{"id":8099,"date":"2015-08-07T05:30:58","date_gmt":"2015-08-07T09:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=8099"},"modified":"2015-08-07T05:30:58","modified_gmt":"2015-08-07T09:30:58","slug":"six-years-of-musoscribe-paul-revere-and-the-raiders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2015\/08\/07\/six-years-of-musoscribe-paul-revere-and-the-raiders\/","title":{"rendered":"Six Years of Musoscribe: Paul Revere and the Raiders"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had been fortunate to score a few magazine cover stories in the early years of my music journo career (Thrice<\/strong>, Fall Out Boy<\/strong>, KT Tunstall<\/strong>). But the feature that had the most influence on my future trajectory was the 2010 cover story in London-based Shindig! Magazine<\/em><\/a>, a detailed piece on Paul Revere and the Raiders<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Not counting my longtime love of their music (most especially the albums and singles from around 1965-69), my relationship-of-a-sort with the band began in 2010. Collectors’ Choice Music put together a 3CD collection of all of the group’s Columbia singles (a- and b-sides), and I wrote a review of the set<\/a> for this blog.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center>Shortly thereafter, I was fortunate enough to line up interviews with several former members of the group. I interviewed Mark Lindsay<\/strong> (lead vocals, ponytail, and \u2013 as time went on \u2013 songwriting and production), Phil \u201cFang\u201d Volk<\/strong> (bass and vocals), Keith Allison<\/strong> (multiple instrument and vocals in the second half of the 60s and beyond), Jim \u201cHarpo\u201d Valley<\/strong> (guitar for about a year), and Roger Hart<\/strong> (the group’s manager through their ascendancy and into the 70s). Paul Revere<\/strong> himself wasn’t available for interview because he was tending to his wife who was ill at the time. Ed Osborne<\/strong>, the music journalist who authored the excellent liner notes for The Complete Columbia Singles<\/em>, was kind enough to share the audio of a recent interview he had done with Revere.<\/p>\n

Compiling a detailed feature from my research and those interviews, I wrote the story that appeared in Shindig!<\/em> I was told shortly thereafter that my Raiders feature had generated an unprecedented amount of (positive) reader feedback.<\/p>\n

Well, I was hooked. Later in 2010 I went on a road trip with my daughter; in addition to a few days in Memphis, we went to Branson Missouri<\/a> and enjoyed a stage performance by the current lineup of The Raiders (Revere plus a number of excellent musicians \u2013 none of whose names you’d likely recognize \u2013 most of whom had been with the band for three-plus decades). I got a few moments with Revere<\/a>, but no interview.<\/p>\n

In the course of my research for that first story, I learned that the three core musicians from the group’s most well-known lineup \u2013 Volk plus guitarist Drake Levin<\/strong> and drummer Mike Smith<\/strong> \u2013 had bailed on the group at the height of their popularity. They left to form Brotherhood<\/strong>, a group that undeservedly sank into obscurity. That story \u2013 based on exhaustive interviews with Volk as well as family, friends and associates of the band \u2013 developed into a sprawling, deeply researched piece<\/a> that would eventually run in Ugly Things Magazine<\/em>. (A few years later, I was involved in the first-ever CD reissue of Brotherhood’s albums<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

When Real Gone Music \u2013 the successor to Collectors’ Choice, and the label that would eventually release the Brotherhood collection \u2013 put together a compilation of Mark Lindsay’s solo material, I rang up Lindsay and did another interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Much more recently, when RGM reissued Keith Allison’s solo In Action!<\/em> album (plus rarities), Keith granted me another extensive interview<\/a>. His memory is the sharpest of all ex-Raiders, and his point of view is remarkably free of score-settling and I-was-the-hero storytelling.<\/p>\n

Longtime Raiders manager Roger Hart had been a key figure in the development of what would eventually become The Monkees<\/strong>, but his role has never been fully explored. My 2013 conversation with Hart<\/a> yielded this feature, one that I hope helps set the record straight.<\/p>\n

Paul Revere passed away in 2014, and though my efforts to convince him to work with me on a Raiders history never came to pass, I always respected the man. I wrote this memorial piece<\/a> in November 2014.<\/p>\n

I hope to announce some additional Raiders-related news in the coming months, but we’ll see about that. Fingers are crossed.<\/p>\n

Thanks for sticking around through this two-week trip down Musoscribe’s memory lane. Standard blogging \u2013 interviews, reviews and features \u2013 will resume next week.<\/p>\n

Follow \u201cthe_musoscribe\u201d on <\/a> \"\"<\/a> Twitter<\/a> and get notified
\nwhen new features, reviews and essays are published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had been fortunate to score a few magazine cover stories in the early years of my music journo career (Thrice, Fall Out Boy, KT Tunstall). But the feature that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview","cat-41-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8099\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}