Interview: James Williamson of the Stooges talks Raw Power (Boston Phoenix, 8/24/10)

Daniel Brockman: So you were a driving force behind the Raw Power album — but as awesome as that album was, it was not successful during its time. I’ve seen interviews with Ron Asheton from the first Stooges reunion a few years ago where he described the Raw Power period as being bittersweet for him — in part due to the album’s lack of success, and in part because he wasn’t playing guitar. Do you find that period to be bittersweet, in retrospect?

James Williamson: No, I don’t think I look at it that way at all. I mean, the band was basically dissolved in 1971 and at that point in time, I was back in Detroit and the Asheton brothers were in Ann Arbor and Iggy went to New York to try to get some kind of a record deal and get something going. And we had had some discussions and our plan was to form a new band. So when Iggy finally did get a record deal, he called me up and we went over to London. And, you know, he was signed with MainMan management and so it wasn’t until a couple of months over in London that we determined that we really didn’t want to work with the musicians that were available. I suggested to Iggy that we bring the Asheton brothers over and have them be the rhythm section. And I know that with Ron, you know, in later years this didn’t sit well with him, but I think at the time he was very happy to get the job. So “bittersweet” is not a word that I would use. I think we all thought it was very sweet: we were working, we had a record deal! I see those times as being very special because, you know, it was my first album and I was able to make up music of my own and work with Iggy and make that album.

When you started working on the material that became Raw Power, did you have a trove of riffs that you had collected, or did you kind of start from scratch?

I had been writing my own music since the beginning, when I first started playing guitar, and I think that’s one of the reasons why my guitar style was distinctive, because it was my natural way of playing. And I found out quite early going on that it was easier for me to write my own stuff than to play other guy’s stuff. In fact, the first time Iggy met me was at a gig where my old band was playing — and Ron Asheton was playing bass in that band!

Was that The Chosen Few?

Yeah, The Chosen Few. Iggy was at the gig, and I played him some of my own material on guitar and I think that that kind of stuck with him — and later on he tapped into that. Even in 1971, I was writing songs with him for the band, although not much of that was ever recorded. So it wasn’t all sort of brewing up inside of me, it was just a continuous effort.

Your time in the Stooges was incredibly prolific, although only eight songs made it onto Raw Power, and the rest has had to make do with being bootleg material.

Yeah, we were very prolific, because we always thought that we would make another record, so we recorded a lot of other songs, wrote a lot of songs that only were played live. So yeah, we were prolific, but we were also very impatient, so as entertainers we would always tend to play the new stuff and not play the old stuff, which is not a very good formula for success because nobody who came to see us ever knew what they were listening to!

James Williamson, circa 2009 (photo: Robert Matheu)

What were Stooges shows like? I mean, for someone my age, we’re used to punk and metal and all — but back when you were doing it, it was somewhat uncharted territory. Who was coming to your shows, and did you guys see what you did as just a variant of rock music?

Well, to us it was rock music, but we had a different sound and a different style. We felt that it was really important, and we felt that we liked it so other people ought to like it too — but it wasn’t like that. There was a hardcore group of people who did like us, and were almost kind of a cult. But outside of that, there was very little acceptance of us, but we just went out and did it anyway. So we played to some pretty hostile crowds — quite often, really, which was really captured on that live album, Metallic KO. Which I’m not really that proud of, I have to say, because I kind of feel like we contributed to some degree to the violence and whatnot that went on in the punk scene, that everyone kind of romanticized. But by the same token, that kind of thing was probably going to happen anyway — after Altamont, everything got kind of… dark.

It’s interesting that you put it that way — a lot of people would probably see The Stooges’ music as dark, but really it’s kind of just life-affirming rock music, even if there are songs like “Death Trip”!

Yeah, I don’t really see what we did as being dark. I think that what The Stooges were about was playing our brand of music and not completely annihilating ourselves in the process. We were more successful at some of those things than in others.

Even though you joined the band after their second album, you knew them from the beginning, back when they were known as the Psychedelic Stooges and were even more primitive than the sound on the first album — what were they like back then? And what was it like joining them and fitting your style into what they did?

