Magic Carpet Ride

In the late '60s, rock music was best enjoyed between two towering speakers hooked up to a hi-fidelity stereo sound system (this was long before earbuds or sleek little speakers). These systems, with their 10-inch woofers, turntables and equalizers, were expensive and took up a lot of space, but the juice was worth the squeeze. With royalties from Steppenwolf's first album, lead singer John Kay bought one of these sweet sound systems. When they were working on their second album, bass player Rushton Moreve came up with a groove for a new song and inserted the line "I like my job, I like my baby" as a placeholder. Kay took the demo home to work on the lyrics. In a Songfacts interview with Kay, he explained what happened next: "I popped the cassette into the player, and out of these rather large speakers came this track. And what popped into my head was, 'I like to dream... right between the sound machine.' The 'sound machine' being that stereo system. I wrote the lyrics and melody in 20 minutes, went and overdubbed the vocal, and then we did some more work on the track with instrument overdubs and the like, and 'Magic Carpet Ride' evolved from that."

A magic carpet shows up in the Arabian Nights tales from the 1700s as mystical, and very romantic, means of transport. It's a device often employed in books, movies and TV shows. Paul Revere & the Raiders were the first to use it in a rock song when they opened their song "Kicks" with the lines: Girl, you thought you found the answer On that magic carpet ride last night That song is about drug abuse; Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" is an invitation to a journey where fantasy will set you free. The magic carpet returned to pop music in 1992 with the #1 hit "A Whole New World," the theme to the Disney movie Aladdin.

Released on their second album, "Magic Carpet Ride" was the second big hit for Steppenwolf; their first, "Born To Be Wild," was released a few months earlier on their debut album. The band was best known for these two hits, but they developed a tight-knit fanbase (the "Wolfpack") that devoured the album cuts and supported the band for decades. In the late '60s and into the '70s, FM radio stations with Freeform or Album Oriented Rock formats would often play the lesser-known Steppenwolf cuts, and sometimes, the whole albums.