Photo by Mick Rock.


1970s


“Oh God. Has he got it out again? For pity’s sake James, put it away.” The Stooges with Ig.


ASS POWER ACTION It’s a Stooges jamboree with the arrival of two vintage live sets and a deluxe edition of their 1973 masterpiece.


IGGY & THE STOOGES Move Ass Baby Lemon CD www.cherryred.co.uk


Coinciding with Sony’s lavishly- expanded Raw Power reissue and The Stooges playing it through at Hammersmith


Apollo in May, this resolutely lo-fi grab bag comes as something of a head-scratcher. Not the first five highly-familiar tracks, taken from the July 1972 Olympic Studios sessions already showcased on Easy Action’s six-CD Heavy Liquid box set, but the mysterious Detroit Rehearsals which, rather than tackle the Raw Power canon, consists of song fragments, blues jams, and covers, including ‘I’m A Man’ and Skip James’ ‘I’m So Glad’. The freeform ‘Old King Live Forever’


features Iggy’s ever-entertaining surreal musings over Hendrix-like guitar swathes while ‘I Come From Nowhere’ is worth the price of admission for the immortal line “I got a mind so weird, I ain’t got a beard”. ‘Delta Blues Shuffle’ is six minutes of sketchy guitar noodling. It’s the sound of The Stooges at play,


offering a previously unheard bootleg-style new glimpse at that period, so of interest to obsessed completists. Kris Needs


IGGY & THE STOOGES Raw Power: Deluxe Edition Columbia/Legacy 2-CD www.legacyrecordings.com James Osterburg’s iconic, recorded-in-London


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comeback project with The Stooges (the intrepid James Williamson on guitars, the late Ron Asheton on bass and Scott Asheton on drums)


was released in February 1973 and proved a sonic assault in the face of the then prevalent mellow-rock and glam sounds. Along with their two earlier Elektra albums (The Stooges and Fun House) it provided the primal, three-chord blueprint for the coming punk-rock explosion. This two-disc set devotes the first to a


newly remastered, ultimate fidelity version of Power’s eight-song 34-minute aural blitzkrieg that restores David Bowie’s original mix in all its glory – as legend has it, Bowie’s mixes were at the mercy of old-school mastering engineers in ’72 who had never heard anything like Raw Power before, and their final EQ proved it. And you didn’t think ‘Search And Destroy’, ‘Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell’, ‘Death Trip’ and ‘Penetration’ could get any rawer, eh? Listen up.


Disc two, titled Georgia Peaches, is a one-


hour concert performance from Atlanta, Georgia’s notorious rock club Richards circa October ’73 where Iggy & The Stooges played two sets a night, with one extended set on Friday and Saturday evenings. Many live shows were recorded at Richards for use on syndicated FM radio shows like King Biscuit Flower Hour, but the airwaves were never ready for The Stooges and the pristine soundboard tapes languished from ’73 on. Tellingly, Iggy and the band were constantly


updating the set list and busy writing new songs – witness the appearance of such heart-


stopping gems as ‘Cock In my Pocket’, ‘Heavy Liquid’ and ‘Open Up And Bleed’. A pair of bonus tracks, also previously unreleased, close the disc – ‘Doojiman’ is a Raw Power sessions outtake and ‘Head On’ is a CBS studio rehearsal performance from ’73. Two booklet essays chronicle in detail the


band’s evolution and the album’s creation. British journalist (and Shindig! scribe) Kris Needs focuses on Iggy’s sojourn in London while veteran Michigan writer Brian J Bowe draws the bead on the American side of things – The Stooges’ origins in Detroit and Ann Arbor, their return to the States after the London sessions and a coda that brings the tale up to date. Gary von Tersch


IGGY & THE STOOGES You Want My Action Easy Action 4-CD box set www.easyaction.co.uk


Touted as the missing link between the first two Stooges albums and Raw Power, You Want My Action is actually a portrait of a band undergoing a


transformation and trying to stay on its feet against a tide of ever escalating narcotic intake by most of its members. It’s a band on a mission nevertheless. Rhythm-wise, new bassist Jimmy Recca is


a more than capable addition to Scott Asheton’s solid drumming, whilst Ron Asheton and the recently recruited James Williamson trade tasty lead licks and killer guitar riffs with all the swagger of a couple of outlaw


gunfighters about to notch up another handful of kills. Four different dates, three different


venues, all the same set virtually. An inchoate ‘I Got A Right’ will probably be familiar to anyone with more than a passing interest in The Stooges, but the other tracks are previously unreleased and hitherto little heard for that matter, such as ‘You Don’t Want My Name’, ‘Fresh Rag’, ‘Do You Want My Love’ and ‘Dead Body’. The speed and ferocity displayed on ‘Big Time Bum’ is as punk as anything they’d ever do, but there are only really a few portents of what was to come on Raw Power a couple of years later. To appreciate these recordings you really


have to accept them for what they are – cassette recordings made by members of the audience. Iggy’s vocals in particular suffer at times as a result of the sound quality, and overall The Electric Circus shows in New York City probably have the edge over the others, both in terms of performance and sound quality.That said, all things considered, the overall clarity is still remarkably good. The more casual Stooges fan might


question the validity of releasing four discs of ostensibly similar material, in which case they might be better directed towards the single album vinyl edition of the first Electric Circus gig, also released by Easy Action. But, this four CD collection archiving as it does such a significant transitory phase in the band’s career, and beautifully packaged as it is, should be indispensable to Stooges enthusiasts. Destined to become something of a


Stooges Holy Grail in coming years. Rich Deakin


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