Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels – William Levise, who would become Mitch Ryder after stringing together two randomly-chosen phone book names, had grown up in the Detroit area and developed a love of r&b early on. As a teen, he was the only Caucasian in the Peps, an local singing act. Audiences didn’t take too him too well, so he gathered some of the hottest rock players on the Motor City scene and crafted the most thunderous sound yet heard in music. The group only cut three albums, for New York producer Bob Crewe’s New Voice label, but its choice of material for those platters was first-rate: songs by James Brown, the Isley Brothers, Allen Toussaint, Sam Cooke and Holland-Dozier-Holland. The Wheels came at these tunes with an overwhelming attack, but the result still had a kind of taste that has ensured their historical significance. And no one, not Little Richard, not Robert Cray, nor anyone in between, has ever shrieked or screamed like this sweat-drenched powerhouse.
Paul Revere and the Raiders – Prior to getting desperate in the late sixties and allowing Dick Clark to talk them into a succession of bubble-gummy career missteps, this fivesome was the hottest bar band in the loud and rowdy Pacific northwest. In 1960, their instrumental album Like, Long Hair for the regional Gardena label was full of the kind of honking sax and boogie piano that would have made Amos Milburn and Big Jay McNeely proud. Then they signed with a bewildered Columbia that didn’t know what to make of their take on Los Angeles r&b veteran Richard Berry’s rave-up “Louie Louie.” In 1964, young session sultan Bruce Johnston cut a slew of Raider reworkings of New Orleans classics by the likes of Jessie Hill and Aaron Neville. Singer Mark Lindsay absolutely tears up Little Willie John’s “Fever” during these sessions, urged on by a thoroughly menacing piano hook from Revere. The crowning moment, however, came in the fall of 65, with the Lindsay-penned “Steppin’ Out,” an out-front screamer that would make for a nice remake by any number of artists. About two more years of great southern California rock followed and then the downhill slide began.
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