A Conversation with Paul Revere & The Raiders’ Mark Lindsay – HuffPost 4.22.11

Mike Ragogna: Mark, what part of the world are you in right now?

Mark Lindsay: Sebring, Florida, home of The Sebring International Raceway.

MR: Very nice. Taking in some sports while you’re there?

ML: No, we are full time RV-ers now and we happen to be at a State Park in Sebring. We’ve been doing this for about six months. In the last 20 years, we’ve lived in California, Oregon, and Arizona, twice–then Memphis, Nashville, Upstate New York, Maui, and Flordia. Then, about six months ago, we decided to just bite the bullet and try to gypsy around in an RV, and if we don’t like it after ten years, we’ll settle down. But if we do like it, we’ll just keep on going.

MR: Mark, let’s have a little bit of a history lesson. First of all, let’s get the origin story of you Boise Boys.

ML: Well, the band started in the Boise Valley area. I was singing with a group called Clay Chapman and the Idaho Playboys, which was a country band. I was a rockabilly singer. But across the street from where we rehearsed, I could hear rock ‘n’ roll music coming from a little white house. Turns out, there was a rock ‘n’ roll band playing there and that’s when I thought, “That’s what I want to be in!” And, as fate would have it, they played at a gig at the Elk Lodge and I walked up and demanded to sing a song, they let me, and I ran off the stage. The next day, I was in McClure State Creek wrapping up orders and Paul Revere comes in. He was picking up his order for his drive, and he was telling me the story about this crazy, skinny kid that walked up and crashed their dance and demanded to sing a song. I asked him how the kid was and he said, “He was pretty good!” So, I whipped off my glasses and my baker’s hat and showed him that it was me, and that’s how I first met Paul. Shortly after, he was fired from that group so we started a group of our own, The Downbeats, then later, Paul invented The Raiders.

MR: Nice. What was the musical association like between the two of you?

ML: Well, we both liked rock ‘n’ roll and luckily, he had a friend with a large collection of New Orleans records and I was listening to Skip From California, so I was getting that funky sound from L.A. We basically started out as a Ventures band bound wound up evolving into a white R&B band. That’s what happened in Boise. Then, Uncle Sam decided that Paul had to go away for two years, so I went out to California to try to keep the band alive. We went out on a small tour with Leon Russell as our keyboard player, billing ourselves as Paul Revere’s Raiders. I remember us having a rough time in Scott City, Kansas, and we were thinking after the first half, “This just isn’t working, they’re just standing there.” So, Leon told us to follow his lead and he’d get them on the right track. After the first half, we went back out and Leon rears back and kicks the lid off of the piano into the crowd and yells, “DO YOU ALL WANNA F**KING ROCK AND ROLL OR WHAT?!” Of course, they all cheered, and he pounded out his best Jerry Lee and we got it back on track again. So, long story short, when we got back to Portland and started up again, I told Paul that it wasn’t enough for us to just play anymore, we had to be a show band. So, I took it upon myself to be the craziest guy that ever rocked or rolled, and that’s pretty much what we did. When we got out of Portland and got signed on Where The Action Is–Dick Clark’s show–we had to clean it up a lot because a lot of our antics wouldn’t have passed the ABC sensors.

MR: What were some of the antics?

ML: Well, I had made pants made extra tight so that I could split them multiple times during the night. I had a 100 ft cord made for my guitar so that I could wander through the crowd. Also, if I had to go to the bathroom, I could just wander in there because the cord was so long. Great acoustics. (laughs) Everything you could think of…hanging from the rafters, screaming my lungs out. Whatever I felt like doing.

MR: Now, in the past, there was a little controversy on whether it was The Raiders or a group called The Kingsmen who put out a certain little record called “Louie, Louie.” What is the story really?

ML: “Louie, Louie” was a song that, if you played in the Northwest, you had to play it three times a night. It was a great dancing song. I think we both got the idea to record it at about the same time. So, we decided to record it though, unbeknownst to us, we didn’t know The Kingsmen had recorded it. The way that I remember it, we were packing up our things and the engineer said to us, “Look, if I were you guys, I would get this track out right away because The Kingsmen were in here two days ago and they cut a demo of the same song.” So, if my memory serves me correctly, and he wasn’t lying, The Kingsmen recorded that song two days before we did. It all happened in the same studio, with the same engineer, and the same everything.

