Iggy Pop

Iggy Pop and the Stooges built their sound on James Williamson's Gibson Les Paul Custom, its humbuckers driven through a Marshall stack at volumes that turned distortion from a texture into a weapon. Williamson's raw, slashing riff style on Raw Power owed as much to his signal chain as his technique — a Maestro Fuzz-Wah adding splattery harmonic chaos, and an EHX Big Muff Pi providing the thick, sustained saturation underneath. The Stooges' gear setup was deliberately primitive, stripping rock to its most aggressive essentials and proving that a Les Paul into a cranked Marshall needed nothing else to level a room. Ron Asheton's earlier Fender Stratocaster work on the debut album offered a thinner, more cutting counterpoint, its single-coils feeding back in ways that anticipated punk and noise rock by a decade.