Paul Rever & the Raiders

Paul Revere was born on Jan. 7, 1938 in Harvard, Nebraska, but was
raised in Boise, Idaho. He learned to play the piano and fell under the
influence of boogie-woogie during the late '40s -- he also developed a
keen appreciation of the work of Spike Jones & His City Slickers.

Revere was still in his teens, a high-school dropout, trained barber,
and restaurateur when rock & roll took over the airwaves and the
charts, and it was the early hits of Jerry Lee Lewis, in particular, that
became the catalyst that pushed him to join a band. He did just that in
1957, at age 19. Next aboard was 16-year-old Mark Lindsay (b. Mar. 9,
1942), who heard Revere's group play, asked to sing with them, and
ended up replacing the band's vocalist. Their group, which became
known as the Downbeats, was one of the few, if not the only resident
rock & roll band in Idaho, and were popular at local dances. They cut a
demo that got them to Gardena Records in Los Angeles, where the
company's owner, John Guss, was interested in issuing a record on
them -- but only if they changed their name. Paul Revere's given name
was such a natural as a gimmick, that Guss urged them to use it.

Their debut single, "Beatnick Sticks," was somewhere midway between
Spike Jones's general output and Kim Fowley's "Nutrocker" (recorded
by B. Bumble & the Stingers), a parody of "Chopsticks" that rocked like
a Jerry Lee Lewis number. It never charted but got some airplay and
interest locally.
The follow-up single, "Paul Revere's Ride," again elicited local interest
but little enthusiasm elsewhere. Their third single, the instrumental
"Like Long Hair" (co-authored by Kim Fowley), however, made the Top
40 in the spring of 1961. Somewhere midway between Rachmaninoff
and Jerry Lee Lewis, the record was fast and hard-hitting as well as
very catchy, and it showed off the early '60s Paul Revere & the
Raiders. That line-up, in addition to Revere and Lindsay, included Bill
Hibbert on bass, Jerry Labrum on drums, Richard White and Robert
White on guitars.

The group's national exposure stalled at that point when Revere was
drafted. As the son of a pacifist Mennonite family, however, he was
granted Conscientious Objector status and spent his alternative
service as a cook at a mental hospital in Oregon. The band continued
playing concerts for a short time at the outset of his service, with Leon
Russell filling in for Revere at the ivories, touring as "Paul Revere's
Raiders" in the wake of the success of "Like Long Hair," but by the
summer of 1961 this early version of the group had broken up.

In late 1962, Lindsay rejoined Revere in a new incarnation of Paul
Revere & the Raiders. Now based in Portland, OR, and with deejay
Roger Hart managing and promoting the new band, they took off once
again, bigger than ever locally despite not having had a hit record. The
early reformed band -- which included Charlie Coe, Pierre Oulette, and
Steve West on guitars, and Ross Alamang on bass -- soon added Mike
Smith, who switched from guitar to drums and stayed with the band for
the next six years. Guitarist Drake Levin, of the Sir Winston Trio (who
also worked as the Surfers), came aboard in a slightly more stripped
down Raiders line-up after an offer of an audition by Revere; bassist
and fellow Sir Douglas alumnus Mike "Doc" Holiday followed his lead
and also joined in 1963. By the middle of that year, the group was one
of the major music attractions in the Pacific Northwest, but had been
unable to chart a record since the spring of 1961.

They were a formidable outfit, drawing on the best of R&B as their
inspiration. One could hear influences ranging from James Brown and
King Curtis to Piano Red in their sound, and also the blues of Jimmy
Reed and B.B. King, as well as classical and jazz, all rolled into a
coherent whole that was irresistible as dance music. There were lots of
white bands like that -- in the Pacific Northwest alone, the group was in
fierce competition with bands like the Kingsmen and the Wailers, to
name but two of their major rivals; Los Angeles had the Standells, and
on the East Coast, groups like the Unbeatables, fronted by future
Rascals guitarist Gene Cornish played around New York, and further
south Bill Deal and the Rhondels carved a niche for themselves in
Virginia and North Carolina.

