James Williamson: Stooges guitarist and IEEE/ANSI-awarded engineer (2015)
ansi.org
ansi.org
- 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)