I’m Decidedly Not In With the In Crowd

Aw yeah. That’s 1964. Dobie Gray on Shindig, one of the many musical variety shows on TV back then. It was only broadcast for a couple of years, but managed to showcase lots of good artists. The first show had Sam Cooke, The Everly Brothers, and The Righteous Brothers, for instance.

The In Crowd had several popular iterations. Dobie’s was the first. A little later, jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis decided it would make a fun jazz cover.

Jazz was very big in the fifties, but rock ‘n roll steamrolled it in the sixties. Despite that, The Ramsey Lewis Trio had a big hit with it, sold a million copies, and got a Grammy for their trouble. The song has more or less become a jazz standard on the back of Lewis’ version. In the seventies, Bryan Ferry from Roxy Music took a run at it, and made the hind end of the charts again with a… a… well, a Bryan Ferry sort of version of it.

The three versions couldn’t sound more different. Dobie sounded playful singing the song. Ramsey sounded sophisticated. And Bryan sounded like he had a pocket full of rohypnol, and was cruising a louche bar in Marseille.