Put the bacon on the paper so’s the grease’ll run off

Put the bacon on the paper so’s the grease’ll run off.

The first artist a lot of Detroiters ever remember making it. one that is, that we could relate to as a Detroit dude, a representative of what we were doing, was Mitch Ryder. Jenny Take A Ride may be part field holler, part shitkicker stomp, but the only place the medley could have come from was urban America; Detroit, blighted factory center of the universe. It was an honest synthesis, running through Good Golly Miss Molly jDevil With A. Blue Dress On, Shake A Tail feather and Sock It to Me. A unique copulation of the white man’s rock and roll and the black man’s rhythm and blues. A marriage between Buddy Holly and Little Richard.

When he dropped out of sight it was commonly assumed that his success had been a fluke. Yet, when he began appearing again, the image of the ass-kicking greaser that we may have had was shattered; he was doing free concerts in the park and it was rock and roll! Catmother should blush.

Mitch Ryder is making a comeback, in a very literal sense. “We had to return to Detroit to find what we had lost in New York”, he says.

Back when the Midwestern rock scene was primarily beer parties, weddings and dj hops, the only real rock music one had was on the radio. The radio shaped the heads of the kids, drove them to forming a “Woodstock Nation”. One of those radio shows came out of the bent frequencies of the occasional ozone, mostly at night, usually on very stormy nights, from Nashville, Tennessee. “The disc jockey’s name was John R. He played Little Richard records and 1 bought my first copy,” Ryder recalls. Why? “1 could see white girls react to it, white girls who had never heard a spade sing before.” He’s not the only one who remembers the John R. show as the first influence either. Johnny Winter has recollections of the program, too. For the late fifties teenager it was the equivalent of progressive FM.

That traditional teenage affinity for the seductive properties of rock confirmed, Ryder and his junior high school friend Joe Kubert started a band, The Tempest. Joe remembers it as “Mostly a wedding band”. The instrumentation was vocal, accordion, bass, guitar, drums and sax. Ryder recalls playing What'd / Say in fifty different versions. We’d be booked on weekends into the Sheraton Cadillac for S30 a night for weddings.”

Those days were short-lived; like most bands of its genre, the Tempest quickly disintegrated. Nobody except Mitch and Joe really thought of it as more than a weekend gig. But like all those little bands, a couple of musicians came out of it.

Mitch was a bit more serious than Joe’; he spent the next couple of years “drifting through downtown Detroit, singing and living with spades. Doing my whole trip that way.” He remembers the old r’n’b’ clubs, playing the Village and the Tantrum, listening to Ahmad Jamal at the Minor Key. Gaining a group of black musicians called the Peps he became a regular at the Village. “We sang whatever the number one rhythm and blues tune was at the time, fused to do a whole lot of Smokey (Robinson) things back then ’cause I had a high range. I used to sing at all these all black parties that they’d have down at the Gold Room of the 20 Grand.” The blacks were impressed by the fact that the white kid could sing r’n’b so effectively. “They’d say things like, ‘My you sing nice. And so white too’.”

Cont. on Next Page

Yet, unlike many of his peers, Ryder doesn’t ever feel that he was hung up with the myth of.what Norman Mailer called “The White Negro.” “As a result of growing up in Detroit it’s something I’m familar with. I used to sing in all the gospel chuches with my father. For two years we would go there. All these things are stuff that I exposed myself to because of my love for a certain type of music.”

Just turned sixteen, Ryder decided to head for glory; specifically, the glory of the West Coast and, hopefully, a recording contract. Like most sixteen year old kids’ dreams, from fire engines to Haight, the reality was much crueler than the fantasy. “My folks gave me the bread to go and it was really like a lot of bread for them to give, me at the time”, he remembers, a bit amazed at his own audacity and naivete. “But they believed in me.”

