iggy and the stooges/raw power

In 1973, The Stooges had reached the end of their road. Drug problems and personnel problems had escalated to the point where the conclusion was inescapable. Lack of commercial success was also inevitably a factor. They released their third album, Raw Power, and called it quits. The album was mixed by David Bowie who had taken Iggy under his wing. As Stephen Thomas Erlewine writes in his band bio on AMG:

Released in 1973 to surprisingly strong reviews, Raw Power had a weird, thin mix due to various technical problems. Although this would be the cause of much controversy later on — many Stooges purists blamed Bowie for the brittle mix — its razor-thin sound helped kickstart the punk revolution.

I read in a biography of Iggy Pop that Iggy did not trust Bowie to mix the album and prior to delivering the tapes to him, mixed everything down to two tracks, one with vocals and the other with all the instruments mixed down on one track. As such, Bowie did not have much to work with so can’t really be blamed for any problems.

Over the years, there have been some attempts to rectify the production of Raw Power. In 1997, Iggy himself remixed/remastered the album. His mix proved to be so absurdly “in the red” as to be unlistenable. Two years previously, Bomp! Records had released Rough Power, a set of rough mixes done prior to Bowie’s involvement. Again, the sound quality of these mixes left much to be desired.

I came to The Stooges fairly recently and since the original Bowie mix has been out of print since at least 1997, I had only heard Iggy’s remix and Rough Power, both of which I found lacking. I really wanted to track down a copy of the original mix as I could not imagine it could be worse than the available alternatives.

I finally got a used copy from an Amazon merchant and am pleased to say that I find the Bowie version to be quite listenable. Yeah, the mix is not perfect but it is, to my ears, clearly the best version available.

I was curious to compare the original mix with the Iggy remix. I hauled the first track, “Search and Destroy” into Exact Audio Copy to look at the waveform. As you can see, the Iggy remix is totally maxed out with absolutely no dynamic range. The original Bowie mix looks much more like a normal waveform. I have always felt the 1997 Iggy remix is an extreme example of a general problem in the music industry today in terms of overly loud and flat mastering. It’s why I tend to avoid remastered versions of cds…they simply sound worse.

[edit]: I’m sure I’ve used either “remix” or “remaster” incorrectly at least once. The fact of the matter is although I think I understand the difference between them, as I understand it, either can cause the problem I’m talking about. But in some cases, I’m not sure which process has caused it so…