Burnishing their garage-rock credentials and featuring a gritty guitar introduction & fuzz bass along with Mark Lindsay’s bluesy vocals, Paul Revere & The Raiders initially intended to release this recording — the original first version of “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone” — as their next single in 1965, but Columbia Records instead chose to release “Kicks” as the next Raiders single, which wasn’t necessarily a bad call; “Kicks” turned out to be a huge hit record, after all. But by assigning “Stepping Stone” to album-track-status-only, they lost their chance at an additional hit single, and the subsequent Monkees’ sturdy-but-not-as-rocking a version of the song became the hit.
“Make mine ‘Raiders.'”
[Source for the photo above is Wikipedia. Photo date is 15 January 1966. This is a photo of Dick Clark with Paul Revere and the Raiders from the television program Where the Action Is. Clark was the host and producer of the show-the Raiders were the “house band” and were permanent cast members.]
