Mitch Ryder

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sutch podcast.
My guest today is the one and only legendary Mitch Wider,
who has a brand new album with Love produced by
Don Was. Mitch. How did this album come to be?
I called Don and he agreed.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
As a result of I signed a new recording contract
with a German label, which we'll get into probably a
little bit deeper as we talk. But I signed the
contract and I had choice of producer.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
So when did you meet Don?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Oh? Gosh, I want to say seventy eight. He hired
me to do a voice for something and then we
established a relationship and I ended up being a guest
on one of his albums called Was and that Was

(01:15):
and then we cut a dance single and then I
did two tracks for one of my German albums with
him as producing. So we're entrenched in LA and recorded
a really nice album out there called The Promise.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Okay, what makes Don the producer he is? How is
he different from the other people you've worked with.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
We have the same sensibilities regional with regard to music
and our exposure to him and the cultural differences inside
the community. And I mean the guy he's produced the
Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. He got Grammys for for People.

(02:06):
He's just very, very talented man.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
So on this album, you wrote all the songs. Did
you write them for the album or did you have
them ready?

Speaker 2 (02:19):
I wrote them for the album, and it's kind of
either autobiographical because of the actual experience or the observation,
but it is what it's about, is my life really,
and segments of it little visual you can imagine you

(02:43):
know what they were by the lyrics. But I love it.
I love it. I think it's a beautiful album, and
I'm very proud of it. I think it's really really
high on my chart of expectations for myself as a
writer and a singer.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Now we're doing this podcast, but we live in an
internet world. It's hard to get the message out to people.
What are you doing to make people aware of the record?

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Pretty much leaving that up to the record company. It's
their responsibility. I put out quite a few albums on
my own label, but I never did have the funding
or the budget to go out and do it the
way it's supposed to be done today. And that was
frustrating because there was some remarkable music that went unnoticed.

(03:36):
So I'm doing what I can. I'm doing every interview
I can get, and I'm honored to be on your show.
But that's what we're doing, and we're doing just interviews, interviews,
and we're making Last night we were we got home
about four o'clock am. We had done a shoot, a

(03:58):
video shoot for the the existing album, the new one,
and we've got a couple more of those planned. We've
already released two, so we're doing that the right way.
But you can't really there's a whole bunch of issues
that would explain why we're having a problem breaking through.

(04:19):
And since you're the guy with the questions, I'll just
wait for you to ask the right one.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Who is the record company Roof Records RUF? But do
you tell me more about them? It's a small label,
but not the smallest I've ever signed to, but they're very,
very good at well, here's what they did with my

(04:49):
live recording with double Vinyl that debut at number three,
I believe, on the Billboard charts, on the Blues charts,
and the existing album, the one we're promoting now, that debuted
at number one. So he clearly knows his business with
regards to the Billboard Blues charts. What I need is

(05:14):
to make that transfer over into the we used to
call the hot one hundred if you remember that, of course,
And you know what was beautiful about that.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
You really had a microscopic picture of the nation's needs
for music and what made them feel good. Because the
way they formulated it was they would take every week
the existing amount of radio play rotations and sales numbers,

(05:44):
combine them and you end up with a top ten
where you could have a country Western song be number one,
a polk on number nine, and Mitch Ryer is somewhere
in the middle there. And that was a reflection based
on that week's activities in the business. But we don't
have that today. We have a million different categories.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
Well, the other difference is you knew every song in
the top ten, whether you liked it or not, because
you were listening to the radio and you heard it.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Oh, you could turn volume down if you wanted to,
you know.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah, better than the news, the monitor news on NBC.
My father would want to listen to that in the car.
So what kind of budget did they give you for
the record?

Speaker 2 (06:29):
I don't know that there was a contract developed between
Don Was and Thomas Roof, the owner of the Roof
Record Company. So I'm not privy to that.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
Okay, you talk about Don Was also being from Michigan.
Does everybody in Michigan in the music business know each other?

Speaker 2 (06:50):
We know enough to not step on each other's toes.
You know, this is an interesting musical city, Detroit, and
the talent comes from all over Michigan. Really, when you
think about it, I'm not sure why it's that way,

(07:11):
but I know that there are a few cities that,
over the decades have established themselves in one way or
another for being a musical city. I don't know if
you remember the Chicago blues wave, or if you remember
the Boston the music that came out of Boston for
a while, or the music that came out of Atlanta

(07:33):
in New Orleans that goes way back to New Orleans thing,
and you know, it's it's like example, the group Nirvana,
I mean they brought to life Seattle. You know, it's
and once that happens, once somebody breaks through in any city,
the record companies, it's like watching a carcass on the

(07:55):
desert floor being descended upon by all the creatures that
are to eat it. They just milk it dry, sign
up everything that can move or pluck a string, and
then go on to the next fortune. De choice less
because we had Motown, which was just a hit factory,

(08:19):
and we had it that way, but we were frustrated
as young white rock and rollers. There was no outlet
for us. Nobody had broken through nationally. It was just
totally controlled by Motown. But my personal experience in music

(08:41):
never went into that rock and roll cave. I kind
of nurtured myself, fed myself and gave myself what I
loved and needed out of the black community, sort of
an urban setting. At at a very young age, I started
to transporting myself down into the forbidden areas of Detroit,

(09:05):
working a lot of places I wasn't supposed to be.
In fact, I was even hitchhiking down. I wasn't old
enough to drive when I started going downtown. Yeah, it's beautiful,
that experience. I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I couldn't trade anything

(09:25):
for it. It has too much value. It's priceless. It
formed what I learned about music. Originally, I had a
vocal instructor in high school and he was putting me
in classical tournaments at Tri County competitions, and I was

(09:46):
winning a lot, and he was very sad. And in fact,
he's still alive. His name is Dell Towers. He's about
ninety four. I just speak to him every once in
a while on the phone because I love what he
taught me. He taught me how to read and write music,
and he helped me develop my singing. But when I

(10:07):
broke away from the classical the journey that he was
leading me on and started. It was a real slow
sort of transition in the beginning, because then I fell
in love with the voice of Johnny Mathis. But after
that I began looking for something with a little more energy.

(10:30):
And it occurred to me one day. I was listening
to the radio, of course, and I hear Pat Boone
white shoelaces or something like that. I'm not sure he
did white shoelaces, but it was some sort of moody, mellow,
really milky, watered down thing. And right after that they

(10:53):
put on a little Richard and I just about lost
my mind. I mean the energy, uh yeah, the energy
and the attack and the and the little Richard saying
I want to be here. I am here. You know,
I am the best, and he would say things. It

(11:17):
was like a young Muhammad Ali, you know, whom I
had the good fortune of getting to know over the years.
So it was easy for me then to make that
transition from classical into rhythm and blues. I had the
ability to do it. And it's just simple. It's basically,

(11:40):
as a singer, what you're doing is less breathing from
the stomach and more meddling with the vocal cords. It's
not a sound, it's just it gives you a better
command over the over the words in my mind.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
Okay, let's go back a step. When did you first
become aware of botown?

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Jeez, I don't think I was. I might have been
a freshman in high school. But Smokey Robinson was the
very first one I heard. Or no, I'm sorry, Jackie
Wilson did reap Petite before he signed with the label
he signed with in New Jersey. But Smokey came out
with a a song called way over There and that

(12:31):
was the first motown record I heard. And his voice
was so beautiful. You know, there's I identify other artists
by they become timeless to me, not for what words
they sang, but their voices. I fall in love with
that immediately. First. You can go a lot of places

(12:54):
in the world and you know you'll be hearing the
Wreatha Franklin. It's the same as listening to Nat King Cole.
Those are very distinctive voices. They they have longevity, they're
they're different from other voices. It's frustrating because a lot

(13:15):
of the young new singers that try to get to
where Aretha was, they may have the talent, but it
doesn't seem like they have the passion for it. So
you know, you run into that. You hear that as
you listen. And I listen to everything. I love all

(13:37):
kinds of music, and I've made a career out of
cherry picking. If I go to write music for an album,
I really do explore. I want to touch everything I
ever heard, and I want to own it for a
little while, and then I want to move on to
something different, something new. It's just an amazing world. This

(13:58):
lifetime dedication to music, what it's done to me, I'm thankful.
I'm very thankful for it.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
So you know, those of us who did not grow
up in that area, there was the Motown House and
there were all these acts. Were they accessible? Was out
someplace you would drive by, or they were people you
just saw on stage and hurt on the radio.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
No, I worked with him. I worked on the stage
with a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
But when you first before you became a star, or
did you work with them before you became a star?

Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yeah? Yeah. There was a dance hall near Detroit, and
that's where the kids would come to to really party
and dance. And what it was was all the lonely people.
They sat against the wall in this big circle, and

(15:04):
then the dance floor, of course, was in the middle,
and you'd make that long sort of journey very slowly
to the other side and asked a lady or a
man if they wanted to dance. And that's how it was.
But we had developed a show. We are jumping ahead

(15:26):
of my career at this point.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
Let's not jump ahead, let's go back.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
Okay. Well, I started recording when I was sixteen, but
my first single out.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
Let's go back even before that. So who were your parents?
Where did they come from? My dad was an only
child and he sang on the radio. That's back in
the day, you know, right before the war. The second
World War, big band music was the thing even through

(15:56):
the war. It was the bit of the thing, and
you had all these all and he sang and the
band was hired by the radio station to back the performers.
And he told me stories about like Danny Thomas before
he was Danny Thomas. He came through and he sang

(16:17):
at that studio was in downtown Detroit, and so that
was what he was going for. He was going to
be a singer. And then the my mom, she was
from Tennessee. She made the journey up to Detroit near
the end of the depression, right, you know, when the

(16:40):
war was starting, and because she needed they needed work,
they needed to live, and there were jobs of plenty
up here, you know, in the arsenal of democracy. In fact,
we grew up by a tank plant where they manufactured tanks.
And my mom heard him on the radio and she

(17:02):
wondered what face was attached to that that voice that
she was attracted to. So her and one of her
girlfriends went down to the studio to be in the
audience one night, and that's how they met a little bit.
Do you know the story, Specifically, she's in the audience,
he's on stage, how did they actually meet.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
Well, nobody's ever told me, but it was in the studio.
That's the place where they met. I don't know what
kind of communications they were and what kind of what
kind of pickup lines she might have had her he
might have had. You know, that's even too old for me.

