In November 1973, 50 years ago, the Stooges gave Iggy Pop (Michigan, 76 years old) the worst concert of his career in a university hall in the city of Largo, Maryland. The “shadiest, craziest and most narcotic.” Until then, the Detroiters were, as the Doors’ Greil Marcus said, a band “at war with their audience.” Since the end of February they have been presenting live what is perhaps the best and undoubtedly most controversial of their albums, Raw Power, but even the likes of Californian critic Joel Selvin were of the opinion that the group barely had “an ember” left of their previous stage fire. They had lost orientation, energy and substance.
Not even the inclusion of a pianist, the powerful and chaotic Scott Thurston, and a second guitarist, Tornado Turner, who replaced Paul Williamson at some concerts, for whom life on tour was becoming unbearable, managed to stoke the fire. Despite everything, Selvin says, with little will and even less success, they persevered well into the winter of 1974 on a grueling tour that took them from Los Angeles to Cleveland via Memphis, Phoenix, Toronto and Washington.
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After more unforgettable concerts in New York and Wayne, Michigan, they landed in their hometown of Detroit on February 9th. At this point, the Asheton brothers, Ron and Scott, decided to pack up and stay home. Iggy broke up the band four days later. It was the second time they were separated. They would not play together again until November 2003.
Jim Jarmusch explains the story of this surrender in his great documentary Gimme Danger, the hilarious epic of a band that was ahead of its time and suffered the consequences. Pop, the Ashetons and their first accomplice, Dave Alexander (expelled from the band in 1970 and died in 1975), had been trying to break into the rock constellation since 1967. In the wake of other Detroit groups like MC5, they expected the punk, the orphaned child with multiple parents, to emerge in 1976 London.
David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Germany in 1977. Evening Standard (Getty Images)
Their first two albums, The Stooges (1969) and Fun House (1970), are now considered masterpieces that contributed significantly to the creation of the American underground, but achieved disappointing sales and were poorly treated by the majority of critics. Edmund O. Ward wrote in Rolling Stone that The Stooges was an album that was “shrill, childish, dull, unimaginative and in terrible taste.”
A dish that is served raw
The fact is that Raw Power, an album that has been remembered for half a century, was the direct result of failure. By September 1971, Iggy Pop was sedate and without a band. His record company had decided not to renew a contract with the Stooges that was producing poor results. The Ashetons had had enough of Iggy, his apathy and his sudden mood swings, fueled by his increasing heroin use.
Only his most recent addition, Texas guitarist James Williamson, was willing to continue making music with him once they got a new contract and formed a new band. Despite everything, the upcoming resumption of activities has been repeatedly postponed since the spring. Pop and Williamson, increasingly lost in narcotic indolence, spent idle hours in front of the television.
Iggy and the Stooges at Whiskey A-Go-Go in Los Angeles in 1973.Michael Ochs Archives
On September 9th, a certain David Bowie came to the rescue. John Adams, manager of the remaining Stooges, called Iggy to tell him that the British musician was in New York, having dinner with his partner Tony DeFries at the famous nightclub Max’s Kansas and wanted to meet him. Iggy almost missed the appointment. At the time, Bowie seemed to him to be an opportunist and an upstart and he also watched a number of Western films. Crossing the few streets that separated him from the nightclub on Park Avenue South seemed like an effort with very little incentive. But Adams managed to convince him. And Bowie, a consummate flatterer, immediately won his sympathy by telling him that the Stooges had been the best American band of recent years and suggesting that he travel to Britain to release in an environment that ” “More conducive to innovation” is a solo career.
The Iguana in London
Pop picked up the glove. He signed with MainMan, Bowie and DeFries’ company, and they got him a contract with Columbia Records. He crossed the pond and settled in London, a city that, as he would explain years later, seemed “unreal” to him. He spent several months taking long walks through Hyde Park, Kensington and Westminster, waiting for DeFries and Columbia to decide what they wanted to do with him.
To overcome his creative impasse, he requested the presence of Williamson in London, whom he considered the only man who could help him write songs. Bowie had suggested the possibility of them writing together, but he accepted the rejection gracefully: after all, he was too busy creating Ziggy Stardust. It took Iggy and Williamson forever to put together a handful of songs that met their own standards, but by mid-1972 they were eager to get into the studio. MainMan suggested the Detroiters recruit British musicians to complete a new band, but Iggy wasn’t entirely clear whether he was interested in glamor beyond a superficial aesthetic affinity, nor that he wanted to surround himself with English people, who he as “the strangest creatures on the planet.”
None of the candidates for his new rhythm section met his expectations. So he called the Ashetons and asked them to fly to London to join a revamped version of the Stooges. Scott took over the drums and Ron replaced the guitar with the bass, as Williamson, with his loyalty to the leader in times of crisis, had earned the right to become the band’s guitarist. The Ashetons agreed because, as they told Jim Jarmusch years later, the months they spent at their parents’ house after the group’s initial dissolution had convinced them that they had nothing better to do.
