“Low Rider” by War

War wrote "Low Rider" with record producer Jerry Goldstein for Why Can't We Be Friends?, the funk band's seventh studio album, which came out in June 1975, and B. B. Dickerson's bass drives it almost the whole way through. Charles Miller sings lead and plays the alto sax riff, with Lee Oskar doubling it on harmonica, and near the end Miller's sax solo lets loose a sound like a siren. AllMusic hears the lyric taking the laid-back cool of the lowrider, the Chicano practice of hot-rodding classic cars on hydraulics, and stretching it by innuendo into a whole lifestyle.

It topped Billboard's R&B chart, reached number seven on the Hot 100 and 12 in the UK, then rolled into the movies, from Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke in 1978 to Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused in 1993. The Grammy Hall of Fame inducted it in 2014.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.