He headed straight to RCA Victor. “They wanted to know how come I didn’t have any tapes. 1 didn’t know where else to go but I wanted to make it look good so T stayed in my hotel an additional five days and used up all the money. Afraid to go out in the streets for fear I’d get lost.”

Unlike most kids, the fantasy didn’t end there for Ryder. He kept on singing, grubbing out the little jobs in bars and teen clubs, wanting to make it. He ended up auditioning again, this time for Motown. “There was some sort of weird dude their called Eddie Holland, playing piano. They had about five rooms in this old renovated house and they were just starting to get some hits with Smokey. Holland and Gordy liked the way I sang but they said ‘We need original material.’ And,sent me off.”

The Peps got an audition with Mrs. Gordy, Thelma, for her Tamla label. They signed with the label, but Ryder split for various reasons. Mostly over money, though, a commodity which Motown is notorious for doling out in obscenely small amounts. His explanation now is that, “Finally I got wise to the whole situation and broke off on my own.”

He returned to the scene of whatever triumphs he had had in the past, the Village. Shortly, he began headlining there. “They even painted my name on the front of the building”, he recalls.

The name was Billy Lee, well remembered in the Midwest as the first half of Billy Lee and the Rivieras, a crazy group of greasers who were the spiritual antecedents of all (i.e. MC5, Stooges) that has followed. That band grew of of Mitch’s Village days. The Village was a spawning ground for many Detroit groups (the Four Tops, for example), but Ryder was the first to make it. A month after his break from the Peps he signed a contract with the Reverend James Hendricks’ Carrie Records, a rhythm and blues/gospel label. His initial exposure to the recording medium, a song called “Fool For You”, was with that label.

It was now nineteen sixty three; after graduating from high school Ryder and Kubert decided to split to Florida for a winter vacation. While there the Beatles broke in Florida and blew Mitch and Joe right back to Detroit to try with renewed vigor to get their music together.

It didn’t quite work out that way; Ryder and Joe were still having problems finding compatible, serious musicians to work with. As Mitch recalls, “Nothing really happened so 1 went back to work at the Village. I was packing them in when three guys came in one night to be the backing group cause the other band didn’t show up”.

The other three, then known as the Riveras, were Jim McCarty on guitar, drummer John Badanjek and bass player Earl Elliott. With the addition of Kubert on rhythm and Mitch’s vocals the Detroit Wheels had been formed. For the time being they were still known as Billy Lee and The Riveras, a prime motivator in shaping a new Detroit sound, far removed from the Tamla/Motown superslick that had always been Detroit’s Musical identity in the outside world.

The band practiced and gigged together for six months and, with typical teenage naivete, decided that they should do a record. To do so, they needed front money. Their source for the kind of bread they needed was Gabe Glantz, then owner of the Village and now owner of the Grande Ballroom, palace of psychedelic delights. “He offered is a ridiculous contract that we~ never signed. But we got the money out of him anyway because Teddy Martine, (a bizarro singer and “exotic dancer” then a fixture in the Detroit music and fag scenes) liked me very much and talked Glanz into financing us.” The label was Bryan Highland’s old Hiland Records, the tune was the old rock standard, Do You Wanna Dance?. “Dave Prince (a disc jockey at WXYZ) used to play the record. He was the only jock in the world who would play the record.”

Those were rough days, financially and musically; they were going through the starvation period which leads either to stardon or oblivion. They would eventually get the breaks, but at the time they did the traditional Bar Mitzvah/wedding free hop circuit for little or no money. “I remember driving all the way to Grosse Isle for WKNR, the super new station, and not even getting gas money.”

WXYZ had become involved with the Walled Lake Casino, a teen dancing/drinking club of the sort which has since boomed throughout the Midwest. Dave Prince was the d.j. at the Casino and through him they became regulars at the club. During the early sixties it was known as the place to go on weekends; all the Ruben and the Jets plastic America pathos in the world could be found there. “It got to the point that our popularity was so massive that we started drawing two and three thousand kids every night we appeared. One night Smokey Robinson and the Miracles got pissed off cause they used to have these little cards they’d give out; there was one with his appearance on it and we got equal billing on it. We went through a whole scene with him cause we’d never had any hits and he was upset.”

