Buffalo Springfield/CSN/CSN&Y principal Stephen Stills, guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Electric Flag keyboardist Barry Goldberg have formed the new all-star blues-rock group The Rides. The multi-generational outfit’s debut album, Can’t Get Enough, is set for CD, digital, and vinyl release August 27 on 429 Records. Featuring four co-written originals, a handful of covers, and a vintage, previously unrecorded Stills number, Can’t Get Enough was inspired by—and is an homage to—the now-classic 1968 album Super Session. That album featured Stills on guitar on one side, and the late Mike Bloomfield (Bloomfield founded Electric Flag with Goldberg, who also played on Super Session alongside Blood, Sweat & Tears keyboardist Al Kooper). The Rides will embark on a world tour beginning in September.
As the band explains:
The project began with Stills and Goldberg writing together at their mutual manager Elliot Roberts’ recommendation. “It was like finding a long lost soul brother,” says Goldberg (who hadn’t met Stills before, their shared 1968 credit notwithstanding). “We connected on so many things, started jamming, and soon had begun writing our first song.” Next came Kenny Wayne Shepherd, and their three-way chemistry was immediate and intense. “The Rides are a perfect mix of generations, where three musicians who love and play the blues collide and create music that goes beyond all our other individual life experiences and career achievement,” says 35-year-old, Shepherd, who’s had six #1 Blues albums. “Stephen and I have rock backgrounds as well, but the blues is the fabric that holds this all together.” Stills says, “It was just really magical with the three of us, one of the best times I’ve had in my musical career.”
The album features four Stills/Shepherd/Goldberg co-writes including the album-opening barnburner “Roadhouse”—about the life of an itinerant bluesman—the melodic, CSN-esque “Don’t Want Lies,” and the title track, a groove soaked, guitar-heavy anthem with a soul-baring lead vocal by Stills. Other highlights include a Crazy Horse-caliber send-up of “Rockin’ In The Free World.”
“Everyone gets off on this one,” says Goldberg, “just a ton of electricity on this Neil Young classic.” The four additional covers are the tracks on which Shepherd sings lead, including “Talk To Me Baby” and “Honey Bee” by blues giants Elmore James and Muddy Waters, respectively, and Iggy Pop & The Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” which The Rides make their own. The album closes with the raucous “Word Game,” a song Stills wrote during his late ’60s era with Buffalo Springfield, but never recorded. “It was an old acoustic song that I had fun adapting to an electric band,” he says.
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