3 hours ago
3
Lonnie Jordan, piano, timbales, vibraphone, vocals
Calling ourselves War was a positive thing: we were waging war against war and the conflicts going on in our back yard. Our weapons were our instruments, which fired rhythms, melodies and most of all harmony. We were a multi-ethnic band and we used our songs to bring peace and love.
In the beginning, we’d been Eric Burdon and War. Eric, who had been the singer in the Animals, taught us so much about improvising on stage. After he left, we’d just jam for ages and record everything. Low Rider came along in the middle of maybe an hour and a half of playing: we took a piece that became the song. Charles Miller sang the lead vocal. He walked into the studio, sat down, had a bottle of tequila, salt and a lemon, listened to the track and started singing in a low voice.
We’d been filming the lowrider car clubs in LA – the Dukes and Imperials – which had these souped-up cars with tape machines, big speakers and hydraulic parts retrieved from airplane graveyards. Charles had just bought a 1952 Chevrolet that was low and looked mean, so his mind was on lowriding. We all developed the rest of the lyrics.
“The low rider drives a little slower” line was a reference to drivers saving gas, which was very expensive then because of the oil crisis. “Take a little trip with me” was an innocent line about getting in the car with us, but after people started asking about it we realised it was a double entendre. The central riff was played by Charles on saxophone and Lee Oskar on harmonica. I played timbales in a swing style and tucked a vibraphone under to bring a bit of solid metal to the horns.
We gave cassettes to the lowriders and they all played it in their cars. As soon as it got played on the radio, the Latin community sent it up the charts, then off it rocketed and nothing was going to stop it.
Jerry Goldstein, producer
I saw the musicians who became War in a club called the Rag Doll. They were called Nightshift and backing Deacon Jones, a famous football player for the Los Angeles Rams. He was doing one-handed pushups and singing, and the band were different to anything I’d seen: a fusion of rock, blues, jazz and Latin. Eric had just quit the Animals and was disenchanted with the music business so I took him to see Nightshift and together they created this whole new jam band. The shows were two and a half hours long, then there’d be three or four encores. I didn’t want all this great music to get lost, so I started recording everything, which continued after Eric left.
Low Rider came out of a jam when we were making the Why Can’t We Be Friends? album. The Crystal studio was a huge place with big speakers, so we could have 20 friends in there hanging with us. Every night was a party. Stevie Wonder was recording in the same studio so we’d each listen to what the other was doing. I gave the band a copy of the jam on cassette and suggested we do something with the good bits. A day or so later, Charles showed up with the lyric, “If you want to do it right, do it in the morning”, which was so absurd I think he was playing a joke on me. I said: “You’ve got your lowrider outside, how about a song about a lowrider?” When everyone else showed up, we started jotting down ideas about what a lowrider was.
Low Rider was the last song recorded for the album. I took Papa Dee’s cowbell part from the jam and made it the intro, with the sax/harmonica riff more of a main feature. I rebuilt the song from the multitrack, measuring and cutting the tape for each edit. I edited five versions in different lengths and finally got it down to the three-minute single at 6am. It annoys some people that the sax solo fades out, but my thinking was that if I shortened the song to three minutes, people would want to hear it again.