The Casino was the prototypical greaser hangout. Those days are somewhat fond memories for Mitch. “Kids would just be walking around. There would be a big mass in the center either watching or rapping and then you’d have a thousand people going around in a big slow circle, clockwise, around the room. Cruising. The girls would sit on the side and wait to get picked up and you’d have about three or four hundred of them who’d nail themselves at the side of the stage, waiting for our performance.” Largely drunk, the crowd came to see a show that was as high energy and crazed as anything the Stooges now perpetrate.

“The chicks didn’t have to throw themselves at us; we threw ourselves at them. We used to take our shirts off and yell and scream and dance. McCarty would switch from guitar to drums and Johnny would jump off the piano and we’d shake together, jump in each other’s arms, do flips and splits. We’d scream and sing and I’d do the knee drop. I did that knee drop continuously for six years til I went to the doctor and he told me I had bone splinters. I asked him how James Brown was doing it and he said ‘He wears knee pads’. Blew my mind.”

But the group was still dissatisfied with the progress they were making. At the height of their popularity they could draw three thousand a night at the Casino. But they were still not satisfied. Ryder himself tried to enlist in the Army three times before he was eighteen. “Too young, they told me, come back when you’re eighteen. But by the time I was eighteen I was hip to ’em and they had to come after me.” But they were turned away by the bone splinters in his knee. The old knee drop saved his career after all. As it was, one of the members, Earl Elliott, had to leave the group right after their second hit record in order to do Army time.

Ryder seems rather defensive about the Casino days. “We made the Casino, that’s the only reason Lee Alan ever hyped us,” he says now. Alan was perhaps the most popular disc jockey in the area at that time and to a lot of kids it looked like he had created the Rivieras. In reality, the truth may be close to the opposite.

At this point, they decided that they were again ready to record a demo tape. “We gave it to our only friend in the biz, Dave Prince, who in turn sent it to a young man named Bob Crewe.” That was the beginning of the Detroit Wheels’ success and also the beginning of what was to lead to their breakup. At' any rate, Crewe sent for them to come to New York and record.

“The first time we went to New York we took a train out. What’s that one, the Grand Central? It was like the biggest thrill cause I was leaving, I had just gotten married a month before, and it was like a whole scene from a World War Two flick.”

New York was the first time the guys had ever been out of Michigan. “We got to New York the next morning and the sun was out, after all night in the train and we were just amazed at the buildings. Said, ‘God are we super! Came all this way, they must really want us!' Because, you see, we hadn’t gotten the recognition in Michigan that we needed for our starving egos.”

No matter how bad Detroit had been for the guys’ heads, New York was infinitely worse. “We couldn’t get any gigs cause nobody liked the Detroit sound at that time. So we lived at Seventy-first and Broadway, what they now call Needle Park, for six months. We used to sit up and listen to people get mugged on the streets and kill time fighting cockroaches.”

What few gigs they could get were held in the remoter areas of the New Jersey swampland. The group felt frustrated; they had no rehearsal hall so they practiced in their hotel rooms. “We used to set up the amplifiers at night and scare the Puerto Ricans. Make spaceship sounds and warn them of impending raids and things.

“The noise didn’t bother them”, Ryder laughs wryly, “cause we were on the fourteenth floor. And the people on the thirteenth floor were all nice people; like deaf and dumb Puerto Ricans. It was like a convalescent home.”

With little or no income, Crewe pulled the old ruse of offering them ‘advance’ money. “We were happy to take it at that point. We were all living on about $40 apiece a week. Paying our rooms and then I’d send about fifteen dollars home each week.”