Well, you know, I did know The Stooges in the early days, back when Ronnie was in the band I was in, The Chosen Few. We all knew each other when we were in high school and all that, and I had a pretty continuous relationship — well, I didn’t live in Ann Arbor, but I was at their house when they first started the band, and so I’d come sit in on their practices and hear them, and that was the Psychedelic Stooges. Which was just a really really bizarre art thing. I mean, Iggy played a vacuum cleaner and an Osterizer blender, mic it up — he’d do anything to get across to an audience. He was just — the band was like nothing else I’d ever seen before, some kind of weird combination of Sun Ra and, I don’t know, John Cage and god knows what. But then they slowly learned to play their instruments a little bit, and I think it was this showmanship that first attracted Danny Fields, who was the A&R guy for Elektra. When he came to town to sign the MC5 he saw The Stooges and he was just bowled over by that.

So they got an album deal, and you’re right, they played very primitive stuff because they were not that technically proficient on their instruments. But they always had a unique style to it, it was always rhythmic, and a lot of that material was really groundbreaking in it’s own way — so I don’t want to minimize in any way what they did on those first two albums, they really changed the kind of music that people were listening to, and every kid that was trying to playing guitar, it was the first thing that they would learn, because it was something that they could actually play. So a lot of people came up playing that stuff. When I got involved, when I was asked to join the band, I came in with more technical skill. I had been playing guitar a lot longer and I think I had a certain style that appealed to Iggy, so it’s almost like its two different bands, because like I said we were gonna start a different band.

So when we worked up all this new material, it didn’t sound anything like the previous band, even thought the singer was the same and the drummer was the same, and with Ron on bass. It was the same bunch of guys, but all of the sudden, a really different sound.

You and Iggy went to England to find a rhythm section, but you didn’t like what you saw. Why is that– it seems like there was so much awesome rock music coming out of England in those days?

Yeah, we didn’t relate to what other people were doing, we played our own style of music and you know, part of being in a band is being in a gang or something. It’s a family or a gang or a group of people who can relate to each other on a whole bunch of different levels and can stand to be around each other. I mean, you really can’t play music that’s any good with people you don’t like. That’s just a fact! So, you know, everyone in those days was all flowery shirts and poofy frilly big hair and all that kind of stuff, and I just couldn’t relate, personally, to any of these guys that we were auditioning. I think Iggy might have viewed it a little bit different from me, but in the end I just wasn’t having it and I said “I think we oughtta call up Ron and Scott”. And he didn’t disagree with me — if I wasn’t around, he might have picked something differrent, I dunno. You’ve got these guys like Trevor Bolder from Bowie’s band with the big jowels and all this stuff and — it’s hard for me to explain, but this was a much better choice for us.

When you joined the band, during the Raw Power era, it seems that the power dynamic had changed, and Iggy had a lot more control — or at least more focus was on him. Is this the way you saw it?

I think it’s more of a perception thing: you know, the fact is that Iggy has always been a dynamic performer. And really from when I was involved in the band, whoever was managing us or whoever the record company was or whatever, they always wanted to make Iggy a star, and the band was kind of like — oh, I don’t know, like Big Brother and the Holding Company or something. They really wanted to make the singer the star. And that ruined that whole situation and it would have ruined us too, but that’s the way it was. And so even though we never called ourselves Iggy and the stooges, we started being called that by external forces, because it was easier for promoters to promote gigs and all that sort of thing. So even though it was Iggy who got the record deal and got signed to MainMan, that is what MainMan wanted him to be, a David Bowie singer with some side guys, and Iggy never looked at it that way until much later. So I think we were able to survive that, and the unfortunate part of the whole equation is that no one bought the record. It didn’t matter what we wanted to call it, if you couldn’t sell records back then, you couldn’t survive.

But even though the album didn’t sell, you must have known when you recorded it that the album ruled, right?

Oh, we did, we loved that record. But the thing is that we were completely delusional! I mean, really, that record was so far ahead of it’s time that it really literally is pretty amazing to me to see how many people sort of imitated the style and the sound enough so that it now sounds contemporary. Because the sound has been established by so many bands, but in those days it didn’t sound like anything, and actually there’s never been anything that sounds like it before or since, even though there have been many who have tried. So it’s satisfying, at least we get recognition at some time in our life. I like to say that the album was a success, it just took awhile!

It was your first experience in a big-time recording studio, right?

Yeah, Raw Power was the first time I went in for an extended period of time and made an album, so it was very exciting for me. But the only reason that the album sounds the way it does is because by the time we got to that point, MainMan was busy breaking David Bowie in the U.S. and they weren’t paying attention to us, so we got to make it without any adult supervision!

The sound of the album is distinctive in The Stooges’ catalog because of your lead work, and the way it pierces through the mix. What were you going for with the layering of guitar tracks and whatnot?

