About writing Gimme Danger, guitarist James Williamson said:

Not everybody knows that in those days I almost exclusively wrote songs on acoustic guitar. 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.