Ryder hit during the mid-'60s when AM radio was going through a golden era courtesy of Motown, Stax, the British Invasion, Aretha, JB, and any number of garage band one-hit wonders. But no one on the radio then could match Mitch and company for pure visceral excitement, no one else could make the hair stand up on the back of your neck and a wild-eyed gleam creep into your eyes because you just know that SOMETHING WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. The explosive quality was there from the very start. Listen to the way the chords introducing "Jenny Take A Ride" are chomping at the bit to swoop down into the double-time mid-section, or how John Badanjek's thundering bass drum trigger's the ecstatic roll that kicks off "Devil With A Blue Dress On". And the Wheels must have known what they had witness the confidence-even cockiness-of telegraphing their punch forever on "Little Latin Lupe Lu", building expectations to fever pitch before hammering down the riff with Jim McCarty's lead lick trailing behind. And nailing it big time. One punch, KO, Mike Tyson-style. The records worked because they perfectly captured the kinetic frenzy of the live performances that had been the group's stock in trade since they first joined forces in Detroit early in 1964.
Born William Levise, Jr., Ryder was performing as Billy Lee in a high school band called Tempest before turning heads in a black Detroit soul club called the Village. At 17, he was skilled enough to record an R&B single ("That's The Way It's Going To Be/Fool For You") for the Detroit gospel label Carrie in 1962 and to start making gigs fronting The Peps, a black vocal trio. Levise was appearing with The Peps at the Village early in 1964 when he ran across a group that included McCarty, bassist Earl Elliot, and Badanjek. Together with rhythm guitarist Joe Kubert, they joined forces as Billy Lee & The Rivieras and by mid-summer had attracted a fanatical local following that caught the ear of Motor City DJ Bob Prince.
Prince began booking Lee & The Rivieras as an opening act at a club/casino north of Detroit, but their live performances were so potent that the unrecorded group was soon headlining over major Motown artists. Prince then arranged for The Rivieras to record a tape in Badanjek's basement, and that demo brought 4 Seasons producer Bob Crewe to a Detroit performance where The Rivieras opened for The Dave Clark Five. They torched the hometown audience for 90 minutes, Crewe was hooked, and in February, 1965, the five Detroit teenagers relocated to New York City and bided their time for a few months playing Greenwich Village clubs for survival money. The name was the first to go (a conflict with The Rivieras who recorded "California Sun"), hence the legendary story of Lee/Levise flipping through the Manhattan phone directory and coming across the name Mitch Ryder. The Rivieras became The Detroit Wheels and album cover photos of the band on top of oil cans or surrounded by discarded tires punched the automotive image home.
What followed was a wild two-year ride trough the starmaking machinery of the record industry that brought them fame but no fortune and tore the group apart in the process. Not that the first Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels single, "I Need Help", exactly set the charts afire. That waited until late 1965 when "Jenny Take A Ride!" climbed to #10 as The Wheels welded Chuck Willis' "C.C. Rider" to Little Richard's "Jenny, Jenny", and cannily tossed in an advertisement for their live show along the way (check how the backing vocals change to "See Mitch Ryder" during the second verse). "Little Latin Lupe Lu" cemented their commercial appeal when it reached #17 and set the general outline of the band's most popular sound- an R&B standard or two revved up, Wheels-style, with Mitch's peerless soul shouting ripping away over the top. That approach bordered on becoming a formula, particularly after "Break Out", the first attempt at a bigger, brassier sound, only made it to #62 and the ballad "Takin' All I Can Get" barely cracked the Top 100.
Late in 1966, the "Devil With A Blue Dress On" & "Good Golly Miss Molly" medleys exploded over the airwaves and indelibly stamped the high energy Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels sound on anyone within an earshot as they hit #4 on the charts. Which was a shame, really, because the albums kept showing other dimensions of Ryder's skills as an interpretive singer. Certainly, tracks like "Shakin With Linda", "Shake A Tail Feather", "Just A Little Bit", and "Sticks And Stones", fits The Wheels mold to a tee. But, "I Like It Like That" spotlighted Ryder's ability to tone down for the kind of slow-drag, New Orleans R&B that emphasized his smooth delivery and immaculate phrasing. And he showed real signs as a midnight rambler songwriter on "I Had It Made" (musically, a thinly veiled re-write of James Brown's "Out Of Sight") and the intriguing "Baby Jane", which sounds like a bizarre but happening cross of Sir Douglas Quintet and Velvet Underground. Early in 1967, prototypical, riff-rockin "Sock It To Me-Baby!" became Ryder's final Top 10 single, despite being banned on several stations for being too sexually suggestive.
