In Defense of Feeling Groovy
“Groovy” is a truly radical — and radically misunderstood — concept
In twenty-first century America, we don’t know what to do with “grooviness.” Today the word exists in the province of mockery and insufferable *wink* *wink* nostalgia. “Groovy” evokes Austin Powers impressions and cheap hippie costumes at Halloween Spirit. Its most prominent user on television in recent decades was “Leo,” Tommy Chong’s clueless aging hippie on “That ’70s Show.” The line “that’s groovy, man” is TV code for “dismiss this loser.”
They mock what they do not understand. Unlike its birthmate, “cool,” “groovy” is a truly radical concept, one that has historically been difficult to monetize, capture, or define. Its very ineffability invites mockery — but despite all of this, it is a profoundly useful word, one that points us in the direction of a deeper truth that escapes the bitter irony of our dominant culture and the pitiless expectations of its economics. But how do we cut through post-9/11 rage, ’90s irony, and ’80s smarm — how do we avoid the implied smirk that inevitably accompanies it? To begin, we must dig into the history of the groove.
Groovy Isn’t Cool
In its modern, nostalgic, use, “groovy” is essentially the psychedelic twin sibling of “cool,” and there is some truth here. Both were born out of 1930s African-American jazz slang, and they’re used interchangeably today to denote something excellent, trendy, or impressive.
But cool in this usage predates groovy by decades — which raises the question: If they truly have the same meaning, why did the participants of 1960s subculture require a new word, when “cool” has functioned perfectly well for every other youth movement from the Jazz Age to the TikTok Age? The obvious answer is that our nostalgic assumptions are incorrect — because they actually aren’t the same words. Instead, “groovy” in its 1930s-60s use captures something distinct and nuanced.
While the Online Etymology Dictionary denotes “groovy” as signifying “first-rate, excellent,” it also notes that it refers to being “in the groove,” a jazz musician’s concept of being laid back and in the flow of the improvisational current of the music.
In his exhaustive 350-page doctoral dissertation Feeling the groove: shared time and its meanings for three jazz trios (2008), Mark Russell Doffman defines “the groove” as “a dynamic, musical sharedness” (pg 3), an inter-subjective state built by multiple musicians who seamlessly micro-coordinate their performances in a dynamic, often improvisational state. Crucially, the groove is something that happens between musicians, a synchronicity that emerges organically when certain — often difficult to define or quantify — conditions are met.
This definition, grounded in the specific context of professional jazz combos, is the birthplace of not only the groove, but the concept of grooviness. But it does not encapsulate the more general use of the concept — prominent in the 1960s counterculture youth scene which sought to break “the Groove” out of music and apply it to a broader philosophy of living.
In search of an unironic groovy
I feel a bit embarrassed writing this — I know that if I were to tell people I’m trying to “reclaim groovy,” It’d produce some tired jokes and outright puzzlement. How do we free “groovy” from decades of encrusted mockery which dismissed not only the word but the intelligence and importance of its users? Because ultimately, all linguistic contempt is a veil for social contempt. What were the hippies up to that we’re missing here?
How is it possible that our capitalist economy, which has gorged on every youth culture trend for the past 70 years, milking every possible profit angle, has so thoroughly rejected “groovy”? What about the idea behind the word is so hostile to capitalist society — remember that these are the folks who put Che’s face on T-shirts — that its only response is decades of mockery and the sales bin at Spirit Halloween?
To understand better, we need to pierce the nostalgia and contempt and go back to a time when grooviness was genuinely appreciated, cultivated, and celebrated. We need look no further than the unironic poets of 1960s groovy, Simon and Garfunkel, and their 1966 masterpiece “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”
The piece is short — clocking in at 1:43, it is the shortest piece on the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966) album, and it has only three stanzas set to a jaunty tune:
Slow down, you move too fast / You got to make the morning last /Just kicking down the cobblestones / Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy/ Ba da da da da da da, feelin’ groovy / Hello, lamppost, what’cha knowin’? / I’ve come to watch your flowers growin’ / Ain’t’cha got no rhymes for me? / Doot-in doo-doo, feelin’ groovy / Ba da da da da da da, feelin’ groovy / I got no deeds to do / No promises to keep / I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep / Let the morning time drop all its petals on me / Life, I love you / All is groovy
“The 59th Street Bridge (Feeling Groovy)” is a celebration of synchronicity and connection to the world around the narrator. But instead of a trumpeter grooving with a bassist — for example — the narrator attempts to groove with the world at large. He approaches a thoroughly quotidian space: the urban landscape of New York City generally and the specific landscape of the 59th Street Bridge (today known as the Queensboro Bridge).