What made Paul Revere & the Raiders stand out from the competition
was their stage act, which featured astonishing antics by the band:
Leaps, dives, and other acrobatics, reminiscent of Bill Haley & His
Comets at their wildest (who, in turn, had borrowed a lot of their routine
from the Treniers), along with lots of comedy, as well as Revere even
setting his piano (a cheap throwaway model brought on for the finale)
on fire. Years before the Who, the Move, and Jimi Hendrix attracted
audiences with that sort of destruction, Revere was doing the same
thing, and also anticipated Keith Emerson's organ pyrotechnics with
the Nice. The group was soon earning as much money as it was
possible to make concertizing in Oregon.

What they needed was a record that would break them nationally. It
was Roger Hart who suggested that the group cut a single of one of its
most popular concert numbers, a rendition of Richard Berry's song
"Louie, Louie," that he thought he could place with a label, or at least
sell at the band's shows and issue locally. Mark Lindsay had first heard
the song done by the Kingsmen at one of their shows, and Revere and
the Raiders learned it from a borrowed copy of the original. In contrast
to the version that the Kingsmen made famous with its heavy organ,
bass, and drum sound, Lindsay's tenor-sax dominated the Raiders'
version. At the suggestion of a local sales representative, an acetate of
the song was sent to Columbia Records, which had virtually no
presence in rock & roll. Amazingly to all concerned, Columbia signed
the band.

"Louie, Louie" was put out by Columbia late that spring. Unfortunately,
the Kingsmen's version of "Louie Louie" was released first on the New
York-based Wand label, and topped the charts on its way to
immortality. Paul Revere and the Raiders lost the race over the song,
but had a contract, renewable annually by the company, with what was
then the largest pop music label in the United States.

The group's next three singles were regional hits, scoring in the Pacific
Northwest. By all rights, the band should have been on borrowed time
just then, as an American outfit trying to compete in a marketplace that,
since February of 1964, had been dominated by acts from England.
They were at a disadvantage, but not a crippling one, because they
had their live audience to sustain them while they went about cutting a
single every few months.

Columbia assigned the group one of the few producers at the label
who was suited to working with rock & roll. Terry Melcher was the son
of Doris Day, one the label's top singing stars of the 1940s and '50s,
and he was also one of a handful of producers at Columbia who didn't
hate rock & roll with a passion. Most of them did, but Melcher had
actually played rock & roll professionally as part of Bruce & Terry, a
surf-music duo with Bruce Johnston, a fellow producer (and later a
member of the Beach Boys).

Under the direction of Melcher and, to a lesser degree, Johnston, the
group cut a series of singles on Columbia, and a debut LP that was
half-studio and half-live, called Here We Come, cut in the fall of 1964
and issued eight months later. None of these attracted much attention,
but the group simply kept on working. In January of 1965, Holiday
exited the Raiders, and at Levin's urging, they asked his former Sir
Winston Trio/Surfers bandmate Phil Volk (often known as "Fang") to
join on bass.

Then, in the summer of 1965, the band hit upon a new, winning musical
formula under Melcher's guidance. Recognizing that the music world
had changed radically from what it was when "Louie, Louie" had been
released, Melcher pushed the group to update their sound. He got
them to create music that was a mix of fast-paced, guitar-and-vocal
dominated Beach Boys-style rock & roll, and also the more intense and
intimidating brand of R&B produced by the Rolling Stones. It wasn't that
far of a stretch, especially to reach toward what the Stones were doing.
The band had toured with them in the fall of 1964, and both groups
were heavily R&B-oriented. It was just a matter of finding a song that
gave them a correct angle of approach.