MR: And the arrangements are pretty close as well.

ML: Yeah, the arrangements are close. Their arrangement is a little grungier and one of the reasons the lyrics were so garbled is that their lead singer, Jack Ely, had braces and the engineer had one really good microphone that he hung way up high so that it wouldn’t get any rock ‘n’ roll spit on it. He had to look up to sing and he kind of garbled the words, and they came out muddled enough to sound like they might have been suggestive.

MR: Let’s talk about some of the good folks you’ve been associated with. For instance, you were produced by Roger Hart in the beginning, right?

ML: Yeah. He was a DJ at KISN in Portland and he became our first manager. As a matter of fact, a stack of the “Louie, Louie” records were sitting on his desk when one of the CBS promo men came through. Apparently, an edict from on high had come down through the ranks that CBS had to sign more rock ‘n’ rollers because Capital and all the indie labels were doing so well with those groups. CBS only had Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, and the unforgettable Mitch Miller.

MR: Wasn’t Mitch Miller also the CBS honcho who refused to have anything to do with Rock ‘n’ Roll?

ML: He hated it, but he was head of A&R. We were the first rock ‘n’ roll group to be signed to the CBS label, but Mitch hated rock ‘n’ roll so much that after the album hit and started doing well all over, he told them to squash it and they did. The Kingsmen’s album sold 600 copies in Portland, and ours sold 6,000, and everywhere we played in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Utah, we were a big hit. Then about six months later, a radio DJ at WMEX in Boston named Arnie “Woo-Woo” Ginsburg said, “I’ve found the worst record in the world, kiddies! Stay tuned for this!” He played “Louie, Louie” and the phone lit up like a Christmas Tree, and the rest, as they say, is history. They got the hit record, we got signed to CBS, and we got Dick Clark’s Where The Action Is and everybody lived happily ever after.

MR: Another person worth mentioning in your history is Terry Melcher. Do you remember your initial meeting with him? I’m a fan of his, that’s why I’m asking.

ML: I’m a fan of his as well. One of the suits at CBS took us into the studio for the first time, Studio A, and said “Here’s your producer, Terry Melcher.” He was with Bruce Johnston of Beach Boys fame, was out in the studio with his head in the wastebasket singing “Shut ’em down, shut ’em down.” They were cutting part of the song “Hey, Little Cobra,” and he asked we what I thought and I told him I thought it was great. That was my first introduction to Terry Melcher, he and I hit it off right away. Shortly thereafter, we moved to California to do Where The Action Is and he found out that I was a fairly prolific writer. He asked me to come and share a house with him in Benedict Canyon and write some songs and we did. He was an incredible producer and he was actually the sixth Raider–he and I sang background on everything. Some of the songs, it’s just me and him singing background, and you can hear his wonderful tenor voice just floating through the song, like in “Humor Me,” he’s the second voice that sings, “I think of you.” I can’t say enough about him, and I’m sorry that he’s gone. He passed away a couple of years ago.

MR: Yeah, that was a sad day. Then, you moved on to television, specifically Dick Clark’sWhere The Action Is.

ML: We were one of the 20 opening acts that opened for The Rolling Stones when they played The Santa Monica Civic Center the first time we were in L.A. One of Dick Clark’s secretaries was in the audience and saw our three numbers, and of course, during “Louie, Louie,” I got up on the piano and danced around in my three cornered hat and full Raider regalia. She went back and told her boss she saw us and thought that we’d be a great house band for the show, and that she thought we’d work for cheap because we were just some band from Idaho. So, (Dick) gave us a call, and wound up contracting us for 13 weeks thinking that if the show took off, he would hire a real band at the end of that time. Well, the country saw us and decided they liked us so we became that “real” band.

MR: How did the band choose its material?

