'Take a little trip, take a little trip with me and see.' That's how it felt with my big brother Charles Miller. We Lowriders like to make our surroundings better by taking pride in what we are blessed with. We have found that if you are a real Lowrider with a nice ride and it's clean you will find that his or her home and work place is neat and in order. We were trying to convey that the Lowrider gets a little higher by riding in his automobile, being proud of how he takes care of his ride. That became a Hollywood thing for some reason. We didn't have any extra money for drugs. As a rule most Lowriders are not big druggies, because we all had regular jobs as machinists, body and fender and mechanics. The lines "Take a little trip" and "Rides a little higher" led many listeners to believe this song was about drugs, but Brown tells a different story: "We did not want it to sound as if we were referring to drugs. Could you imagine having a blow out? You would be dragging along the cement. The Sheriffs would measure from the ground up to your rims, then slide the calipers from one side to the other to make sure you had proper clearance. After a couple of years they became more sophisticated by having a stick with a caliper on the end made as a ruler.
You have to call your daddy or momma to come give you a rider. If it didn't go from one side to the other they would give you a ticket or impound your ride. Then they would take a pack of Camel cigarettes and clamp it on to the rod sliding it under the chassis of your hooptie. At first they would have a long rod with a clamp on it. There wasn't any AAA for us folks.īack in 1965-66, The Sheriffs would stop us for our car being too low. When they finally built freeways in Southern California we would cruise in the slow lane just in case we had to pull over and do some repairs. We would drive from Pomona California to South Los Angeles taking side streets and main drags through El Monte, Whittier, Watts, and Compton, then eventually into Long Beach/San Pedro, California. If you were driving a truck with lift gates on the rear, you'd better check to see if someone has stolen your hydraulics - it happened to me. It made for a hard ride up until homies started putting hydraulics on them. We'd chop our springs with torches - this would lower the car a few inches. He eventually lowered it all the way around after returning from the Korean War.
Leon left his 1953 yellow Mercury with black prime spots on it, tuck and roll seat covers from Tijuana Mexico, lowered in the front, parked on the side of the house. They were from the other side of the tracks. You also had Hot Rodders, which were a different breed racing around town. Brown told Songfacts: "The first time I knew about what we called Low Riders were my cousin Leon and a few more cruising up and down the coast in California. War's drummer Harold Brown, who was a founding member of the band, knows his way around cars and had his own business working on them for a while, which kept him from getting drafted during the Vietnam War.
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