fun house

Description

Raw Power is the third and final studio album by The Stooges. Though not initially commercially successful, Raw Power gained a cult fanbase in the years following its release and, like its predecessor (1970's Fun House), is generally considered an influential forerunner of punk rock. Iggy produced and mixed the album by himself; unfortunately, his botched first attempt mixed most of the instruments into one stereo channel and the vocals into the other, with little regard for balance or tone quality. Tony DeFries, the head of MainMan, informed Iggy that the album would be remixed by David Bowie. Iggy agreed to this, claiming that "the other choice was I wasn't going to get my album out. I think DeFries told me that CBS refused to release it like that, I don't know," but insisted that his own mix for "Search and Destroy" be retained. Due to budgetary constraints, Bowie remixed the other seven songs in a single day in an inexpensive Los Angeles studio, Western Sound Recorders, in October 1972. According to Iggy, the mixing session took place in one day. In 1996, Columbia Records invited Iggy Pop to remix the entire album for re-release on CD. Iggy says in the liner notes that had he declined, the studio would have remixed it without his blessing. Iggy cited longtime encouragement from fans and peers, the existence of Rough Power, his distaste for how the original 1989 CD release of Raw Power sounded, and the fact that Columbia were going to release the new mix on its sublabel Legacy Recordings as factors that led him to go through with the new mix, which was undertaken at New York's Sony Music Studios in 1996. The remixed edition of Raw Power was released on April 22, 1997. Some fans felt the new remix was as unfaithful to the material as the original 1973 mix, and further criticized the audible digital distortion in the new mix. In the reissued CD's liner notes, however, Pop points out that one of his intentions in doing the new mix was to keep audio levels in the red (which would deliberately cause such distortion) while at the same time making the music more "powerful and listenable". This new version is arguably the loudest album ever, reaching RMS of -4 dB, rare even by today's standards. James Williamson and Ron Asheton have both stated that they prefer Bowie's original mix of the album to Pop's remixed version.