Raw power: They can (still) feel it

Nostalgia goes up in smoke on "Iggy and the Stooges: Live in Detroit," an incendiary record of the group's first hometown show in 29 years, as Iggy Pop is reunited with the surviving members of his original band. The group's apocalyptic garage punk was the root and source of a huge percentage of today's rock music -- the Stooge legend has grown even as Pop's own musical career has settled into a pattern of reliably athletic underachievement. Can they pull together some sort of return to a former intensity? Of course they can. Dave Alexander, original bassist, is dead, and is replaced here by alternative folk hero Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE) -- an excellent move. Watt's sense of occasion is acute, and he gives it every-thing, gaping and puffing over his bass. The rest of the band is pure Stooge: Pop himself, and the extraordinary Asheton brothers -- Ron on guitar, Scott on drums -- who plod back into the limelight slump-shouldered with the weight of the years but apparently undiminished in ferocity. Ron Asheton's guitar-playing, in particular, has not aged: Out of this dumpy, immobile man pour the sheer, transcendentally harsh riffs that touched off punk rock. The intransigence of the Ashetons is a nice foil to Pop's hard-working showmanship, the professionalism of which threatens, at moments, to sap the evening of its vitality. But then he loses his mind, swearing like an overexcited 12-year-old and yelling, "Satan! Death! Love! Victory!" Priceless. (Music Video Distributors, $19.95)