As it turned out, yes. Released in September 1968 as the lead single from Steppenwolf's next album, The Second, "Magic Carpet Ride" peaked at #3 on the Billboard pop chart, where the catchy, upbeat rocker stayed for an impressive 16 weeks. To this day, the tune remains a classic; it's been featured in countless movies and TV shows and it's still a radio staple, not to mention a road tripplaylist mainstay.
As Steppenwolf lead singer and co-writer John Kay told the Wall Street Journal in 2016, the band didn't have a full album's worth of songs when they headed into the studio to record The Second.
"The guys in the booth went nuts," he continued. "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.'"
"Months earlier, as royalties from the success of our first album started to come in, [Kay's wife] Jutta and I replaced our lousy stereo with a top-notch system from a high-end audio store in Beverly Hills," he said. "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.'"
SteppenwolfPhoto by Gems on Getty Images
"The 'little girl' in the song wasn’t supposed to be anyone specific," he added. "For me, it was Jutta."
"I didn’t drop acid before writing the lyrics, as many people later assumed," he quipped. "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."
Related: 1968 Classic Rock Hit That Invented Heavy Metal Became a Generation-Defining Anthem
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