The Story Behind ‘Magic Carpet Ride’

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The Story Behind ‘Magic Carpet Ride’

Post by voguy » 07-26-2016 07:44 PM

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Anatomy of a Song
The Story Behind Steppenwolf’s ‘Magic Carpet Ride’
John Kay and Michael Monarch discuss the origins of 1968’s ‘Magic Carpet Ride’
By Marc Myers - WALL STREET JOURNAL


Released in September 1968, Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” became one of rock’s first songs to open with an extended passage of guitar distortion. The eerie prologue lasts 20 seconds and includes chugging electronic tones before dissolving into the song’s rhythmic power chords and blues-rock vocal.

Though the song came out a year after Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady” with its shorter guitar distortion intro, “Magic Carpet Ride’s” thick guitar riff set the tone for hard rock and heavy metal bands that followed in 1969 and ’70. The single reached No. 3 on Billboard’s pop chart.

Today, John Kay, the band’s lead singer and the song’s co-writer, performs as John Kay and Steppenwolf to fund the Maue Kay Foundation, which supports wildlife protection and conservation. Mr. Kay, 72, and the recording’s lead guitarist Michael Monarch, 66, recently talked about the song’s evolution. Edited from interviews:

John Kay: 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.

In early ‘66, the Sparrows left for New York and spent the spring playing there. We got our chops together, but none of it was really going anywhere. Then we moved to Los Angeles before heading to San Francisco in the fall.

One night, after an argument with a club owner there, the Sparrows broke up. At this point, my Toronto girlfriend Jutta received her U.S. immigration visa and joined me in L.A. We moved into a tiny apartment above a garage at 7408 Fountain Ave. Our organist Goldy McJohn and drummer Jerry Edmonton moved into a place a few minutes away. The three of us were trying to figure out our next move.

Then a girlfriend of Jutta’s from Toronto moved in next door with her new husband, Gabriel Mekler, who happened to be a producer at ABC/Dunhill Records. Gabriel urged me to contact Goldy and Jerry and to get a bass player and lead guitarist from local sources. He said if I did, Dunhill would likely pay for some demos.

Goldy and Jerry were all for re-forming. I called Michael Monarch, the 17-year-old guitarist who had sat in with us at clubs on the Sunset Strip. He came aboard.

For a bassist, we posted a notice on a bulletin board at a record store. Rushton Moreve responded. He looked like a hippie, but he was a natural-born bass player. He understood instinctively the concept of grooves and melodic content, not just droning away on the root note of a chord.

We started rehearsing in the garage below my apartment. Every so often, Gabriel would stick his head in to give us input. At some point, Gabriel said we were ready to cut the demos. So we went into a studio and cut everything on a two-track recorder.

At the end of the session, a guy in the booth asked us the band’s name. Gabriel told me he had just read Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf,” which was popular on college campuses. Gabriel said he liked the sound of the title, so we told the guy “Steppenwolf.”

Gabriel submitted the demos to ABC/Dunhill, and they signed us. We soon recorded our first album.

Singles from the album were released, including “Born to Be Wild,” and we went out on a cross-county tour. When we returned in mid-’68, we went into the studio again to record our second album. But we didn’t have a complete album’s worth of stuff.

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.”

We did that for two cycles. The guys in the booth were excited, and they had hit the “record” button. When we went into the booth to hear what we had, the breakdown sounded really good. Except all we had was the riff and a breakdown. We didn’t have an introduction or anything on top to hold the ear. Michael went back into the studio.

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.

Mr. Kay: Bill Cooper, the studio’s co-owner, loved what Michael had done and spliced the electronic passage onto the start of the tape, so the song would open with this electronic overdub. Now we had a track. But we didn’t have a song. We still needed lyrics. Bill made me a cassette tape and I took it home.

Months earlier, as royalties from the success of our first album started to come in, Jutta 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.”

The lyrics were about how great my new stereo sounded. But I had to go someplace with the rest of the lyrics. I came up with, “Last night I held Aladdin’s lamp” and all the imagery of making a wish. The “little girl” in the song wasn’t supposed to be anyone specific. For me, it was Jutta.

The next day, I went into the studio and cut the vocal track. Gabriel thought the lines, “You don’t know what we can see/ Why don’t you tell your dreams to me/ Fantasy will set you free” needed a harmony. So I overdubbed a falsetto to give it some thickness. But we didn’t want to fade the psychedelic free fall to close out the song. “Magic Carpet Ride” needed to be a single, but we didn’t want to hurt the album version.

Bill copied one of the finished vocal choruses onto a second tape machine and spliced that extra chorus at the end, right after the jam section. He spliced it in after my slide does a little lick, which tells the ear the soloing section is ending. We faded out the added chorus.

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.



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Re: The Story Behind ‘Magic Carpet Ride’

Post by Fan » 07-27-2016 12:35 PM

Canadian connection baby :) Interesting read, thank you.
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