James Williamson on The Stooges

Photo: Robert Matheu 2009

It's been more than 35 years since the Stooges unleashed their seminal album, Raw Power, on an unsuspecting, and largely unimpressed public. It has since been lauded as a classic in its own right, not to mention one of punk's most important precursors. To celebrate the latest reissue of the album, as well as the band's latest live incarnation, MOG's Ethan Stanislawski caught up with the band's guitarist, James Williamson.

An essential part of the Raw Power sound, Williamson retired from music a few years after the Stooges broke up, spending most of the intervening time as the Vice President of Technology Standards for Sony Electronics. Now that he's back with the band, Williamson was ready to talk about the group's original era, overcoming beefs with his bandmates, Raw Power's legacy, and how Iggy Pop's stage persona has actually gotten more intense.

MOG: How much have you been in contact with Iggy and the other band members while you've been at Sony in the past 30 years?

James Williamson: Very, very little. I saw a couple of gigs... one with Iggy solo and one with the band when they first got back together, but other than that I haven't even seen them. The only time I'd talk to Iggy was involving publishing and things like that. I did visit Ron Asheton once when I was visiting my sister in Ann Arbor. Other than that, there was nothing really at all.

MOG: In an interview a couple of years ago, you said you had no real interest in rejoining the band. What was the biggest factor in the change?

JW: Ron died, so Iggy and I started talking to each other again, just about catching up. When people die, there's sort of a time where all those little things really don't matter that much anymore. There wasn't going to be much of an opportunity to rejoin the band because I had my job with Sony. But then Sony was handing out early retirement packages, so I took mine... The question was whether I wanted to do it again. Essentially, it all boiled down to the fact that these guys needed me to do it.

MOG: You played with Ron on bass in the original run, and now Mike Watt's been playing bass with the band for years. What was it like rejoining the guys now that they've been playing together for a while?

JW: The band dynamic has been fine... Three of the five band guys are guys I'm very familiar with. We're old buddies.

MOG: How was playing with Mike different from Ron?

JW: Mike Watt is a sweetheart kind of a guy, and a really, really good musician. So he just does his job. Playing with Ron was a different style of bass playing, and a different time. Mike and I are really clicking right now.

MOG: He probably grew up playing all the songs from Raw Power.

JW: Yeah, as a matter of fact, he had played all of them, actually.

MOG: There's been talk of you guys are working on a new album with this lineup. What's the status of that?

JW: There are about three songs we're working out now that are new. There's a fourth we may never release... we're thinking we'll try to record something this year for people so they can hear us. Maybe it will just be a single or two to start out with... we're pretty busy. But we do want to release something... that's our intention.

MOG: How consistently have you been playing guitar over the past 30 years, and what was it like to pick it up live?

JW: 35 years, actually, but who's counting? I hadn't been playing at all, period... When I took this on, I had some serious woodshedding to do.

MOG: In a lot of recent reunions, some musicians have picked up instruments after not playing for decades. Is it kind of like picking up a bike?

JW: A little bit. If you're a musician who's played for a while, those synapses are still there. They're not firing too well when you start, but once you get going you get back into it. Luckily it's my music and it's my style, so it's kind of natural for me. If I had to play somebody else's stuff, who knows.

MOG: The band now is much less wild now than in the '70s... Iggy is still very intense, but how have things changed now?

JW: I think he's more intense now than he was then. It's pretty amazing how much he puts into the show now. Back then he was also intense, but very unpredictable. You never knew which Iggy you were going to get. There were times when we didn't even know if we were going to get through a show, and sometimes we shouldn't have, then we did.

MOG: Mike Watt's talked about how he can't believe how aware Iggy is of what's going on in the band while he's still performing like that.

JW: He's an experienced pro at this point. He's a perfectionist now, which is one big difference from the old days. He demands a lot, but that's a good thing.

MOG: Do you feel good where you left things with Ron before he passed?

JW: I guess when I met with him at his house, things seemed to be okay. That was before the band reformed. After the band reformed, they got very busy.

MOG: They just remastered Raw Power for the third time... What's your thought on the new mix?

JW: I think they did a first rate job on it and the whole package. I like that they brought the Bowie mix back on the market; despite all the criticisms of it I think it deserves to be on the market, for historical reasons if nothing else.

MOG: I grew up in the CD era, so I never heard the original Bowie mix.

JW: That's the important part of the Iggy mix, because with the Bowie mix, people like yourself hadn't even heard of it. But he [Iggy] had a big enough name eventually where he rereleased it, and people got to hear it, which was a big help for the album.

MOG: One of the things I think people lose perspective of is how much you guys stuck out back in that era... What do you think is different about how the Stooges were seen then vs. now?

JW: The Stooges were not about whatever was fashionable or acceptable or maybe even successful in that time... We really played music for ourselves and not for other people. As a result of that, the music wasn't very popular in the day, because no one could relate to it. But I think the success of the music came later when so many people imitated it. So it was something people were more in tune with, and it sounds strangely contemporary now.

Ethan Stanislawski @'MOG'