The brassy "Too Many Fishes In The Sea" & "Three Little Fishes" reverted to the medley formula, but it was the final chart entry (at #24) for Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels because Crewe's long running Svengali notions of (ahem) putting The Wheels in motion back to Detroit and working with Ryder as a solo artist were finally bearing fruit. After a final single (the first credited to Mitch alone), pairing the syncopated "Joy" with the hard-riffing "I'd Rather Go To Jail", Crewe packed Ryder off to Las Vegas with a big band in tow. Crewe had big plans- wretchedly excessive plans since the What Now My Love album released in mid-1967 may be the most god-awful piece of overblown dreck ever associated with a major artist. Divorced from the power drive of The Wheels, swamped by saccharine strings and pompous pretense (poetry by Rod McKuen and music by Jaques Brel on a Mitch Ryder album, for Chrissakes), the fact that Ryder somehow got the title track up to #30 might rank as the most amazing feat of his singing career. It was the final straw- Ryder bailed out of his contract with Crewe, who promptly milked the last bit of mileage he could by slapping horn tracks over the R&B tunes The Wheels had covered and putting out the Mitch Ryder Sings The Hits album.
Instead of immediately returning to Detroit, Ryder took a down-home detour to Memphis to record The Detroit-Memphis Experiment album with Stax luminaries Booker T. & The MGs and The Memphis Horns for Dot.Liner notes containing phrases like "After being raped by the music machine that represents that heaven-on-earth , New York b/w Los Angeles" and "Mitch Ryder is the sole creation of William Levise, Jr.", left little doubt about his feelings over the Crewe experience. It was the only time Ryder recorded with a bona-fide soul band, "Liberty" shows it was a two way exchange- Ryder's Detroit bred rock 'n' roll energy goosed the musicians just as their innate funkiness moved Ryder's singing in new directions.
But fine, fine music didn't spell commercial success, and Ryder returned home to a reunion with The Wheels drummer John Badanjek in the short-lived super-group Detroit, which lasted just long enough to record one monster of a heavy-duty rock 'n' roll album in 1971. "Long Neck Goose" updated the classic Wheels sound as Ryder digs into the tune with a ferocious glee (listen to the screams he hurls off as the song fades) but the climatic moment was "Rock N' Roll" (here in its rarely heard 45 mix), kicked off by a mountainous guitar riff while Badanjek bounced a cow-bell off your skull at regular intervals. It was so powerful a performance that Lou Reed was quoted as saying that was how the song was supposed to sound, and proved it by recruiting guitarist Steve Hunter for his Rock N Roll Animal phase after Detroit disintegrated.
An embittered Ryder left the active performing scene then, heading to Denver and working a day job for 5 years and honing his songwriting skills at night. After returning to Detroit, he formed a band and released the confessional, autobiographical How I Spent My Vacation and then Naked But Not Dead on his own Seeds and Stems label. That helped trigger a resurgence of European interest in Ryder and he released several additional albums- Live Talkies, Got Change For A Million, and Smart Ass -in the early '80s on the German Line label. He came back to a major American label for the John Cougar Mellencamp- produced Never Kick A sleeping Dog in 1983, highlighted by a world-weary, gritty version of Prince's "When You Were Mine" that cut the original and all others to shreds. Single tracks- "Bow Wow Wow Wow" for Was Not Was and a satirical take on Oliver North called "Good Golly Ask Ollie" - are his only other domestic releases since then. It would be a mistake to consign Mitch Ryder solely to the past- he's shown too much resilience to be counted out.
He is currently enjoying another surge in European popularity and continues to revisit for live performances. There's certainly nothing nostalgic about the charged music here- no one, but no one, ever kicked out the rockin' R&B jams better than Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels. The tragedy is that mismanagement, and show biz machinations sidetracked a great band and- the financial inequity aside- quite possibly prevented Mitch Ryder from tapping his full potential as a singer. But all these problems can't erase the indelible rush of The Detroit Wheels shifting into over-drive with that imitable, fiery voice flying over the top.
