” After saving Raw Power, Bowie would lose touch with Pop for more than a year, until after the dissolution of the Stooges. Pop checked himself into a neuropsychiatric ward at UCLA to kick his addiction and, while in a state of withdrawal, Bowie and Dennis Hopper showed up with bushels of cocaine for their incapacitated friend. The drugs never made it past Pop’s medical team, but the visit did bring him and Bowie together again.