(17:47):
I mean, the earliest part of my life that I remember.
One of the things that's really funny was when Dwight
Eisenhoer was running for president, they gave out swag and
he was given out lucky strikes which had the red
circle in the white riding, but the package itself was
military green, and that was a promotional item for his

(18:12):
election campaign. And my father was like bringing stuff like
that home. Stuff. Anyway, she had to leave the South
to get a job. But before she left the South,
it was only her and my uncle Paul at that point,
and she had to put school in the sixth grade

(18:36):
to go pick cotton to help the family because my
grandfather was just a drunk and he was a horse trader.
That's what he did for a living. When they finally
moved up to Detroit, he became an automobile salesman. I
guess it's the same kind of deal, you know. Yeah,

(18:59):
it was. It was rough for her because she had
to witness her original mom died right in front of
her eyes and my uncle's eyes. She got caught on
fire from this weird stove they had down there, and
nobody could help her put it out. She was a

(19:20):
frail lady, and that had to be tough. And when
I think about my mom and what I know about
her history, it wasn't pretty at all. You know. There's
a lot of poverty, a lot of tragic accidents. And

(19:41):
then finally my drunk grandpa remarried, had two more children,
or three actually, and then the whole bunch of them
were living now in Detroit, I think on Third Avenue,
and I went I went there to visit a couple
of times, and it was a time when they let

(20:04):
you behind your apartments or your whatever you were living,
and you were able to burn leaves. They allowed you
to do that, so they even provided you with little
ovens to do that. I'm trying to remember because I

(20:25):
was young, there were so many images that were flashing
in front of me, like my uncle George, who ended
up marrying a woman from Germany when he was in
the military. During the Korean War. He was an MP
and she was a farm girl and they met and

(20:48):
married and brought her back to America, and it was
my first dose of German, you know, I guess you
can put it that way. And she was sort of
a little bit timid and shy, because of course you

(21:09):
and I both would be if it was a foreign
country for the first time. If not shy, I'm afraid
at least really amazed. You're going to have to help
me walk through this.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
Okay, Okay, you're telling such great stories. I don't want
to interrupt you.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Yeah, but they're not connected to you.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
Know, they are connected in my brain. We're starting the meeting.
So your parents get married, Then when does your father
stop singing?

Speaker 2 (21:39):
When he got drafted? And when he got drafted. They're
out in Lincoln, Nebraska at an airfield there, and he
was his assignment at that time, was a tail gunner
and they be twenty sevens seven it sounds right to me.

(22:04):
And he was feeding his machine gun and it tore
off two of his fingers and so it was bye bye.
You know. He had no more military career, but he
thought he could get back into the radio thing and
Unfortunately this country moves so fast, always has that wasn't

(22:30):
available anymore. That wasn't what was necessary, that wasn't what
was rock and roll. Was just starting to kick his heels.
You could feel it down south and you could hear
it up north. Yeah, so for him it became really
really crazy and frustrating because he knew then that he couldn't,

(22:53):
especially with the physical missing two fingers. He felt a
little bad about that, but he's it was a beautiful singer.
You would keep us little kids awake at nights, singing
love songs to my mom in bed. Yeah. He didn't
want to give it up, you know, but he did

(23:13):
eventually when I succeeded, he started living vicariously through me.
So I had done what he started to do. What
did he do for a living? How did he provide
a tool and die maker? Working over time whenever he
could get it? Never really home. I remember many occasions

(23:38):
where there was they had called Grandma so we'd get
the lights turned back on. It wasn't enough. I mean,
we ended up having eight kids in that family. So
you know, it's a challenge for sure, especially if you're
Catholic and you don't want to if you're deep into it,
you know the Catholic Church has changed. I'm kind of

(24:00):
excited about this new pope from Chicago.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
So with area of Detroit did to grow up in?

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Well? I was born in ham Trammick, which is a
Polish enclave almost one hundred percent so not today it's
heavily populated by a lot of different ethnic cultures, but
back then it was totally Polish. And it's curiously enough,

(24:35):
it's one of the popes visited there. All the places
in America you could go to, he went to ham Trammick, Michigan.
I have no idea it was okay, but we were
Italian and we were surrounded by Polish people, so we
moved pretty quick. After I was born. I pretty much

(25:02):
think that's when that doctor made that mistake with my circumcision.
That was a joke.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
I wasn't sure. You never know, but yeah, not till
you look. So you're going to school, What was school like.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
School? Well, I tested out my wings early. When I
was three years old. I ran away from home on
my tricycle. I remember going past the tank plant and
I got about a mile away from home and a
cop car pulled up and took my tricycle and put

(25:45):
it in a trunk and discorded me back to my
crying mother, who was desperate to know why things were
so miserable that I had to run away at three.
So I waited a while, and then when I was
in kindergarten, I did it again. I just started walking home,
remembering the route the bus had taken as best I could,

(26:08):
and my uncle Bobby Joe come scouting for me and
found me and then took me home and I had
to face my crying mother again. Tried to enlist in
the Marines twice before I was seventeen. That didn't work
because my Actually it was funny for me to watch.

(26:30):
But in the beginning they called me to tell me
when to report to Fort Wayne for induction in the
morning to sign up. And he said, who are you calling?
And they said WILLIAMS Levice. Is that you? He said yes,

(26:51):
and then he stops for saying, looks at me. He
says yeah. He said that's also my son's name, and
so he had figured out that I had the Marines
were calling for. He said, I fought in a way
he needs to say it fought. He said, I served
and I was discharged with honorable discharge, and I think
I know what's going on here, and so I was grounded.

(27:14):
You know, I couldn't go anywhere because I tried to
run away from home again, just how it was, and
it was never I never felt fear out of running away.
It was more like an adventure. But I have to

(27:35):
say my parents, they weren't the most intelligent people in
the world. They were smart. My mom was smart enough
to teach me some things that I should never never forget,
and one is, do not talk about politics, do not

(27:56):
talk about religion, and you'll get along fine.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
Okay. What kind of kid were you growing up? Were
you good in school? Did you play sports? Did you
have friends?

Speaker 2 (28:07):
At the age of four, I had rheumatic fever, which
left me with a heart murmur for the rest of
my life, even today I have it. So in the
early grades one, two, and three, they wouldn't allow me

(28:28):
to play sports with the boys because of the heart thing,
and I ended up learning how to play jacks and
babble about nothing forever, just sitting with the girls, you know,
and trying to understand what they were talking about, why

(28:50):
they were talking about it. And so I had a
preview of what makes little girls turned into women. You know,
I'm talking about personality wise, and yeah, I'm not trying

(29:13):
to describe women is anything less than we certainly were equal,
especially when it came to marbles. So that went on
for some years and then the doctor finally said, okay,
you can play sports. And when I got to high school,

(29:34):
that's exactly what I did. I tried football, but I
was skinny and I was My assignment was the running back,
so they hand the hand off the ball to me
and I tried to cut through the slot that was
supposed to have been open for me, and I came

(29:58):
through in my pants, swear on it anymore. I was
standing there in the football field in my jock strap
and no cheerleaders are going what you So I chose
track and field and that was my pursuit. But I
didn't really excel at anything. I did get a medal
for cross country, but my love. The things I gravitated

(30:25):
to in high school were essentially music, and thank god
we had a music program and art. Mister van Zant
was my art teacher in Dell Towers. As I mentioned
in the opening, he was the music teacher and I
was like a straight a student in those I guess

(30:48):
my next best thing that I did was grammar. I
love the written word. I'm very very passionate about it.
And when I write songs, it's so tempting to play,

(31:11):
to play with the words, to look for the ambiguities,
to look at how many ways can you use this language?
But that didn't. That disappeared just recently because I have
learned this as well. When you start speaking legal language,
you don't you just stop trusting the English language. You

(31:34):
absolutely lose your trust for it. And you've got all
these right boys that went to schools to learn how
to twist words. And in a way, I guess we're similar.
But I don't lie, and I'm not calling attorney's liars.
I'm just saying it. You know, if you come to

(31:56):
a signpost and it shows I got three under my
this way one hundred and fifty, if you go that way,
you know, they just parse words and just clog up
the court system and get it's like getting away with murder.
And you know you need them. You certainly need them

(32:16):
when you need to be defended. And things are changing,
Bob so quickly that I really don't have time to
ponder on that. What I do is I continue to
dream about tomorrow and what I want to do tomorrow,
what I want to create new things that I've not

(32:38):
experienced yet. And I've done this. I've completed in my home.
I have a completed album that's never been released. I
have two books that have been authored by me and
never been published. I have a musical stage play and

(33:00):
I have to find right now. I'm looking for an accomplice,
if you will, to help me set this for the stage,
because not like the movies where you can get a
different image every two seconds and still understand what's going on.
On live stages, you have to have sets and you

(33:23):
can only have so many set changes in a play.
And it's things like that that I'm not used to
because I didn't take drama. And I'm looking for an accomplice.
I'll call them an accomplice. At this point, we don't
know what we're capable of.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Let's go back to school. Did you graduate?

