Raw Power Reunion

Forgive me if The Weirdness has turned me into a jaded prick, but I’m totally taking the idea of a Raw Power-era Stooges reunion with a heaping spoon of Morton’s salt.
Did you hear The Weirdness?
The shit was so bad that I had to listen to The Stooges and Fun House about a hundred times each before I remembered how they were one of the greatest bands ever.
I don’t get it. Why not just do a reunion bit, throw in a few new tunes if you must, and then release a live cd/DVD to capitalize on the whole venture.
But no, they had to do a new album with all new material and they practically diminished Steve Albini’s reputation in the process. For a dude that so righteously preaches of wrong/right + bad/good, you would have thought that he would have tapped an aging Iggy and said, “I can’t be a part of this career destruction. Call Butch Vig.”
Raw Power was the first Stooges record I bought. It was the weird Bowie mix, so it took a while to warm up to. A dude named Tom who owned a record store in Waterloo told me to hook up three speakers in some strange sequence-a trick he learned from the liner notes of a Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land album.

You know what? Something did happen to that Raw Power album when I set the speakers up to do this. It suddenly seemed like Bowie’s weird-ass mix was intentionally designed for this type of set up, as impractical as it was at the time. Remember, this was before 5:1, 6:1, 7:1…hell, it was before surround sound…and Eno apparently discovered all of this through sheer accident.
Raw Power was later re-mixed by Iggy so that all of its badass glory was unleashed. Call it Rawer Power.
So the idea of this era of the Stooges reforming (somewhat, obviously) is extremely appealing to me. The Asheton brothers served Iggy well as hometown fuckups who stumbled on to genius, but it was James Williamson who took that genius and attempted to move forward with it. And I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t help do just that: Raw Power is just as groundbreaking as Fun House and yet it’s a different beast all together. Fun House sounds like the world imploding on itself while Raw Power sounds like the mutants sorting through the rubble.
Williams ended his time with Iggy right around Soldier and the two haven’t spoken since. If you’ve never seen Iggy around this time, check out the Tom Snyder Tomorrow show DVD featuring him; Iggy is obviously in piss-poor shape, occasionally gnashing his rotting teeth from what could only be excessive drug use. Williamson is too much of a legitimate musician to tolerate such shenanigans and he left the industry-read that: the INDUSTRY-entirely. The dude has barely picked up the guitar since that time and hasn’t performed live since the mid-70’s. All of this doesn’t bode well for any worthy new material.

But a live setting? Who knows. I just hope they’re not seriously entertaining the idea of a new album, even though there’s already talk of it. Someone needs to remind Iggy and company that there’s little interest in a new record-The Weirdness only sold 30,000 copies-and those that our interested just want to hear the band play Raw Power in its entirety and maybe a few other Stooges tracks. I wouldn’t mind if the pair also work on some Iggy solo material that Williamson was a part of (“Dog Food” from Soldier, “The Endless Sea” from New Values would be awesome and a few tracks from the pair’s Fun City album).
If they can keep it restricted to the stage (and if Iggy can keep his questionable banter down a notch) then this could be a good thing. If it becomes another idea of a reunion album on top of everything, this could become another reason to question Iggy’s logic as of late.
Back in the day, we could always rely on Iggy to make bad choices for the sake of rock and roll. Today, it seems that many of his bad choices are the result of looking ahead to a retirement package.