almost okay

I was driving back home from downtown after work one day a couple of weeks ago listening to one of our local R&B stations. It hadn't been a particularly good day for me, the majority of it spent in mindless toil, and wrapped in as much difficulty as the client could manage due to poor planning and carelessness. I was sitting in rush hour traffic inching along from light to light through Highland Park on Woodward, a sea of brake lights before me and a constant parade of pedestrians crossing mid-block, balancing on the double yellow line and threatening to step right into the side of my truck.

Suddenly a song came on that made all the trouble slip away and had me singing along and bobbing my head, filled me with as much joy as the first time I'd ever heard music. It was the late, great Lou Rawls singing 'Groovy People', and it changed the color of my day. Don't get me wrong... I still stopped at Happy Hour, but this time I was already happy when I got there, still high on Lou's tune, which echoed in my head for hours even after just hearing it a single time.

His first LP for Philadelphia International and producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, 'All Things In Time' went platinum and produced Lou's biggest hit ever, 'You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine', which climbed to number two on the pop charts in the summer of 1976. 'Groovy People' also cracked the Hot 100 later that same year, but I don't recall ever hearing the song before my bad work day in October of 2007.

Lou started singing in church as a child and was guided towards singing professionally by his grandmother, who's main motivation was to steer the young man away from trouble and keep him off the mean streets of Lou's native Chicago. As a member of the Teenage Kings of Harmony and The Pilgrim Travelers, Rawls toured and sang gospel in the fifties with Sam Cooke, eventually backing Cooke on his 1962 hit 'Bring It On Home'. Both performers survived a serious car accident in 1958, Cooke emerging virtually unscathed but Rawls winding up in a coma and being pronounced dead at the scene.

Rawls had minor successes in the early sixties, working the club circuit for peanuts before signing with Capitol Records and launching a long and successful career as a solo artist. By the late sixties, Lou had recorded a number of hits, including 'Love Is A Hurtin' Thing' (1966), 'Your Good Thing (Is About To End)' (1969) and 'Dead End Street' (1967). 'Dead End Street', which earned Lou his first Grammy, included a lengthy spoken monologue at the beginning, a technique which became part of Lou's signature style during live performances. He also contributed a song called 'Down Here On The Ground' to the film score of 'Cool Hand Luke' in 1968.

But it wouldn't be until the seventies when Lou would really hit his stride. His 1971 hit 'Natural Man' went to number 17 on the pop charts before today's featured LP was released and took him over the top. Other hits followed, including 'I'll See You When I Get There' (1977) and 'Lady Love' (1978), also recorded for Gamble and Huff's Philly International label.

In later years, Lou made his mark as host of 'Lou Rawls' Parade Of Stars', an annual telethon to raise money for the United Negro College Fund, which he began in 1980 and continued right up to the end of his life. Towards the end of his career he was almost as famous for selling Budweiser and Colonial Penn Life Insurance as he was for being a recording artist, and Lou also made a handful of appearances on television and in movies, most notably doing voice-over work for the 'Garfield' animated television show. Believe it or not, among his many other distinguished accomplishments, Lou opened for the Beatles in 1966 when they played Crosley Field in Cincinnati.

Lou, a former smoker who had quit in the early seventies, died in January of 2006 as a result of lung and brain cancer at the age of 72.

My very next visit to a record store after having heard 'Groovy People' made me seek it out. I dug up a copy of this LP for a buck after flipping through a bunch of other albums by Lou and scanning the back covers for the song title... no easy task since Lou released over seventy LPs during his lifetime. When I did find it, I knew the cover looked familiar, but didn't realize until I got it back home that I actually already owned a copy that I had never listened to.

Oh well. Now I have a copy for upstairs and one for the basement, which is good, because I've practically worn the new one out just listening and singing along to that one song...

“...I like groovy people...badumbumbumbum...groovy, groovy people...”

If you can picture me playing air bass, you'll get the full effect.