Six months after their arrival in New York, in the early part of 1966, the group finally got into a studio. “We just did a stereo tape, two tracks. He said ‘Play some of the songs you do in your show’”

The tape consited of mostly “Beatles hits or whatever came out of our heads at the time.” What came out of their heads was a synthesis of the rhythm and blues of Ryders’ spade-digging period and the rock and roll of their peers.

Six months later Crewe finally managed to listen to the tape. “This is how his glorious career as a producer started; we were running the tape and listening to the tunes and all of a sudden he said ‘It’s a hit!’ He ran in and overdubbed a tambourine on it and put it out.” What he put out turned out to be the group’s first hit, Jenny Take a Ride. “That is the genius of Bob Crewe basically, his ability to hear a song. No matter how little effort he puts into it, he’s got an ear.”

That Crewe and his partners took much more credit for Ryder’s success than was due them still rankles Mitch somewhat. “He wasn’t involved in the music at all on any of the hits, not until the Dynavoice label, What Now My Love and all those things. Everything at that point was all McCarty’s brainchild and mine; whatever we put together with the group. The whole concept of medleys was ours too. It you want a different opinion though I’m sure you can contact Bob Crewe in New York. He’ll be sure to give you one.”

Jenny Take a Ride broke in December 1965 under the name Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. The name change was for a variety of reasons; Crewe felt it sounded too country and western (a drawback in 1965) and there was already another group called the Rivieras (they did California Sun). “We all volunteered names; one was going to be Mike Rothchild. So we went through the phone book and picked out Mitch Ryder. Somewhere in Manhattan Right now there’s somebody telling everybody he’s Mitch Ryder and they’re all laughing at him. He is Mitch Ryder though, in all actuality. Detroit Wheels required little inspiration after that.”

It was right after Thanksgiving 1965; the Wheels were playing a gig in Macena, N.Y., which, as Ryder notes, “is right under Cornwall, Canada.” The rough equivalent of being located forty miles from the heart of downtown Dubuque. “They called us up on the phone and said ‘You have a hit’. It broke Philly at the same time it hit in Detroit.”

The flip side of Jenny was a song called Baby Jane (MoMo Jane) which was a stone drug lyric combined with rhythm and blues; probably the first time for that particular combination. But the focus of his music was also on sensual, sexual lyrics. “The drug songs will go down quick,” he commented at the time. “Those are temporary, but sex is permanent.”

“It’s becoming an art today to try and slip something by the censors (that’s the program directors of the radio stations). The hipper the lyrics are, the hipper the kids have to be to catch them.” Ryder had the insight to see that exactly what’s happening would happen; that kids would soon begin to take such lyrics for granted, even expect them, because they related directly to their experiences and desires.

Their sound was then, and is now, directly involved with the body; at its best, it damn near compels you to dance to it. It is no mere coincidence that Detroit is the home of both Mitch Ryder and the MC5 (who talk about “resensifying” as their primary goal), that Detroit’s pop festival was called a Rock and Roll Revival. All relate directly to the essence of Midwestern rock; groin oriented, crotch music. Ryder remembers that, “In the early days a lot more boys would come to our concerts than girls. Because we were doing things that they wanted to do to their girlfriends but couldn’t cause they didn’t have the guts.”

The earliest rock stars and especially Ryder’s main influences. Little Richard, were as crotch oriented as the Stooges are today; Frank Zappa still talks about ‘cock-rock’ and “rock music is crotch music” is something the Five have been known to rely on to gain a broader base of acceptance. But those original singers, erotic as they were, were largely black men and the audience for rock was the sexually repressed white teenager. ”1 sort of became an accaptable substitute for Little Richard”, thinks Ryder. “1 did it out of a deep desire to become what Little Richard was to me; free and sexual and animal.” He recalls occasionally becoming so involved in his performances that he would have orgasms.

The success of Jenny and all the other Ryder hits was built on that premise, the premise that rock and roll was still body music. If anything, rhythm and blues is even more erotic. The best way to view that eroticism is live.

