(Credit: Michael Markos)
Thu 1 January 2026 4:00, UK
By 1973, The Stooges had already cemented their status as the foundational punk pioneers.
Burnished amid Detroit’s garage rock maelstrom toward the 1960s’ tail-end, the Motor City’s blue-collar edge proved the perfect petri dish for the gaggle of countercultural misfits too unrefined for New York’s artistic aloofness and favouring booze and speed over the West Coast’s LSD psychedelia. Somehow, the likes of MC5 and Alice Cooper spotted the decade’s tumultuous close from a mile off, scoring a bruising garage attack at the hippy idyll that was swiftly turning into a bad trip.
Despite the stiff competition, no one touched The Stooges. A potent surge of Jim Morrison’s violent theatre, James Brown’s pumped sexuality, and The Sonics’ riffing heft, Iggy Pop took his frontman duties to explosively volatile realms, virtually inventing the stage dive and invasion, as well as routinely indulging in bouts of self-mutilation and sheer abandon to his well-being. Wrapped in notoriety, fans were gripped, witnessing a garage whirlwind completely out of step with anything in rock during the 1960s’ final throes.
The Stooges’ live reputation was matched by their studio efforts. 1969’s eponymous debut starkly captured their dark sensuality and snarled skulk, but the following year’s Fun House surpassed as their defining document, an incredible groove of chaos bottling as close as possible the frenzied air hung across their on-stage spectacle.
Yet, it all appeared to be over as soon as they’d started. Scant record sales, gnawing heroin habits, and a fracturing line-up saw The Stooges kicked off the Elektra label. In came David Bowie. Meeting at the famed Max’s Kansas City in September 1971, Bowie’s connections resulted in a two-album deal with CBS/Columbia Records, and a second roll of the dice for his fraught Detroit band. Corralling founding members Scott and Ron Asheton and newcomer James Williamson on guitar – a narked Ron reluctantly picking up the bass this time around – a rejuvenated Stooges headed to London to begin work on their third LP.
Dropped in February 1973, while glam was at its glitteriest and prog wizardry was selling out arenas, Raw Power’s miscreant energy stuck like a sore thumb amid the rock charts. Swapping slacker groove for Williams’ riffing fury, not even New York Dolls were able to clamour toward The Stooges’ primal rock strut, teeming with acidic proto-punk spit whose influence on the imminent new wave would only grow more fiercer. Among a cluster of fantastic cuts, from the queasy ‘Penetration’ to ‘I Need Somebody’s bluesy shuffle, visceral lightning was harnessed for Raw Power’s sledgehammer opener.
Blowing the doors down within its first half-second, ‘Search and Destroy’ hurtles with turbo charge beyond any of the garage rock crowd and harder-end of glam at the time. Inspired by a Time article on the ongoing Vietnam War, Pop’s lyrical shrapnel of a “street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm” clashing with a “runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb” demanded a suitably gargantuan fret bludgeon to score such comic dystopian visions.
‘Search and Destroy’s raw power leaps straight out of Williamson’s borrowed Vox AC30 amp like an animal. Veering between terse laceration underneath the verses and nuclear hook clinging onto the radiating chorus, US Army choppers and napalm jungles seem to burn out of his Gibson Les Paul, conjuring a mean, nasty, yet infectious riff sweeping aside the pretenders and firmly forging the stripped-down punk template without even releasing it.
Standing as the album’s only single outside of Japan, Raw Power failed to make a commercial dent, barely scraping the Billboard 200, and testing management’s patience on a drug habit soaking up much of the budget, Columbia dropped The Stooges in 1974. Pop would join forces with Bowie and embark on a solo renewal for 1977’s The Idiot and Lust for Life double-whammy, but never quite unleash such a smoking, steaming crater of a proto-punk blast as ‘Search and Destroy’s immortal clarion call to imminent danger.
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