This is typical of Simon and Garfunkel, who seek to transform urban spaces into living poetry; a concept made literal later in the same album in “A Poem On The Underground Wall,” where a man escapes from the oppression of a nighttime train station by scrawling “A single-worded poem comprised/Of four letters” on the station wall. It is an act of ecstatic liberation, as “…his heart is laughing, screaming, pounding/The poem across the tracks rebounding.”
But where “A Poem…” is a tale of liberation from darkness, the narrator in “59th Street Bridge” is already liberated and fully able to groove with his surroundings. He greets the lamppost (“what’cha knowin’?”) and loves life and flowers, “feelin’ groovy” in this connection and synchronicity. This is where the musical concept becomes a philosophical one, a call for a higher unity with the world and a promise of joyful liberation from the cares of the world.
These artistic observations echo the scholarship of Michel de Certeau, especially his work in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) where he explores the way that individuals caught within an oppressive contemporary capitalist context cultivate freedom in the ways they act in quotidian contexts — especially the act of walking in the city . For de Certeau, cities are created by the strategies of powerful people and institutions, and operate under their logics and to serve their priorities. However, ordinary people practice their tactics of liberation in the ways they walk and operate within that context.
De Certeau’s observations help us understand the wider liberatory power of the superficially whimsical acts of the narrator in “59th Street Bridge” (or the apparently pointless rebellion in “A Poem…”). Here they become part of a deeper tactic of humanization and liberation of a cityscape that is not designed for humans or liberation, and the poems point to the wider potential for transformation that exists within the practices of everyday life.
Puff and Stuff
Perhaps the strangest coda to the story of an already strange song came about in 1969. In that year, puppeteer brothers Sid and Marty Krofft released arguably their most surreal television show: “H.R. Pufnstuf.” It is a tale of a boy lured by an evil witch into a psychedelic fantasyland where he is protected by an anthropomorphic dragon/small town sheriff — H.R. Pufnstuf himself.
The intersection with “59th Street Bridge” was due to the fact that significant sections of the show’s theme song were lifted from Paul Simon’s tune, a fact confirmed by Simon’s successful lawsuit against the Kroffts and his eventual inclusion in the credits.
H.R. Pufnstuf is infamous as a purported metaphor for a psychedelic high, such as with LSD or Magic Mushrooms, and it provides us with a bridge into another important area that helps us understand the rise and fall of groovy: the 1960s drug culture.
“Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” These infamous instructions were given by Dr. Timothy Leary, a professor of psychology at Harvard, to young people of the 1960s. A proponent of the mind-expanding powers of psychoactive substances, Leary openly called for college students to leave universities and instead pursue enlightenment. As H.R. Pufnstuf guarded a magic “living island” where everything from the trees to the rocks was sentient and beautiful, Leary sought to guide his young charges to a new cognitive world.
This embrace of the playful ecstasy of the high reached its height with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. A collective of psychedelic artists and psychoactive philosophers who were the seeds of what would become the Grateful Dead, they traveled across the country in 1964 (and again in later years) to proselytize for the potential of LSD for a societal transformation.
It is important to note that while their aesthetic and personality was playful and strange, their mission was a profoundly serious one, part of a mission of spiritual and cultural transformation for both the individual and society. In a 1989 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Kesey reflects on the spiritual significance of LSD, how he prepared for his first trip, and how his experience was unironically groovy:
KESEY: …I think that we’d been preparing for a long time. You know, I knew the Bible. I knew the Bhagavad Gita. I knew the Daodejing. I had read Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, which gave us an underpinning spiritually, so that these phenomena that were happening to us had something that we could relate to. We just happened to come at a time when it was not only a lot of stuff happening chemically, there was a lot of new changes in music and in film. Burroughs was just beginning to do his work in literature, and there was a movement afoot that this was just a part of. […] it was exciting. It was wonderful.
GROSS: What was the very first trip like, though, under the experimental conditions?
KESEY: Groovy, man.
(Laughter)
KESEY: It was groovy. We suddenly realized that there’s a lot more to this world than we previously thought.
