After The Stooges
After collaborating with Iggy Pop in 1975 on demo sessions for a proposed new album to be produced by John Cale, which were released in 1977 as Kill City (despite Pop's objections), Williamson gave up playing music professionally to train as an electronics engineer: 'The Stooges was maybe my only real band and kind of a family and so when that fell apart it was difficult to go on'.
In 1979 Williamson was again persuaded to work with Iggy Pop to produce and write for Iggy's third solo album New Values, with former Stooge multi-instrumentalist Scott Thurston playing guitar on all the tracks except "Don't Look Down". Williamson also did the initial production work on Iggy's subsequent album Soldier, before falling out with Iggy over recording methods and losing contact with him for 16 years.
After working on Soldier, Williamson removed himself from the music business entirely and concentrated on his career in electronics and in 1982 received an electrical engineering degree from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and eventually becoming Vice President of Technology Standards for Sony. Looking back in 2010, Williamson said, 'I gave up being a Stooge to study calculus. I designed computer chips, working with geeks who had no idea about my past and who wouldn't have heard of the Stooges'.
Read more about this topic: James Williamson (musician)