With the success of Jenny the band immediately began touring. “We were gigging all over fo $1000 a night right after working a week for $350.” For the next year the band was a major attraction on such shows as the Dick Clark Caravan, Murray the K’s programs at the Fox Theatre in Brooklyn, and on TV on Where the Action Is and Shindig!.

In England, Jenny took the country by storm. Ryder had captured soul in a way that people like Eric Burdon had been doggedly attempting to do for years. “We had beat them to it. As a matter of fact, Eric Burdon had a C.C. Rider due for release and when mine came out it blew his whole fucking thing. He waited another year to put it out.” In Burdon’s version, the line “Jenny take a ride now” is a tribute to Mitch’s version of the tune. He and Ryder were later to become very close; one of the highlights of Ryder’s career came in the summer of 1966 when the Animals were performing at the Schaefer Music Festival. Held annually in New York’s Central Park, it’s considered a prestigious gig even in the age of the super-festival. At that time, when it was the only thing of its kind, outdoors, the prestige was even greater. Mitch showed up for Burdon’s set that summer and was nearly raped in the front row until he got tip and jammed with the Animals in a set that culminated in a long C.C. Rider. When he did his own show a week later, the response was just as great.

But the success in England suffered somewhat because of the second release. That sone was Little Latin Lupe Lu, which while a hit in America never happened in Britain. In America the song was unknown; in Britain it had been a hit several months previously by the Righteous Brothers, who authored it. Lupe Lu was released in April 1966 just as Jenny had left the charts. It was never quite as successful as Jenny (that tune reached number ten on the Billboard charts, nationally), but it was even more rock and roll than Jenny.

The third and fourth singles, Takin ’ All I Can Get and Breakout were released that summer; neither one made a huge hit, but Breakout enjoyed some success including minimal airplay on r’n’b stations. This was a first for a self-contained white groupY'until the Young Rascals got some airplay in the last couple of years it was the only totally Caucasian group to even enjoy any rhythm and blues success.

Takin ’ All I Can Get, Ryder thinks, was just too bluesy to be commercial, “We were getting heavier and heavier into blues, but people weren’t gettin on it with us.”

Troubles began developing, centering on a plan by Crewe to get Ryder to go solo, but also involving personality conflicts between McCarty and Ryder. McCarty is a brilliant but moody guitar player and he and the occasionally equally moody Ryder simply didn’t see eye to eye on some things both considered important. Also Crewe and the groups’ manager, Allan Stroh, were both doing their best to get the band to split up. McCarty was the first to go.

The culmination came at the recording sessions where all of Mitch’s other hits, from Devil With a Blue Dress On to Shake A Tail-feather, were recorded. The group had become deeply involved in New York’s then burgeoning rock scene and had become close with Michael Bloomfield, Barry Goldberg, and their whole circle of friends. It was the last recording session with Ryder and the Wheels together. McCarty walked out because “he was pissed at Crewe. Crewe was belittling Bloomfield and things like that. We’d be sitting in the studio trying to work things out and Crewe would come swishing out; he’d start demanding that we play these corny, weird lines. This is where he started imposing himself. He actually believed that he was responsible for the music we were making.”

Crewe and Stroh had decided to make Ryder into a pop star of such proportions that he could play in movies and Vegas main room. Stroh finally convinced Ryder that the Wheels should be rent asunder; Ryder recalls the matter despondently. “I busted the group up,” he said, “I forced it on ’em.” Devil With A Blue Dress On {Good Golly Miss Molly had just become a million seller and Sock It to Me was about to.be released. It was Christmas, 1966.

Ryder regards that move as the beginning of the fall of his career. “From that point until now it’s just been nothing but financial burden and troubles for me. Misunderstandings and trying to get rid of the whole mess.”