“Slow down, you move too fast”
The sentiments held in “59th Street Bridge” were, and remain, profoundly radical. This starts with the opening line, which calls for a slowing down of life in the center of the frenetic heart of world capitalism. The title situates us in New York — a city famed then and now for striving and hustle — and rejects all of it: “I got no deeds to do/No promises to keep.” Instead, the narrator seeks a higher goal of finding a way to groove with the city itself.
This is a continuation of the work of the Beat Poets — themselves well aware of the groove in jazz — and their attempts to commune with the urban landscapes in poems like William S. Burroughs’ “Spain & 42nd St.” (1962) or celebrate the divinity in everyday life as Allen Ginsberg did in his ecstatic proclamation of holiness, “Footnote to Howl” (1955).
Another example would be Jack Kerouac’s haiku “The Bottoms of my Shoes,” where the act of walking in the rain cleanses the filth from the narrator:
The bottoms of my shoes
are clean
From walking in the rain
But unlike the Beats’ gritty, ground-out personae, the grooviness of Simon & Garfunkel is uplifting, hopeful, joyous. This is where grooviness becomes completely incomprehensible to capitalist sentiments. At the very core of consumer culture is the assumption that happiness is a consumer good to be bought in a can, preferably repeatedly.
This promise of spiritual liberation echoes other works of the time, notably Godspell (1973), a very groovy retelling of the Christ story. Also set in New York, it tells the story of Jesus freeing souls of his disciples to cavort about a strangely empty Manhattan, singing and listening to the Christ in childlike joy.
Simon & Garfunkel themselves openly reject the consumerist ideal of commodified happiness in their 1965 single “The Sound of Silence,” where the narrator — again walking through the city — communes with his surroundings, this time the darkness, which he calls “my old friend.” His reveries are disturbed by a great crowd of soulless husks of humans illuminated in neon light:
And in the naked light I saw / Ten thousand people, maybe more
[…]
And the people bowed and prayed / To the neon god they made
“Sound of Silence” remains a worldwide hit (with renewed interest after a 2016 version by Disturbed), comprehensible to the economic system as a commodification of rebellion. “The 59th Street Bridge”, on the other hand, is mostly lost to history despite a number of covers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even Paul Simon claims in the 21st century to ‘hate’ the tune — though by that time the soft ‘yacht’ rock revolution of the 1980s had fundamentally transformed the “sweet” of 1960s artists like Simon and Garfunkel and the Beach Boys into the “saccharine” of acts like Captain & Tennille and Christopher Cross and jettisoned their intellectual core as part of a broader coarsening and commodification of popular culture in the neo-liberal turn of that era.
“He was an artist, and a writer, and a poet, and a friend”
It was perhaps inevitable that the Counterculture’s groovy assault upon dominant cultural norms would not achieve their goals, especially in the face of the implacable political and cultural opposition of the 1980s. But it was not only external forces that mattered: In their emphasis on transformation of society through individual enlightenment, they presented no critique or alternative to dominant economic systems. This individual approach further ignored the fact that their movement, despite its roots in jazz culture, was overwhelmingly white and male dominated, and did not present anywhere near the universal vision it claimed. Moreover, in place of an economic system, they posited a form of squalid secular asceticism whose appeal was limited even in its heyday. Self-inflicted squalor may have its attractions, but it inherently excludes parents who wish to keep their children, those whose health or abilities are compromised, and anyone caring for dependents.
By the 1980s, it appeared that the unironic search for grooviness was dead in all but a few derided holdouts. But some of the core beliefs of the Counterculture prophets continued in another youth subculture: punks. In the ’80s, the punks adopted the belief in a toxic, materialistic mainstream culture that sought to destroy the souls of people in pursuit of power and profit. They cultivated an ascetic that embraced squalid anti-materialist purity and a grooming and style that consciously excluded them from dominant culture. Perhaps most importantly, they combined deep earnestness of belief with a playful clowning.
Part of the mystifying nature of the groovy counterculture has been the complete cultural dominance of ironic humor in the decades since. The Counterculture clowns like Kesey and Abbie Hoffman sought an earnest humor that subverted the powerful, but their vision was edged out and eventually completely replaced by the humor of their contemporaries, the stand up artists — embodied in the likes of George Carlin and Richard Pryor. Comedy became so dominated by the standup comedian that the clowns have nearly vanished from recognition.
