All hail the Iguana Chronicles series released by BOMP! Records, saviors of the Stooges' fearful and loathsome legacy. Along with the French New Rose and Fan Club (R.I.P., I believe) labels, they've saved a great many wonderful things from rotting in vaults.
Rough Power is a selection of rough mixes from the Stooges' final studio album, Raw Power. Why does this matter? David Bowie wrecked the damn album; see Raw Power for more detail on that. Before Bowie arrived, the whole thing had been recorded: He was only involved in mixing it. The band themselves had made numerous rough mixes throughout the recording process, and a lot of those have survived. And here they are: Guitars! Reverb! Bass! Yeah, on most of these tracks you can hear Ron Asheton just like he was in the band or something. It's loud, fierce, and wonderful, and the sound quality is very good throughout. In true archival overkill fashion, there are multiple versions of most of the tracks, but it's all worth having. A lot of this stuff has been available on bootlegs for years; I have a 10" bootleg from the mid-1980s with four of these on it.
It appears that a lot of these Stooges odds'n'ends things have been released with the approval and participation of the band; most of them claim so, anyway, and they're widely available in normal record stores -- and they're sold at normal prices, too, not larcenous bootleg prices.
So here's what you get for your fifteen bucks (or nineteen, or whatever). The dates are the dates when they were mixed, but don't go assuming they're accurate or anything:
- Search and Destroy (3/10/72)
- Gimme Danger (3/10/72)
- Hard to Beat (4/10/72)
- Penetration (4/10/72)
- Raw Power (3/10/72)
- I Need Somebody (4/10/72)
- Death Trip (4/10/72)
- WABX broadcast, early 1973 with DJ comments (These are more (undated) mixes of the same studio tracks, but with DJ's muttering over the beginnings and ends of the songs.)
- I Need Somebody
- Hard to Beat
- Death Trip
- Raw Power
- Search and Destroy
- Shake Appeal
- Not Right (Yeah, I know: What's that doing here?! The song is from the Stooges' first album back in 1969, but this is a different and much later version. It's labelled "Previously unknown outtake". Okay.)
"Bonus: Still more Stooges mixes." (We were expecting maybe Donnie and Marie?!)
- Raw Power (possibly 11/28/72)
- Shake Appeal (possibly 11/28/72)
- Search and Destroy (possibly 11/28/72)