A Legacy Project

This would have been 1968. I was in tenth grade. I wore an orange Nehru shirt. And I was not embarrassed. 

As far as I knew, no one in school had a Nehru shirt. I would not have worn it to school. I couldn’t see myself sitting in Mrs. Davison’s civics class wearing an orange Nehru shirt. But I was a guitar player. I was a performer. 

On stage in the high school cafeteria that night, I sang into the school’s giant Electrovoice microphone. Between songs I also talked. I thought the guitar and the Nehru shirt conferred enough coolness upon me. “This next song,” I said at one point that night, “is a slow number from his first album, “Are Your Experienced?” It’s called ‘Hey, Joe,’ by Jimi Hendrix.” I took a breath. Could I? Should I? Yes, I could. “We think it’s a groove,” I said.

Before I could start the guitar riff in the song, I glanced to my left and saw Doug Haynes standing at the edge of the stage. He was shaking his head. Nobody I knew in school used the term “groovy” or its noun form “a groove.” Sitting in Mrs. Davison’s civics class, I would never have used it. Doug was the first person I knew who drank Boones Farm Apple Wine, the first person I knew who smoked pot. Had an aura about him. In today’s lingo we would say he was authentic. I was not. I was trying. And that was the point: if you had to try, you weren’t.

Clearly, groovy was not groovy. Neither was “a groove.” 

I read recently that, of all the songs he wrote, Paul Simon can’t stand “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” That was 1966. I hated that song. Paul Simon could not make groovy groovy.

For a short time I dated a girl who used the term. The first time I heard her say, “Yeah, that would be groovy,” I cringed and was never able to get past it. I could not be with that person. There were other reasons, of course, but groovy was big.