Lonnie Jordan of War says the group’s genre-bending music may have kept it out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The group’s songs combined rock, reggae, jazz, R&B and Latin music.
Courtesy photo
By Bill Vaughan
Entertainment Writer
June of this year marked a milestone for the iconic group War, which received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Still eluding the band, however, is a space in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, despite being nominated in the past.
When Tasty Clips spoke with founding member LONNIE JORDAN in 2016, he believed their versatility hampered them throughout the years because they can’t be categorized.
With massive hits “Spill The Wine,” “Low Rider,” and “The Cisco Kid” among many others, he said, “If you go into a library and ask for War, we might be under rock, reggae, jazz. Check all of them. Might be under Latin.”
Jordan still loved the road and was happy that the catalog of his multi-platinum selling band continues to please a multicultural audience spanning different generations.
Then 69, the leader of this evolved group wanted people to have what’s called a flashback.
“That’s my Disneyland that I’m giving to the people,” he said. “The word reminiscing doesn’t even exist in my vocabulary. Flashback exists.”
He was contemplating putting a new project together with some of the hip-hop artists who have sampled their music for over a decade.
“We’d like to share some of our experiences with them and give them the real lowdown of what it was like coming out of Compton,” he said. “We first recorded ‘The World is a Ghetto’ on a truck in Long Beach outside of one of our rehearsal rooms. There were a lot of kids that used to come around in the summertime when they were out of school. Some are rappers today. One of them being Snoop Dogg!”
I brought up a story I heard him tell in the 80s from a club stage in Malibu about Bob Marley lifting “Get Up, Stand Up” from “Slipping Into Darkness.”
“We were on tour with them and it just so happened that he came to the side of the stage and heard our horn line,” Jordan said. “He loved melodic sounds. He borrowed the horn licks and then just wrote a whole piece.”
“All music is borrowed,” he said. “It’s not a rip-off. That’s what it’s all about. Just like the classical music back in the day like Claude Debussy and Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Beethoven, Bach — all these guys they borrowed from each other. One classic piece sounded just like the last one.
“If you listen to our song ‘Summer,’ I borrowed from Burger King the one line, ‘Have it your way.’ ‘All Day Music, when you listen to the horn line, that’s ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan.’ It’s all borrowed.”
Jordan was just as candid about some of his contemporaries and the use of his music.
ON SLY STONE: “A couple of years ago we hung out a lot. Sly’s just in his own world. That’s part of the genius of him. I’ll never understand, though, why he won’t come out of that shell. I don’t even know if a therapist could help him at this point. He has to come out in his own time. He’s due a lot of awards.”
ON GEORGE CLINTON: “I didn’t even recognize him this last time in Chicago. He cleaned up big time and got rid of a lot of the people in the band that was still part of that old school of killing themselves — the suicidal mission. I guess George got tired of it because people started dying in his camp. He had a rude awakening finally and realized he’s not getting any younger.”
ON JAMES BROWN: “Only had the pleasure of meeting him years ago at one of his headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. I’ll never forget that he shoved a vial up my nose, and it was cocaine. This was in the 70s. I tried to explain to him that he came into Los Angeles playing the 5/4 Ballroom. I was a young kid then and my mother wasn’t going to let me go. I went anyway.
“Didn’t want to go home, so I ended up sleeping at a hamburger stand. Woke up the next morning surrounded by all these plainclothes police officers because someone had broken into the burger stand while I was asleep. They fingerprinted me and let me go. I got in trouble, but he was amazing.”
Jordan was in the news last year for halting the appropriation of War songs politically.
“I don’t mind people using our music for their pleasure in the White House,” he said. “Like maybe [Barack] Obama dancing with his wife to ‘Deliver the Word’ or ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside.’ Don’t use our music for the benefit of boosting your campaign against a group of people. That’s raging wars. Our whole model was to rage war against wars and to bring people together as one.”
“Although ‘Why Can’t We Be Friends?’ may sound joyful, I would never want Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton to use our song against one another because they don’t mean it.”