That song was "Steppin' Out," a Revere-Lindsay original that was
released during the summer of 1965. It became the group's first
nationally charted single in four years. Based on lyrics that Lindsay
had written when he was 16, "Steppin' Out" also marked a distinctly
new musical phase in the group's music. They would never entirely
lose their R&B sound, but the group did become more sophisticated
starting with "Steppin' Out. Instead of trying to sound black, they
suddenly sounded punk -- like cool (yet frustrated) suburban white
teenagers, which was the audience they were aiming for. The sax
wasn't heard too much anymore, and there was less lead guitar than
rhythm -- though that was sharply played -- and suddenly Revere
wasn't playing piano, but a Vox organ; his boogie-woogie piano was
replaced by heavy organ chords behind the rhythm guitar and bass, all
to startling effect. They suddenly sounded louder and more intense
backing Mark Lindsay, whose performance was suddenly more
personal and charismatic. In one fell swoop, Paul Revere & the Raiders
had come up with their own unique variation on the rhythm-guitar
dominated sounds of the British invasion.

"Steppin' Out" could have been the Standells or even Bill Deal and the
Rhondels, but for the presence of Mark Lindsay. He was a powerful
singer with a personality that surged out from the speakers, whether it
was projecting lust, anger, or resentment, and he didn't sound like a
teenager. Rather, he sounded the way every frustrated male teen of
14 through 17 pictured himself looking and acting at the age of 21, free
and ready to say what he felt like and make it stick, whether it was to
girls on their mind or authority figures in their face.

Steppin' Out's release coincided with another, even more vital event in
the band's history. The previous fall, while sharing a bill with the Rolling
Stones, the group was spotted by Dick Clark, who was starting to put
together a new afternoon music program, a 1960s successor to
American Bandstand -- the latter was still on the air, but was wilting
somewhat in ratings and influence in the face of programs like Shindig
and Hullaballoo. He needed a house-band for the new program and,
after seeing the antics of Revere and company on stage, knew he had
a group that could not only make decent records but also do funny
things while miming to them, and could play any current rock & roll hits.
His original plan had been to use Revere and company as the resident
band and, once the show was a hit, replace them with a major band. He
never replaced them.

"Steppin' Out" was released at the same time that Where the Action Is,
as the show was named, went on the air, on June 27, 1965. It quickly
shot into the top 50 and became the group's first serious hit, and once
it was clear just what Paul Revere & the Raiders were capable of doing
musically and visually, neither party ever looked back, recognizing that
they were good for each other. Clark and the band renegotiated, and
they spent the next two years getting network television exposure every
afternoon for their songs, off of whatever new album they had out.

Ahead of "Steppin' Out," the band had gone through a period of visual
metamorphosis, adding Revolutionary War-style outfits to their look.
That began on a whim and became a concerted effort to look as
different and distinctive as possible from the competition. In a period
when most American bands were either cowering in the shadow of the
British invasion, or casting out for new, hybrid sounds like folk-rock,
Paul Revere & the Raiders stood out for playing straight ahead rock &
roll and having fun doing it. Their name and their look added an
element of topical fun to rock & roll, almost a humorous response to
the British invasion, and their new sound was different from any of the
home-grown competition. Clark's television show gave them entre to
the homes of tens of millions of American teenagers every afternoon --
the only other group that ever had it remotely so good was the
Monkees, who were actor-musicians hired to portray members of a
rock & roll group on television, and who didn't get on the air until a year
later, and that was only once a week.

The latter part of 1965 saw the group move to Los Angeles as its new
home base. Where the Action Is became a major part of their activities,
and was shot in different locales around the country, and they finished
work on their second album. Just Like Us, released on January 3,
1966, was a landmark record, filled with great songs and even better
performances. Like the debut album of the Rascals, or the Shadows of
Knight's second album, it stands as a monument to a moment in
American music when a hard, lean, punkish R&B-inspired sound took
root. They were rewarded, as well -- spurred by the presence of the
Top 20 hit "Just Like Me," Just Like Us earned a Gold Record award for
sales, granted a year after its release. Perhaps the cover of
"Satisfaction" didn't add anything to the Rolling Stones' original, but it
was a pretty hard and impressive performance, and damn courageous
of Lindsay, Revere and company. Among the teenagers of the period,
they were even known, informally, as "America's Rolling Stones."

