How James Williamson Revitalised The Stooges Without Iggy Pop

When Iggy & The Stooges – the name that seminal Michigan proto-punks The Stooges adopted for their final incarnation – split asunder in early-1974 (largely due to frontman Iggy Pop’s drug-fuelled erraticism), they had in their kitbag a swag of new songs in various stages of completion that they’d been working on for their next long-player. Their now-revered album Raw Power had been out for a year but sold dismally despite rave reviews, resulting in them being dropped from their label; the band was basically in freefall. The new tracks that Pop and guitarist James Williamson – the songwriting team responsible for Raw Power – had been accruing were essentially left by the wayside, destined to live on only in shoddy bootleg recordings and dusty memories.

Until now. Williamson – who post-Stooges had studied electrical engineering and forged an immensely successful career, ultimately finding himself vice-president of technical standards at Sony – had never forgotten this batch of songs which had basically been ignored for all these years, except for by the most hardcore of fans. Upon his return to The Stooges’ ranks in 2009 some of these songs began seeping back into their live sets until, finally, Williamson decided to record them for posterity once and for all. With Pop deigning to be involved (although giving his blessing), Williamson enlisted the current Stooges touring line-up – Mike Watt (of Minutemen and Firehose fame) on bass, Steve Mackay on saxophone and Toby Dammit on drums – and laid down the tracks in the studio, then roped in a slew of guest singers from all corners of the rock’n’roll spectrum to take the vocal reins. The result is Re-Licked, an astounding collection which – even given the calibre of those involved – somehow manages to add up to more than the sum of its considerable parts.

"I just knew what great songs they were, and I’ve really wanted to [revisit them] for a very long time."
 

“I feel the same way,” Williamson marvels. “Think about it from my perspective, I wrote those songs and I was expecting to like it too but I wasn’t expecting to be blown away, and I am! There was magic going on. The musicians were incredible, and the vocalists came in and they’re all Stooges fans to begin with – they’ve been living with these songs for their whole life – and they got a chance to sing ‘em, and they just brought it! There’s just this enthusiasm on the record that is really, really remarkable. The vocalists were all psyched and just having fun and making jokes – it was really a good time.”

It must be an especially poignant experience for Williamson, given that he’s been waiting to hear fully-realised versions of these songs for decades.

“Yeah it has been, I’ve been planning [to record these songs since] they were written,” he laughs. “They were written to be recorded as the follow-up album to Raw Power – we had every belief that they would be – and we’d written them and were playing them on the road to fine-tune them. Consequently you hear bootlegs with six or seven versions of songs with different lyrics and all that kind of stuff, because we were trying things out. But fast forward to the last five years when I’ve been back playing music, and I would hear those songs from bootlegs and I would just cringe every time I heard them because the sound quality on most of them is really, really bad – I just knew what great songs they were, and I’ve really wanted to [revisit them] for a very long time.

“In fact, before we recorded (2013’s fifth album) Ready To Die Iggy and I discussed doing just that – we both know that the fans have always wanted this record, but we rejected that idea because his voice has changed an awful lot over the years so for him to sing those songs today would be asking for the comparison between Raw Power and the young Stooges to the old Stooges. That’s what the media does with any new Stooges album, they immediately compare it to Raw Power – especially with me playing on it – so we rejected that and recorded Ready To Die. I think that was the right decision and I’m proud of that record but we still hadn’t done this record, and I think that’s what led me to undertake this project. It’s been a real challenge, but a labour of love type of thing. They sound new – it’s pretty amazing, I can’t really explain it except to say that everybody was really enjoying doing it and everybody was putting their heart into it.”

Musically the band itself is in fine fettle – their bond forged by a solid gigging schedule – although other commitments meant that some ring-ins eventually contributed to Re-Licked as well.

“They played on eight of the tracks; when we had finished touring last September we had been playing several of these tracks live already so they already knew them,” Williamson explains of the touring band’s contribution. “Towards the end of the tour I had come up with a different arrangement for Open Up And Bleed, which was something I wanted to do first and what kicked everything off, so we could do four or five of [the tracks on Re-Licked] without even thinking about it. Some of the other ones required a little more work, but once the first eight were done Mike had to go off and tour with his other band in Europe and Toby got busy with some projects and stuff, so basically I really didn’t want to delay this album anymore so I went out and got some new musicians. I was able to get Simone Marie Butler from Primal Scream – who is an amazing bass player – and also Michael Urbano who’s another amazing drummer, and then I got Gregg Foreman from Cat Power and The Delta 72 who’s an incredible keyboard guy; so those people came in and finished off the album with me and we just had a blast playing together. It was a lot of fun for me to play with a new band and everything, and we just clicked right away, so it really sounds good.”

When it came time for Re-Licked’s vocals Williamson didn’t want a stream of Iggy clones, so he co-opted a disparate array of singers each with their own well-defined personality.