Despite their often terrifying exteriors to the dominant culture, to themselves, the punks deeply appreciated clownishness and humor. What they lacked from their 1960s predecessors is the deep-held optimism, joy, and whimsy that is a necessary precursor to the spiritual search for the groovy.
This is perhaps most obvious in their attitudes towards drug use. The 1960s counterculture attitude saw drugs as a gateway to a wondrous world where one can groove with lampposts, find enlightenment, or meet a psychedelic dragon for adventures.
The 1980s and 1990s punks also saw drugs as an understandable escape from the horror of modern life. However, they often focused on this escape’s deep inherent dangers. The punk narrative is more likely to focus on overdose or a terrifying bad trip that ends with, to cite a famous example, flying into a delirious rage and stabbing one’s own mother.
A repeating theme in punk lyrics from the time is the death of a close friend, typically from overdose, suicide, or the dangers of sleeping rough (often it is unclear). In these narratives, death often seems to take the most playful and delightful members of the narrator’s “crew,” the ones who embody most the spirit of the ’60s groovy. For instance, in Rancid’s Daly City Train (1995), the narrator eulogizes Jackl, an “artist, writer, poet and friend” who is an “angel” but who “rolled the dice” too many times. The lyrics continue:
Jackl was one of the ones that perished / Yeah, he was one of the ones that was already saved / Through all this evil and wreckage, yeah / He maintained a sense of himself, yeah
In this grim vision, enlightenment is not possible, and the best one can hope for is being saved from evil. The temporary escape through music, friendship, alcohol, and drugs precedes the final escape, to be avoided primarily because one must then leave one’s friends to face the evil without you. Similar ideas can be seen in Pennywise’s “Bro Hymn” (1991), “People Who Died” by the Jim Carroll Band (1980), and “Stay Free” by the Clash (1978).
“Pity the Dead” by Bad Religion (1996) in particular encapsulates the brutal, secular anti-spiritualism of these songs that runs in the face of the optimistic spiritual hope of the Counterculture:
Well, you’ve seen the disease, suffering and decay, / And you whisper to yourself blissfully “it’s okay” / And you still refuse the possibility / That the dead are better off than we / Tell me what you see, tell me what you know / Is there anyone who lives a painless life? / If there is show me so
The destitute and famished, demonic and the / Banished, dejected and the ostracized, the / Brainwashed and the paralyzed, the conquered / And objectified, the few who see the other side / Tell me what you see! It’s a mortal wretched cacophony
In the end you may find there’s no guiding subtle light, / No ancestors or friends, no judge of wrong or right / Just eternal silence and dormancy / And a final everlasting peace
And so, while sharing a similar DNA with their 1960s predecessors, the punk movement fundamentally turned is back on the search for the groovy, along with all of the other metaphysical and spiritual goals that went with it, instead recognizing few ideals greater than comradeship, clowning fun, and escape from the destructive forces of the world around.
In Defense of the Groove
Ultimately, the intended cultural revolution of “the” Counterculture did not manifest to the extent desired by the Keseys, Learys, or Ginsbergs, and its excesses were seized upon by the defenders of the hegemonic and institutional to the point where, by 1989, Terry Gross can laugh in Ken Kelsey’s face when he proclaims something “groovy.” It is a laughter rooted in an ironic, bitter acceptance of the material order of things, a context where Ginsberg and Rancid agree that the best of us are “destroyed by madness.” In a sense, the Counterculture faced head-on the alienation of late capitalism and revealed many of its inherent inconsistencies, but was unable to present a sufficient alternative.
The hippies clearly had an incomplete project, one that promised universal escape and enlightenment but delivered it only for a few and presented no material challenge to the pitiless logic of capitalism, but this weakness does not mean that their observations were entirely without merit. It does not mean that we should dismiss with a snigger the concept of “groovy.”
Grooviness is a joy and connectedness to the world independent of societal norms, time-saving gadgets and capitalist snake oil. It is not the product of individual action or planning, but — like jazz improvisation — emerges out of the synchronicity of performers. It is the joy expressed through four-letter-word poetry and lamppost conversations. It is hidden in the drowsy moments of half-formed consciousness when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. It is ecstatic, weird, silly, ineffable and, ultimately, “groovy.”
