I distinctly remember one Saturday watching American Bandstand when Dick Clark introduced the new hit “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf with “a short movie to go along with it”. It was one of the first “music videos” broadcast on national TV. Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild” tour was the second concert I went to, January 31, 1969. Ticket price was $4.50. I can still remember Goldie McJohn with his huge afro rockin’ his Lowery organ. Here is an interview from American Bandstand:
The group wrote this based on the bass line their bass player, Rushton Moreve, came up with. The only words he had written for it were, “I like my job, I like my baby.” Lead singer John Kay wrote the rest of the lyrics.
Months earlier, as royalties from the success of our first album started to come in, Jutta [his girlfriend] and I replaced our lousy stereo with a top-notch system from a high-end audio store in Beverly Hills. As soon as I put in the cassette and heard the electronic sound effects in the opening, the song’s lyrics popped into my head: “I like to dream/ Yes-yes, right between my sound machine/ On a cloud of sound, I drift in the night/ Any place it goes is right.”
In an interview, Kay disputed a common rumor about the song:
I didn’t drop acid before writing the lyrics, as many people later assumed. And the lyrics weren’t about an acid trip. I may have smoked a joint that night, but that was it. Since birth, I’ve had achromatopsia—complete color blindness. If I had dropped acid, I would have been hallucinating in vivid black and white. I doubt that would have helped me or the song much.
The single version differs noticeably from the album version with a different vocal take by Kay used for the first verse of the song and differing instrumental balances, most notably the introduction feedback. The single version is also much shorter than the album version, with a running time of 2 minutes and 55 seconds. (The album version is 4 minutes and 25 seconds long.)
In the interview, Kay and guitarist Michael Monarch discussed the making of the song:
Kay: One day, Jerry’s brother Dennis, who had changed his name to Mars Bonfire, came in to show us a new song he had written. At some point, Rushton started playing this bouncy riff on his bass that he had played during sound checks on our first tour. Mars liked the riff and started playing chords against it on his Fender Jazzmaster guitar.
The guys in the booth went nuts. They came on the speaker and said, “Hey, keep doing that. That’s really good.” So we kept at it. But all we had was this cool riff. Mars suggested we add an instrumental interlude. He played these chords that led into the jam, for which I later wrote the lyrics, “Close your eyes girl/ Look inside girl/ Let the sound take you away.”
Michael, our lead guitarist, loved thick distorted guitar notes and had a Fuzz Face guitar-effects pedal. I said to Michael, “Let’s go into the studio—you do your feedback routine, the really nasty, growly animal, monster sounds. Whenever I hear something approaching a note, I’ll contrast that with a high-pitched single note slide on my guitar.”
Michael Monarch: I cranked my Fender Concert amp full open. Then I took my Fender Esquire and leaned into the amp, to overload it and create midrange-to-bottom feedback. I was being real physical with the instrument, bending notes and hitting the strings hard with the bottom of my fist so the strings would touch the pickup underneath.
Normally, they never touch, so when they did, it made a chugging sound, like a space ship landing. I gave the guys in the booth about 30 seconds of that. Then they asked me to do it all again. I did, but it came out different, of course. What you hear on the record’s opening are the two takes I recorded overlapping.
The first part is my distortion and bending the guitar strings while playing. The second part is me hitting the strings rapidly against the pickup to get that chugging sound before John’s vocal comes in and the song starts.
The full interview can be read here.
John Kay (born Joachim Fritz Krauledat) was born 12 April 1944 in Tilsit, East Prussia, Germany, now Sovetsk, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. His father Fritz was killed a month before he was born. When Kay was a baby in early 1945, his mother fled with him from the advancing Soviet troops during the Evacuation of East Prussia in harsh winter conditions. What a way to start a life.
In 1948, when I was 4, my mother and I escaped from East Germany. We eventually made our way to Toronto in 1958, where I listened to rock ’n’ roll on the radio and began playing guitar. When I was 20, I moved to Los Angeles, and from 1964 to ’65 played folk-blues guitar at coffee houses. I played my way back to Toronto in 1965 and joined a rock group called the Sparrows.
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