Official Website: Mitch Ryder
Devil With A Blue Dress On
Mitch Ryder Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
Jump up, get it, hey
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress
Devil with the blue dress on (ooh, yeah)
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress
Devil with the blue dress on
Look at Molly now, here she comes
Wearin' her wig hat and shades to match
Her high-heel shoes and an alligator hat
Wearin' her pearls and a diamond ring
Got bracelets on her finger, now, and everything
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress on (blue dress)
She's a devil with the blue dress on, Lord have mercy
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress on (blue dress)
Devil with the blue dress on, hey
Wearin' her perfume, Chanel No. 5
Got to be the finest girl alive
You walk real cool, catches everybody's eye
The cats are too nervous, they can't say hi
Not too skinny, she's not too fat
She's a real humdinger and I like 'em like that
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress on (blue dress)
She's a devil with the blue dress on, hey I say now
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress on, yeah (blue dress)
The devil with the blue dress on
Good golly, Miss Molly, woo yeah (good golly, Miss Molly)
You sure like to ball, yeah yeah (good golly, Miss Molly)
Golly, Miss Molly (good golly, Miss Molly)
Ah, you know you sure like to ball (good golly, Miss Molly)
Even in the evening (good golly, Miss Molly)
Don't you hear your mama call? (Good golly, Miss Molly)
Ohh, from the early, early mornin' 'til the early, early nights
Should see Miss Molly rockin' at the House of Blue Lights
Good golly, Miss Molly (good golly, Miss Molly)
You sure like to ball, oh yeah (good golly, Miss Molly)
You're rockin' and you're rollin' (good golly, Miss Molly)
Can't you hear your mama call? (Good golly, Miss Molly)
Ohh, woo-hoo
Hey, hey
Wearin' her pearls and a diamond ring
Got bracelets on her finger, now, and everything
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress on (blue dress)
She's a devil with the blue dress on, hey I love it, say
Devil with the blue dress, alright
Gon' and sock it to me now
Hey
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress (ohh, I have to jump up)
Devil with the blue dress on (hey, I got to, got to, got to jump up now)
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress (got to feel it, feel it)
Devil with the blue dress on
The opening lines of the song, "Hey, hey, alright, jump up, get it, hey", immediately sets the tone and energy for Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels' hit, "Devil With a Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly". The lyrics are about a woman, referred to as the Devil with the Blue Dress on, who catches the attention of everyone with her stylish blue dress, wig hat, high-heeled shoes, alligator hat, pearl necklace, and diamond ring, and her confidence in walking in it. The lyrics also mention the perfume she wears, Chanel No. 5, which underscores her class and sophistication. "Good Golly, Miss Molly" is a phrase that is often repeated in the chorus, signifying how she's always having a good time, and enjoys dancing and having fun.
Line by Line Meaning
Hey, hey, alright
Excitement and anticipation for an upcoming performance.
Jump up, get it, hey
Encouragement for the audience to dance and participate.
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress
Describing the woman's attire as a blue dress.
Devil with the blue dress on (ooh, yeah)
Emphasizing the sexy and seductive nature of the woman wearing the blue dress.
Fee, fee, fi, fi, fo-fo, fum
Nonsense words used to invoke a sense of fun and playfulness.
Look at Molly now, here she comes
Drawing attention to the woman named Molly entering the scene.
Wearin' her wig hat and shades to match
Describing Molly's accessories that complement her attire.
Her high-heel shoes and an alligator hat
Further detailing Molly's fashion choices.
Wearin' her pearls and a diamond ring
Highlighting the woman's elegant and expensive jewelry.
Got bracelets on her finger, now, and everything
Completing the description of Molly's ornate fashion.
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress on (blue dress)
Repeating the description of the woman's outfit for emphasis.
She's a devil with the blue dress on, Lord have mercy
Portraying the woman as irresistible and alluring.
Wearin' her perfume, Chanel No. 5
Adding to the sensual sense of the woman's persona.
Got to be the finest girl alive
Expressing admiration for the woman's beauty and attractiveness.
You walk real cool, catches everybody's eye
Describing how the woman's confident style grabs everyone's attention.
