1. Kicks*
2. There's Always Tomorrow
3. Little Girl in the 4th Row
4. Ballad of a Useless Man*
5. (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone*
6. There She Goes
7. All I Really Need Is You
8. Get It On
9. Louie, Go Home
10. Take a Look at Yourself
11. Melody for an Unknown Girl
B+
Sometimes, listening to these albums, I have to wonder why they were included in the Book. It's called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, after all. That kind of implies that all the albums included will be amazing and important works of art. And when you consider that so many brilliant albums weren't included (there isn't a single Yo La Tengo album, for God's sake; and for some reason they left out the three best Bjork albums), some of the stuff that does make it in can be a real collection of headscratchers.
All of which is my way of saying that Midnight Ride is a pretty good album, but maybe not something you need to immediately seek out. I think it was mostly included for context - a lot of music like this was being produced at the time (although not necessarily of this quality), and it tends to get overshadowed in retrospectives by more high profile acts. When people think of the late 60s they think of Hendrix, the Stones and so forth. Paul Revere & the Raiders' main claim to fame these days is a throwaway joke in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood about how desperately uncool they were.
This might make it sound like I'm dumping on Midnight Ride, but I'm not. I'm actually quite fond of it. The Raiders marry intelligent, accessible lyrics to a driving garage rock sound with just a hint of psychedelia thrown in (as was the fashion at the time). And a couple of the songs are genuine classics. "Kicks" is one of the first and very best anti-drug songs, and while it was released at a time when such views were deeply unfashionable, from the perspective of 2023 it seems like a timely warning of things to come. It also helps that it's a kickass rocker that sounds like it was written for people to do drugs to. And like most great anti-drug songs it was written from personal experience - the song writing team behind it were trying to reach out to their friend who was an addict. The central message of the song, that "you can't run away from you", is one of the most important lessons a person can learn in life.
The other really great song on the album is another Brill Building composition, "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone". This song just straight-up rocks, and sounds like it could have been by the Animals. The title says it all really, and it's a lot of the fun.
The rest of the album is mostly solid, danceable garage rock, and an obvious precursor to a lot of punk and power-pop of the ensuing decades. "Little Girl in the 4th Row" is a pretty ballad, and "Melody for an Unknown Girl" is an honestly quite terrible instrumental with a cringeworthy spoken word intro. The real outlier on this album is probably "Ballad of a Useless Man", which is both a solid rocker and a pretty dark song about a man's descent into unemployment, poverty and alcoholism. So it's not all jangly guitars and paeans to self-empowerment.
Ultimately, I do think this is an album worth hearing, if only because it's a window into the tastes of Middle America in the mid-to-late 60s. That Silent Majority Nixon was on about. It's like watching Mad Men - you don't see the picture postcard version of the 60s, with lots of longhairs and groovy iconography; instead, you're getting a look at the 60s as it was actually lived. Kids dancing to Paul Revere & the Raiders, a band whose music made them role models for sane, straight folks whose countercultural tendencies extended no further than growing their hair a little longer and maybe sharing a joint at a party now and then. The people who hated Pat Boone, but weren't terribly interested in Jefferson Airplane either. As a kid who grew up so straight edged you could have used me as a ruler, yet has always loved rock music, I can speak for the importance of music like that in providing support and giving a voice to the nerds, dorks and squares of the world.
Although I would like to stress that this album does totally rock.
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