The Dark Trinity

Iggy and the Stooges 1973 album 'Raw Power' is rightly judged (in my humble opinion) to be one of the most powerful and influential recordings in the bizarre and wonderful pantheon of rock music history.

It sounds literally too 'raw' and edgy to have been made (never mind released) in an era that included the saccharine glam rock of 'T-Rextasy', the pretty 'gypsy boy' warbling of David Essex or the Sunday school Ned Flanders weirdness of The Carpenters.

But then again, when it was released I was only 6 years-old with an extremely limited and viciously parochial point of view. The mainstream media in the UK and US at the time were also quite oblivious to this counter cultural communique for the dispossessed.

I think I can be forgiven though for letting it pass me by in '73 - I was more interested in beheading my Action Man with the garden shears than listening to some weird little American guy deconstructing consumer alienation to the sound of an electric chainsaw guitar.

Since then of course, many others have dug out this post-Sixties-pre-Punk gem, citing its almost Biblical importance to the roots of British Punk and New Wave - even Johnny Marr of the Smith's rattles out a regular eulogy...'eulogy' being the operative word, as, like Iggy himself, the album appears to have risen from the dead in the last few years - in the popular consciousness at least.

Interesting it was recorded in London too.
The Beat writer William Burroughs had been living in the city for a number of years when the album was being made. 'El Hombre invisible' was haunting the streets with his camera and tape machine, cutting up the Reality Studio and spitting the fragments back at the agents of control at ear-splitting volume.

In between these hours of subversion and the dreaming up of fresh Boschian literary landscapes, Burroughs dined and reminisced about old Tangier's with the painter Francis Bacon - what a fabulous creative duo they make...much more darkly (and bleakly) charismatic than Picasso and Braque.

Bacon's contorted figures remind me of Iggy doing his on-stage death Yoga, or one of Burroughs' sinewy, psychotic and lethal 'lost boys' ready to cleave the flesh from the unwary with their copper knives.

I like to think that all those influences were feeding into the making of Raw Power, that the album is the auditory document for the more darker London Bohemia of those times.

Funny too that Brixton Boy Bowie re-mixed most of the tracks for the the album before release, in LA in a single day. Ziggy had to have a hand in it all too of course.
The whole thing for me has echoes of Donald Cammell's 1970 movie 'Performance'.
There's lots of potential there: 'Turner' the decadent Rock star played by Mick Jagger is Iggy. The Edward Fox gangster character is Bacon's ex-lover, the 'rough-trade', slightly dodgy George Dyer...I'm working on the rest.

P.S. There's a vid on You-tube on the making of the album, but last I looked Sony were taking parts off.