Speaker 2 (33:53):
Yeah? Of course. It was really cool because the principals
pull me when you're handed me in my diploma. He
pulled me close to him and whispered in my ear.
The only reason you're getting this is because I don't
want to see you here and this that's what he
told me. I took him to heart, you know.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
Okay, so when did you start going to clubs and
when did you start performing in clubs?

Speaker 2 (34:21):
In clubs at fifteen years old?

Speaker 1 (34:25):
Didn't tell me how that ended up happening.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
Well, I kind of did. It was the radio. I
wanted to go where that music was emanating from, and
of course I couldn't go to New York at the
time anyway, and so I just sought out Detroit. That
was where the music that I loved was. And I
ended up making a lot of friends. And I was

(34:50):
surprised because I never felt racially intimidated by by my
black friends. They just didn't do that. And I remember
also as well, neither of my parents ever said anything
that would come close to being bigoted or racist at

(35:13):
all at our home, and so there was no foundation
for preconceived notions of what the urban life was like.
I walked in, people greeted me, I made friends, we
started working together, and it was like just living everyday life.
There was nothing about skin and that's another thing that
I loved music about. There aren't really color barriers there.

(35:38):
It's all about the music. And I think the world
cannot live without music. In fact, I'm sure of it.
But I would be interested in me witnessing what the
first drummer used. I would like and I'd like to
know what he was beating it on. You know.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
So when you started performing, what were the circumstances did
you form a band? Were you singing soul music?

Speaker 2 (36:10):
I was solo and my father wasn't in some ways
trying to still tried to make a comeback. I remember
him there was a casting call in Detroit for a showboat,
and he got dressed up and went downtown and auditioned

(36:32):
for it. But he didn't make it. But he had
a friend at his tool and die factory where he worked,
a black gentleman whose wife played keyboard and a choir
at this black church. And the church was run by
the reverend James Hendricks, and he owned a record label

(36:53):
called Kerrie and my father wanted to get signed to
that label. But I'll be darn I stole I tole
his I stole his job away from Kelly. I just

(37:13):
thought of it that way. Yeah, the reverend wanted he
looked around him and saw what was happening in the
music world and figured with a Okay, I got a
white kid here, but if you listen to him, he
doesn't sound white. I think I better sign this kid.
And he did, you know, And and we put out

(37:36):
that first single, but it was a nickel and dime operation.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
How successful was that?

Speaker 2 (37:45):
How successful was it? I lost my interest in it
because it was my very first time into a radio station.
And as we were leaving and this jockey, I think
it was popcornwile it was his name, he took the record,

(38:07):
said turn on the radio when you get in the car,
I want to be playing it. And then when they
shook hands, I just happened to see the palming of
the money, and every bit of joy I was feeling
fell to the floor into a muddle of tears. I
guess because I so new to that that industry, seeing

(38:33):
that happened that you had to pay somebody to play
your record. But it didn't stop me, because you know,
the sun will come up tomorrow. And so I'm working
at the village it was called on Woodward Avenue in Alexandria,

(38:54):
and I'm performing with acapella with the PEPs the black
group I was a part member of. And every week
the Glands Brothers owned the building and they would hire

(39:15):
a house band. You would audition to be a houseman,
and so it was difficult because you got new guys
coming in. They have to learn your songs and they
have to learn them in like a day, two days,
so you could get ready for the shows. And what

(39:36):
they would do the Glands Brothers would then tell the
band after the week's performance, nah, we don't think you're
what we need, because nobody paid them to audition, right,
And that's how they would get their bands in there.
They just would keep rejecting people and having auditions for
new ones. And so on one given weekend, these three

(39:59):
young white boys come in and they consisted of Earl Elliott,
Jimmy McCarty and Johnny Badangic extremely talented guys for sure.
So they backed me and we liked what we heard

(40:24):
because they're like they were like a rock and roll
group and that's what they did best. And I was
strictly into the rhythm and blues thing. And we found
out that when we put those two together on our

(40:45):
song list, it was a new it was a different sound.
It wasn't what was out there, and we were right,
but we didn't know it yet. So we put out
a single in the Detroit area on Hireland Records and
we were called Billy Lee and the Rivieras, and it

(41:07):
didn't really do anything except for our live performances were
so so crazy. At that time, you had the beginning
of the British invasion. And this one radio station paid
a lot of money to hire this dic jockey just
because he had an English accent. I thought that was stupid.

(41:31):
But this this jockey that was there, his name was
Dave Prince. He said, you know, you guys are different.
And I got a friend in New York and would
you make it like a tape? Can you guys make
a little tape that I can play for him, you know,
so he can hear the band? And we did, and
he took it to New York and a producer named

(41:55):
Bob Crewe, who is most famous, I guess, doing the
Four Seasons songs. He loved it and they called us
to New York and we took a really cheap hotel
there called the Colisseum House. I had the occasion to

(42:17):
be there a few years ago and revisit. It's not.
The structure is still there, but it's it doesn't have
any more cockroaches, cleaned up and you know, it's been
sanitized and gentrified. And so that's where we stayed. And

(42:37):
there were only two bedrooms and there were five of us,
so somebody had to sleep on the couch and we
take turns doing that. It was really boring is waiting
around for the producer to get his himself in a
position where we could go in and record. So we

(42:59):
started working at some of the local clubs in Manhattan.
In the village, there was a joint called Trudy Heller's,
which wasn't a folk club, but we did work some
folk clubs too, and didn't go over too well with
the folkies. That you know, hard electric pounding beat. That

(43:21):
rhythm we were using. We spent our time doing that
and guy came in one night and he came to
me because at that point I had been married and
left my pregnant wife in Detroit while I ventured out

(43:42):
into New York to await my fate. And he comes
up to me and says, hey, do you want to
make fifty bucks? I said, well, yeah, of course, he
said Okay, can you play hobn Neguila. I said, yeah,
I need to do that because my first wife was

(44:03):
Jewish and so our children were Jewish as well. Oh man,
this just popped into my mind. My legal name is
Levice L E V I S E. But Nay Briath
didn't think so they thought my name was Levine. So
I started getting all these male for contributions to all

(44:28):
these different causes. And so the kids were going to school,
I was learning Hebrew, I was wearing the Azusa. I
was thinking of converting. And then it happened success, And
it happened in a very strange way. The producer when

(44:52):
we all arrived in New York. First of all, nobody
was old enough to sign. Our parents had to sign
our contracts for us. And we sense that Bob Crue
didn't want to accept the whole group because the very
first single that he put out was one of me

(45:14):
alone singing an R and B, a very good R
and B classic, but you know, it appeared on the
Rhythm and Blues charts, but nowhere else, and he had
a failure with it using studio musicians. So he said, okay,
get the band together. We're going in the studio. I
want you to play every song you know. So he

(45:37):
had also at that very same time acquired the publishing
rights for the Rolling Stones catalog, and so subsequently we're
doing this session, one of only three studio sessions we
ever did for him. He called all of the music
for all the five albums he put out on me

(46:00):
from those two sessions except for what Now I Love
album and two of the Rolling Stones, and they were hot.
They had made it already. We hadn't. They were in
the studio because they they love music too. And I
think Keith told Bob Crue, if you want a hit

(46:23):
out of what you've got going on out there, you
might want to bet on that, Jenny take a ride,
And when he did, you didn't have the dismal failure
of that single by Mitch Wrider, but you had a
hare record by Mitchwriter and Detroit Wheels, which was full
of energy and that special sound I tried to describe

(46:45):
to you earlier, that sort of cocktail, that rhythm and
blues mixed with rock and roll. At that point in time,
it was different. It was very different. I kind of
have an understanding of why people liked it. I heard

(47:05):
it really hurt it because we had an alarm clock
that would wake you up with music and Darren, it
goes off and they're playing Jenny Take a Ride, and
I'm listening to it laid in bed like it's foreign
to me, like I heard it for the first time.
I'm saying, damn, that's a really good song. You know.

(47:27):
It was churchy. It had a gospel feel to it,
but it had those hard electric guitars going, kind of
like drunken people that staggered musicians that stagger into a
Salvation Army band. But it was cool. And that's you know,
We're in Messina, New York, working a club six days

(47:51):
a week, three shows a day, seventy five minutes, and
we're just waiting and waiting and waiting, and we get
a phone call and said to simply, all right, you guys,
you're all done there, pack up your bag. You're going
on tour tomorrow. And that's exactly what happened. And the
money we were making for an entire week, we made

(48:14):
double that in one show for fifteen to twenty minutes.
And we worked all those weeks to get that money.
So that's how quickly things change, how they can change.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
So they put out Jenny takes a ride. You have success,
stay on the road. How long until there's another record?

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Wow? Everything was done within a two and a half
year period, everything the recording, as far as recordings go.
And then you had the lack of their what now
my love, which I sang on because I was contracted to.
You know, I came from an age where my parents

(49:12):
were good parents. You know, they did teach me right
from wrong. But at that time in our American history,
if you got a girl pregnant, he had to marry her.
You know, you didn't have say in it if you
were a righteous kid. But that's one of the tragedies

(49:34):
of my first marriage because the kids were wonderful success
coming at that very moment when I'm needed to be
a father and you can't say enough about that. I
know what it was like to not know my dad
because he had to work so hard, and I just

(49:57):
didn't want that to be for my kids. So I
had a pretty hard choice to make. But we didn't
get you know, we got married when we were eighteen,
so we didn't know what love was. I mean, the
underpinning is what it really took to be in love,

(50:19):
and that's one of the reasons the marriage didn't work out.
We were just and so much was happening so fast,
and the demand of my time and that machine that
wanted to make as much money as it could. They
didn't leave me a second to spare. I was lucky
to get home and see my kids. I was if

(50:41):
you're going to be a musician, think about it deeply,
if you want to have a family as well, because
I've seen it cause wreckage wherever it goes.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
So how did it end with your first marriage?