ML: Well, I was writing a lot of stuff, but we needed some commercial singles after “Stepping Out” and “Just Like Me,” which came from within the band. By this time, Paul Revere and the Raiders were sort of known on the charts, so Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil submitted “Kicks” to Terry and they asked what we thought and I thought it was great. I didn’t know at the time that Barry and Cynthia had written it as a caveat to Gerry Goffin of The Goffinated Kings not to dabble in some of the hard (drugs) that he was getting into. I just thought it was a song about not being able to have as much fun as you used to. (laughs) I didn’t know it was an anti-drug song until Newsweek contacted me and asked me how it felt to have produced the first anti-drug song. I said, “Is it?” (laughs) But Barry was always one of my favorite writers, I’ve loved him ever since I heard “Who Put The Bomp?” Actually, Barry, who has written hundreds of songs, is getting together with writers of some ilk, Paul Williams and Jimmy Webb are getting together and doing a concert or a small tour sometime soon.

MR: Barry and Ellie Greenwich are my favorite Brill Building writers. And Paul Williams is another great songwriter, with songs like “Rainy Days And Mondays,” “Old-Fashioned Love Song,” “We’ve Only Just Begun”…

ML: You know, “We’ve Only Just Begun” was almost a Mark Lindsay single. I heard it on a bank commercial and Jerry Fuller, who was my producer at the time, and myself really liked it and decided to record it. About a day before we released our version of the song, The Carpenters came out with theirs. So, it was like “Okay, we got aced on that one.” It also happened with a song called “Tobacco Road.” We had just finished recording a great version of the song and I called Clive Davis and said that we had the song ready to go, and he told us that Johnny Winters was just about to release a version of the song. (laughs) Sometimes, good ideas are just swimming around in the same stream.

MR: That’s the Dobie Gray story too, he kept getting beaten to the punch as he was about to release singles. You guys wrote some very strong material as well, songs such as “Good Thing.”

ML: After the success of the songs “Kicks” and “Hungry,” which were written by Barry and Cynthia, Terry said “You know, we have a lots of great tunes, but I bet if we put our minds to it, we could write a really great single” That’s when we wrote “Good Thing” and it worked pretty well.

MR: Now, Mark Lindsay also was doing movie themes as well, right?

ML: Well in the ’70s, I had an agent who said, “You know, you write all of those records. Do you think you could write something for movies or commercials?” I said that I didn’t know but we should give it a try. So, he teamed me up with a guy name Perry Botkin Jr., does that name ring a bell? He was the composer of “Nadia’s Theme” and “Bless The Beasts And Children.”

MR: Yeah, I remember when “Nadia’s Theme” first appeared years earlier as “Cotton’s Theme,” a song originally written as the theme music throughout the movie for my pal Bill Mumy’s character in the movie Bless The Beasts And Children. Perry worked on so many things in that era.

ML: He and I did a lot of commercials and a couple of movies, then I did some stuff on my own for Artie Butler. I also did some stuff for For Pete’s Sake, a Barbara Streisand movie and “Amanda’s Theme” for The Valley Of The Dolls, and we had a bunch of fun. The movie themes were easier because you were actually writing a song, but the jingles were more difficult because you had to try to write a hit song in 30 seconds. (laughs) It was challenging, but fun.

MR: Okay, let’s talk about “Indian Reservation (The Lament Of The Cherokee Reservation Indian)” What’s the story behind that classic?

ML: If you go down to the L.A. Musicians Union and look in the archives, you’ll find that that song was a Mark Lindsay single with studio musicians, and it was going to be a Mark Lindsay record. It was presented to me and I cut it. However, I knew that The Raiders needed a hit single, and I had already cut “Birds Of A Feather” with them and I knew that song would make it to about the ’30s or ’40s on the charts. But I was so close to “Indian Reservation…” because I produced it for myself, so after I finished my album, I loved it and I thought it sounded great, but I was really paranoid about putting it out. One of the guys I was working with told me that if I was so paranoid about putting it out as a solo thing, I should try putting it out with The Raiders, so I did. Of course, it turned out to be the highest selling single of CBS Records to that time.