Return of the henchmen
Bowie, DeFries and Columbia were not happy about this premature resurrection of the Stooges. Bowie even accused Pop, whom he considered his protégé, of ingratitude and blindness: they had offered him a new opportunity and he decided to repeat the mistakes of the past. After all, the Briton had not been completely honest at the meeting in New York a year earlier. He appreciated Iggy’s stage charisma and his ability to write energetic and wild songs, but found the Stooges a worn-out band and the Ashetons two mediocre musicians with a rather deplorable image.
David Bowie and Iggy Pop at a concert in San Francisco in 1977.Richard McCaffrey (Getty Images)
Despite everything, a gentlemen’s agreement was reached. The new band would be called Iggy and the Stooges, the album would be recorded at CBS studios in London, and a few ballads would be added to the string of proto-punk hits that Pop and Williamson had dreamed up. The initial demos, recorded with engineer Keith Hardwood at Olympic Studios, were intended to serve as a guideline, but Columbia hoped that the album’s sound, which they felt was too raw and chaotic, would be significantly refined under the supervision of one of his confidants would be, Mike Ross-Trevor.
The nine songs that make up the album were recorded between September 10 and October 6, 1972. Pop says he felt like a kid with new shoes and regained the feeling of making music in complete freedom and surrounded by his old accomplices environment, supported by technicians who treated them with the utmost reverence and seemed to fully understand what the Stooges were.
The problem arose when Pop and Williamson insisted on acting as “producers” despite admitting they had “not the slightest idea” of what they were doing. In particular, they wanted the album to sound “neither glamorous nor polished”. Even the two edgier ballads, “Gimme Danger” and “I Need Somebody,” must have had the Stooges’ tense and vicious style.
As he later admitted, Iggy made an amateur mistake by mixing most of the instrumental parts into one of the stereo channels and the vocals into the other, without worrying too much about little things like balance or the quality of the sounds. Although the resulting mix horrified Columbia, Iggy and Williamson insisted that this was how the album should sound.
DeFries intervened to save the investment by deciding to have the songs remixed by Bowie. He apparently managed it in a single day, at the end of October, at the studios of Western Sound Records, with Iggy present but without direct access to the mixing board. The American accepted this “humiliating” solution because he was made to understand that “otherwise there would be no album.”
Paul Young, Iggy Pop, Rick James and David Bowie at the Ritz Hotel in New York in 1986.L. Busacca (WireImage)
Despite everything, Bowie tried to be conciliatory and find a middle ground between the “artistic” concerns of his colleague Pop and the commercial pressures of DeFries and the record company. Unfortunately, despite his good nature, Bowie wasn’t an experienced producer and he worked in a hurry. Some experts attribute the (relative) failure that ultimately led to his intervention in the album to his use of technological resources, such as the Cooper Time Cube, which he found fascinating but with which he was unfamiliar.
Dude, what did you do to my album?
Iggy told Jarmusch that “he let him do it” but that his frustration increased when he realized the songs no longer sounded the way he had imagined them. It particularly bothered him that songs like “Penetration” insisted on emphasizing percussion and trying to add clarity and polish to what Iggy wanted to sound “raw, chaotic and compact”.
Bowie’s version is significantly different. The Brit wrote in the notes accompanying the album’s 1996 reissue that Iggy, not Tony DeFries, was the one who asked him to try to “save” an album that had already been rejected by Columbia because it had obvious problems with completion. His recollection was that his “very limited” intervention consisted of “details.” Iggy Pop said that “the carrot” [Carrot Top, una referencia jocosa a Bowie, que en 1972 llevaba el pelo teñido de color naranja] had “ruined” his album. Years later, coinciding with the 1996 reissue, he put this very negative impression into perspective by admitting that “David did what he could, considering the remix was done in a cheap studio and with a mixing board, that seemed prehistoric.”
Of course, the Iggy Pop of 1996 had already had a close friendship with Bowie for several years, who finally rescued him from a personal abyss in 1976 as a guardian angel, brought him to East Berlin, where they lived together until 1978 and helped him break away from heroin and started his career as a musician again. Their legendary friendship has inspired such prolific novels as the film Velvet Goldmine.
Furthermore, the pop of 1996 was no longer an artist lost in his labyrinth, anxious to find a place in the sun as quickly as possible, but a rock legend who felt at peace with his legacy. He could afford to be generous to the accomplice and friend who had contributed so much. As for “Raw Power”, despite the controversy surrounding its remix and the low trust of the record company responsible for its release, it was enthusiastically received by at least the most modern and combative faction of critics.
Today we know that the album that would end the budding friendship between two titans of music and that led to a tiring and self-destructive tour is a marvel, the go-to source for immersion in enduring classics of noise and music Noise to immerse yourself. Rage like Search and Destroy or Gimme Danger. Time has proven him right, and his reputation as a crucial cultural artifact is more than secure from the trivial controversies of 50 years ago.
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