Joe Lynn Turner and guitar virtuoso Marcus Nand have collaborated on their version of the 1970 classic Ride Captain Ride. The track is taken from a new Cleopatra Records album, Yacht Metal – Yacht Rock Goes Heavier & Louder.
Turner, who rose to fame with Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, and most recently released the epic Belly Of The Beast, is joined by Nand, who is best known for his flamenco work, having moved to Spain from England aged 8. Nand has worked with Mike Tramp and the songs of White Lion, Rod Stewart, The Dead Daisies and Ziroq.
“I’ve been a big fan of Joe Lynn Turner for years,” Nand told us, “so getting the chance to play on this track was a real thrill. It was also a lot of fun to revisit Ride Captain Ride – such a classic.
“I wanted to stay true to the spirit of the original while giving it a heavier edge without losing what made it special in the first place.”
The late songwriter Mike Pinera had said he wrote the song “in about 15 minutes [and] we cut it right that day.”
“It was 1970 and Ride Captain Ride was the big song,” Joe Lynn Turner told us. “It went to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart but was forever engraved in our lives. I played it in my cover band a thousand times.
“It was a real joy to do a new version for Cleopatra. A fun tune with a positive message…hope you enjoy it as much as I still do.”
The track was a hit for Mike Pinera and his group, Blues Image, in 1970. Co-writing with Skip Konte, Pinera wrote on a Model 73 Rhodes piano, and the song’s opening rhyme riffed on that number, “73 men sailed out from the San Francisco Bay.”
“Now, here is the weird thing that happened,” Pinera, who passed away in November 2024, has said. “It got released, it was in the Top Ten, #1 in a lot of regional markets, and my manager gets a call from the Pentagon, wanting to know how I, as the writer of those words, knew about the secret spy ship USS Pueblo?
“My manager goes, ‘What are you talking about? I don’t think Mike knows anything about that stuff. Ask him about the latest Gibson guitar and he’ll know, but he doesn’t know anything about secret spy ships.’ Which I didn’t.
“But it turned out that I had written a song that coincided with an incident that had not yet happened. It took place after the song was released and here’s what made it so freaky. There were seventy-three men on board who sailed out from the San Francisco Bay on this secret spy mission that nobody was supposed to know about, and they got in trouble out there on the ocean.
“They were captured and taken prisoner. Seventy-three men sailed off into history. As far as I was concerned, those lyrics were free form flow of consciousness stuff, but then you get to the third verse.”
“At one of my concerts years later, I met the radio guy from the USS Pueblo who told me something I didn’t know about that third verse, that while they were actually being captured, it was during a massive storm and they couldn’t get the word out that they needed help because the bad weather was blocking the radio transmission.”
For more details, visit orcd.co/joelynnturnermarcusnand_ridecaptainride.
Joe Lynn Turner and guitar virtuoso Marcus Nand – Ride Captain RideThe post
Joe Lynn Turner & Marcus Nand Get Heavy With Ride Captain Ride first appeared on
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