One World
Rare Earth were the other great caveman hard rock band to come out of Detroit in the late ’60s. And just like their peers in Grand Funk Railroad, their albums are full of monster jams and forehead-slappingly dumb lyrics delivered with endearing earnestness. One World, the band’s fourth album, included their biggest hit, “I Just Want To Celebrate,” but it opens with an astonishing, seven-minute version of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” that travels from pounding riff-rock to a weird, almost King Crimson-ish turnaround to a funk breakdown worthy of War. Their blend of foot-stompin’, gang-shoutin’ boogie-rock and surprisingly deep funk (they were signed to a Motown imprint named for them, but could easily have been Funkadelic’s labelmates on Westbound) reaches a kind of apotheosis on “…Celebrate,” which offers the granite-skulled chorus “I just want to celebrate/Another day of livin’/I just want to celebrate/Another day of life.” As another prominent group of rock boneheads advised, shout it out loud.