Gimme Danger - Bowie Mix

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.