Bowie's mix allows a greater appreciation of what the band is doing and better favors Pop's vocals, but sometimes it sounds too polite, while the Pop mix boasts a tougher guitar sound and more bass but pushes everything so far into the red that listening to the thing is tiring (though curiously, the album's quietest song, "Gimme Danger," is the one that gains the most in Pop's mix). The remastered version of the Bowie mix boosts the bass that was all but absent in the original LP version just a bit, and the fidelity is inarguably superior to the long-gone CD version of Raw Power's original mix, but ultimately it seems that the definitive version of Raw Power lies between these two extremes. Now the whole saga comes full-circle as Columbia releases a two-disc "Legacy Edition" of Raw Power that features Bowie's original mix in remastered form, along with a bonus disc of studio outtakes and an October 1973 Stooges show recorded in Atlanta for possible radio broadcast (then as now, radio wasn't ready for Pop's between-song banter or tunes like "Cock in My Pocket"). Then the world heard Pop's painfully harsh and distorted version of Raw Power, and suddenly Bowie's tamer but more dynamic mix didn't sound so bad, after all.
In time it became conventional wisdom that Bowie's mix spoiled a potential masterpiece, so much so that in 1997, when Columbia made plans to issue a new edition of Raw Power, they brought in Pop to remix the original tapes and (at least in theory) give us the "real" version we'd been denied all these years. After Iggy & the Stooges' manic swan song Raw Power was released in 1973, Iggy Pop was known to complain that David Bowie's mix neutered the ferocity of the original recordings. Historical revisionism has been part of rock & roll ever since folks started writing about it with a modicum of serious intent, and part of the fun is it hardly remains static with the passage of time.
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