I wish I had a good compilation or some sort of good anthology of Don Covay’s work. I was, however, so very fortunate to have been exposed to him twice in my early days.
I always wax poetic about the ’68-’74 period in music for good reason. It was during the wonderful Summer of 1973, a period when every Soul single that got released could seemingly do no wrong, that I got nailed by Don Covay. I got a good dose of reality while listening to “I Was Checkin’ Out She Was Checkin’ In” while sliding myself into the groove as I lay down on the floor in my bedroom and having the little speakers going into my left ear. It was one of the great songs about infidelity in relationships and it reflected the times where a mature approach in both the lyrics and the music were taking on ever greater leaps and bounds in my mind.
When I picked up my first copy of the Out Of Our Heads album from The Rolling Stones at some point shortly after ’74 and heard “Mercy, Mercy” for the first time, for some strange reason, I had already known that the song had been done by Covay. This was one of the early examples of my making the connection between Soul and Rock. The inspiration that Covay created for Jagger & Richards gave me, in turn, the inspiration to have it go off in my head that this music had to be referred to as survival music. By the late ’70s and when I was growing into my own more sophisticated development into loving a lot of different types of music, it was imperative in my mind that this was what it had to be called while I was dealing with the first two years of my High School years down in San Jose.
I am so grateful to Covay for “I Was Checkin’ Out She Was Checkin’ In” and for allowing me to draw another spiral upward in my thinking about music and the reason for it being in my life and in anybody’s life.
Don Covay
1938-2015
RIP
–Stephen Talia