Speaker 2 (51:02):
Well, she was a very good woman. She allowed me
to be with my kids and have my kids with
me when I wanted them, because I hardly got home
anyway at all. I mean one year, we did two
hundred and eighty nine performances and I ended up being sick.

(51:22):
I had to go to hospital. After that, I was
just playing more out. I was working for Premier Talent
in New York, ran by Frank Barcelona, and they were
just starting to bring over English acts to help the
English breakthrough. The Beatles had already done that, so had
the Rolling Stones, but there were a million others to follow,

(51:44):
like the Dave Clark five and anybody you can name
that was from that sixties period that were British. A
lot of great groups, but in the beginning, for almost
every one of them, they did cover songs of black
urban music. Listened to their early stuff by the Stones

(52:07):
or anybody else for that matter that wanted to break through.
Early on, they were cover songs of black American artists.
And I was a headliner at that point. We had
already had a couple gold records of the top tens,
and I was headlining a theater. And because I was

(52:31):
a headliner, my contract said that I could pick the
artists that were on the show. So I picked the
Who and the Cream, and damn if I didn't cut
my own throat. They are amazing. But Peter Town said,
when I went to England for the first time to

(52:52):
be introduced socially and publicly as an artist, he sponsored me.
The British were obsessed with this notion and they just
almost everyone to a man came up with the same question,
how do you sound so black? And I was offended

(53:13):
by it. I almost lost it on one I just
wanted to call them an ignorant asshole, but I didn't,
and I mean their view see that's how you go
about colonizing a world. You don't care. You know, they're

(53:34):
nothing if they're not white and bright, they're not shiny
and fun to be with. That's why it was easy
for the Brits to conquer the world. They just simply
didn't care. But they were the only colonials expansionist country.
You know what. The history of the world is just
like I do, and it's cyclical, and it just keeps

(53:57):
repeating itself. I think currently we're headed for another Gilded Age,
only one hundred million times worse in terms of the
divide between they have and have not.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
So tell me about Bob Crue.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
Okay, he was overtly gay. He didn't mind that at all.
And he was a showman, he was a seller. He
was a star in his mind. And what he had
in mind for me, though, is different from what was

(54:38):
going on in America at that time. He thought that
working seven months stays at a Las Vegas hotel was
the top of the world. Went all around me, It wasn't.

(55:00):
All the other artists were trying to conquer the entire country.
And he's trying to get me to get us stay
in Vegas for God, knows how long, and it wasn't
going to work, so I sued to break the management
contract and he sold my contract to Paramount, which wasn't

(55:24):
so bad in the beginning because we had artists like
Billy Joel was at that time on Paramount before he
made his moves. He also stole my drummer. People keep
stealing my drummers. It's crazy. They just offer them a
little more, you know what, I can't pay them. They'll
just pay them a little more. And then these guys
go and they go with my blessing because they gave

(55:46):
me what they had when they were with me and I.
It gets complicated, Bob.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
Well, that seems there's a story there. It gets complicated.
To tell me a little bit more about that. Well,
which aspect of it, Well, you're saying keeping a band together,
that must be a really hard effort.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
Not if you're having hits. Because I've seen bands that
actually hate each other. They'll perform. They don't even talk
to each other off stage, but they'll perform. Because that's
it's all about money. That's if we wanted to, you know,
say good night, that's all we have to say. It's
all about money. So that's in everything we do.

Speaker 1 (56:36):
When do you realize the hits have dried up and
it's not going to be so easy to have a
new one.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
When he put out the What Now My Love? Album,
I was calling radio stations asking him not to play
it because I just didn't believe in it. It wasn't
I did it because I had to contractually, but I
didn't like it. And well, Dell Towers, the guy I

(57:07):
was telling you about Taughty Classical, he loves. He loves
that album. It's like a bunch of French ballads like
what Now My Love? I don't know if it's French
of it strings. Utch Davies was the musical director. I

(57:28):
don't know if you know Hutch, but he did a
marvelous job with those string arrangements. I can see where
a certain part. Well the record got. The single got
to number thirty seven, which would be hard to believe
if you were a hardcore Mitch writer Detroit Wheel fan fan.

(57:54):
And yet it's just a very uncomfortable place to be
because no, that's not what I wanted. I loved the
idea of a big band, but you know, Bob Cruise
mission was to separate me immediately. With that first record,
we spoke of from the group and make me into

(58:16):
a soul entity. Each of us had our own individual
contracts What Now My Love? And then the pursuant lawsuit
that I filed to break my management was the a
downward spin for me. But Pure Amount knew how much,

(58:39):
the exorbitant amount of money they had paid for my
contract because at that time, when you count them all up,
we've had like seventeen or eighteen songs totally in the
top one hundred, I guess four and top ten, and
then you go to five, you go the top twenty,

(59:00):
you get another five, and so it was well in
such a short period of time because it's from those
three sessions. Play everything you know, Bob cru said, and
we did, and he taped everything we knew, and that's
where he do. Look, you had all the Great Hits
by Mitch Ryder, which was just a repeat of everything

(59:22):
that was a hit. You have Mitch Wrider Sings the Hits.
That was another album he put out, which was the
same material with different packaging. You had the What Now
My Love? Album, and you had Genny Take a Ride,
and you had Breakout, and you had Socker to Me baby,
which was incredible because I'm with my wife, still married

(59:45):
to my little Jewish princess, and we're shopping and we
go buy this cart and they're selling little Mitch Ryder dolls.
Who has bro is selling Mitch writer dolls right next
the mamas and the papas and crazy crazy stuff. I didn't.

(01:00:07):
I guess my wife bought a couple and stuck them
away because my daughter still has hers. But I went
looking for him one day, and not too long ago,
I maybe five years ago, and I found one. But
they wanted a lot of money, and they had taken
this stage costume off the doll. It was just a

(01:00:29):
nude little doll, and and and in my private parts
it was just plastic. And I had a lot of
mental problems over that. For a while, I didn't know
what what gender I was, you know, I was a
little confused.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
So emotionally, how do you cope when you realize, man,
the hits are no longer coming.

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
Oh that wasn't a problem because I was always just
about being able to sing and write. It didn't bother me.
But you're asking how did you stay alive?

Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
I think well that too. I was going to go
there next Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
Yeah, yeah, Well I took whatever they gave me. I
didn't have a manager, I didn't have a br association.
I didn't have at that time, they didn't have such
a thing as influencers. You know. It was a different
time and it was hard, and I went through so

(01:01:32):
many different booking people that promised me they could get
me work and stuff, and I ended up with one
group that got me worked for a while. When I
say work, I'm talking about good work. It was middle
class at least. And then they started putting me on

(01:01:57):
these package tours, which were lucrative for the promoters because
you had all these stars with all these hits. But
that's all they do is come out and sing the
hits and nothing else. They wouldn't do a show. So
I was tied up in that for well over a decade,
maybe two. But every year that passed and you're getting

(01:02:20):
further and further from your core audience and there was
no new music being made. But Polygrim did manage to
get me a dream come true, and they arrange it
so I could make a record called the Detroit Memphis
Experiment with Burger T and the MGS, with the original
band and the Memphis Horns, and that was thrilling in

(01:02:43):
so many ways. Started a relationship and knowledge of Otis Redding,
for example, was one of their stars. Interesting label. There's
some stuff on TV I saw about it, how they
got ripped off by Atlantic Records and so on and
so forth. I'm not saying anything liable. I'm just telling

(01:03:09):
you what I saw on TV. Gosh, that was fun.
That was fun. But after that I got a new manager.
I wanted to take another chance at a manager. And
his name was Barry Kramer, and he had created a
magazine out of Detroit called Cream Magazine, which he wholly

(01:03:31):
intended to go head to head and compete against Rolling Stone,
and he signed a deal with Curtis Publishing in New York,
which brought up is you can find his book everywhere
because prior to that, we were taking his magazines on
tour with us in big black garbage bags and dumping

(01:03:52):
them off at different bookstores and newsstands that he said
were important to do that. So we were kind of
like doing our tour and selling his publication at the
same time. So Barry became my manager, and he drafted
a new contract with Paramount and we birthed the album

(01:04:16):
called Detroit, which was produced by Bob Ezrin out of Toronto.
For those of you who don't know too much of
his work, he was, uh, the group, well, the guy
that did taking care of business, for example, the guitar player.

(01:04:39):
I'm trying to remember his names with Burton coming, Yeah,
Randy and then Burton was a singer and.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51):
Golly we did Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd the Wall.

Speaker 2 (01:04:58):
Yeah, yeah, he's a I don't know what he's doing now.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
He's living back in Toronto. He's producing records, produced Fish record,
Andrea Bocelli still working.

Speaker 2 (01:05:13):
Good good. I wonder if he still has the same
publishing company Nimbus nine.

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
Nimbus nine. I think Nimbus nine was Jack Richardson's. He
used to work for Jack Richardson in New York, that's right,
I mean in Toronto. I don't know who owns Nimbus sign.

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Well, they own some of my songs. I can tell
you that.

Speaker 1 (01:05:46):
Well, let's okay, you sit at home now this lead date.
You get any royalties.

Speaker 2 (01:05:53):
We're having to fight that very issue as we speak.
We're getting some today. I got three different checks from
three different collection agencies, so it helped, but those weren't ours.
In the beginning. Crew never intended to paying anybody anything.

