Raw Power's Got No Place to Go: Bringing the "Lost" Stooges Album Home (Part I)

Many of us dream of stumbling on a priceless relic. But what if it was the missing master tape for Iggy and the Stooges’ classic “Raw Power”…and it’d been hanging out in your attic the whole time?

Image by Brian Walsby

“Is this real?”

The way Steven Brown remembers it, it was like a dream. It was 1993, and he was packing up his Brussels apartment in preparation for a move to Mexico. It was when he got to the attic that he saw the unmarked cardboard box; inside was a reel of 2” audio tape. There was little information save for a name scrawled in ink: “David Bowie.” Then it all came back to him, and he felt a sudden wave of fear. Right there, sitting in his attic, was the lost master reel for Iggy and the Stooges’ album Raw Power.

“I felt dread,” Brown related over email. “A huge responsibility.”

Even given the regard Stooges’ vocalist Iggy Pop has accumulated over the last decades, it’s difficult to overstate the impact of Raw Power. Both Kurt Cobain and Johnny Marr have cited it as their single favorite record—the breadth of the two guitarists’ disparate styles providing a hint of the record’s influence. And it’s safe to say that without it, punk would’ve sounded very, very different. The Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones shared that he learned guitar by taking speed and playing along to Raw Power.

But shortly after the album’s ignominious 1973 release—it peaked at #183 on the Billboard Top LPs chart—the master multitrack tape vanished, making it impossible to revisit the notoriously polarizing mix. Now it’d resurfaced—in Steven Brown’s attic. “I didn’t feel guilty,” he wrote. “[But I had] a huge responsibility to somehow return this item to its rightful owner.”

As one of the principals behind the experimental post-punk band Tuxedomoon, Brown was no stranger to storage areas full of junk. After forming in San Francisco in the late ‘70s, the band relocated first to New York and later Brussels, along the way picking up any number of musical collaborators, instruments, props and ephemera. That’s how the tape had come to him in the first place:

“Towards the end of my 12-year sojourn in Bruxelles, Patrick Miller was camping out in the attic of my apartment. Patrick was an old friend and former roommate from San Francisco; Tuxedomoon rehearsed for a time on the back porch of the apartment. So in retrospect it seems natural that Patrick would eventually get involved in music. [He] started to perform in the US and later in Europe under the name of Minimal Man.

“Patrick was a teller of tales. The problem was at times some of his tall tales would prove to be true and so one was never sure when to believe him. I remember Patrick recounting in his laconic drawl that while living in New York City, he had found the master tape to the Stooges’ Raw Power in a Dumpster. At the time I let it slide, figuring that this was one of his less believable tales.”

Tragically, Miller’s not available for comment. The famously debauched figure behind “antimusic” band Minimal Man, he died in 2003 after contracting hepatitis C. But Brown’s discovery set wheels in motion, some of which would have far-reaching consequences. In addition to returning a piece of stolen art to its creator, it opened the door to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to “fix” the original mix of Raw Power. And that’s exactly what happened: Raw Power was remixed and rereleased in 1997, sparking varying degrees of admiration, puzzlement, and scorn.

But this isn’t a critique of the 1997 Iggy Pop remix (or, for that matter, the original 1973 David Bowie mix). Rather, it’s the story of one very wayward audio tape, and how its rediscovery allowed us a fresh assessment of one of rock’s great “lost” albums. Later, in Part II of this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at how this challenging remix actually came together, meet some of the characters involved, and see how sometimes, things aren’t what they appear to be.

Life in the Stooges: “Everybody fucking hated us!”

The pioneers, they say, get all the arrows. Today, the Stooges are hailed as pathfinders. But half a century ago, things were very different. In 1972, they were dead in the water. Owing in part to tensions arising from the addition of second guitarist James Williamson in late 1970, brothers Ron and Scott Asheton (guitar and drums, respectively) had quit the band. Iggy Pop was descending into heroin addiction, and bassist Dave Alexander’s drinking was entering a terminal tailspin (he’d die in 1975, aged just 27). So when ardent fan David Bowie suggested the band decamp to London to record a comeback, Pop and Williamson—minus the Asheton brothers—jumped at the chance. But like nearly everything else relating to the Stooges, things wouldn’t go according to plan.

