A couple of times a month I eat at a popular LA diner known primarily for its Jetsons-like décor, its mini-skirted waitresses, and bizarro, health-conscious menu that pairs quinoa and broccoli entrees with decadent red velvet cake for dessert. It also has a great selection on the CD jukebox, though I’ve rarely seen anyone actually pump coins into it. Rotating on its own pre-programmed mix of alternative, classic, and punk rock hits, the machine’s electronic brain shrewdly segues LA’s own Doors and X with England’s Led Zeppelin and the Clash, Seattle’s Jimi Hendrix with Nirvana with Detroit’s White Stripes with the MC5 in a steady stream of straight up rock (which, when it comes to desert island time, is how I like to roll). But no matter what time of day, night, or season I stop in to eat to the beat, there is one song that never fails to spin: “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, that pre-punk nugget by the Stooges that became a punk rock anthem of partying and general depravity. Well, c’mon!

Recorded for the band’s 1969 self-titled debut, “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is right up there with “Sweet Jane” and “I’m Waiting for the Man”, songs once considered required learning by garage bands everywhere, just as “Louie Louie” was in its day. Maybe it’s because any bonehead with an ax can plunk out the three notes it takes to sound out the main melody of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (Sid Vicious could play it), but punk’s masters, from the Fall, Pere Ubu, and Sonic Youth, have also wrestled with the five chord wonder as have rocksters Joan Jett and Alejandro Escovedo, among others, who’ve all kept the song’s arrangement basically true to form. Among the multiple recorded versions, few have messed with the classic arrangement, though Uncle Tupelo managed to strip the song of its soul with their twanged-up version of it.

Some might say that drug-fuelled insanity was the source for the Stooges’ three-minute maelstrom, and you know, they just might be right—the band was gloriously ramshackle and out of their minds. But there were other likely touchstones for their composition, including the drone of the Velvet Underground and maybe even the experiments of free jazz, of which they were avowed fans. And lest the lyrics to “I Wanna Be Your Dog” be written off as the yearning of some sado-masochistic freak or random burble plucked from a psychedelic stooge’s daydream, I’m going to go out on a limb and assert they were not: “I wanna be your dog” as a concept is a reflection of frontman Iggy Pop’s edumacation in the blues.

Following his youth in an Ypsilanti, Michigan trailer park as Jim Osterberg, and after time done in his pre-Stooges bands, the Iguanas and the Prime Movers (noted as such for anyone who missed the memo), Iggy stole away to Chicago to be nearer the blues and to study the nightlife there. “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is a version of a blues song thanks to its trick of a thrice repeated line and its overall feeling, though that still doesn’t explain the dog, does it?

The likely source of the line is “Baby Please Don’t Go”, a blues song originally recorded by Big Joe Williams in 1935 (Baby please don’t go down to New Orleans / I love you so / Baby please don’t go) and known to rock fans as the A-side of the 1965 single by Van Morrison and Them (the B-side was “Gloria”). Both versions contain the line: ‘Fore I be your dog / Git you way down here / Make you walk the log / Baby please don’t go (sometimes for I can be heard like wanna). Williams’ song was a variation on “Don’t You Leave Me Here”, the roots of which are planted in “Alabama Bound”, and “Elder Green.” According to scholar Paul Oliver in his book Songsters and Saints, the songs circulated as early as 1912, parts of them date back to 1908, and “Elder Green” was recorded by Charley Patton in 1930. But it was Williams’ recording of “Baby Please Don’t Go” that elevated into the realm of musical standard: Working R&B bands knew it and eventually all the big bluesmen got around to recording it in the ’50s and ’60s, from Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, and Bukka White to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, John Lee Hooker, and Brownie McGhee. A 1962 version of the song by Bob Dylan, previously available only as a bootleg, surfaced officially a few years ago.

You could nearly say that “Baby Please Don’t Go” is purely American music with a through line of American origins, had not the most white hot version been laid down by the rambunctious Irishman, Morrison. He and Them toughened and tightened up the song with a famous guitar figure, reportedly provided by sessionman Jimmy Page (and which is notably similar to one in Buddy Holly’s “Down the Line”, released a year prior). Morrison and Them’s definitive blueprint inspired versions by Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes in 1967 and AC/DC with Bon Scott, who revived the song in ‘75. Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, and those other guys in Aerosmith had a hit with it in 2004.

For reasons unknown as of this writing, it would seem that “Baby Please Don’t Go” was a favorite in the Detroit metro region where local settlers persistently performed it. Townies the MC5 recorded it Morrison-and-Them style; migrant John Lee Hooker carved his own groove for it (Morrison and Hooker also maintained a connection in the bluesman’s lifetime). Motor City Madman Nugent also went for Them’s harmonic two-note bass drone, but two years later when suburban Ypsilanti’s Iggy broke through, his “Dog” took the experimental/minimalist/repetitious angle to an abrasive new level.

Alejandro Escovedo, an Americana musician with first generation punk roots, is among the song’s most persistent torchbearers, performing it on and off for something like 20 years. Following his performance of it in 1998 at a stop on the Newport Folk Festival Tour, folk-heads in the crowd expressed such a distaste for Escovedo’s punky attitude that all subsequent Newport Folk tours never materialized (the last part of the story could not be substantiated). R.E.M. performed the song with Patti Smith at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony; perhaps it was their way of saying that it’s high time the Stooges received the honor themselves (at this year’s induction Iggy performed Madonna’s songs as she was inducted but still no induction for the Stooges). As for Iggy, he still does the song, most recently on the Stooges’ reunion dates; it’s become quite the spectacle, complete with barking and woofing.

Far removed from the abandon of Van’s “Baby Please Don’t Go” and Big Joe’s signature version of that song, “I Wanna Be Your Dog” lives in a category of its own. Though it definitely takes its place in a long line of dog songs, from Rufus Thomas’ dog-trilogy (”Walking the Dog”, “Do the Dog”, and “Can Your Monkey Do the Dog”) and George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” to the Baha Men’s unfortunate “Who Let the Dogs Out” and too many rap songs to rundown concerning dogs and double Gs. Kinda makes me wanna say Bow wow wow, yippie yo, yippie yay. Well c’mon!

Watch: Iggy Pop perform “I Wanna Be Your Dog” [at youtube.com]

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