No rock and roll song exists in a vacuum. It’s always colliding with stuff—with whatever drives the songwriter to write, with obsessed or half-attentive listeners, with forces and events in culture larger than the singer’s bedroom or basement. Though a song can be time- and date-stamped, a great song will transcend whatever it was—a heartbreak, a news scroll—that occasioned it. Great songs carry history inside of them.

The Stooges released Raw Power in February of 1973, four months after Presiden...