He still came up with more hits after the Wheels were broken up; all of them from that last super-session with the Bloomfield/Goldberg contingent. Then, in late 1967, Crewe released a single calles What Now My Love. The change was incredible. Where before Ryder had been playing and recording with a minimal four to six piece band he was now touring with at least ten and occasionally as many as sixteen musicians. The recording sessions were done with orchestras. “I walked into that session one day and I saw sixty musicians sitting there, ready to play. So I asked Crewe who was paying for it all and he said, ‘You are’. I just said, ‘I don’t believe that,’ and he came back with, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be a hit.’”

Bloomfield did appear on some of the What Now My Love album sessions, but he finally grew completely fed up with Crewe and walked out on the session. “At that point I realized that it wasn’t my head that was fucked up. it was Crewe’s”. Ryder says.

The show band was a failure primarily because Ryder could never accept the glitter and shuck required to make it work. “The concept was to present rock and roll and rhythm and blues in a very plastic manner ... so you could take it into a Vegas main room. We had costumes and lighting and swirling discs; fantastic incredible makeup and garb, but it never came off. My managers took every penny 1 had at that point and sunk in into the show at a cost of about SI 10.000. I used to have four and five costumes that cost SI000 a piece. People would show up at the concerts just to see the bullshit, the trappings.”

But it really didn’t work because Ryder wouldn’t, and perhaps couldn’t let it. Ryder wanted a group, an entity he finds distinguishable from a mere band. “The whole thing was a disaster cause 1 refused to put myself into it. I’m sure 1 could have brought it off if I would’ve worked with it but I just couldn’t. I didn’t feel comfortable. I tried to make that show band become a group. I tried to put myself into it in a group way; but it just never happened.”

There were a variety of other reasons why the show failed to work. One of the primary ones was the failure of the other musicians to relate to the show in an artistic, rather than mercenary, manner. The sound couldn’t really improve because the band members weren’t interested in it except as a salaried job. “There wasn’t a lick of creativity in the two years I toured with the big show. It was like a paying job for ’em; there was no incentive to create. They were just whores, money whores.”

The show certainly didn’t lend itself to the normally wild Ryder performance. Its basic premise was superslickness; yet Ryder s primary asset had always been his raw, primitive r and b style.

Those years weren’t totally degrading however; one of the bands first gigs was at one of Murray the K’s Fox Theatre shows. “The Cream were booked fifth on that bill. It wasn’t until then that 1 realized how important the band was; Clapton asked what Jimmy was doing.” Ryder headlined that show with fellow Detroiter Wilson Pickett. “That was all based on what I’d done with the Wheels. And they weren’t there to reap any of the benefits.”

Interest in the group was at its height at this point; Devil had been a smash. Shake a Tailfeather and Sock It to Me tollowed with equal success. Then Ryder dropped out of sight.

1967 was the year when Ryder should have been consolidating all of his past successes; instead he spent the year hassling out his problems with Crewe. The records Crewe had been putting out were bombing; they had been done with the Wheels but, in Ryder’s phrase, “They weren’t single material.” The road show was on the skids, the money was stopping and the musicians in it still expected to get paid. “We were making incredible bread at one point. A peak of about SI 2000 for a one hour show in West Virginia, 1 think. But the show band became incredible to work with because there would be weekends when the most we’d be making was Si500. And these guys would demand their S250 salary that they’d been receiving and also their transportation paid. And they wanted it every week whether they worked or not.”

Coupled with this were the financial problems with Bob Crewe. The Wheels saw no money (Badanjek said he never received a cent from recording, not even session money) and Ryder fared little better. “I was with Bob Crewe and I must’ve sold six million records,” Ryder said. “I received two things from him; a fifteen thousand dollar advance (which is nowhere near six million records, especially since I had part of the writing royalties) and a thousand dollar royalty check. Sure, I got the gig money but that’s nothing to do with him; he still got his ten percent anyway.”

