[E.O.M.S.]

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'

Girlz With Gunz # 96: Polski plakat 'Bladerunner'

This one is for you Spacebubs!

Is This the Future of Journalism? Why Wikileaks Matters

This week marked the international coming-out party for a new media organization that could upend the sacred cows of traditional journalism. Wikileaks, an Internet-savvy investigative journalism outfit, released a video showing an American Apache helicopter open fire on a group of men, killing two Reuters employees, along with 10 other people, on July 12, 2007. "There was no threat warranting a hail of 30mm [caliber gunfire] from above," says Anthony Martinez, a former U.S. Army noncommissioned officer who has watched thousands of hours of aerial footage of Iraq. COMMENTS (0) SHARE: Digg Facebook Reddit Bookmark and Share More... The video, seen through the perspective of the Apache gun camera, captures a dark moment in the Iraq war. As the American airmen chuckle over the body count, it also amounts to a damning indictment of war culture. No traditional journalism organization was able to bring it to the public, as these tapes are normally classified; Reuters filed an FOIA request but never received a response. True to its promise to release complete source material, Wikileaks has posted the full 38-minute gun camera video on YouTube. But the focus of its Monday press conference was an annotated, 19-minute edited version, published on the site collateralmurder.com. It opens with a quote from British provocateur-cum-journalist George Orwell: Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind. The video proceeds to transcribe the radio chatter and break down the action with highlights and arrows. A group of men gather in the street; one reporter talks on the phone and another shoulders a camera bag. Seconds later, the pilots, mistaking a camera lens peeking around a corner for an RPG, strafe a cluster of civilians. That is almost forgivable. But events turn from queasy to horrifying when the crew open fire on an unarmed van that has stopped to pick up the journalist left alive. As Wikileaks shows in a closeup, two children sitting in the front seat of the van were struck by the barrage of gunfire. The video was sensational, and it exploded online Monday -- it's since gotten more than 2 million views on YouTube and prompting a follow-up story by the New York Times. Many viewers were undoubtedly encountering Wikileaks for the first time, though the organization was launched in December 2006. The site, which is funded by private donors and does not accept government or corporate funding, encourages would-be whistleblowers to upload incriminating material anonymously on its website. The small editorial staff verifies submitted documents, decrypts or translates them when necessary, and then publishes them in full -- often with commentary. This is not to imply that Wikileaks' editors are merely passive distributors of their sources' information. They cultivate and protect anonymous sources, verifying submitted materials, adding context, and promoting important leaks. In the case of the Iraq gun camera footage, the process began with using volunteers to help decrypt the submitted file. Then they worked with Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson to verify the video on the ground in Baghdad. Wikileaks says Hrafnsson found the two children who were injured in the attack, and has posted recent pictures and other documents. The whole story cost the organization about US $50,000, according to Julian Assange, the site's co-founder.

Jonathan Stray @'FP'

Kids Today!!!

What Does Palinspeak Mean?

Why does Sarah Palin talk the way she does? Just what is this sort of thing below?
We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we're confident that we're going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?
Just forty years ago people would be shocked to read something like this as a public statement from someone even pretending, as Palin pretty much had to have been by the time of this quote, that they were going to be serving in a Presidential Administration.
It’s not quite Bushspeak, which, with the likes of “I know what it’s like to put food on my family,” was replete with flagrantly misplaced words with a frequency that made for guesses, not completely in jest, that he might suffer from a mild form of Wernicke’s aphasia, interfering with matching word shapes to meanings. (Bush the father wasn’t much better in this regard—there just wasn’t an internet to make collecting the slips and spreading them around so easy.)
Rather, Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. Or at least, insights that go beyond the bare-bones essentials of human cognition — an entity (i.e. something) and a predicate (i.e. something about it).
The easy score is to flag this speech style as a sign of moronism. But we have to be careful — there is a glass houses issue here. Before parsing Palinspeak we have to understand the worldwide difference between spoken and written language — and the fact that in highly literate societies, we tend to have idealized visions of how close our speech supposedly is to the written ideal...

Continue reading

John McWhorter @'The New Republic'

Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish) - A question for you...

You say you will be "rooting for the tories"...how DO you feel about this?

Joan Jett - 'Dressed To Kilt' NY 5-04-10

*swoon*

Revelation 3,14159...

@'alulamecontou'

The music industry is sucking the blood of its main assets: the musicians. Gang Of Four does something about this.

They'll let you, the potential listener, do it instead. Or whatever sick perverted thing you'd feel like doing with your favorite band's blood!

Gang Of Four are set to give away bottles of their own blood in exchange for money contributions to aid the recording of their new album 'Content'.

The post-punk veterans are funding the album through Pledgemusic.com - where users can contribute cash to the process and be rewarded with album-related products, including the vials of blood, in return.

@'NME'