Raw Power's Got No Place to Go: Things Are Not What They Seem (Part II)
What would you do with the find of a lifetime? In the last installment, Tuxedomoon’s Steven Brown found the “lost” tape for The Stooges’ "Raw Power" in his attic. But he wasn't the only one looking.
As we learned in Part I, when Steven Brown of post-punk band Tuxedomoon was preparing to leave Belgium, he stumbled onto something extraordinary: The missing multitrack reel for The Stooges’ classic 1973 album Raw Power, sitting innocently in his attic. But when Henry Rollins and Rollins Band guitarist Chris Haskett reunited Stooges vocalist Iggy Pop with the priceless artifact, he seemed strangely ambivalent. Here’s why.
A technical note before we begin: Before the advent of digital recording, music was typically recorded onto a “multitrack reel,” a reel of magnetic audio recording tape that could store information on anywhere from 1 to 24 tracks (in isolated cases even more), depending on the tape deck used to make the recording. From there, it would typically be recorded onto a “master reel” utilizing one or two channels (mono or stereo) which would hold the completed and mixed program material.
Here’s what’s important: An album can be remastered from a master reel (reprocessed to improve overall audio quality or highlight certain aspects of the mix), but it cannot be remixed from it. To do that—changing the balance and treatment of individual tracks—you need the multitrack reel, such as the fabled missing one we’ve been discussing.
The Art of Finding Lost Things: Reissue Producer Bruce Dickinson
Bruce Dickinson—yes, THE Bruce Dickinson (but not THAT Bruce Dickinson)—has worn many hats during a long and storied career in the music industry. In 1995, one of his duties was producing reissues. And as a longtime fan of The Stooges, he was on a quest: To find the legendary missing multitrack reel for the band’s third album.
Bruce: So as we all know, the story goes that Iggy was always morose about the end result of the Raw Power album and how it sounded. They had spent all the money, and there wasn't really enough left to mix the album. And Iggy's manager at the time, Tony DeFries, went to Clive Davis—who was the head of Columbia Records—and he said:
“Look this is going to be a great album, but we need more money to mix it.” And Clive said: “Well, they spent all the money!” And Tony said: “Look, I manage David Bowie and I have Mott the Hoople on your label. We've had some success here. How about we get David to mix the album? He's a friend of Iggy's. Will that work?” Clive goes: “Fine. He's got a day and a half to do it.”
Chris Haskett (Rollins Band guitarist): “I had the privilege of working with David Bowie in 1999, and I asked him about [mixing Raw Power]. I was just like: ‘Dude, how the fuck did you end up with a record sounding like that?’ And he said all he was given was a stereo mix of instruments, second channel lead guitar, and vocals. He says he was given four channels. That's what he told me. I mean, I believe him, but who gave that to him and why? I don't know. He said he never saw the multitrack and he was intrigued.”
Clearly, fortune wasn’t on The Stooges’ side. Then again, as admirably told by
in his profile of Iggy Pop’s and James Williamson’s Kill City, Pop’s flagrantly self-destructive behavior hardly helped matters.Danny Kadar (remix engineer): I mean, Iggy also mentioned that when he met Clive Davis, Clive basically said: “Oh, you're the guy that's trying to ruin my company with that record?”
Bruce: [Since then], Iggy had always wanted to remix it but never been able to, because the tapes were missing. Jeff Jones was running Sony Legacy, and I was working as a producer [there], and he called me into his office. Jeff says: “What do you know about these multi tracks for Raw Power? And I said: “They've been missing for years. I've been trying to find them!”
And Jeff says: “Well, what's this about Henry Rollins wanting to take the two- track master, put it up onto a multi track reel, and add bass?”
And I said: “Yes, I've heard that story. I've heard it from Art Collins. It comes from Iggy. Iggy's not in favor of it.”
Don Fleming (producer, archivist, sometime Stooges collaborator): “There are cases I've heard of with mixes where [musicians will play an instrumental overdub] live because they don't have enough tracks, and they'll do it in the mix as a live track through the board [to the master reel]. And then when people try to remix it later, they're missing this key element. There's a couple of [projects] where it happened back in the 90s, when the major labels were re-releasing stuff. And people were like: There’s usually an extra thing you'd expect to be there and they realize it's not on the multi. People would do that live to the mix at the time.”