By the second year of the Show Band Ryder was through with Crewe. “He started putting out the shit that he wanted me to record. The first year I’d recorded those things but the second year I wouldn’t touch ’em.”

Thoroughly disillusioned and nearly bankrupt, Ryder’s move was to dismantle the show. He simply couldn’t afford the expense. Next, he moved to rid himself of the Crewe organization. Crewe had anticipated the axing. “He once told me that if I ever left him he would make sure I died musically and never return to the music scene. Threatened me!”

Perhaps feeling that he was better off dead without Crewe than with him, Ryder filed suit against him and began a recovery attempt. Getting rid of a manager is no easy job, however; so Ryder went to Dot, which distributed Crewe’s Dynavoice and New Voice labels, to see what help he could obtain in ridding himself of the dude.

“They wanted to get ride of Crewe because he was spending fortunes and fortunes on these superhypes of his but wasn’t making any money. It was a mutual thing; we worked it out so that Crewe gave them a release.” Knowing he would lose Ryder anyway because of the lawsuit, Crewe was happy to take what he could get and split.

The next problem was finding a compatible producer; one who would be sympathetic to Ryder’s music yet would make the album commercail enough to reinstate him in the public’s mind. Fortunately, Dot had recently purchased Stax/Volt records in Memphis and Steve Cropper (lead guitarist with Booker T and the MG’s, and author, with Otis, of Dock of the Bay and others) was available to do the production. It was advantageous for Mitch in several respects.

“It would do several things, solve several problems. First it would raise me to the heights of any artist trying to record r and b. (No other white artist had ever recorded with the Stax group prior to Ryder.) And it would be a commercial success. That would eliminate my financial problem and enable me to get into a position where 1 could get something musically happening again in my own mind. On top of that, The MGs are excellent musicians.”

Thus last June Ryder journeyed to Memphis to the Stax studios there. The idea for the album was to attempt to strike a blend between Ryder’s raw power and the tight instrumentation of the MGs; a Detroit/Memphis Experiment. The release of the album is imminent and it should prove to be one of the most interesting albums of the year. ,

It’s exactly that, an experiment, a one-shot attempt to achieve something new. Ryder’s energy combined with the funk of the MGs energetic funk could prove to be the new music of the seventies (people like Sly Stone already point us in that direction).

Cont. on Page 28

Cont. from Page 17

But that isn’t what Ryder’s conception of his music is, either; it’s merely an acceptable compromise. By his own admission this album is a side trip designed to put him where he wants to be. Hopefully then the experiment will be a commercial/artistic success.

The real plan, however, is in some way to re-form the Detroit Wheels; two of the old Wheels, the ever-present Joe Kubert and drummer Johnny Badanjek (one of the most influential rock drummers ever) are with his band now. Boot Hill, late of Billy C. and the Sunshine (predecessors of Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, presently storming the West Coast), is the group’s pianist. He has also added a trumpet and tenor sax.

The sound will be closer to comtemporaty white rhythm and blues.; that sound (e.g. Joe Cocker) certainly didn’t stand still for two years while Ryder was residing in obscurity. If anything, it mushroomed beyond anything ever expected by anyone when Jenny was released. Ryder is aware of all this. He still feels that he’ll be successful again; the teenagglust for rock and roll hasn’t left him yet, not at only 24.

“All I know is what I’ve gone through; rock and roll with the Rivieras, rhythm and blues with the Wheels, big band with the Show. And now the Stax record which I’m sure will be as successful as the first two, simply because its got an energy people can closely relate to.”

It’s still the age-old dream; what the Byrds said about success in So You Wanna Be A Rock and Roll Star can be true but it can also be overcome,-And once you’ve been there that last line still runs through your mind “Don’t forget what you are/You’re a rock and roll star”. And Mitch Ryder knows. Like the Beatles, he’d like to get back. There’s a good chance he will. Which speaks well for thirteen year olds’ dreams.

Dave Marsh