Customer Reviews

Let's Groove

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This huge EWF 1981 hit, which went to #3 in the US on the pop chart and reclined regally at #1 for eight weeks on the hot soul singles chart from late 1981 into 1982, is certified gold, and was nominated for a Grammy. All that aside--and that's impressive--every time I hear it I'm back in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on a sticky Saturday night in December 1998.

I was the lone American representative in the 1998 class of the Malaysian Armed Forces Staff College. We were near the end of the course, and we had the formal class dress ball. All students, instructors and staff, about 300 all together, with wives, were in their service mess dress uniforms at a downtown hotel. I was hanging with my mates, the British Army, Australian Army and New Zealand Army officers. Our wives looked absolutely smashing, my own simply gorgeous in a brand-new full length gown of embroidered gold Chinese good luck symbols on cobalt-blue silk that I'd brought back from Vietnam a few months earlier. Gawd, she was hot.

The formal military ball was over, the ogre of a commandant retreated back to his cave, but the night was young, so we headed for the Hard Rock Café'. Now, this is a pretty busy place on just about any night in KL, but Saturday nights are nuts, with expats, tourists, and the open-minded locals packing the place for food, music, and drinks. We arrived in two taxis, and with the four officers in their best mess uniforms, medals jingling, and the ladies dressed to the nines, the doorman spotted us, waved the crowd aside like parting a sea while bringing us forward, pulled aside that velvet rope and ushered us right on in like we were unanticipated top-tier celebrities. I've never gotten that kind of treatment, and it was intoxicating.

As we entered the HRC, right about midnight, the local band had just finished a song, and as we entered the room, so many folks looking at us in our incongruous outfits, they launched into this song. The whole room vibrated with that signature bass riff, and the crowd exploded. The entire place was moving, jumping and dancing, cheering and clapping, with the stage lights making everything orange and red, and we were occupying the place like flipping rock stars. That was the moment, an instant like nothing I'd ever experienced, and one I don't expect to ever happen again in my life.

Bottom line: music can be transformative, and it truly can serve as a soundtrack to your life. This song is indelibly etched on my consciousness as a singular moment in time when I, by pure happenstance, transcended my regular, mundane existence to live for a few moments on another plane. And it's got a great beat that you can dance to.