(01:06:19):
In fact, he bragged publicly. I don't know how high
he had to be able to say this, but he
bragged about spending about seven million dollars just on cocaine,
and it made us wonder why we weren't getting any royalties. Kelly,
you know, it's really hard, Bob, because when you people say, Okay, yeah,

(01:06:47):
you got screwed, but that was how they did the
business back then. You were lucky if you didn't get screwed,
and we just you can't complain too much because at
some point, if it wasn't for Bob Crue, there wouldn't

(01:07:07):
be a Mitch Rider. So I can respect that, but
I can tell you this as well. I'm sure it
would be under a different name, but I still would
have made it because I was determined to become a star,
and whatever circumstances I found myself in, I'm absolutely certain

(01:07:32):
I would have done that. That was the easy part.
That's not the hard part of my struggle. The hard
part of my struggle is to establish myself and keep
chasing the dream. I love all these kinds of music,
but I want to go deeper into them and bring

(01:07:53):
more of myself into it. The new album that we're
creating to be recorded next year is probably as close
to my inner self as I've ever allowed myself to be.
This one the latest Woman we're promoting now. It's a
good album, but we're striving for something a little different

(01:08:19):
than that, and new and a new experience and some
you know, beautiful music. And when I say beautiful, I
mean stuff that you just want to listen to over
and over again. And last night we did a shoot

(01:08:40):
for a music video for the new album, and I
mentioned it to Josh. Anyway, we were up till four
a m. This morning, and we're deeply involved in it.
You know. At some point, I want to talk about

(01:09:05):
why we feel a need to sort of cast raise
an eyebrow when we ask ourselves, how are we going
to deal with our aging population, How are we going
to deal with our elders? How are we treating them
in this country? And I'm here to tell you that

(01:09:26):
it's a big difference in cultures. It is not this
way around the world, the way we treat older people here.
But I want to table that for a minute to
try to keep this trade on, to make every stop
that we can make.

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
No, no, no, no, no, you no. Tell me, tell
me more about the aging people, the aging population.

Speaker 2 (01:09:48):
Well, it's a lot of ways to look at it,
Like if you can afford to put mom in a home,
you know, it really depends on what kind she needs.
Do you need assisted living? That happens sometimes they just

(01:10:09):
send them to like a morphine house, where when they
decide they can't handle it anymore, they just they're allowed,
without much discovery, to in their lives the way they
want to. And I think they should be allowed to

(01:10:30):
do that. They've spent their whole life. You know, life
is not easy. That's the first thing you want to
teach your kids. It's not going to be easy, kid,
but you know you'll end up loving it. So what
do you do in a family that doesn't have the
money to put mom in assisted living or into a

(01:10:51):
morphine house or take care of her? You know, then
you take on We used to have in this gun
what we call generational homes. Nobody can I don't know
if they can't afford to have a generational home. Because
both of the principal, the daughter and son of this

(01:11:14):
woman or man. They both have to work. There's so
many different interchangeable parts in the financial situation that it
directs you to what your choices can be and what
they will be. I don't know. If you start taking
away safety nets, then that raises another problem because you've

(01:11:39):
got people now, not now, but gosh, fifty years ago
started learning how to game the system, you know, and
raise families on government money instead of doing work for
it if there was a job to be had. And
that's what's so frustrating about everything is happening today. But

(01:12:01):
you know what, it's cyclical. It's been done before. It's
coming back again, only this time it feels like it's
coming back a little harder. But we're all going to
live through it, you know, unless something, Unless God wants
to call you in. So I wouldn't be afraid of

(01:12:21):
what's happening now. I know that's easy to say because
I'm still being productive. I'm still hiring lighting people and
audio people and gaffers and humpers and putting people to
work contributing to society paying taxes. So I'm still viable.

(01:12:42):
But what do you do with people that can't and
they're suffering a lot of them are suffering. They can't
they can't work because they can't physically do it. They'd
love to work if they could. And eighty years old
or whatever age you want to put it at, where
you think they're they're no good for society. You need
to relook at that and see where you can find

(01:13:07):
the value that these people are still willing to give
but have no opportunity to do it. So, you know,
it's messy. It's messy to describe. It's messy for me
to even dissect it in front of you because there's
so much emotion involved in it. But I do know

(01:13:28):
that if you've done done it the right way and
you played by the rules and you did what you
thought was right, only to find out that it didn't
matter one bit what you were doing right or wrong,
because in the end, there's so much greed in business,

(01:13:53):
in capitalism, there's so much greed tied up there to
very few that you can't really it's hard to fight
the machine. And what do we do. We're living through,
like I said, another Gilded Age, which was interesting following

(01:14:15):
the reconstruction period in the American history, and that fell apart,
and then you go, you know, into the roaring twenties,
all this while the Industrial Revolution is just making itself

(01:14:36):
more viable and more and more and buying up things
and consolidating and looking for a bigger check for everybody
that's lucky enough to be employed by them. And I'm
sitting here wondering about what happens if they start to
privatize our social security? And what happens when they hook

(01:14:59):
you ira and you're for ones? What if they hook
them irrevocably to the stock market? I mean, is that
how it's going to turn out? Who knows? Seems like
right now we're capable of doing anything.

Speaker 1 (01:15:16):
So how's your financial situation? And what's your plan going forward?
Assuming you know, let's say you live another ten twenty years.

Speaker 2 (01:15:26):
Wouldn't that be something to witness? I can't. Even when
I close my eyes, I can still see it. Anyway,
I'll tell you when it's too late. If you're a
man is loose skin, if you sit down on a toilet,

(01:15:47):
your gonads are floating, you've got problems anyway, you know
what the heck? My financial situation right now, we're rolling
with the wind. It's not easy because there's very little

(01:16:07):
work in America. For me at this moment, and that's
what we're trying to do with this latest recording. We
feel it's a worthy record. It needs to be heard.
You know, when I was passionate, not as passionate as
I am now, but when I started really liking music,
I just when I heard something on the radio and

(01:16:31):
it sounded good, and I like the way it sounded,
I didn't care. I didn't think about age, I didn't
think about color, I didn't think about those things. I've
thought about how much I liked that song, and I
don't know. I think maybe that's some kind of mentality
we should at least give another chance to because there's

(01:16:54):
a lot of people, elders that are quite capable of
still contributing valuable and entertaining things into our culture, but
we don't do that. We're like a fast food restaurant,
you know, give me the next thing that's going to sell.
And I had a conversation a couple of years ago

(01:17:15):
with a record company and they were quite honest with
me that we love you, we love your music, we
love the music we just heard that you did. But
it would cost us, starting at half a million dollars
to re establish you in the in the consciousness of

(01:17:35):
the of the country, to to to get that much
information out there, to get you set up on social media,
to get you all the things you're going to need
to return as a star. I said, well, what about
if I don't want to be a star. I just
want my records to be played, you know. That's that's
kind of what we're facing right now. We've got a

(01:17:58):
great record. I love it so much, and I'm just
trying to come home. I've been recording in foreign countries
for so long now that and people don't even know
I'm alive. I mean, I've had nothing for them to hear.
But it's not because I wasn't producing. It's not because

(01:18:19):
I wasn't creating. It's because I never had the power
or the push to open the doors I needed to open.
I did have a very interesting management agreement with a
wonderful man. His name is Brett Steele. He's a manager,
and unfortunately that had to fall apart. I think for

(01:18:46):
a couple of reasons, but it doesn't matter. He's talented.
I thought the roster was a little too full. I
felt like I needed somebody to give most of their
attention to trying to resurrect me, and so when you
had a larger roster as he did, it was difficult

(01:19:07):
to want to stay with him. And besides, it was
one of those situations where, you know, we talked about
management contracts and he said a handshake will do well.
I don't know about a handshake doing because you know,
I've gotten stabbed that way before, not that he would
do it. He's a marvelous guy, and I'm happy for

(01:19:31):
the artist that he does manage, but I can't give
up the power that I'm going to need to reintroduce
me and somebody say, hey, you know your home kid,
you did all that stuff, you know, whatever the heck
way you were doing over there because we didn't hear it,
but you're home now, and that would make a nice

(01:19:53):
ending to that day, and then they you know, then
you can rest easy when you look forward to what
are you going to do tomorrow? And my idea what
I'm going to do tomorrow is continue to write and records.
That's what I want to do. It's getting harder to
play because I have severe spinal stenosis with scoliosis, and

(01:20:20):
so walking is difficult. And get this is I don't
know where this woman came from, but I'm going to
describe it to you now. We were performing on a
cruise ship and I'm walking around with a cane because
i have to at this moment. I can walk, but

(01:20:41):
I can't. I can walk without a cane, but I
can't walk far and I can't walk long times. So
we're out there, we're enjoying the music with all these
hundreds of other people on the ship, and we leave
the area where everybody's congregated, and we're going past some
open hallways, empty hallways, and we turn a corner to

(01:21:06):
go around, and there's this woman and I'm struggling at
this point because I've been in the sun for hours
in the standing and I'm struggling to walk. And this
woman just ambushed us, jumped out from behind a pillar
and started videotaping my struggle to walk. And I'm wondering

(01:21:28):
to myself, well, why would you do that? Why would
you want to have that on tape? You know, what
is that going to do for you in your social
media world, showing somebody having a struggle. So maybe she's like,
maybe she likes those national geographic snuff films where you

(01:21:51):
watch the animals kill each other. You know, I don't know.
It's a funny world.

Speaker 1 (01:22:07):
Tell me about your world in Europe and your career
in Europe.

