The Music Explosion – A Little Bit Of Soul

A good song for a beginner on guitar plus it’s just a cool 60s pop/rock song. I bought the single when I was a kid after I heard it on AM radio. The Music Explosion was an American garage rock band from Mansfield, Ohio. It’s one of those songs that will stick in your head all day…in a good way.

The song peaked at #2 in the  Billboard 100.

From Songfacts.

The remedy for life’s lows is found in this little pop ditty from 1967, which claims all you need to get by is a “little bit o’ soul.” It was written by British songwriting duo John Carter and Ken Lewis, who wrote the 1965 hit “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” for Herman’s Hermits. That same year, The Little Darlings recorded an early version of “Little Bit O’ Soul,” but it was largely ignored until a band from Mansfield, Ohio, called The Music Explosion got a hold of it. They were auditioning for producers Jeff Katz and Jerry Kasenetz, known as the Kings of Bubblegum, when they were given the song to practice.

“It was a folk version, sung like a ‘Puff The Magic Dragon,’ with a flat-top guitar,” Richard Nesta, the band’s guitarist, recalled in the book One Hit Wonders by Wayne Jancik. “It was a chordy song. Nothin’ special.”

That is, until they came up with the tune’s signature bass guitar riff (played by Butch Stahl). The Music Explosion’s version started out as a local hit and, once Kasenetz started shopping it around to California stations, it shot to #2 on the Hot 100.

All that roof raising that was going on in the late ’90s can be traced back to this song, with frontman Jamie Lyons singing, “When you raise the roof with your rock ‘n roll, you’ll get a lot more kicks with a little bit o’ soul.”

The controversial rap group 2 Live Crew sampled the riff in their 1989 song “The F–k Shop.” The group’s Luther Campbell, aka Luke, also recorded a #1 rap single in 1997 called “Raise the Roof,” which popularized the hands-in-the-air dance of the same name.

The Music Explosion disbanded in 1969. Their only other hit on the Hot 100 was 1967’s “Sunshine Games,” which peaked #63.

The Ramones covered this on their 1983 album, Subterranean Jungle.

This was used on the TV drama The Wire in the 2004 episode “Middle Ground.”

This was used in the 2017 film Detroit, set during the 1967 Detroit riots.

Little Bit Of Soul