“No excuse,” offers Jim Danger, when asked how he’s remained virtually unknown, though one of the more interesting and original musicians in this world of trend-chasers and icon-mimickers, for some three decades.
Jim Danger, born James Paradis in Portsmouth on July 3, 1959, to parents who were both professional musicians, began as a drummer at age 7, learning primarily by playing along with the just-released “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” Beatles album. As a drummer, he was involved in a band by age 9, and played with scores of locals, doing everything from rock’n’roll to country-western to gospel, including a “very brief” stint in his high-school band, before dropping out of Kittery’s Traip Academy at age 15.
At age 19, Jim drove himself and his pregnant wife to the West Coast, where, in a band in West Covina, California, he heard punk rock for the first time. “At first, I hated it,” he summarizes. “Then, though, as soon as we did an Iggy Pop song and I actually played punk, on the drums, I realized immediately that this was for me. The energy was just what I’d been looking for all my life.” Bear in mind that this was a life steeped from birth in nearly all types of popular music. “I grew up listening to the Everly Brothers, the Kingston Trio, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Ernest Tubb, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Doors, bluegrass stuff, Lawrence Welk, CCR and lots and lots of church music, especially old hymns and gospel quartets,” once his mother started taking him to a “backwoods Pentecostal church” when he was 9 -in 1969.
It was ten years later, during his 6-month stay in southern California, that his heart was won to punk rock. The Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, the Buzzcocks and Iggy Pop made the music in which he then steeped himself. “Though I was into the music, I had no idea about the scene, the culture, or the mindset of punk. Then I met GG Allin.”