Speaker 2 (01:22:13):
Very different, very different. I was this coming year will
be forty eight years of non stop touring every year
in Europe, with the exception of one COVID year where
they wouldn't allow us to travel there. It's a market

(01:22:33):
that I built over a long time. The first seventeen
years were in West Germany before the wall came down,
and then we slowly got invited by the government in
the East to perform. And I did a performance on

(01:22:56):
a show called The Rock Palace, which was sent out
to one hundred and thirty million. At that point in
the morning, they said there was one hundred and thirty
million people probably watching. I was on a bill with
Nil's laughkra and Southside Johnny, and they had those sons

(01:23:18):
of guns. Nobody had told anybody what time the headlining
was going to go on. I wasn't headlighting, I was opening,
and nobody had told me that. When Southside found out
and Neil's found out that the headlining would be going
on at two in the morning, all of a sudden
they wanted to Hey, Mitch, listen, man, we love you.

(01:23:42):
Would you like to close the show? And I'm going
what headline the show over you guys? Of course I would,
and it's because I didn't know about the time. So
we were going to open. So we were having in
the early afternoon. We were having a few drinks and

(01:24:04):
we thought we'd be going on pretty soon. It wouldn't
be long. Well, then nobody told us about the change.
You know, they told me that I would be headlined,
but nobody told us about the time. So as we're
sitting there waiting, we're continuing to drink and by the
time it comes me to be on stage. They had

(01:24:24):
a pre interview where the other bands had their interviews
after their performance. They had a pre interview with a
drunk who hadn't gotten a chance to put his music
out there yet. Well, by the way, I haven't had
anything to drink for over twenty years now, and same
thing with the dope. What messes it up for me

(01:24:50):
with my back is they screwed up to begin with
with the cervical. They fused the cervical and the medal
wasn't quite right. Now I kind of see everything from
my dog's perspective. Whatever, it's on the sidewalk in front
of me, that's what I'll look at. This show is

(01:25:10):
called the Rock Palace. So we go on. In the interview,
I said some things that the government didn't like, and
my record company didn't like, and my manager didn't like.
But the kids loved it. And during the show, my
show wasn't like anybody else's show. I got off the stage,

(01:25:33):
I went down into the audience. I sat next to
the to the attendees, and I talked to him. I
sang with him, and I was moving all around, and
the band was just roaring, and we did this remarkable show,
which they're calling the best that they've ever seen. For

(01:25:56):
that for marketing purposes, maybe, but that drew my fan base,
and that's what allowed me to continue to go over
to Germany for all these decades. In the beginning of
the transition from West to East, where we started going
into a whole Germany, I continued to bring American players

(01:26:20):
over because of the lack of knowledge of not blues
but sort of rock and roll stylings. Because the East
Germans were heavy into blues scene. I would too if
I was, you know, I would be very bluesy in

(01:26:42):
a communist country, and we worked it. We worked it,
we made it into something. We molded it. We dedicated
our lives to it and did so many great shows,
but never once having to do any of the American hits,

(01:27:04):
and no requests for him wow, doing two hour shows
with no intermissions, no opening acts, all material that I
created in Germany or France.

Speaker 1 (01:27:17):
Tell me about East Germany before the wall came down.

Speaker 2 (01:27:21):
Well, we happened to go over. There was no neon
that was immediate once you went through checkpoint Charlie. There
was no neon at all. And we asked our guide
we wanted to go to a bar. He said, well,
let's just keep walking. I said, well, do you know
where you're going? He said, no, we will. I said,

(01:27:43):
what do you mean we will? He said, when we
come to the door where you hear music, that's going
to be a club, Let's just walk in. There was
no out signage outside or anything. It was all like
known to the locals, you know what was happening. And

(01:28:04):
so I got invited over a couple of times before
the wall came down. I recorded over there same studio
that you two and David Boy used beautiful studio. In
the middle of the studio was an old ballroom where
the Nazis would have their ballroom dances. But I'm straying,

(01:28:30):
as I have been for the whole interview. So we
do this thing and we get invited to play a
soccer field. Okay, when's the last time I saw a
soccer field in America? So considering, you know, my last
big hit was like sixty nine, and now we're deep

(01:28:53):
into the eighties, not deep into the eighties, but we're
in the eighties and all those years. But things did
happen in America for me. But let me set that
aside for a moment and finished this East German story
because it's cute. They would didn't. They didn't want to
pay us in the East German marks because of the embarrassment, uh,

(01:29:18):
the valuation and they so they wouldn't pay us. I
remember the marks were green colored to a sort of
light blimey green. So they paid us in hardware. We
got two grand pianos. We got a Trebbe, their little
national car, the East German car. I got a generous tent,

(01:29:43):
had like four different rooms to it, a huge tent.
And so what did we do with this stuff, you know. Well,
what we did was we took it back and we
sold it in the West and made our money that way.
But what we discovered as well is when you're traveling
between those two borders, they'd make you get off the bus,

(01:30:07):
leave all your belongings on the bus, go inside for
your paperwork, and then say all right, get on the
bus and leave. And so you did, only to discover
that your cassettes were gone, your radios were gone, your
instruments were gone, you know, I mean, they just outright
stole from you. So it was the culture in East

(01:30:28):
Germany was certainly different from West Germany. And that's why
I was so shocking for the West. When the wall
did come down. There was a lot of traffic heading
to the west, a lot of traffic, but the only
people head into the West that I knew of at

(01:30:49):
that time were the banks, and they were going to rebuild.
The Soviets never gave anything, They just took, took, took.
So when the wall came down, these cities, famous cities,
big cities in the East had to be rebuilt, from

(01:31:10):
the sewers to the streets, the electrical grids, to everything
that you could think of that you need to run
a functioning city, had to be replaced by Western tax
dollars in Germany, and so that's where that resentment came from.

Speaker 1 (01:31:30):
Okay, you're a saft spoken, thoughtful, intelligent, educated guy. What
was the twenty something Mitch Ryder like? Same or different?

Speaker 2 (01:31:45):
I was just watching an interview at some New York club,
New York City, when I was hot, okay, and I
was I was polite and respectful. I don't think I
carried myself. Only later on after I started getting mad,

(01:32:11):
angry at myself for choices I had made that sabotaged
my career. So I started drinking heavily. Only then did
I realize what a fool I had been. But in
my twenties, I was, you know, pretty reserved guy. I mean,

(01:32:36):
the American Heart Association made me Prince of Hearts for
a year. Just tons of stuff like that, charitable causes
doing everything I had learned, you know, being a Catholic.
Not that they don't teach in goodness anywhere else, but
the Catholic Church is famous for it. If you can't

(01:32:59):
understand them, whip it into you.

Speaker 1 (01:33:03):
So tell me about getting angry and feeling like a fool.

Speaker 2 (01:33:08):
You don't know what your age, what that's like.

Speaker 1 (01:33:10):
Well, I know, but my light history is different from yours.
You know, I didn't have this ubiquitous fame. I wasn't
ripped off for all this money. I didn't hit a
peak and then, you know, have a hard time reclaiming
that peak.

Speaker 2 (01:33:27):
You're absolutely right one point. So which part do you
want to hear? All of it? All right? My wife's
turned to poison me, I'm sure of it. The water

(01:33:47):
is different today. Well, as I said, the most regrettable
part of my career is, uh, how I managed to
hurt myself career wise. I'm simply a dreamer and I

(01:34:11):
need leadership that's not going to try to hurt me.
What would do me, what would serve me best right
now would be probably a six year old billionaire with
a devil make air attitude. I just, uh, I think

(01:34:37):
what could look? I'm going to end up happy when
when the end finally comes anyway, because I'm happy. Now.
We're talking about things that are uncomfortable, but I am
a happy guy, and I do expect the sun to
come up tomorrow and I'm working on new projects. Complete

(01:35:00):
needed many projects that aren't for sale yet, and I'm
still ambitious that way. It's not comfortable being disabled slightly,
But you know, they don't come to see me dance,
they come to hear me sing. So it's simple.

Speaker 1 (01:35:21):
Well, how long did it take you to get all
over being ripped off?

Speaker 2 (01:35:28):
I think when the Appellate Court in New York State
ruled against me in my lawsuit, there was a finality
to that. I didn't feel like appealing to the Supreme
Court in New York State. And so one of the

(01:35:52):
curious things, do you mind if I continue to call
you Bob?

Speaker 1 (01:35:57):
No, that's cool, that's my name.

Speaker 2 (01:35:59):
Okay, okay, So Bob Crewe, like I said, was from
an earlier age. I told you the Vegas thing, which
was an example. But he also had his own little
tin panelley right in his offices, and you would go
in there and he owned everything. You know. He just

(01:36:22):
simply hired people to write songs for him and they
would get credit and a small royalty. And when I
say small, we're talking about one or two cents a
record five cents at the most if you're a really
big deal. So he dissuaded us at a time. See
I wrote my first record, I wrote my second record.
All before I went to New York. My mom used

(01:36:44):
to sing around the house all the time. My mom
used to write music. She'd take me a little preschooler,
and she'd read and sing her songs to me and
asked me for my opinion. She valued my talent that much,
I guess. But it's always been about for me that

(01:37:08):
that creative progress, the evolution. I started out being a writer,
and that's what I wanted to be, and I wanted
to be a singer, which of course I'm good at.
But at a time when everybody around us, their managers

(01:37:28):
were pressing them hard, especially the Brits, to write your
own music so we can establish a catalog. Bob Crew
was saying that, no, no, no, no, no no no, don't
you worry about the music. I've got music for you.
And that's what we ended up doing, or a lot
of covers. So you know, I wanted to, after that experience,

(01:37:57):
at least for myself, get to a position that reflected
who I really am as a person. And how different
is that from anybody? If it's different at all, it's
just part of the discovery process, you know, And to

(01:38:19):
become a better writer. And that's been I've been chasing
that forever and I'll be chasing it tomorrow. I want
to make another new album, you know. I want to
write better songs. I've been told that I've written great songs,
but I have no proof of it because I never

(01:38:41):
I haven't been with the machine for a long time.
Contracts I sign in Europe, multiple contracts are usually with
smaller companies, have no power, have no push, have no connection.
At least roof Records is getting me on the American charts,
but it's just a little glimpse of me, you know.

