Interviews: James Williamson (The Stooges)

Get this. James Williamson of the Stooges is a nerd. Like, he's a huge, colossal, gigantic nerd. The man who resurrected the Stooges, the man who wrote the nasty, nasty licks for Raw Power, the man who ran with the wildest, most drugged-out band ever, the man who plays riffs that can cut a car in half, is a Pointdexter.

Do you know why Williamson's music record is blank from about 1980 through 2009? It's because after the colossal drug trips and catastrophes that were Raw Power and Kill City, Williamson did a little production work for Iggy and then moved to California, went to college, and got a job right away at a computer company in the Silicon Valley.

And then, do you know what he did after that? He was so good at computers that he worked his way up to being Vice President of Technical Standards for Sony. That's right, the man who stood next to Iggy as he got his ass kicked by rednecks on Metallic K.O. eventually became one of the most important guys in the tech field, meaning that not only is he perhaps rock's most important guitarist, but he's also one of the computer industry's most important computer guys. Because Williamson mastered both the rock and computers field, making us all look like lazy slackers, features editor John Gentile called up Williamson for the story on how he transitioned from the stage to the computer age.