Honestly,I was just trying to make the other guys happy. We’d go in there, and after the rhythm tracks, I’d be overdubbing solos and just keep doing it until everyone was nodding in the control room, and that meant that it was time to quit and move on to the next one.

How did the situation come about where Bowie was brought in to remix the record — and what was that experience like?

Well, what happened was that we did the album ourselves, and we made lots of mistakes because we were inexperienced in the studio, and Iggy was pushing the envelope with the mix. I didn’t have any frame of reference — like I would now if I was trying to mix that album take a different approach. The engineer, you know, his hands are tied because we’re the client telling him what to do: so we made a mix, and we liked the mix, but MainMan didn’t understand it and couldn’t relate to it and they thought “This is never gonna fly”, so they brought in their golden boy in hopes to salvage it, because we owed the album to CBS. So on some days off from his U.S. tour, David Bowie came over and did it in L.A., and you know, it was a really really bizarre approach to the mix that he did.

But I have to say that if we had actually had something that we thought should have been done differently, we should have spoken up, because we were both sitting there in the mixing room for the whole thing. And secondly, a lot of times you get in the studio and you think “Oh man, that sounds great!”, and then you get outside and think “Oh my god, this is awful!” And David Bowie, he’s very stylized, everything he does — and the thing about the album is that it sounds really different. But ultimately, the beauty in that album is in the songs and the performance, and so no matter how you do it, it still comes through and sounds good.

It must have been weird for you in the ensuing decades to watch the endless debate about the mix of the album, with superfans passing around bootlegs of the alleged original rough mixes, that sort of thing.

You know, it is kind of weird, and frankly I’m happy that Sony/Columbia has re-released the original mix, because I think historically that’s an important thing. But if it was up to me, I’d just release all the tracks and let the guy who buys it mix it for themselves. I mean, it’s like “why are we arguing about this for 30 years?”

How does it feel to be playing those songs now?

It feels great — we’re, I think, all in our 60’s, and I think that there’s an opportunity for a little bit of closure and we’re having fun doing it. I mean, how many victory laps can we do? I don’t know. But we’re having a good time this year and I guess we’re going to see you guys pretty soon in Boston.

Do you think you’ll end up doing a new Stooges album?

We’ve all kind of agreed that we’d like to only release new material if we all really like it. So, you know, The Stooges bar is pretty high, and we don’t want to put out material that isn’t of that kind of quality. We’re working on it, and even if we don’t put out an album, but put out some singles, I’d love to do it, but only if it’s something that we all feel is in keeping with the level of the quality that we’ve done before.

The Stooges: Getting into the mix– three more that fans want raw (Boston Phoenix, 8/24/10)

Raw Power is viewed by many as one of the all-time great rock albums — but its hyper-trebly, David Bowie–mixed brittleness has been almost as infamous as the musical mayhem on the wax. At first, the band self-produced the record. James Williamson explains, “Our management was busy breaking David Bowie in America, they weren’t paying any attention to us. So we got to make the album without any adult supervision. But they finally heard it and said, ‘This isn’t gonna fly,’ so they brought in their golden boy in hopes to salvage it. Bowie came over to LA on some days off from his US tour and did it — and you know, I have to say, he really took a bizarre approach to the mix.”

The ensuing decades saw the album’s legend grow, with an endless parade of bootlegs purporting to offer the “real” mix before Ziggy Stardust had got his bass-stifling hands on it. In 1997, Sony reissued a “definitive” version overseen by Pop himself, an overblown monster that hit the ceiling of digital distortion. Fans who’d lived with the Bowie mix and their bootlegs for decades were irate. Williamson and Ron Asheton were both openly critical.

This year’s remaster of the Bowie mix puts a sheen on the original vinyl release — but for most fans, agreeing to disagree is just part of loving Raw Power. “If it was up to me,” says Williamson, “I’d just release all the tracks and let whoever buys the album mix it for themselves. I mean, why are we arguing about this for 30 years?” Amen, James — but aren’t arguments part and parcel of being an obsessive rock fan? With that in mind, let’s look at three more of rock’s most controversial mixing jobs:

THE BEATLES | LET IT BE [1970] | Near the end of their seven-year dynasty, the Beatles’ January 1969 attempt at a return-to-roots album flamed out in confusion and miles of magnetic tape. Wall-of-sound producer Phil Spector fashioned the spaghetti into a hit album, but with tacked-on string sections and other cheesy touches that rubbed fans the wrong way for decades — until a Spector-less version of the album, Let It Be . . . Naked, was released in 2003, sans cheese.