(01:39:03):
So our if we want to be heard, we need
to What I need is a benefactor, I think, and
I can together with somebody that's intelligent, that's self made,
that's comfortable in their lives and wants to dally and

(01:39:26):
prove a point about aging Americans and what their value
is to us. Give me a call, you know, and
we will make it happen. We'll turn the world upside
down on his head and say, hey, you know, I'm
eighty years old and I'm doing music. It's just as
good as what you're doing. So let's take that argument
there instead of sending our seniors off to places where

(01:39:49):
we'll never see them again, you know, and the ones
that are suffering, there's no need for that.

Speaker 1 (01:39:58):
Let's talk about life experience. You've been married three times.
What did you learn and what advice do you have?

Speaker 2 (01:40:07):
Well, if you're a musician, don't get married. That's what
I learned. My children are from my first wife. My
second wife, I woke up one morning with a very
bad headache, only to come fully conscious and realize that

(01:40:30):
she had a loaded handgun pressing against my forehead, and
it did disturb me a little bit. I talked her
down by offering her some more drugs, which I didn't have,
but it was long enough to get that gun out

(01:40:51):
of her hand. And then I filed for divorce, and
I thought I had substantial cause she ended up dying,
unfortunately as a result of her drug use. And then
I met my wife, my current wife, who is just
absolutely my savior. Yeah, she's an incredible woman. I've never

(01:41:19):
known a woman like that. When I met her, I
was still I was coming off the heels of the
John Mellencamp produced album Never Kick a Sleeping Dog, and
so I was in Detroit anyway, reborn as a star,
and not that you would know, but that song we covered,

(01:41:40):
the Prince Song, did chart, and it was the first
time I was.

Speaker 1 (01:41:44):
That's my favorite song on that album. When you did
a cover, I woke right up and said, wow, And
it was a great cover.

Speaker 2 (01:41:52):
I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, I saw it in
a movie called Hot Dog or something, A bunch of skiers, right, yeah,
a nice, nice groove and you know, a great experience.
And then thanks to John believing in me. So I've
had help along the way.

Speaker 1 (01:42:10):
But you were telling me about meeting your third wife.

Speaker 2 (01:42:14):
Yes, so I'm hot again. And the higher the record
goes in the charts, the prettier the girls get every week. Okay,
it's just a fact. She was different because I was

(01:42:34):
getting divorced and she had been divorced, and she had
two little kids in a shopping cart and we're in
Kmart and we both end up at the flower shop
together and I'm looking for roses, and I asked, do
you know anything about roses, kind of offhandedly because I
saw the kids and I wasn't really ready to mess

(01:42:56):
with any of that, And she said, yeah, in fact,
I'm looking for some stuff from my garden as well.
I think what you're looking for is over there and whatever.
But anyway, it sparked a conversation, but not too many
details were forthcoming from her, and she we ended up

(01:43:23):
in line together, and they pushed my stuff through. She's
behind me, and the lady sees her stuff on the
counter and thinks her together and starts pushing her stuff
through as well. And she stops the lady and said, no, no, no, no, no,
that's that's not his. Those are my belongings. And I said, well,

(01:43:50):
you know, hey, I'm sorry she did that. If you want,
you know, I can help help you. Because she didn't
look like she had much money. In fact, she didn't,
so she wasn't enjoining, she wasn't getting into that. She

(01:44:15):
didn't like to pick up line, she didn't like any
of that stuff. But one thing I realized about her was,
and I swear to you this is the truth as
I know it, I did not want She's beautiful. She's
a beautiful woman physically, intellectually, morally, she's industrious, intelligent, as

(01:44:41):
they say down south, she cleans up well. She if
it had been any other woman, Because I was out
of that marriage and I just would have wanted to
take her to bed, but I didn't want to touch
the woman. We corresponded, We telephone called, We went on

(01:45:05):
dates for a year and a half before the thought
sex even came into my mind. I mean that was
something absolutely I had never experienced before. No, she was
this woman so whole, uh and and honest and industrious

(01:45:37):
and you know, I mean she put she changes electrical
sockets around the house, she runs wiring, and she she
does all the technical stuff and then she has these
beautiful gardens. She she makes and designs, and she loves
a clean house. And she's uh, she plays pickleball every
day she can, and she's really good, you know. And

(01:46:02):
she's see she is seventy seven years old, or not
seventy seven, sixty seven years old. I'm eighty. So you know,
the big big drama here is I'm going to be

(01:46:22):
leaving probably if things go according to the plan before
she does. And it's it's brought some deep feelings between us.
We bonded, I think even closer than we thought was possible.
And here's the woman that we did get divorced after

(01:46:47):
three years, and we took those three years to understand
that there was nothing out there that satisfying the two
of us as much as we satisfied ourselves on all
levels of thought and action. The trick about sex is

(01:47:14):
that's usually the first thing that people use as an
introduction card, and that's no basis for a relationship at all.
So I think we did it the right way. We
studied each other for that year and a half before
I married her, and the divorce came and we realized

(01:47:35):
that we couldn't do it without each other, and we
wanted to be back together. And we've had some hard times,
but we've had some grand times. And I took her
to see the world that she wouldn't have been capable
of seeing. She's got friends all over the country. She's

(01:47:58):
been to eighteen year nineteen different countries, and she's got
friends in all of them. This is a beautiful woman.
Her name's Megan.

Speaker 1 (01:48:16):
So tell me about fame.

Speaker 2 (01:48:19):
Oh, it's one of the most destruct It's one of
the most misunderstood aspects of American culture. It changes people,
so normally it changes you know. I had this discussion
with a high school buddy of mine who's still alive.

(01:48:41):
I don't think I changed. I became just something for
all these different people that needed different work and different jobs,
a new piece of meat to hang your hat on
and make some money. And I was following directions and
orders and stuff, and their perception of me. Well, he's

(01:49:05):
a star now he You know, he's got to have changed. No, No,
if anything, No, my buddy's and kids from high school,
they've changed with their regard to their attitude towards me.

(01:49:26):
I know this because I've sat and talked to the
old buddy I was telling you about, and his idea
of what's happened in my life is way different from
the reality I'm living through. So famous, it was harder
to get back when I was looking for it. I

(01:49:51):
just it's not that I don't understand what's happening now.

Speaker 1 (01:49:55):
I do.

Speaker 2 (01:49:56):
I simply am not in a position of power to
make the moves that have to be made.

Speaker 1 (01:50:02):
But is it an advantage or a disadvantage of both
being famous? I mean, if you go out to the
grocery store, you go people to people recognize you. Do
you ever trade on your name and say I can't
get a reservation, but tell them I'm Mitch Ryder stuff
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:50:17):
Well, these days, yeah, that still works in Detroit because
I'm a Detroit boy. I remember they did a special
on me with one of the local TV channels and
they put us in Washington, d C. And they asked
ten people on the street, have you ever heard of
Mitch Ryder? And only one person said yes out of

(01:50:38):
the ten. So you know, but in Detroit, everybody knows
the name. If not, they can ask their grandma. She'll
tell them. It's famous. Corruptive, you know, if you're not careful,
it can lead you into believing that you're something you're not,

(01:51:00):
other than a human. I don't put cabinets together. I
couldn't build you a chair. I couldn't There's a lot
of things I can't do. But I do know music
because it's been the only pursuit I've had.

Speaker 1 (01:51:20):
And to.

Speaker 2 (01:51:25):
Understand that these other people I'm talking about, with the
different occupations, they're no different from me. They're going to
have success or failure too. And I think essentially all
a man wants in this world is to be able
to have his dignity and be able to feed his
family and keep him in shelter and keep him healthy.

(01:51:47):
That's all anybody wants all over the world. But there's
so many greedy assholes out there that are just making
it difficult for people to get even a living way.
And I just like I said in the beginning, this
is the first time this has happened in our history.

(01:52:08):
It won't be the last, But what you're seeing is
an erosion. The only people I believe when they swear
an oath to the Constitution are the soldiers, the frontline infantry,
people of the men and women that are willing to
give up their lives. I'll believe them when they swear

(01:52:28):
to the Constitution. But it seems to me like there's
a lot of people lying about it right now.

Speaker 1 (01:52:35):
So in your regular life, are you Bill or you Mitch?

Speaker 2 (01:52:40):
It really depends on how long we get to know
each other.

Speaker 1 (01:52:46):
Well, what does your wife call you.

Speaker 2 (01:52:49):
Idiot?

Speaker 1 (01:52:54):
When she's happier with you? Does she use Bill or Mitch?

Speaker 2 (01:53:00):
Billy?

Speaker 1 (01:53:02):
And on your passport, what does it say.

Speaker 2 (01:53:05):
William s Leviice jor And let me ask you a question.
If you're a junior and your dad dies, are you
no longer a junior?

Speaker 1 (01:53:18):
That's an interesting Okay, So did you contemplate naming your
child the third?

Speaker 2 (01:53:25):
No? But you know one of the original names they
wanted for me in New York when they were searching
for one was Michael Rothschild. At least you be rich, right,
like I'm gonna like, you know, I'm going to diss
a whole financial establishment in Europe. That was crazy, vincent.

Speaker 1 (01:53:47):
How did it end up being Mitch Ryder?

Speaker 2 (01:53:49):
H A finger fell on a name in the phone book,
and there were five of them, And I felt so
bad about it that I literally called all those people
and apologized to him for whatever problems I had brought
into their life.

Speaker 1 (01:54:05):
Wow, So there there were five people named Mitch Ryder.

