Still Raw

It's one of those bizarre stories that the beautiful mistress that is rock'n'roll throws at us only every now and then. Band makes a record, it flops, band splits up, record becomes posthumously massive and decades later the band get back together and get their due.

But for decades, James Williamson didn't want his due. He split with frontman and creative collaborator Iggy Pop and rhythm section Ron and Scott Asheton not long after the record was released to little acclaim and even less commercial success, shunned music in general and didn't look back.

He became an electrical engineer, got a job in Silicon Valley, started a family and forgot all about what he referred to as his “failed record and failed career”. Even when people started crediting the album as one of the most influential rock'n'roll releases of all time, Williamson at first didn't know and then wouldn't accept it.

“Well, I didn't really initially accept that, it wasn't really until probably the mid-'90s that people got enough access to me to keep feeding me all this information,” he explains. “I really was out of the music scene and wasn't paying any attention to it. To me, we had a failed record and a failed career and that was the end of it.

“So, slowly as the internet came about and people got more access to me, then I slowly became begrudgingly accepting that it might be important and it became more and more clear that it was important. It's been kinda hard; they've dragged me into that realisation.

“I guess now, especially with the Hall Of Fame and all that sort of thing, you can't really deny it. So I guess I have to accept it. It's a big honour to be given that kind of praise.”

Begrudging as it he might've seemed of the album's vast influence, these days Williamson is hopeful that his work, which he admits to constructing naïvely, may have had a genuine impact on modern music.

“I didn't know what the hell I was doing, really,” he says. “I wrote a bunch of music and worked with Iggy to make them into songs. We all liked them at the time but it was a very, very, very big disappointment at the time because nobody else did, but here we are all these years later and I'm astonished every day with different people who I would never think would like that album and they love that album.

“But the world has changed, the music scene has changed, and I like to think that we had a part in making it change. Now our sound is pretty well accepted and that's something I'm certainly proud of.”

The sessions for Raw Power, an enchantingly ugly sounding record, happened with scant supervision from the band's record label, Columbia Records. Was the naïveté of a 22-23 year old James Williamson, let loose with the manic Iggy Pop, a blessing?

“It probably was,” the guitarist ruminates. “There was a combination of factors. One was that our management at the time got very, very involved in David Bowie because he was a cash cow and he was starting to break at the time. He got all their attention at the time which meant that they weren't paying attention to us, which was a good thing, because then we didn't have to have somebody producing the album and telling us what to do – we could do whatever we wanted to do. We got to make a very unique record that I'm sure would not have been possible had we had outside, adult supervision.”

The flipside of this was the relatively low-fidelity of the record, possibly part of the reason it didn't perform particularly well commercially.

“It was very, very poorly recorded,” Williamson admits. “Part of that was our inexperience; Iggy's not a particularly technical-type guy and he was kinda running the show because he had made two albums and I had made none. I think our engineer was competent, but he was just the staff engineer at CBS Records in London – I'm not even sure what his name was – he was competent but we made him do a bunch of stuff that he usually would not have done, so the net result is that the recording is not as good as we would have liked it to be, in hindsight. But on the other hand it has a unique sound and nothing else really sounds like it.”

The change of pace Williamson adopted with his new life fit well with him. “I've never regretted doing that,” he says of going into a professional career. “The music thing is very intense, especially the way we used to do it in the beginning. We were doing everything viscerally; everything was day-to-day and tough.

“To go to something as cerebral as electrical engineering, learning things like calculus, was just mind blowing. I think that experience reshaped some of my thinking and developed some thinking that I would never have experienced just as a musician.”

So drastic was his change of heart about music, he completely stopped playing guitar. “I stopped. I couldn't reconcile the two things, both were so demanding on my time and energies and I also by then had started a family and so with that on top of everything else, I just let the music go,” he concedes. “In a way I kind of regret that, my son has gotten very interested in music these days and I probably should have taught him how to play guitar when he was young and could still learn it, but I didn't.”

Williamson admits that these days members of Iggy & The Stooges are afforded a far more comfortable life on the road. “I don't have to do all the day-to-day stuff and this band is so well established that we don't have to do a lot of the stuff that the younger bands have to do – schlepping stuff around and going town to town just to eke out a living,” he says. “All the tough parts aren't there but all the good parts are there.”

There has been a fair amount of talk about this being the final time Iggy & The Stooges will come to Australia, but Williamson says he can't confirm anything at this stage. They just take things year by year.

“I don't know,” he says. “The fact is, we're not getting any younger. For quite some time we've been doing a year at a time but at some point we're gonna have to stop, because we just won't be able to go on. It's gonna be Iggy's call, because he's the one who's taken the most beating out there doing what he does; imagine yourself doing what he does out there at his age? It's really unbelievable that he's even doing it.”

LONG TIME COMING

Raw Power wasn't the only record released around this time that sold poorly but became hugely influential – here are three others.

Love – Forever Changes

The infamous summer of love that hit San Francisco in 1967 gave birth to some incredible music. Even those averse to the hippie culture ought to be able to relish its prettiness and its grandiosity, as well as the dark premonitions that songwriter Arthur Lee saw coming for the movement. The record is widely considered to be Arthur Lee and Love's masterpiece, but was by far their worst performing record upon its release – peaking at #168 on the Billboard charts in 1968.

Gene Clark – No Other

Famously one of the most extravagant flops in the history of recorded music, Gene Clark of The Byrds' fourth solo album was to be the bane of his existence. The 1974 record reportedly cost over $100,000 to make – the value of which 40 years ago is obviously astronomical – and when Clark presented it to Geffen Records, they were incensed at the uncommercial nature of the songs and barely promoted its release. It stalled at #144 on the US charts. But the songs that Clark wrote, together with the ambitious and intricate production of Thomas Jefferson Kaye, stand up today as some of the most illustrious slices of folk-pop of any era.

The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico

The 1967 classic – as it is now heralded – entered the US charts at number #199 and peaked at #171. Even critics stayed away from it at the time, very few reviews of the record written before the mid-late 1970s exist. Of course the influence of the record barely even needs to be mentioned; just about every self-respecting rock band has lifted something from this brilliant LP; from the cute chime of opener Sunday Morning, to the stomping I'm Waiting For The Man and the stoned squalling of Run Run Run, it's hard to believe this record was so unsuccessful.

Iggy & The Stooges will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 23 March - West Coast Blues N Roots Festival, Fremantle Park WA
Monday 25 March - Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide SA
Wednesday 27 March - Festival Hall, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 30 March - Bluesfest, Byron Bay NSW
Tuesday 2 April - Hordern Pavilion, Sydney NSW