Guitarist Leo Nocentelli presses rewind on the Meters’ fifth studio album, from 1974.
“One song on the album is called ‘Loving You Is On My Mind.’ I did a recording with Ramsey Lewis for the Routes album, which Allen produced, and he did one of my songs, called ‘Come Back Jack.’ So I thought I would write something for an upcoming record that Ramsey might do. ‘Loving You Is On My Mind,’ if you noticed, is a piano-orientated song that’s kind of reminiscent of Ramsey Lewis. But I wasn’t going to hold the song, so I introduced it to everybody and Art did a wonderful job on the keyboard part. There was another song called ‘It Ain’t No Use’ that I was doing. It was a bad time in my life, and that song, the lyrics kind of speak for it. It let the secret out. The song was reminiscent of how I felt.
Zig was always a clever lyricist. I’m okay, but I serve my purpose with the Meters much better musically. There was one particular time when we were rehearsing for the album at the Musicians Union, Local 174. There was a riff I started playing with my wah-wah pedal, and Zig was listening to it and he said, ‘Hey man, what is that?’ I told it him it was something that just feels right, just came to me. So he started writing lyrics to it and that was the beginning of ‘Just Kissed My Baby.’ That’s how that happened.
There were several other songs that Zig and myself kind of worked out. ‘People Say’ was another one that ran the same course, me coming up with the musical aspect of it and Zig coming up with the words. Another one was called ‘Jungle Man.’ This is a thing that people don’t know: ‘Jungle Man’ was originally called ‘Zebra Man.’ If you listen to the breakdown of the lyrics, it’s ‘black and white/ full of stripes/ black and white/ full of stripes.’ It was about a zebra. But at the time there was a serial killer called the zebra serial killer, so we decided to change that name to ‘Jungle Man.’
Here’s my take on all of this, regarding who wrote what. I think I was the most musically educated person in the band. I went to school for music. I’d been writing long before the Meters. There were songs that I recorded with Allen long before the Meters started. But those songs wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for all four guys. It couldn’t have happened without George. It couldn’t have happened without Zig. Those songs couldn’t have happened without Art. Even though I mentioned the songs that I wrote personally, there’s no way you could’ve gotten another group of guys to make those songs sound like they sounded and like they still sound.”
