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and having fun and dancing. It was just so great, and I think why is America so off

on this?

BiTS: Yes, it’s very strange, isn't it? Very strange.

JI: It's not right at all. I mean, I don't think it's productive. I don't think it's saving

lives. Anyway, so that's how I became Johnny Iguana. That was only when I was, you
know, 17 to 21. When I joined the Junior Wells band when I was 23, I decided to
revive the name because not only was it my old blues name that I’d employed, but

in that band two thirds of our repertoire were Junior Wells songs because sometimes
your repertoire when you're first starting out is just a record you happen to have,
and we all had Junior Wells records, particularly Stevie Lizard did. So we played all

of “Hoodoo Man Blues”. We played a lot of “Southside Blues Jam”, and we had some
other collections that had deeper cuts, like ‘Stomach Ache’. ‘I Got A Stomach Ache’
and ‘I Need Me A Car’. We played that.

I knew the Junior Wells stuff so well
that when I met him, it was almost kind
Otis Rush
of cosmic because it would have been

a bigger gig to play with John Lee
Hooker. At that time Junior was pretty
big in the mid-90s, but B.B. King or

something. But Junior's nephew who
was road managing him, recognised
how much it meant to me and how

much I knew Junior’s stuff and that
gave me a lot of points, even though

musically I wasn't really ready, but I
kind of learned on the job.

BiTS: What was meeting Junior like as

an emotional experience? I mean, you'd been a kind of fan from a distance for some
time, I would guess. It must have been quite an experience.

JI: Yeah, I often say that finding myself living in Chicago, which was a 12-hour drive

from where I was in New York City, living in Chicago, where I’d basically never been,
and going all around the world with Junior Wells and also having an address book
with phone numbers in it that had Junior Wells and soon after that Otis Rush because
I toured with him too. I’d pick up the phone and call the number in there and

someone would say, “Hello”, and it's actually Otis Rush or Junior Wells and I was
allowed to call, and they were happy to speak with me. It was just like an absolute

fantasy land situation.

So Junior, I was so happy to find because I of course, didn't know him as a human
being. I discovered that in a nine-person band, he was my favourite person in the

band. He was always charismatic and smart and funny, very childlike. He would play