The cats are too nervous, they can't say hi
Suggesting that men find the woman intimidating and are too scared to approach her.
Not too skinny, she's not too fat
Asserting that the woman has a desirable body shape and size.
She's a real humdinger and I like 'em like that
Expressing approval of the woman's various qualities and characteristics.
Good golly, Miss Molly, woo yeah (good golly, Miss Molly)
Exclaiming in excitement and agreement with the previous lines.
You sure like to ball, yeah yeah (good golly, Miss Molly)
Suggesting that the woman enjoys having fun and being social, including dancing and partying.
Golly, Miss Molly (good golly, Miss Molly)
Continuing the expression of admiration and enthusiasm for the woman.
Ah, you know you sure like to ball (good golly, Miss Molly)
Reasserting the woman's love for socializing and having a good time.
Even in the evening (good golly, Miss Molly)
Further emphasizing the woman's lively and active personality, even at night.
Don't you hear your mama call? (Good golly, Miss Molly)
Suggesting that the woman is so wrapped up in the fun that she forgets her responsibilities.
Ohh, from the early, early mornin' 'til the early, early nights
Expressing how much the woman enjoys socializing and how long her days and nights can be.
Should see Miss Molly rockin' at the House of Blue Lights
Suggesting a specific place where the woman likes to hang out and dance.
You're rockin' and you're rollin' (good golly, Miss Molly)
Commenting on the woman's dancing style and how she enjoys herself.
Can't you hear your mama call? (Good golly, Miss Molly)
Reiterating the idea that the woman gets caught up in the fun and forgets about other responsibilities.
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress on (blue dress)
Returning to describing the woman's outfit yet again.
She's a devil with the blue dress on, hey I love it, say
Reiterating the attractiveness and allure of the woman and expressing a personal preference for her style.
Devil with the blue dress, alright
Repeating the title of the song and the woman's description one more time.
Gon' and sock it to me now
Encouragement for everyone to have a good time and make the most of the situation.
Hey
Expression of excitement and enthusiasm for the experience of the song and performance.
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress (ohh, I have to jump up)
Further repeating the woman's outfit for emphasis and expressing a need to dance and jump up.
Devil with the blue dress on (hey, I got to, got to, got to jump up now)
Repeating the chorus and emphasizing the infectious nature of the woman's style.
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress (got to feel it, feel it)
Encouragement to feel the music and enjoy oneself while dancing.
Devil with the blue dress on
Repeating the chorus one final time to bring the performance to a close.
Lyrics © CONCORD MUSIC PUBLISHING LLC, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Royalty Network
Written by: Frederick Long, William Stevenson
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
@niamorris9616
Fee, fee, fi, fi, fo-fo, fum
Look at Molly now [or look out once again, now], here she comes
Wearin' her wig hat and shades to match
She's got high-heel shoes and an alligator hat
Wearin' her pearls and her diamond rings
She's got bracelets on her fingers, now, and everything
She's the devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress,
Devil with the blue dress on
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress,
Devil with the blue dress on
Wearin' her perfume, Chanel No. 5
Got to be the finest girl alive
She walks real cool, catches everybody's eye
She's got such good lovin' that they can't say goodbye
Not too skinny, she's not too fat
She's a real humdinger and I like it like that
She's the devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress,
Devil with the blue dress on
Devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress,
Devil with the blue dress on
@missladybug6712
My mom used to dance to this song when she was pregnant with me in 1967. Brings back happy memories of her (RIP mommy, 2001). ♥️
@elmerbeckett5909
you remember being a fetus?
@tombeyer375
Hang on to all those memories that'll make you smile! RIP to your dear momma. Lost my dear momma on Easter Sunday in 1991 when she got broadsided on her way to church.
@richardbijacsko1135
Great for the share 😊
@russwalker3119
I used to dance to this in 67 when I was 17, most of the local bands covered this at the High School dances
@davidpetersonharvey
I'm so sorry for your loss.
@joytassoni5036
Wow!! This song STILL ROCKS ON!!! Thanx so much Mitch for 1 of the very BEST rock songs ever Yes 60's !!!🥰
@bluewolfserene5921
This song pop up in my head. Had to play it.
@Foxyymama
Same🎉
@sidneydavidulrey453
Lol. Same exact situation with me!