The group also learned quickly from the recording of Just Like Us just
how far they could go in the studio. Their earlier records had
essentially been cut live in the studio, the band members playing their
basic instruments, but under Melcher's guidance, they soon found their
musical range extended vastly. Their sound blossomed in much the
same way that the Beatles' music had when they got accustomed to
working in the studio, and it opened a golden, glowing cooperative era
in the band's history.

By the time of their next album, Midnight Ride, released three months
later, and its follow-up, Spirit of '67, issued at the end of November of
1966, the group members were playing multiple instruments -- Lindsay
was playing three kinds of sax on the same track -- and everyone in
the group was singing. Spirit of '67 was virtually the Raiders' answer to
the Beatles' Revolver album, complete with some very lightly and
tastefully orchestrated music, proto-psychedelic tracks, and other
musical developments of that year. Those albums went gold, lofted
high and long into the charts by the hit singles "Kicks" -- a great song
that managed to be cool and anti-drug -- "Hungry," "Good Thing," and
"Him or Me-What's It Gonna Be," which were all Top 10 hits in 1966
and 1967.

The classic Raiders line-up was broken up in the spring of 1966 when
Drake Levin was drafted. He joined the National Guard, which took him
out of the touring version of the group, though he was able to record
with them. To replace him, the group recruited Jim Valley (often
referred to as "Harpo"), late of Don and the Goodtimes, who'd been a
fan of the Raiders from their days in Oregon. These line-up changes
were not as important as the changes that took place in the studio.
Increasingly, Mark Lindsay and Terry Melcher took responsibility for
(and control of) what songs the group recorded, and how their records
sounded.

Additionally, the band played a decreasing role on their actual records
-- in a sense, Paul Revere & the Raiders became victims of their own
success, and early beneficiaries of the revolution that swept over
Columbia Records in 1966 when the new, rock-oriented regime under
Clive Davis took over. Their records were making money, the label was
willing to devote more studio time to those recordings, and with access
to players like Ry Cooder, Jerry Cole, and Van Dyke Parks, among
other ace studio musicians, all the band had to do was record the
rhythm tracks on a lot of their records, beginning in 1967.

Their fortunes also took a downturn when Where the Action Is went off
the air in the spring of 1967. Although Dick Clark would put them into a
new Saturday afternnoon musical showcase called Happening '68, the
group never got back the audience it had enjoyed. By 1967, their
comedic antics and Revolutionary War uniforms also seemed dated.
"Good Thing" was the last single on which the classic line-up played
together, and it was a graceful way to bow out, reaching the top five.
Gradually, the group's sound had changed as Melcher and Lindsay
tried to keep up with the shifting shape of music and the taste of the
public around them. Levin, Volk, and Smith decided to exit in late 1967
-- they went off to found the group Brotherhood, while Lindsay and
Revere put together a new line-up around guitarist Freddy Weller,
bassist Charlie Coe, who'd played with the early Raiders, and drummer
Joe Correro, Jr.. Coe later left and was replaced by bassist-guitarist
Keith Allison, whom the group had known during their work on Where
the Action Is.

By 1968, the Raiders were looking for a new sound. Goin' to Memphis
was one answer, virtually a Mark Lindsay solo album cut without the
rest of the band with a group of soul and country players at Chips
Moman's Memphis studio. It was a great showcase for the singer, if not
a high chart entry. Terry Melcher had already given up his producer's
spot with the group by then, leaving Lindsay in effective control of the
group's recordings.

