This girl, Vivian, who had given me the ride to Chicago, left me with a little grass. So one night I went down by the sewage treatment plant by the Loop where the river is entirely industrialized. It's all concrete banks and effluvia by the Marina Towers. So I smoked this joint and then it hit me. I thought, what you gotta do is play your own simple blues. So that's what I did. I appropriated a lot of their vocal forms, and also their turns of phrase—either heard or misheard or twisted from blues songs. So "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is probably my mishearing of "Baby Please Don't Go."
~ Iggy Pop, interviewed in Legs McNeil's "Just Kill Me"
[State Street at the Chicago River]
