Iggy & The Stooges - Raw Power: Live In The Hands Of The Fans

After soiling the Stooges name with The Weirdness, Iggy brings James Williamson out of musical retirement for a final injection into Ig’s 401K plan before heading to Florida full time.

And to be honest, I’m so ready for him to retire that it’s scary.

I’m finally at a point where so much shit has clouded his career that I’m having a tough time justifying sticking with him this long. I hold similar resentment with Lou Reed, but Iggy still had the ability to deliver a strong punch live.

I was intrigued by the notion of a Williamson/Pop reunion with an obligatory run through of Raw Power and, by default, the promise of a live recording of that album by these much older comrades.

To call the results less than worthy because of the band’s collective age is not fair: Mike Watt still plays like a kid in the candy store and James Williamson sounds like he’s having a blast. The moment you hear him in the opening track-slightly off thanks to a revamped track listing-you’ll hear how seems to be making up for a quarter-century of silence with a punishing tone.

The problem here-as it was with The Weirdness-is Iggy, and yes, you can attribute it to age. As fuck-it-all frightening as he sounded on the original, he sounds winded here, hoarse from the years and content with letting the bite of his delivery be reduced to a bark.

On “Shake Appeal,” he’s completely drained, spewing out syllables that barely manage to stay in time. Actually, that’s better than Rock Action’s plodding timekeeping on “I Need Somebody” which slows Ig to a point where he sounds more like On Golden Pond era Katherine Hepburn than the Grandfather of punk.

At the end of “Death Trip,” Iggy yells “That was fuckin’ Raw Power....Turn on the lights and gimmie some fuckin’ air!” It’s almost sacrilegious how-after this album was originally released-Iggy famously invited the audience to throw shit at him before bragging at how much money he was making for the gig. Compared that to now, where Iggy’s asking for fucking oxygen while keeping mum on what’s obviously a bunch more than the 10K figure he was tossing around on Metallic K.O.
Admittedly, I’m getting way too worked up on what is merely a limited-edition ploy at getting record buyers excited for Record Store day. And when you consider the amount of endless garbage that has turned Raw Power outtakes into a cottage industry, I shouldn’t put Raw Power: Live In The Hands Of The Fans on too high of a pedestal.

I only do because the original Raw Power is still a critically important album for me personally. Even the rawer-Raw Power mix is a bit weird to me. So if you’re making a claim at over recreating only the most decadent glam-rock album ever made, then you shouldn’t subject even a limited run document with such bullshit like fade outs after every tune, sub-par performances, and an aged frontman who’s no longer able to will his body to sound younger than it really is.