Speaker 2 (01:54:09):
No, there was like an m writer, there was a miswriter,
there was a Mitch writer. One Mitch writer. And did
you know that? There was a rest but he died recently.
He called himself Mitch Writer too, because he appeared on
Google once when I punched in my name.

Speaker 1 (01:54:30):
Okay, Billy, you dropped a lot of wisdom on us.
It's great to hear that you're so optimistic and driven
for the future, still dreaming. Too many people get up
the dreams. I wish you luck, and I wish a
benefactor find show.

Speaker 2 (01:54:46):
Yeah, that's not so important. It would be helpful but
you know, you know how life is.

Speaker 1 (01:54:55):
I can't believe that you have a smile on your fee.
You've been through a lot and not all positive, and
the fact that you have a positive attitude is really
pretty enlightening and a beacon for those of us who
can't always stay so positive.

Speaker 2 (01:55:09):
But you know what, look at what choices we have.
You only have two choices. Why would anybody want to
waste their life regretting the experience? We all knew this
is how it worked. You start dying from the day
you're born. So life is not easy. And believe me,

(01:55:36):
this is not anything to be ashamed of or feel
sorrow about. Yeah, you don't want to leave the people
you love, but if you're in a place where you're
not having a life that is enjoyable and you're suffering,

(01:55:56):
there's really why do you want to be here? Why
do you want to stay in a place where you're
suffering and you cannot get rid of the suffering? And
they you know, I've asked myself that question, but fortunately
there is an answer. You look forward to waking up

(01:56:17):
and seeing that sun the next day, and that's all
you need to know that you can carry on. You
can realize whatever dream it was that you haven't found,
and you now found a way to look for it,
Go for it, you know, just do the positive stuff
and forget all that. I could talk to you for

(01:56:38):
hours about it, but my wife warned me in the beginning.
No politics, no religion, and those are just like a
tinder box waiting to be lit. We could expand this
conversation into some deep intellectual, thoughtful properties and meanings and things,

(01:57:04):
but I don't choose to do that. That's not what
I do. You know, I don't ask myself when my
audience walks into a venue to see me. I don't
ask if they're a Republican or Democrat. That's irrelevant. They

(01:57:24):
came to hear music that they love or they wouldn't
be paying, and so why why muddy the waters with
something that they didn't want. If I feel like grand standing,
I'll take it off the show stage and put it
on a street corner. Look at the problem that Bruce
Springsteen's going to have now when he comes home. Do

(01:57:49):
you understand what I'm talking about?

Speaker 1 (01:57:51):
I do, But he's in a slightly different financial and
career spot than you are.

Speaker 2 (01:57:58):
Yeah, you know, true enough, and you.

Speaker 1 (01:58:00):
Know, listen, I could go on about this forever myself,
but if you're trying to please everybody, no one can
do that. Even if you get on stage and you
just do your music, they're going to be people who
dislike you or dislike that style of music. You're right,
so you make choices. And the artists that we became

(01:58:22):
enamored of when you were so successful was because they
took a stand, whatever that stand might be, and they
were speaking their truth through the music. It was different
from you know, as you put it, Tin Pan Alley,
But you know, I think that's also a difference between
yesterday and today.

Speaker 2 (01:58:41):
You know, one of my heroes is I have very
few of them. I have the greatest love and affection
for Bob Dylan.

Speaker 1 (01:58:50):
Tell me why he is not.

Speaker 2 (01:58:58):
Afraid to talk about any subject. He's just simply and
he does it with such ambiguity that it's it's clever
because you you, three different people could listen to a

(01:59:19):
line from one of his songs and come out with
three different meanings. You know, That's why he's so damn cool.
Is he still working? It's something somebody, I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:59:34):
He's been working. I respect I respect Dylan for everything
he did in his work. But one thing I respect
him for is he goes on the road and makes
it interesting to him. I don't want to go see it.
I have seen it. But you go to see Dylan,
he rearranges all the songs to the point of unrecognizability.

Speaker 2 (01:59:57):
I know what you're talking about because we went through
that experience. It's my wife and I three years ago,
I believe. And he had been on the road so
long that first of all, the first thing you noticed
was that he had lost his voice. Okay, everything was
like a growl. And then suddenly you'll put put in

(02:00:22):
the name of the song right right where you can
tell what song it was. But in spite of that,
he did write those wonderful, wonderful.

Speaker 1 (02:00:34):
Song No listen, I could quote that stuff ad infinitum.

Speaker 2 (02:00:38):
Who were your favorites when you were a teenager? Who
did you like?

Speaker 1 (02:00:41):
Oh, come on, okay, I mean, if you want to start,
you know, I'm younger. I'm ten years not ten, but
eight years younger than you. So the first stuff you heard,
all that Beatles stuff whatever, I mean, all the eldest
stuff was really before my time. And then Babying and
Bobby were aware of the first stuff that resonated in

(02:01:03):
the other than the novelty tracks were the Beach Boys
in the Four Seasons, and then of course the Beatles
hit and that was everything. And you live in the
New York market and you had all the FM radio,
so you know Quem Hendrix, I could go on to
who all that stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:01:20):
I knew all those guys. That's crazy.

Speaker 3 (02:01:23):
And you know what people don't realize is it was
different if you wanted to know what was going on,
if you were younger, you turned on the radio. Not
only did you get the songs, you got news, it
applied to you, et cetera. And there's always been music.
There was music before the Beatles. But just like with tech,

(02:01:44):
from like nineteen ninety five to like five years ago,
we were all focused on it. That's what it was
like with music. It drove everything, just like today it's
like politics. You opened the paper every day and you
see a story that causes an emotion, whether you disagree, whatever,

(02:02:05):
there's a passion That is not what we're getting from music.
Music now is more entertainment, more commerce. And I'm talking
in generalities because there's thousands of acts doing all kinds
of music. But as you were talking earlier about the
Hot one hundred, you know, we know those songs by heart.

(02:02:27):
And the other thing was, yeah, they talked about turntable
hits with the reality was it had to be really
fucking great in order to make it.

Speaker 2 (02:02:36):
Yeah, you know, Barry Gordy said, it's what's in the
grooves that comes absolutely.

Speaker 1 (02:02:42):
And you know, the other good thing is that you know,
for a while there it was how you looked and whatever.
Now it's you know, because you know now it's based
back to the record. Yeah, people want to be able
to see what you look whatever, but that's not the
number one thing you're selling. One more question for you, though,
because what did you think when you found out Springsteen

(02:03:02):
was doing a medley of your songs?

Speaker 2 (02:03:06):
Well, he invited me and we did perform them together
here in Detroit, But when was the first one. There
was a funny part to that though, because I got
so involved in the show. You know, I hadn't played
a venue like Cobo Hall where he was in such
a long time that I was very excited and we

(02:03:27):
started doing my songs and I actually just it's so
insane and embarrassing to talk about Bruce laughed about it,
but I was so into the show. I turned around
to Max, the drummer, and I signaled him to turn down,
and he just he looked at me with these like

(02:03:48):
a deer caught in headlights, and then looked at the
boss and you want to know, what do I do?
What I do? Oh? You know, it was fun. There was,
you know, a kick ass performance.

Speaker 1 (02:04:00):
But when was the first time if you remember, you
were aware that he was doing that medley.

Speaker 2 (02:04:07):
When he called me to come and rehearse it. Really,
we went in a day early and he said, I'm
coming to Detroit, and I wondered if you'd be kind
enough to come up and sing your songs. I said, well,
not all of them. He said, well, no, just too
in particular.

Speaker 1 (02:04:30):
Okay, of all of the people you know in your book,
you list all the musicians you've met, tell me one
or two that lived up to the image, because they
usually don't.

Speaker 2 (02:04:43):
Lived up to the image as projected by them or
as perceived by the public.

Speaker 1 (02:04:48):
I would say, it's really a combination of both, but
it's what in your mind they represented.

Speaker 2 (02:04:57):
Wow. Well, first of all, one of the most heart
rendering voices I got fell in love with was Otis reading.
Did you ever hear cigarettes and coffee by him? I

(02:05:17):
don't remember it at the top of my head. No, no, okay,
but okay. He was very emotive. It was very very
capable of making you hear him cry if he was crying.
Just a good natural connect with that voice. And I
remember doing this TV show. It occurred like the night

(02:05:42):
before he flew out of Cleveland and died in Lake, Michigan.
He was a tall man and at the end, while
they're rolling the credits, we were closing the show, he
put his arm around my right shoulder, and he's a
much taller man than myself, and he started rocking, and
every time he rocked to the left, my whole right

(02:06:03):
leg would come up off the crowd. So I was like,
it was like he was a puppeteer, you know. I
just I enjoyed meeting all of these people, hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of all these people that are stars
that made it. I've spent time with him, I've you know, shared. Yeah, Yeah,

(02:06:26):
it's been wonderful. It's been a remarkable experience.

Speaker 1 (02:06:30):
To what degreed did you wrestle with imposter syndrome?

Speaker 2 (02:06:36):
Imposter syndrome where you say.

Speaker 1 (02:06:38):
I'm not worthy. They're on a different level. I don't
deserve the success. Maybe you didn't wrestle with that at all,
but a lot of people do.

Speaker 2 (02:06:49):
I'm honored that people think that way. Are you talking
about people giving me accolades and stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:06:57):
No, it's like being on stage with another ract and saying, Oh,
do I deserve to be here? Do I deserve the
way people are looking at me?

Speaker 2 (02:07:12):
If I was invited up on that stage by the headliner,
I'd have to say yes. Why else would you put
them up there to embarrass him? No?

Speaker 1 (02:07:24):
No, it's good you have that confidence. Okay, we're gonna
leave it here. It's been great talking to Mitch Ryder.
Till next time. This is Bob Left said's