68. Paul Revere And The Raiders - Midnight Ride (1966)




















Track Listing

1. Kicks
2. There's Always Tomorrow
3. Little Girl in the 4th Row
4. Ballad of a Useless Man
5. I'm Not Your Stepping Stone
6. There She Goes
7. All I Really Need Is You
8. Get It On
9. Louie, Go Home
10. Take a Look at Yourself
11. Melody for an Unknown Girl

Review

Paul Revere and the Riders are probably the band with the least street cred in this whole list (and that includes the Monkees). Still, that really doesn't matter. Let's judge them for the quality of their album and forget the fact that they were American TV's clowns in the year of 66.

Midnight Ride is a mixed bag. There are some very good songs here, quite gritty and raw and then there's unmitigated pig-shit. On the first category you have Kicks and Louie, Go Home for example and on the second one you have Melody for an Unknown Girl as one of the crappiest, most annoying and saccharine tracks I've had the disgust of listening to.

Still... their good stuff is very good indeed. Kicks is a great catchy tune that you should really get, a nice anti-drugs song which isn't too dumb, a rare thing indeed. Unfortunately for all the good efforts that are in this album, it is a very uncoherent thing. You get the almost punkish with I'm Not Your Stepping Stone and you go all the way to Kenny G style on the last track. In the middle you go through everything, from Beatles rip offs to country and western inspired. It becomes really hard to judge this album because you really don't know what it is trying to be. Therefore as an album, if you think that an album is more than a collection of songs, it fails. Still, parts of it are really good.

Buy it from Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Kicks
2. Louie, Go Home
3. All I Really Need Is You
4. I'm Not Your Stepping Stone

Final Grade

6/10

Trivia

Their PR agent was shit.

From Wiki

The band appeared regularly on national television, especially on Dick Clark's Where the Action Is, Happening '68, and It's Happening, the latter two of which were co-hosted by Paul Revere and Mark Lindsay. Here they were presented as the American response to the British Invasion. The group wore American Revolutionary War soldier uniforms and performed slapstick comedy and synchronized dance steps while the ponytailed Lindsay lip synched to their music. This farcical, cartoonish image obscured the proto-hard rock sound that their music often took.

Their hits from the mid-60's included "Kicks" (Billboard Pop Chart #4), "Him or Me - What's It Gonna Be?" (#7), "Good Thing" (#5), "Hungry" (#5), and "Great Airplane Strike" (#20). Of these, "Kicks" became their best-known song, an anti-drug message written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil that was especially akin to The Animals.

In mid-1967, with three gold albums to their credit, they were Columbia Records' top-selling rock band; their Greatest Hits album was one of two releases selected by Clive Davis to try out a higher list price for albums expected to be particularly popular, along with Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits.