Gimme Danger

Album: Raw Power (1973)
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Songfacts®:

  • Iggy Pop wrote many of the lyrics for the Raw Power album while wandering around Hyde Park in London with a notebook. "Gimme Danger" finds him wary of a girl who could be his ruin. This is likely Johanna, a girl he says "drove me out of my mind." He wrote about her again on his 1977 Kill City track, "Johanna."
  • Pop wrote this song with Stooges guitarist James Williamson, who layers acoustic and electric guitars on the track. "In those days I almost exclusively wrote songs on acoustic guitar," he said in a Songfacts interview. "I'd sit up in my room with a little acoustic guitar, because I didn't make a lot of noise and disturb the neighbors. I also liked the tonal qualities of the acoustic - you can really hear the notes quite well.

    So anyway, I was fooling around and just came up with those chord patterns - the beginning patterns of that song - and fleshed it out from there. It was a very convoluted process of actually stringing all that stuff together, but once it did come together, immediately it was like, a song. It was very quick from there on out."
  • In 2016, an Iggy Pop documentary called Gimme Danger was released. It was directed by Jim Jarmusch.

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