It speaks volumes about Mitch Ryder that he would be featured here at Friday Nuggets and previously in our Soul Corner feature (Oct 2011 for his cover of "Devil With a Blue Dress On").
Ryder was from Hamtramck, the inner city suburb inside the Detroit boundaries. He, more than any artist of the 1960's, absorbed Detroit's rich soul and R&B history and its burgeoning rock'n'roll culture. And Ryder is a truly gifted singer, one of my personal all-time favorite rock vocalists.
And he was a powerhouse performer. Ryder had a very big influence on Bruce Springsteeen, Bob Seger, and John Mellencamp (who produced a Ryder album in the 1980's). It's even said that actress Winona Ryder took her stage name from one of his albums, a favorite in her Dad's collection (WYMA doesn't make this stuff up and doesn't even charge extra for this kind of valuable historical knowledge).
From a Nuggets/garage rock perspective, the great Mitch Ryder's high water mark may been this 1965 hit "Jenny Take a Ride", a turbo-charged rewrite of the 12 bar blues / 1920's standard "See See Rider":
I never get tired of the track. It's like a party in a bottle, open the top and the energy just leaps out of it. We cover a lot of current, young punk and garage bands here at WYMA but you'd be hard pressed to find something any more high octane rock than "Jenny Take a Ride". And to think it was a top 5 radio single.
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