METALLICA | . . . AND JUSTICE FOR ALL [1988] | Metallica rebounded from the death of bassist Cliff Burton with this double-platter breakthrough album thanks to the crossover hit “One.” But amid the MTV adulation, many fans noticed a distinct lack of bass guitar. Perhaps the band were just hazing new member Jason Newstead, but whatever the cause, fans still wonder whether there isn’t some kind of alternate mix that includes an audible low end.

NIRVANA | IN UTERO [1993] | Kurt Cobain and company’s choice of Steve Albini to record what would be their final studio album seemed a logical choice, especially with Cobain wanting to avoid a repeat of the grunge-o-matic sheen that Butch Vig had left on their previous multi-platinum long-player. But the tracks the band brought back from their Minnesota sojourn did not please the label overlords. As Cobain put it, “The grown-ups don’t like it.” Nirvana eventually remixed a few tracks after Geffen’s consternation crumbled their resolve.

The Stooges (8/29/10, Boston Phoenix)

WORLD’S FORGOTTEN BOYS: Millions now bow to Raw Power’s majesty, but in 1973, it and the Stooges were considered a flop.

It’s hard to fathom now, when their music has achieved such godhead status, but in 1971, Ann Arbor’s legendary Stooges had dissolved in ignominy, dropped by Elektra after the seemingly indulgent commercial failure that was 1970’s howling Fun House. Ron Asheton (canonized by Rolling Stone shortly before his passing in 2009 as #29 on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time) and his drumming brother Scott languished at home. The new second guitarist, James Williamson, was back in Detroit, marveling at his brief foray with the late band. And ringleader Iggy Pop was in New York, hustling for a solo record deal.

What happened next is rock scripture: Pop, with the backing of some new rock superstar named David Bowie, would convene a slightly reconfigured Stooges to record a third album that would atomize even their previous two earthshakers. It is immaterial that the album failed to get noticed outside of an enlightened few, even though its failure led swiftly to the Stooges’ demise. Its legend has mushroomed since, and millions now bow to the altar ofRaw Power majesty.

When I spoke to Williamson over the phone, on the eve of the reunited Stooges’ tour (it comes to the House of Blues on Tuesday) to celebrate that 1973 disc in all its glory, I was expecting him to view the triumph of the record as bittersweet, given that it was so unheralded in its day and was created amid such turmoil. I was wrong.

“No no no, ‘bittersweet’ is not a word that I would use at all,” he says. “I think that, in fact, we all thought that time was very sweet. We were working, we had a record deal, and so I see those times as being very special.”

It was a particularly special time for Williamson: when Pop got a record contract (CBS) and a management deal (Bowie’s MainMan), he took Williamson with him to England to draft a new rhythm section. They auditioned scores of foppish glammed-out rockers, but Williamson wasn’t impressed. “You really can’t play music that’s any good with people you don’t like. That’s just a fact! Everyone in those days was all flowery shirts and poofy frilly hair and all, and I just couldn’t relate to these guys. Iggy may have seen it differently, but in the end, I said to him, ‘You know, I think we oughtta just call up Ron and Scott’ — and he didn’t disagree.”

The Asheton brothers were enthusiastic, but they had to adjust to the new rules: Ron Asheton moved from guitar to bass, and this time out, Iggy was the star. Williamson views the whole thing pragmatically: “You know, the fact is that Iggy has always been a dynamic performer. And whoever was managing us, or whoever the record company was, they always wanted to make Iggy a star, and the band was secondary. Luckily, Iggy never looked at it that way, at least not during Raw Power.”

Williamson’s contribution to the Raw Power sound cannot be understated — whereas the group’s prior incarnation was notable for its primitivism, the 34 minutes that make up this album see lunkhead riffs getting replaced with serpentine friction and hip-moving thunder, and the Stooges re-emerging far sexier and darker. Sinewy shakers like “Death Trip” and “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” erupt with Motown violence, Williamson’s guitar spewing endless mirror shards all over the proceedings.

The title track and “Search and Destroy” are now the kind of canonized rockers that infants play along to on Rock Band — but in 1973, this was dangerous stuff, in some ways too dangerous for the music business to know what to do with. The album, like Fun House, was deemed unlistenable. “Back then, if you couldn’t sell records, you couldn’t survive. And no one bought the record. When we made the record, we didn’t care — because we were completely delusional!”

