PAUL REVERE AND THE RAIDERS
(important work in color)
1961: Like Long Hair. 1963: Paul Revere & The Raiders. 1965: Here They Come. 1966: Just Like Us * Midnight Ride *The Spirit of ’67. 1967: Paul Revere and the Raiders Greatest Hits * Good Thing * Revolution! * A Christmas Present - and Past. 1968: Goin’ to Memphis * Something Happening. 1969: Hard ‘n’ Heavy (with Marshmallow) * Alias Pink Puzz. 1970: Collage. 1971: The Raiders' Greatest Hits, Vol. 2. * Indian Reservation * Good Thing. 1972: Country Wine * All Time Greatest Hits * Movin' On. 1982: Special Edition. 1983: Paul Revere Rides Again. 1990: Legend of Paul Revere (compilation-2 CDs). 1995: The Essential Ride: 1963 – 1967. 2000: Time Flies When You’re Having Fun.
On the liner notes to Just Like Us (1966), Dick Clark wrote:
"In January 1965, I took a chance … Paul [Revere] was clearly a solid, sensible young man with an iron grip on the group’s direction. He had no boring, complicated "hang-ups" about labels or images or eccentric musical values and had decided that they were to be a first-class, professional, middle-of-the-road rock team who would give full-blooded, full-value entertainment to the fans who paid money at the box office."
Paul Revere and the Raiders was pretty much summed up in Clark’s cash-register analysis. The band’s "middle-of-the road" approach was defined in a number of ways. Both the lusty cynicism of the Rolling Stones and the playful optimism of the Beatles were touchstones for impersonal song craft. They tended to follow other bands rather than lead (Kinks, Who, and Van Morrison references abound). Self-revelation was over-shadowed by a touch of camp and the pursuit of careful, sometimes predictable, verse, chorus, bridge terseness. Heart and soul were lost among cookie-cutter confections of pop radio releases and uninspired album filler. Their psychedelia was largely dope free and improvisation free. As musicians, the Raiders were professional, but never musically adventuresome, and often willing to turn the musical chores over to session men. Their few ballads failed to be powerful emotional showcases (here referring to Alias Pink Puzz and Hard 'n' Heavy with Marshmallow) because Lindsay, Revere and company never really let us in on who they were, and how they connected to the world emotionally. Albums were unfocused and usually put out while on the run - in between touring, shooting television shows, doing promos.
The band's fans have been vocal about disliking comparisons to the Monkees. In some ways the comparison isn't apt - a look at the 2-disc compilation Legend of Paul Revere shows that Mark Lindsay wrote, or co-wrote with Revere and Terry Melcher, a large number of their most enduring songs ("Him or Me," "Happening '68," "I Had a Dream," " "Let Me," "Gone Movin' On," "Just Seventeen," "Good Thing," "Great Airplane Strike," "Steppin' Out," "Blue Fox"). The Raiders had a vivacious playing style early on. A comparison to what the Monkees were capable of as a live band (see Monkees - Live 1967) shows the Raiders' superiority. On the other hand, many of the musicians who lit up the Monkees' albums - Hal Blaine, Jim Gordon, Jerry Kole (Lindsay says of Cole "He was really the guitar player for the Raiders), and session men like Ry Cooder, Van Dyke Parks, etc. - are present on many Raiders' songs. Maybe a better comparison is to the British Invasion Dave Clark 5 - though the Raiders had a better sense of humor and a more solid playing style. Terry Melcher - so important to many L.A. bands - played a large part in the Raiders pop-radio consistency.
Most Raiders’ music was studio-structured with crafty instrumental interaction. On the early albums, they sounded wound up and punchy. Their stint as a Pacific Northwest bar band resulted in tight arrangements on accomplished covers like "Do You Love Me," "Out of Sight," Night Train" and "Doggone." They recorded an early version of "Louie, Louie" in 1963 (a regional hit, eclipsed on a national level by The Kingsmen's version). Their album production style from the mid-sixties now seems a little hard on the ears: producer Terry Melcher kept the compression and the treble cranked up because that’s what sounded halfway decent coming out of your TV set when you watched buffoonish episodes of the Raiders’ s afternoon TV show Where the Action Is. Colorfully sonorous and varied albums by bands like The Rascals, Traffic, Love, and The Doors seemed beyond the Raiders grasp. The Raiders clattered and bustled through an energetic but uninspired string of albums. Mark Lindsay is said to have focused for almost nine months on writing Something Happening, but the result was still lightweight. Despite attempts at more important work (i.e. Collage), by the end of their career Paul Revere and The Raiders were right back where they started: playing songs by other people.
The pro-Raiders argument suggests that they were a rowdy, rocking, unpretentious band in the early/mid-sixties. It’s not overly horrifying, after one absorbs the band’s full emphasis, to bounce back through their song history and crank up hits like "Him or Me," or "Kicks." There are even a few neglected blasts that never received much airplay – "I Hear a Voice," and "Get Out of My Mind," for instance. But it would take quite a few more of these songs to make a case for Mark Lindsay as an overlooked songwriter from the era. William Ruhlmann quotes Paul Revere circa 1968: "Mark was trying to write and produce songs that were not too heavy for our fans, but not so light that we wouldn't be taken seriously by the media." This is the kind of constraint that many rockers from the era were throwing out the window, and the constraint is reflected in the band's music.
So put a batch of Raider’s songs together on a greatest hits album and what does it sound like? Some of the hits weren't all that great: "Birds of a Feather," "We've Gotta All Get Together," "Where the Action Is" and "Indian Reservation," for example. Strict pop formula is so demanding that every verse, chorus and bridge must work for a song or the whole thing tends to loose force - and this can be said of fairly nice tunes like "Mr. Son, Mr. Moon," "Cinderella Sunshine," "Don't Take it So Hard," "Corvair Baby," etc. That said, The Legend of Paul Revere offers 55 songs that hold your attention almost all the way through. Immersed in the middle of "Him or Me," "Just Seventeen," "Let Me," or "Happening '68" all Raider distractions fade away. A lack of pretension may be slightly overrated as an artistic quality, but it is what drives some of the the Raiders' best songs. What's missing in the band's career are those complicated hang-ups and eccentric musical values that would give their songs more of a personalized signature. Dick Clark, Terry Melcher and Paul Revere and the Raiders epitomized the generally harmless banality of corporate pop collusion and the wonder songs it occasionally produced.
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