I Just Want to Celebrate

Zoo Freaks, pull up a chair and let the Crew spin a little history while Rare Earth is rolling through “I Just Want to Celebrate,” the lead single off their 1971 album One World. This is the one that still lifts a room without asking permission. Detroit white boys with a Motown contract, a horn in the pocket, a drummer singing lead, and a chorus that sounds like somebody finally put the weight down. The Zoo Crew has been riding this groove since the days when album rock still meant the long version and the short version lived on the same shelf.

The tune was not a jam the band cooked up on the road. Motown staff writers Dino Fekaris and Nick Zesses wrote it for them. Those two were in the writing rooms all day, a piano in every corner, turning out songs for the whole roster. Fekaris later co-wrote Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” and the pair already had credits with Martha and the Vandellas and Diana Ross. Sax man Gil Bridges told the story years later in plain language. The band walked into the studio one night to cut something else. The writers played “Celebrate” for them. They scrapped the other song on the spot and cut the whole thing, vocals and all, in a single day. That is the kind of accident a freeform station lives for.

Producer Tom Baird, who had also worked with Diana Ross and Gladys Knight and the Pips, shared the credit with the band. On the record you hear Pete Rivera on lead vocal and drums, Ray Monette on electric guitar, Mark Olson on organ, John Persh on bass, Gil Bridges on tambourine and backing vocals, and Ed Guzman on congas. Monette’s wah-wah guitar answers the vocal like a second singer. The album cut runs about three and a half minutes. Radio got a tighter edit, under three. For a band famous for stretching the Temptations’ “Get Ready” out past twenty minutes, that was almost a novelty. Joe Viglione later wrote that without this song, One World would have been an instant bargain-bin candidate. The single, Rare Earth Records 5031, with “The Seed” on the flip, hit the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1971, peaked at number 7 for two weeks, and stayed on the chart thirteen weeks. It also reached number 30 on the Best Selling Soul Singles chart, number 10 in Canada, and number 13 in the Netherlands. It was the band’s last Top 10 pop single, and the opening track on the live album Rare Earth in Concert later that same year.

Folks remember the shout in the chorus and miss the verses. Rivera sings that he put his faith in the people, but the people let him down. He had his hand on the dollar bill and the dollar bill flew away. Then he shrugs the whole mess off. He cannot be bothered with sorrow, and he cannot be bothered with hate. He just wants to celebrate another day of living. That is not a party lyric so much as a sigh of relief. By 1971 the old hippie glow had gone a little sour, the war was still grinding on, and a song about simply being glad to be upright landed harder than a sermon. Gil Scott-Heron even name-checked the band in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” listing Rare Earth among the voices that would not be singing the theme song. Being put down in a poem that famous is its own kind of plaque on the wall.

The song kept turning up in odd corners. On February 2, 1973, Rare Earth played it on NBC’s Midnight Special, alongside the then-current single “We’re Gonna Have a Good Time.” Decades on, it scored scenes in Three Kings, Invincible, and Tropic Thunder, the last of those in a cover by the Mooney Suzuki, and it closed out the final episode of Six Feet Under. In late October 2007, Metallica opened an acoustic set at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit with it, which startled a room full of metal fans and proved the hook still travels. Commercials have leaned on it so often that half the country can hum the chorus without knowing who cut it. That is the mark of a record that outlived the chart run.

To get how a band like this even existed inside Motown, you have to go back to a 1956 Ford Sunliner convertible. Gil Bridges was the kid who would not join a high-school outfit called the Glo-Worms. He told them if they wanted him, they could take the name off his car. They did. The Sunliners started around 1960 in Detroit, with Bridges on sax and flute and Pete Hoorelbeke, later billed as Pete Rivera, on drums and lead vocals. Through the sixties they worked Club Cliché, the Ann Arbor rooms, The Dells, Grandmother’s, and even the Peppermint Lounge in New York. John Persh came in on bass and trombone, then guitarist Rod Richards and keyboardist Kenny James. In 1968 they shed the car name for something that fit the psychedelic hour and became Rare Earth. A deal with Verve produced the album Dreams/Answers, which did not catch. Berry Gordy was looking for a way onto FM rock radio, where the old Motown formula of house bands and separate vocal sessions did not always travel. Other white acts had signed to the label and stalled, partly because Motown had little promotion aimed at that market. When the company came calling, they said they were starting a new division for rock acts. Bridges joked that they ought to call the label Rare Earth. They took the joke and ran with it. In 1969 the band signed, and the subsidiary was named after them. They were not the first white group on Motown, but they were the one that actually hit, a self-contained unit in a building built around the Funk Brothers.

The fit was never tidy. Motown liked to cut the track, then the vocal. Rare Earth wanted to play together. At one point the label paired them with a teenage Stevie Wonder as producer. Wonder wanted the gig. Rivera could imitate almost anybody, and the tracks started sounding like Stevie. Bridges did not think that served the band, Motown agreed, and the project was shelved. What did work were the long covers. “Get Ready” and “(I Know) I’m Losing You” gave them the first real airplay, and then “I Just Want to Celebrate” gave them a song of their own. One World was their third Motown release. Not long after the hit, the lineup started to fray. Rivera left in the mid-seventies amid a fight over the name. Bridges won the name in court and kept a version of the band on the road for decades, the last original member to stay with it until his passing in 2021. The chorus outlasted every argument.

That is the record the Zoo Crew is riding for you Zoo Freaks, a one-day Motown session that became the last Top 10 for a band named after a Ford, cut on a label named after a joke. If you want the long version of nights like this, the deep cuts and the stories between them, you already know where the freeform lives. Come hang with the hippie and rock and roll biker DJs over at THE ZOO, where the album still matters and the chorus still gets the room on its feet.

The band’s own trail is easy to follow. The official site is Rare Earth, still built around fifty-five years of “I Just Want to Celebrate.” The official Facebook page is Rare Earth on Facebook, the official Instagram is Rare Earth on Instagram, and the official X account is Rare Earth on X. Fans keeping the old records and the road stories alive gather in the Rare Earth Fan Page on Facebook. Spin it again if you want. The Crew will not argue.