That delusion may have fueled the album’s creation, but its head-on collision with reality meant the death of the band in 1974. Williamson went on to work with Pop on projects that included 1977’s Kill City and 1979’s New Values. But the end of the ‘70s saw him leave the music business — at least until Iggy extended an invitation to revisit RawPower one more time.

“The thing about that album is that it’s so far ahead of its time,” Williamson reflects. “And it’s amazing to me to see how many people sort of imitated the style and sound — so much so that now the album sounds contemporary. In those days, it didn’t sound like anything else around. So it’s satisfying, definitely — I like to say that the album was a success, it just took a while!”

IGGY & THE STOOGES | House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | August 31 at 8 pm | $45–$65 | 888.693.2583 or hob.com/boston

RIP: Ron Asheton (1948-2009) (Boston Phoenix, 1/12/09)

 

 

 

THE WEIRDNESS: We owe the vortex of sonic mayhem that is Fun House to Ron Asheton.

Ron Asheton’s off-and-on relationship with James “Iggy Pop” Osterberg Jr. was both a blessing and a curse. Without Mr. Pop and his crucial proto-punk antics, Asheton could never have become what he’ll be remembered as: a pivotal figure in the development of electric-guitar-based rock and roll. On the other hand, the wacky high jinks of his out-of-control vocalist were always going to overshadow the sonic revolution taking place behind the mic stand. As the Stooges became Iggy & the Stooges, Asheton would find himself muscled out of the spotlight, until Iggy went solo, Bowie-style, and Asheton was left to fend for himself in the wasteland of mid-’70s rock.

Asheton died alone last week, and his body lay undiscovered for days after his death in his Ann Arbor home. There are some grim parallels between the expanse of time during which his corpse went unnoticed and the decades after the disbandment of the Stooges during which his guitar genius went unrecognized. He could claim prime involvement in three of rock’s most seminal LPs: 1969′s The Stooges, 1970′s Fun House, and 1973′s Raw Power. Each record is a world unto itself, and the way that Asheton pushed the Stooges from their origins as a cabal of talentless volume-addicted cretins into a primal musical machine that combined drone, funk, psychedelic sludge, and oddly touching light-and-dark melody is astonishing. Consider that there was once a world where the endless vortex of sonic mayhem that is Fun House did not exist — someone had to create it. For this achievement alone, we should take a silent moment to thank Ron Asheton.

 

He was by all accounts a level-headed guy who held together the drug-addled psychotic mania that was late-’60s/early ’70s Iggy Pop. And even when Pop ditched the band, hooked up with guitarist James Williamson, went to England, auditioned a soccer stadium’s worth of talentless punters, and came sniveling back to Motown to beg the Asheton brothers (Ron and drummer Scott) to rejoin the band they’d been summarily laid off from, Ron (now relegated to bass!) took it in stride. I’d like to think that it wasn’t just because he was broke and this was a paying gig. Asheton knew the value of true rock alchemy, and he must have known that he could create another monolith of rock awesomeness with Pop. Which he did, with the breathtaking Raw Power, a record that will forever define, in song, what being a rebellious teenager in Western society in the late 20th century sounded like. Full of sex, drugs, and speaker-cone-shredding solos, Raw Power is the pinnacle of perfection of the now-fading rock-LP format.

Post-Stooges, Asheton continued to plug along, first in his all-star combo the New Order (no, not that New Order) with the MC5′s drummer. When that didn’t pan out, he trudged on with a series of unsuccessful bands, from Destroy All Monsters in the mid ’70s to the New Race in the early ’80s to Dark Carnival in the early ’90s. But he could never escape his legacy as the backbone of the Stooges. Fortunately, he lived long enough to be part of the recent Stooges reunion — though the album it produced, 2007′s The Weirdness, is at best an inadequate addition to the Stooges catalogue and at worst an atrocity that should stand as a warning to reuniting bands. The subsequent tour was a delight for both fans and the band, and it was heartening to see Asheton finally getting his due as the influential figure in post-’60s hard rock that he was. It’s a shame that he was taken from us so soon, especially when he was just getting back into the business of blowing minds. But it’s solace to consider that he lived long enough to receive some recognition. Rest in peace, brother.