“It was a combination [of things I was after] – certainly the style of each one of them was very important, you couldn’t put Slipknot on a Stooges song, although the singer wanted to try! That just wasn’t going to work,” the guitarist laughs. “The style was important, and I knew several of them and knew their work and stuff so it was easy for me to say, ‘Okay, yeah that guy would work really well on this track’, but then there were others who were recommendations or whatever and I had no idea [about them], so I had to go and listen to some of their stuff and see what they were like. They also needed to have the context – have they ever even heard a Stooges song before? – and as it turns out they all were huge Stooges fans, and they were people who had listened to these tracks their whole lives really. You take a guy like [Primal Scream frontman] Bobby Gillespie, you don’t even need to send him the track – he knows the song by heart! There was a lot of that, and it was wonderful. When I told [former Dead Kennedys vocalist] Jello Biafra about the project he literally demanded to sing Head On The Curve. I’m serious, he demanded to sing it! So I said, ‘Okay, let’s give it a try’ and I had no idea, but he just came in and just killed that track. It was all like that – what can I say, sometimes everything just works right.”

One imagines that Biafra is probably a hard man to deny when he’s got his heart set on something.

“He can be pretty persuasive, and he doesn’t take no for an answer,” Williamson chuckles. “He’s not all that easy to control in the studio either, he’s a guy with a lot of energy and he talks a lot. Trying to produce him is a little bit of a challenge, it’s about managing the energy so you get something at the end of the day, but he was so well-prepared – he was just all over that track, and you can really hear what a great job he did. I’m not that familiar with what he’s done recently, but people have told me that they haven’t heard him sing like that in ages – he just completely tore that up.”

Williamson explains that the vocalists weren’t given strict instructions about their performances, rather just encouraged to be themselves and see what eventuated.

“That was exactly what I told them, just be themselves,” he recalls. “Everybody – especially the people who didn’t really know me – didn’t know what to expect, and you take a person like [The Kills’] Alison Mosshart; she flew from London to do her vocal in LA, that’s how much she wanted to do it. She comes in, and I’ve never met her before in my life – a totally cool chick – and once we were settled in and everything I kind of had to just remind her, ‘Hey, don’t be thinking about how Iggy did this or how The Stooges would do this – do it your way!’ And I did that with pretty much everybody and I think it let people loosen up quite a bit because they really don’t know what you want. I don’t need them to be Iggy – I could get Iggy – so it was really cool.”

One of the strengths of the vocalist selection for Re-Licked is the way that old hands like Mark Lanegan and Biafra rub up against members of the next rock generation, such as Mario Cuomo from young Chicago punks The Orwells.

"He can be pretty persuasive, and he doesn’t take no for an answer."

“That was a suggestion from Jon Sidel who’s the A&R guy at BMG, my publisher, and he had suggested Mario and also had suggested Alison, and I thought it really brought a lot to the party,” Williamson recounts. “Mario was fantastic – I think he does [I’m Sick Of You] really great. I was very happy with the way that it worked out. And then you’ve got guys like Bobby who’s practically in The Stooges, and then others who are completely outside the whole thing like Caroline Wonderland, who if you listen to her tracks is just phenomenal. She’s an incredible talent. She’s usually more in the blues genre, but that woman plays all the time – every day constantly on the road – and she’s just a force of nature. I don’t know what to say, I’ve played with her a few times live to do those songs – we did SxSW and we just did them up in San Francisco too – and she can bring it every night, the same thing. That voice is just a huge talent.”

Another female voice which tears through Re-Licked belongs to Lisa Kekaula from Californian garage-soul dynamos The Bellrays.

“Oh my God!” Williamson thunders. “That was another person that I didn’t know, and I was fortunate enough to have Joe Cardamone from The Icarus Line helping me out on this a lot – he sang Pinpoint Eyes – and one day we were in the studio together and he suggested Lisa, and I really only had one available track left at that point, which was I Gotta Right. So I said, ‘Sure, call her up’ and he called her up and she drove out and sang on that track cold, and my God! I was just, like, ‘Oh my God, I have to make a single out of this immediately!’ Then I had to find another track for her and everything and we didn’t even record it that day, oh man… that woman is just unbelievable!”

Williamson mentioned that they’ve recently aired a few of these tracks onstage – does he see an opportunity to tour Re-Licked properly popping up down the track?

“I’d love to, although ‘touring’ might be too strong a word,” he explains. “With fourteen singers it’s probably not realistic, but it is possible for us to do some showcases in major markets like LA, New York, Paris, Sydney and of course if you’re in Australia you have to do Melbourne too and then why not throw in a couple of other ones if you’re already down there? It’s something that’s going to require a promoter to step up and really put together some fairly large shows, because you can’t pull all of these people together from all over the world any other way. So I’m open to it, we’ve just got to get the promoters.”

And finally, it seems from a distance that The Stooges legacy seems to be growing rather than diminishing with time, as new legions of rock fans discover their amazing tunes and more and more established bands cite them as a major influence. Williamson attests that it seems this way from inside the bubble as well.

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that too,” he ponders. “I’m not exactly sure why, I dunno. Maybe it’s just a crescendo before we all fade into the ethers of time, I don’t know. I think maybe we’ve helped it some with the reunion and putting on some strong shows, and even this album will help perhaps – even though it’s not a Stooges album per se, in a way it is. It’s really a tribute to Iggy’s and my own songwriting if anything, and all of that helps the impression that people have of us that we could write songs that have held up against the test of time. Think about how many bands actually have albums that people still buy 40-some years later – not that many.”