Living with 'Feels So Good' since 1977

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Eleven-year-old me is in my bedroom, clock radio blaring a local FM rock station, when a song comes on unlike anything they normally played in that era. The jangly guitar intro, and then that solo flugelhorn (I didn’t know it was a flugelhorn at the time, I just assumed it was a trumpet) kicks in over a really funky rhythm section. It had that disco sound, but it was also funky, driving, and yes, catchy. For a boy used to hearing rock music — what we call classic rock now — this woke up a part of me I didn’t know existed. I was a soccer player, a pretty decent one, and I’d never really thought about actually playing music. Yet this song moved me so much I started looking into what it would take to play a trumpet.

I’d been surrounded by music my whole life by then. My mother and my uncle were both deep into it, all kinds, and I’m fairly sure she had something on while I was still inside her. Between them they had enormous collections, and I’d pull a record out because the cover looked interesting and then sit with it for hours.

But that was their music. In early 1978 I spent my own allowance money on that Chuck Mangione album, Feels So Good.

Most kids my age were putting their money into Fleetwood Mac and Queen and KISS. I listened to all of that on the radio too. But Chuck Mangione is the one I bought.

That fall I started middle school, and band was an option for the first time. Our elementary school had nothing. I signed up for trumpet.

Mangione played flugelhorn, which nobody was handing an eleven-year-old in a school band room, so trumpet was as close as I could get. Seventh grade through graduation I buried myself in it. First chair my senior year. I bought everything he released and tried to play like him, and I had no idea at the time that one album was going to shape as much as it did.

Guitar came my freshman year, bass the year after, piano after that, trumpet all the way through. My tastes widened out — Zeppelin, Rush, Skynyrd — but Mangione stayed right there alongside them, and he’s the reason horns ever meant anything to me. That one record opened the door to jazz, to big band, to classical, to soul, and to the rock bands built on a horn section: Chicago, Tower of Power, Earth, Wind & Fire. Almost everything I’ve listened to since traces back through it.

What’s interesting is that I mostly gave up the trumpet as I got deeper and deeper into guitar. My improvisation on guitar outran my improvisation on horn by a long way. I could read sheet music all day on trumpet, but I struggled to play anything that wasn’t on the page. I tried the horn parts Chuck did flawlessly and couldn’t get near them. I could cover the melody lines. The rest of it I never could grasp.

At sixty I hear those same parts differently. At fifteen I couldn’t get close. Now I listen and think they’re reachable — that if I’d put the forty years into the horn that I put into the guitar, I’d have them.

The strange part is that the thing I can’t get near isn’t the horn at all.

Grant Geissman’s guitar playing on that record is a whole other story. Chuck’s flugelhorn is front and center, but it’s still one voice in a band. Grant’s playing is in a different universe. I’m a pretty decent guitarist and I can’t even get close to comprehending what he did on that track. The technique, the phrasing, the timing — all of it is exactly right for that song, and I’ve had four decades on the instrument to work out how and I still can’t.

The thing I keep coming back to is how much is packed into it. Disco was on top in 1977 and the track has that feel underneath, but there’s jazz in it, and pop, and soul, and funk, and rock. That’s a lot to hold in one song without it falling apart. It doesn’t fall apart.

I never saw him play. Not once, in forty-eight years. He toured, I could have gone, and I kept not going the way you keep not doing things you assume will still be there.

He died in July 2025.

I spent that week playing every album of his I owned. It hit hard. I didn’t know him, I’d never seen him perform, but he’s where it started for me, and it started with Feels So Good.

Chuck Mangione · Vintage66's Weblog

Living with 'Feels So Good' since 1977