Kevin Bronson on April 28th, 2010

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By David Kronke

You can make a documentary about anything these days, but the making of Iggy Pop’s “Raw Power,” one of those albums whose abysmal initial sales are belied by the broad extent of its influence, kind of merits the attention.

“Search and Destroy: Iggy & The Stooges’ ”˜Raw Power’” premiered Monday night at the Egyptian Theatre, followed by a Q&A featuring director Morgan Neville, Stooges guitarist James Williamson and band biographer Bob Matheu, who offered his geographical theory of the Stooges’ first three seminal recordings: The first album, “The Stooges,” was recorded in New York and thus was recorded under the influence of the Velvet Underground; the next, “Fun House,” found Iggy and Co. in Los Angeles, where they picked up the Doors by osmosis; finally, 1973’s “Raw Power” was produced in London, where the band’s ethos, Matheu declared, was, “Glam-rock’s here but we’re not having any of it.”

Should you want to see the film on the big screen, well, you’re probably out of luck: Only those of us who were at the Egyptian on Monday enjoyed that experience; to everyone else, it’s only available on a Deluxe Limited Edition CD set available only from Iggyandthestoogesmusic.com (That just rolls off the tongue, no?) or from overseas sources. But the good news for those who missed out is, there’s nothing so visually interesting that you need to see it on a big screen. Small screen is fine, probably preferable. (Particularly given footage of a 2009 Iggy show, which suggests it might be best if he kept his shirt on these days.)

The film offers Iggy, band members, and a few fans (Henry Rollins and Chrissie Hynde among them) discussing the making of the 1973 album and the subsequent dissolution of the band, as well as its eventual placement in the rock pantheon. (The Stooges were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year; after the screening, Williamson noted that the ceremony, otherwise attended by members of Genesis and ABBA, was “lucky to have us,” because the event was otherwise pretty boring.)

So basically you have standard talking-heads shots (Iggy is show listening to snippets of tracks and responding, variously, “Wow ”“ that’s pretty fuckin’ cool,” “Sounds like a whorehouse” and “Schlock has its place,” and declaring himself a “macrocosmic lyricist” while others making music at the time were the equivalent of “a pig, a cow, a brontosaurus and a deaf person, all competing”) with precious little footage of Iggy and the Stooges’ live performances of the era, along with breathlessly edited, apropos-of-nothing-much montages featuring menacing insects, the Klan, the atom bomb and grade-school educational films. Of Iggy’s song “Search and Destroy,” Rollins declares “Bill Shakespeare wishes he could write like that.”

Iggy was championed during the making of “Raw Power” by David Bowie, which proved to be both a blessing and a curse: Bowie landed Iggy a label for which to make the album, but his fame took attention away from the label’s interest in marketing the record. The documentary is vague when discussing the very confusing matter of sundry mixes of the album: Though there were different versions of the songs out there, including rough mixes aired on Detroit radio, Bowie helped mix it, and band members’ opinions on what Bowie brought to the table vary greatly. And the film seems to soft-peddle the band’s drug problems at the time, even though Iggy admits to passing out in the middle of writing lyrics, drummer Scott Asheton describes the band as “headed for, maybe, death,” and all discuss the Stooges’ utter dissolution while touring in support of the album. (And how many documentaries can you say soft-pedddle drug-usage when an interviewee declares all the band members were “headed for death?”)

After the screening, Williamson joked, “The only reason we didn’t kill ourselves (by drug overdose) was because we were too broke.”

Williamson – who met Iggy (or, rather, James Newell Osterberg) at a frat party, then spent much of his post-Stooges life as a programmer for Sony Electronics – says he spent a quarter-century not talking to Iggy but is now once again part of his band (after this event, he flew to join him on his latest European tour). He called the Stooges’ tour in support of “Raw Power” “a death march.”

Ultimately, the film seems an oddly genteel celebration of transgressive behavior, though essential nonetheless. “As for the rest,” Iggy states, allowing the notion of “the rest” to linger in your imagination (the more perverse, the better; the more disparate, the more menacingly all-encompassing), “society is to blame.”

||| Additionally: Iggy Pop discusses “Raw Power” with Spinner.

David Kronke is a Los Angeles-based freelance entertainment journalist.