Bruce: The reason Iggy's not really in favor of it—or at best, lukewarm—I think [he] just felt it kind of kicked the can down the road. It's not a perfect solution. I said you can get something that has more bass by putting bass on the multi track and then remixing it, you know, with the original two track master. But it's still not going to sound quite right, and it's not going to sound authentic, and it's not the real bass, as was laid down by [Ron Asheton] at the time.
At that point Jeff just raises his hands, and goes:
“Okay, find the damn tapes. Whatever it takes, just send me the bill!”
The Theory of Multiple Discovery
It’s said that when a great notion is about to manifest, it appears in several forms and places at once. It would seem this is what happened with Steven Brown’s discovery of the reel in his attic. But unbeknownst to him, Bruce Dickinson had already been working behind the scenes for years to find it.
Bruce: Now there was no paper trail, but I did over the years make calls and ended up talking to people in LA at Western Recorders, and they checked, and in one case, actually got a hold of the guy who’d owned one of the studios. [He said]: All the multi tracks were shipped back to CBS in London. They checked; they don't have them and they haven't had them since 1974.
I don't know what you mean by [the Belgian reel], but it doesn't really come into play. Now, it makes sense that there would be European copies of the master reel. [CBS Studios on Whitfield Street in London, where Raw Power was recorded] was sold, and they dumped everything into Dumpsters outside. There was a lot of Dumpster diving, and there were an awful lot of Iggy tapes, Pink Floyd tapes, I believe Genesis, all sorts of things. So I'm just guessing, but knowing how things work—and having been in the music business my entire life—it's a very plausible scenario that that's where that tape in Belgium came from.
But it was neither here nor there, because Columbia Records had the real deal, first-generation master tapes in their possession the whole time. Unfortunately, that's all they had. A few other scraps. There was one multi track reel that had a couple of songs partially. I mean, we're talking about a number of tapes that you could literally count on one hand.
Seth: So, to be clear: The tapes were recorded in London, shipped to the States, and then shipped back to London to be mixed?
Bruce: Yeah, that [was] completely normal. I mean, when I worked with the Divinyls we were shipping stuff from Australia back and forth, you know. I mean, it's a little hairy to do it, but it [was] commonplace. So anyway, the tapes go back to CBS Records in London. The tapes could have gone to somebody's office, and when that person gets fired or moves on, whatever's in their office gets tossed in a Dumpster. So that was my biggest fear. So at that point I call Richard Rowe and I told him the story. He was the head archivist for Columbia. I said: “Can you get into Whitfield Street?” He laughed. He goes: “Well, you know who owns Whitfield Street now? We do!”
I asked him: “What about these tapes?”
“Bruce, I've been through that. I've taken every CBS reel there was out of there—and do you know the story about the Dumpsters? There's nothing there that I didn't pull out of the archives.”
And I said: “Okay, Humor me. You have permission to go in and tear the place apart.”
And he's like: “Okay, I will. I will do that this afternoon.”
The next morning, Rowe called Dickinson:
“Well, guess what I have right here on my desk sitting right in front of me? Nine beautiful two-inch tapes from the Raw Power sessions.”
I said: “Where were they?”
He laughs. “Well, the work was done in Studio A, and right outside the door of Studio A I noticed another little door, and it's a closet, and this door, I swear to you, has not been opened since 1974. It's a cleaning equipment closet; there are cleaning products that have decayed, and they don't make any more, and someone just stuffed the tapes there, and they have been there collecting dust in their boxes since 1974.”
After all that—the discovery of the “lost” multitrack reel in a Belgian attic and a years-long, multi-continent search for the genuine article—the tapes for one of the greatest rock albums of all time had been sitting in a forgotten cleaning closet all along.
Dickinson sent word to Iggy Pop through his then-manager, Art Collins. Returning home the next day, he heard a distinctively gravelly voice leaving a message his answering machine: “I hear you have something that belongs to me.”
“I grabbed the phone and said: ‘Well, it's in London right now, but I can have it here in two days. Would you be interested in finally getting the album the way you always wanted it to sound?’
“And he said: ‘That's pretty irresistible’.”
Coming up in Part III: We’ll learn how Bruce Dickinson and mix engineer Danny Kadar made sense of a notoriously jumbled-sounding album. And we’ll get crucial context from Don Fleming, the archivist and producer who had a front-row seat to the inner workings of the Stooges reunion following the Raw Power remix.