We have an inside glimpse of this moment thanks to Jason Carmer, a Grammy-winning producer, former member of cult Washington, D.C. punk band 9353, and sometime collaborator with Williamson:

“I was a huge Stooges fan; I was obsessed with James Williamson. And I once asked him: “What was it like being in the Stooges back in those days? He's like: ‘I mean, to be perfectly honest with you, it sucked. Everybody fucking hated us. Like we got beat up or chased out of town.’ He told me that when they went to England to make Raw Power, they just thought they’d pick up a bass player. But no one wanted to play with them; no one even wanted to hang out with them!”

Unable to find a suitable rhythm section, Pop and Williamson relented and asked the Ashetons to rejoin them. This solved one problem, but introduced another.

Ron Asheton comes off as a slightly tragic figure in this saga. Listen to the Stooges’ 1969’s self-titled debut or 1970’s Fun House and it’s clear that the band was every bit as much his as Iggy’s, at least musically. Now, relegated to playing bass guitar—a role in which Iggy Pop (and many others) have remarked on his brilliance—Ron chafed at the arrangement. We’ll hear more from and about him in Part II, courtesy of his collaborator Don Fleming.

Perhaps inevitably, at the time of its release—February 7, 1973—the caustic-sounding Raw Power sank beneath the waves. But in the coming years, the legend of the Stooges (not to mention David Bowie, who’d mixed the album) only grew. By the mid-90s, Iggy Pop was—if not quite a household name—a salient figure in the American underground. Punk, the sonic movement he’d done so much to forge, had thoroughly saturated the overculture. Perhaps the world was ready to hear Raw Power thorugh fresh ears—and a fresh mix. If only someone knew where to find the missing reel of tape….

The Belgian Connection

Like Steven Brown, Chris Haskett is no stranger to the stranger byways of rock. A virtuosic guitarist who’s performed with such artists as Henry Rollins, David Bowie, Tool and many others, he’s long been fascinated by Raw Power. And as fate would have it, he’d play a crucial role in its return. After performing at a one-off concert with Steven Brown in the early ‘90s, the two remained friendly. Still, Haskett was startled when Brown reached out with news of his discovery. Knowing the guitarist was friendly with Pop—“I'd see him around New York and we were cordial, go to his house for coffee and stuff”—Brown asked if Haskett, already en route to Belgium on a Rollins Band tour, would manage the handoff.

Haskett has spent countless hours on stages and in recording studios with bona fide rock stars. Still, when he finally saw the tape with his own two eyes he was awestruck:

“It really was like opening the Ark of the Covenant. Like, we gasped—expecting a light to come out [from the box]!”

For the remainder of the tour, Haskett kept a close watch over the tape. But as he prepared to travel back to the States, he fretted over how to transport it safely. Fearful of even taking it in the vicinity of the powerful X-ray machines in use by airport security, he made a safety copy of the reel.

“I was like: There's no way I am taking this through airport security without making a safety, right? So I contacted Steve Mack [That Petrol Emotion vocalist], and we just did a one-to-one transfer at his studio, Bang Bang. I didn't let security put it through the X-ray. They hand-inspected it, and I'd also made photocopies of the track sheets. This is kind of like, you know, archival sensibility; both my parents were historians!”

A couple of months later, Haskett arranged for Pop to visit the Rollins Band’s rehearsal room on Avenue A. And with that, the quest had been fulfilled, a precious lost artifact returned to its rightful owner.

Right? Sort of.

According to Haskett, the meeting was strangely anticlimactic. Iggy—who also goes by his given name, James Osterberg—seemed nonplussed:

“I think giving Jim back the tape, he really was…more like he had no idea what to do with it. It was like: ‘Okay thanks, I guess?’ Which is probably why [after the remix] he handed it straight over to Henry [Rollins]. At one point, Henry casually mentioned that it was actually sitting in his closet. Jim was like: ‘I don't know what to do this, you want to hang on to it?’ I think it's probably still in Henry's closet!”

What Iggy Pop knew—and Chris Haskett and Steven Brown didn’t—was that the “lost” master reel wasn’t what it appeared to be. And as we’ll learn, a remix of Raw Power had been brewing for a long time. Despite the missing reel’s torturous backstory, it would turn out to be a mere bit player in this saga.

Coming up in Part II: We’ll learn how the missing master tape really made it back to Iggy Pop, and we’ll meet a couple of people heavily involved in the project: producer Bruce Dickinson (yes, the Bruce Dickinson) and engineer Danny Kadar. We’ll also get a fly-on-the-wall account from archivist and producer Don Fleming, who had a front-row seat to the inner workings of the Stooges reunion following the Raw Power remix.