Gimme Danger Page #3

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I got to know my parents.

Uh, that's a..

That's a real treasure.

[instrumental music]

I remember dumping my Tinker toys

and my Lincoln Logs

when I was a little boy

and pickin' up the wood bits.

And I would make a drum out

of the cylinder and beat on it.

And then, when I was in the fourth grade

they took us to

the River Rouge assembly plant

of the Ford Motor Company.

And they had a machine that engineered

a controlled drop of a piece of metal

onto a stamping plate.

And every time that thing hit

the stamping plate

it made... this racket, this..

[imitates banging]

A-a-a mega-clang.

And, uh,

I-I liked the mega-clang.

[instrumental music]

I walk today

Past some old time

(Iggy) I had a high school

band, "The Iguanas."

We got a job playin' full-time

at a teen club.

A place called The Ponytail.

I kept scheming, thinking of things

to get more attention and,

uh, so I thought

"What if I played

on the biggest drum riser

that anybody has ever had?"

I was about 16 feet up.

[chuckling]

All by myself, you know

and the, and the band

is down there grumbling.

A loser in the biz named Chuck

approached me and he said

"Well, I think you guys are pretty good

"I'd like to be your manager

and I'll help you

promote your own gigs."

So we rented a pier for one night

to throw our own concert.

And we had a huge turnout,

a huge success.

[instrumental music]

Until half-way through

the floor started to give.

[screaming]

Nobody got hurt but basically,

we, we broke the pier.

[Iggy chuckling]

That was the end of the self promotion.

I was "The Iguanas" during high school

and straight out of high school

then a semester in college.

Then I dropped out of college

and was looking out for

somebody to give me a job.

And the "Prime Movers"

were these school dropout

older guys.

And they knew

about all sorts of blues music.

Butterfield's band came through town

and the "Prime Movers"

tried to establish a connection

to see if our group could get

some work through them.

I asked, uh, Jerome Arnold

the bass player

in Butterfield at the time

if he had any tips for me and my playing

and he said, "When you play,

you play it like you mean it."

I was getting fairly good

and, um, at some point I lost

respect for or faith in the group.

And I thought it wasn't really itself.

So I decided to go where the real..

[chuckles] ...real people

were doing the real deal.

[instrumental music]

Different.

Not like white America.

I sat in with a couple of guys

and, uh, actually got paid

ten bucks a couple of times

to do very unimportant gigs.

Once with a guy named Johnny Young

and once with Big Walter Horton

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