
James Williamson: Stooges guitarist and IEEE/ANSI-awarded engineer (2015) - j1vms
https://www.ansi.org/news_publications/news_story.aspx?menuid=7&articleid=0f594818-ea48-46e2-9b51-657f9228ebd3
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j1vms
Some choice excerpts from Williamson's wikipedia entry [0], and that of _Raw
Power_ (The Stooges' Bowie-produced third LP in 1973) [1]:

\- Immediately following his graduation from Cal Poly Pomona, Williamson moved
to Silicon Valley. For the next fifteen years, he worked for Advanced Micro
Devices in San Jose, California, designing products around its chips. His
coworkers never inquired about his earlier career as a rock musician; in a
2010 interview with Uncut, Williamson asserted that many of his colleagues
were "nerds and geeks... they don't listen to The Stooges much." In 1997, he
was hired as Sony's vice president of technical standards; in this capacity,
he liaised with competitors and helped to codify nascent industry standards,
most notably the Blu-ray Disc. [0]

\- (...)Williamson's explosive and aggressive guitar playing on Raw Power has
often been cited as a major influence on the emerging punk scene in the mid-
seventies. Seminal indie pop guitarist Johnny Marr (The Smiths, Modest Mouse)
has also lauded Williamson's abilities: "I'm his biggest fan. He has the
technical ability of Jimmy Page without being as studious, and the swagger of
Keith Richards without being sloppy. He's both demonic and intellectual,
almost how you would imagine Darth Vader to sound if he was in a band." [0]

\- Despite its weak initial reception, the reputation of Raw Power grew
tremendously in subsequent years, and the album's volume and ferocity became
benchmarks against which later albums were measured. Singer and guitarist Kurt
Cobain of the band Nirvana wrote in his Journals numerous times that Raw Power
was his favorite album of all time. In his list of the top 50 albums he
thought were most influential to Nirvana's sound entered in his journal in
1993, "Raw Power" appears in the number one slot. [1]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Williamson_(musician)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Williamson_\(musician\))

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_Power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_Power)

