Produced by Terry Melcher, Paul Revere & The Raiders’ 1964 and ’66 Columbia albums remind us of the the solid pop/ garage band credentials that lay behind their eye-catching line in American revolutionary war garb and their catalogue of synchronised stage moves.
Drawing heavily on non-original compositions, including Louie Louie (the recording that alerted Columbia to the band, but which was ultimately usurped by The Kingsmen’s version), Here They Come! is every which way an album of its time. It married The Raiders’ more unrestrained Pacific Northwest garage roots with a contemporary pop edge. Cooked up in the face of the then-ongoing British invasion, Midnight Run (here with three bonus tracks: an Italianlan-guage version of Little Girl In The Front Row and remixes of SS 396 and Corvair Baby) documents the band’s rising stock as songwriters in their own right. Of the titles penned by non-band members, the stand-outs are Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s anti-drug song Kicks, and the high-energy take on Boyce & Hart’s I’m Not Your Stepping Stone, which, in familiar Raiders pioneering fashion, predates The Monkees’ hit.
