Iggy And The Stooges, Raw Power

It was 1973, OK? Even then, the Stooges two albums on Elektra (released in 1969 and 1970) were legendary for their influence on glam rockers like David Bowie and a nascent generation of punks. Raw Power in its time was renowned for two things: a strange and thin mix by Bowie that Iggy has described as "weedy," and its collection of eight nearly perfectly conceived and executed songs — and "executed" may be the operative word here — written by Pop and Stooges guitarist James Williamson, that are unmatched in their musical brutality and carnal wit. The Legacy remastering and reissue (done in 1996) restores some necessary bottom, played with utter lack of inhibition by the bass/drum brother team of Ron and Scott Asheton, that the original mix ignored, but the hysteria remains intact. Just listen to the opener "Search and Destroy"; the barely controlled lunatic firepower lives up to the title's description of a typical mission in the still-ongoing Vietnam War. "Gimme Danger" embodies the life on the edge that the Doors 'Jim Morrison would have died for if he hadn't, in fact, died. "Penetration" is more subtle than its title suggests, the kind of twisted desire the Rolling Stones struggled to capture in "Goat's Head Soup." "Shake Appeal" may have taught the Ramones how to sound obsessive, cementing the place in rock history Raw Power owns as the pivotal album between the garage and punk eras.