In addition to trying to figure out what would sell for the group, he
developed aspirations as a solo singer, enjoying a huge MOR hit with
"Arizona." Somehow, the group kept its edge, creating very catchy and
serviceable pop-rock on albums like Hard 'N Heavy (With Marshmallow)
and singles such as "Mr. Sun, Mr. Moon" and "Let Me" -- "Mr. Sun, Mr.
Moon," in particular, sounds like a heavy version of the Archies or the
Ohio Express, and that is no criticism from this quarter; records like
that were part of what made being in one's early and middle teens a
great deal of fun in those days, and the group tried to keep the fun in
its sound, whatever that sound was. The problem was that by 1970, it
was far more important for a top-flight band to produce solid albums --
and solid albums, in 1970, meant music with a serious purpose, not just
a dozen songs that were good to dance to -- than catchy singles.

In a quest to shed their mid-'60s image, the group gave up the "Paul
Revere" gimmick that had identified them since the late '50s, switching
to the name "The Raiders." Gone were the Revolutionary War
costumes as well, and suddenly the Raiders tried to sound serious,
heavy, and very modern. The result was the Collage album, a serious
rock record that never found an audience, being too intense for older
fans and not persuasive to potential new listeners.

The next single followed the same pattern, and its success shocked
everyone. The Raiders took a John D. Loudermilk song called "Indian
Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)," which
had previously been a British hit for singer Dan Fardon, to number
one, the first chart-topper of the group's entire career. A serious yet
stomping piece of rock & roll, it boded well at the time for the group's
future. The Indian Reservation album duly followed, and a second
single, "Birds of a Feather," got to the Top 30. The group was
continuing to make good music -- "Country Wine" was an enormously
appealing single with a great beat, and none of the Raiders' work
during this period was deficient as pop-rock. The problem was that
they just couldn't sustain the momentum, or capture the public's
imagination sufficiently to maintain the sales of their records.

Lindsay's own solo career had taken off with the single "Arizona," and it
was increasingly clear that he had considerable interests beyond the
band, though he never wavered from performing with them, but the
confusion on the part of the public didn't help the band. The decline in
the group's audience after "Birds of a Feather" led to several important
changes that split the two group leaders. For starters, as it did with
other successful singles acts such as the Hollies, Columbia lost interest
in the Raiders when it became plain that even with a hit single behind
them, the group was no longer selling LPs in serious numbers and
likely never would -- in an era dominated by LP sales, the effort
required to launch even a number one single, assuming the group ever
yielded anything that could get there again, seemed better put into
other projects.

Somewhat ironically, history has rendered "Indian Reservation" as the
least significant of the group's hits. It comes off as a piece of
early-'70s, heart-on-the-sleeve topical ersatz, while their middle- and
late-'60s singles have a credibility that has only increased over the
decades, even propelling Paul Revere & the Raiders to perhaps the
greatest honor in their history: Two spots on Rhino Records' 1998
four-CD Nuggets boxed set. By 1975, Lindsay had ended his 12-year
partnership with Revere, owing to the latter's insistence that the current
version of the group place more emphasis on comedy and
entertainment. Since then, Lindsay and Revere have pursued separate
careers, neither remotely as popular as they were together in the
mid-'60s, but each still busy, and Lindsay has even played and sung
with the classic Raiders line-up of Levin, Volk, and Smith. Both Lindsay
and Revere have periodically recorded, the latter mostly remakes of
classic hits.

Lindsay also has a fascinating website, steeped in the history of the
band, while the current Paul Revere & the Raiders, led by the
60-year-old-plus Paul Revere, is a working comedy-music act --
dressed once again in the Revolutionary War outfits -- on the oldies
circuit and maintains a website devoted to the group's early history and
its current activities. Meanwhile, as a final irony in the group's roller
coaster history, Sundazed Records has accorded the group's classic
'60s albums and singles a level of respect and care in its CD reissues
that exceeds anything that the owners of the Beatles or the Rolling
Stones' recordings of the same era have ever attempted.

Links:
Paul Revere & the Raiders Official Website
Paul Revere & the Raiders Ups & Downs
history-of-rock.com biography
Raiders fan site
Another fan site