MR: Did that song make you more aware of the plight of Native Americans at the time?

ML: Sure, I related to it quite closely being part Cherokee myself. When Jack Gold brought me the record, he said he knew that he thought I could make it happen, but I knew Don Fardon had put out the song before and it fell off the charts. But Don thought that since I was part Native American that I could pull it off well. At that time, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee was a New York Times Best Seller, so everyone was kind of behind the movement. It was the right time for that record, and I did feel very emotionally about it. As a matter of fact, whenever we play these days, people still come up to me and call me “My Brother.” (laughs) It was written, of course, by John D. Loudermilk who also wrote “Tobacco Road” and “The Shadow Of Your Smile,” so he had a very diverse career. I think he was also part Native American, and he wrote the song from the heart and it really worked well. And if we helped raise consciousness even one iota from that song, then I’m happy with it.

MR: Beautiful. As far as Mark Lindsay singles, there’s the amazingly catchy “Arizona.” When you started your solo career, was it simultaneous with being in Paul Revere & The Raiders?

ML: Well, actually is was. There’s a rumor about me that I left The Raiders to pursue a solo career, but actually, it was because of some pressure we were getting from CBS. All of the airplay that we were getting was from some of the slower tracks and ballads, so CBS suggested that I do a record of my own of some mellower songs, and that’s how all of that began. My first record on CBS was never released, it was called “If I Were A Carpenter” and Tim Hardin sang it, then after that, there was a Jimmy Webb song called “First Hymn From Grand Terrace,” which was released but kind of confused DJs because that wasn’t the kind of music they were used to hearing Mark Lindsay sing. So, when “Arizona” came along, my producer Jerry Fuller and I were listening to it, and when it got to the hook we looked at each other and said, “Yeah! This is it!” Luckily, a lot of other people thought that was it too, because it was my first gold single.

MR: Let’s circle back and talk about the release of the new Paul Revere & The Raiders’Essential set.

ML: Well, rock ‘n’ roll is one of the first types of music that had refused to die. Most things like ragtime or swing lasted 10 or 15 years, maybe. But rock ‘n’ roll has been roaring since the early ’60s, and it refuses to die. So, I think that most of the people who grew up with this music are never going to let it go, and every generation that comes along can relate to that music as well. For example, I (did) a concert where there (were) three generations just out there in the crowd. So, I’m very fortunate that people still like the music, and this collection encompasses a slice of Paul Revere & The Raiders from the beginning of the group to its end. It pulls together over a decade and a half of the many hit records, and I think it’s a great direction. Bob Irwin did a great job. I hope people play it and smile just as much as I do.

MR: Very nice. And Bob Irwin, of course, is the man who oversees your album reissues at Sony’s Legacy label, right?

ML: Oh yeah. And he probably knows The Raiders’ catalog better than I do. He’s always finding weird versions of songs that we recorded that never saw the light of day. (laughs) He’s a great guy, and he has a great ear.

MR: Yeah, I’m with you. Having had this kind of career, and contributing to our culture as much as you have, what advice do you have for new artists?

ML: Before you record a single bar of music, get a good attorney! (laughs) I think that it’s very important that people who want to be a part of the music business realize that there are two parts to this job–music and business. If you’re not business minded, find someone that you really trust to keep that part of your life together for you. Otherwise, you’re going to lose a lot of bucks.

MR: Very good advice. Unfortunately, a lot of people learn the hard way about that one.

ML: Well, looking back on my career with The Raiders, you would see that at the beginning, I handled all the music and Paul handled all the business, so it can come back and bite you. (laughs)

MR: Yeah. Now, I mentioned earlier how I personally feel your music has contributed to culture. But how would you describe how Paul Revere & The Raiders influenced rock ‘n’ roll?

ML: I think that we were a great kick ass rock band and we were right in there slugging it out with some of the heavies. And I think that we contributed, hopefully, a great deal to rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe someday, if people forget about some of those outfits, we will make it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I am just so grateful for the fans who liked it then, like it now, and keep it going!

Transcribed by Evan Tyrone Martin