"downbeat: How did you decide to record In Crowd? It isn’t exactly an obvious song.
Lewis: I was in Washington D.C. playing at the Bohemian Caverns. We had a record session coming up on the weekend. This was like on Tuesday. We were gonna do like nine tunes, and I think I had seven down. So one afternoon, I was having lunch in this place, and this waitress came over and she said, "What are you doing?" I was getting my notes together for the album, what I was gonna play. She said, "Why don’t you record The In Crowd?" The in what? She said, "It’s on the jukebox.” And she played it. So I said, maybe. I was kind of desperate at that moment. The session was three days away and I needed two more tunes. So I went by a record store, I bought the 45, took it back to my hotel, and played it, wrote out the changes, and we had rehearsal that day. And it felt good. But I said, well, at least it’ll fill the album out — because as far as I was concerned that was not one of the major tunes on the album. So we played it that night, and the people started reacting to it. So I said, maybe this will do good for the album. That following night, we recorded it, and the audience participation was out of sight. They were clapping and carrying on and, of course, it’s history now. " - Ramsey Lewis to Michael Bourne, downbeat 10.25.1977