Ron Asheton (Weekly Dig, 4/9/07)

Stooges, circa 2007, left to right: Ron Asheton, Iggy Pop, Scott Asheton

In his seminal rockist bible Rock And The Pop Narcotic, Joe Carducci states “Rock is rock and roll made conscious of itself as small band music.” It is pretty unarguable that no band did more, at least in its infancy and early rise to power, to wave the freak flag of “small band music”, or “Rock”, as Ypsilanti, Michigan’s The Stooges.  Carducci also posits that an artist like David Bowie represents the “Pop Narcotic”, or the way that the biz steals the soul of the band of rock cretins by introducing them to fame, money, and blow the way that, say, 2001 introduced the monolith to prehistoric man. Bowie-damage definitely altered the course of Stooges history forever, for better or worse (both, I’d say); regardless, the original Stooges are back to re-write history and restore order and all of that nonsense. I caught up with Stooges guitarist and co-founder Ron Asheton (“You don’t know him? Shame on you!” – a rockist) on the eve of their impending US tour supporting their new album The Weirdness.

DIG: What was it like getting the band back together, playing again with Iggy and your brother?

RA: For this reunion, I was a little nervous meeting Iggy – I hadn’t seen him in, I don’t know, 25 years. It was like going to meet your ex-wife to talk about your son’s graduation. Or imprisonment. But once we talked and then had some food and wine, it was like all the years disappeared, and it was like “Remember the time we did this!” And that was cool – all the stuff we did together back then really made it easy for us to reconnect now.

DIG: Has it been difficult or odd to revisit a band that so perfectly encapsulated not only your youth, and the youth of so many fans, but essentially the youthful arrogant phase of rock’s third wave?

RA: No, it’s been easy, because now everyone’s caught up, it took the world all that time to catch up! I mean, you know, back then, we didn’t really sell a lot of records. We had some fans, but… well, here’s a good Boston story for you: we opened up [in 1969] for Ten Years After at the Boston Tea Party, and I’m going “Well, it’s an odd bill, but you know, it’s music, and people are hip”, right? So we go on, and we play, we do two songs back to back, and then there’s that little pause, and it was dead quiet. Well, except for three or four people applauding, and those people came from Philadelphia, and they were the president of our fan club and her friends! So we didn’t go over very big – but now, today, all the years have caught up, people are familiar with the songs, etc. It’s really the best of all times, now.

DIG: It’s interesting that you say that, because it seems that when you were at your “heyday”, it was more of a confrontational thing, I guess, but–

RA: Yeah, the world was stiffer then. The 60’s were interesting times because it was still that us-against-them attitude, the rockers against the establishment sort of thing. But still, I mean, at the time, the Funhouse record got dissed! Now, people say “Oh, it’s a classic record”, but back then, not too many people were saying good things.

When we started, we just flubbed along, doing the best we could. We kind of just lived our lives day-to-day back then, see what happens, and everyone hopes to be successful. But you know, in the back of our minds, we knew, you know, that we weren’t Linda Rondstadt. We weren’t really going to score any commercial success. But at the same time, in the beginning, when we started, labels were just signing anyone, everybody got a shot. It seemed pretty easy to get somebody to listen to you and wind up with something.

And then somehow, it became more of a business, in the Raw Power era – Iggy’s management, they had Bowie, they had Mott The Hoople, and that was their little trip, that was Iggy’s deal. Iggy never treated us like we were employees, but we all, James Williamson also, were hired employees of Iggy’s management to be Iggy’s band, and I was like “Wait a minute, that’s business”. [Raw Power] was actually his first solo album. But now, everything’s so bizzed out, with manufactured boy bands, girl bands. There’s just so much business now.

DIG: To me, The Stooges represents, so perfectly, the ideal of a rock band as a democratic populist entity, so of course the rock and roll machine had to come in and pervert it and destroy it. Raw Power is a pretty undeniable rock album – but at the same time, it almost represents a certain fall from innocence.

RA: That’s a good way to put it – I like the record, but seeing the slow agonizing death of the band, being dumped by management, going through managers who just took our money, living on $15 a day, etc. There was no pot of gold, no pay day on Friday. I’ll go back and listen to the album, I like the song “Search and Destroy”, but it’s very bittersweet.

DIG: It seems like for most Stooges fans, you are either a Funhouse fan, or a Raw Power fan; this reunion, for obvious reasons, is for Funhouse fans. Is this reunion a kind of re-conceptualization of The Stooges as being all about the first two albums, the pre-Williamson period, kind of making *that* the definitive Stooges?

RA: This is the good Stooges, the fun Stooges.