The 30th Anniversary Tour Mitch Ryder & Engerling (1994-2024)
An impressive discography comprising 32 albums: That is the balance sheet from over 50 years of musical career. The rock musician and singer Mitch Ryder has long since become a legend. With his band “Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels”, he had his first hit in 1965 with “Jenny Take A Ride!”. Two years later, he tried it solo, but the hoped-for success failed to materialize. Disappointed, Ryder turned his back on music. In the 70s, he became famous through his legendary appearance on the WDR Rockpalast night. Since 1994, he has been on the road with the German group Engerling (G,A,CH,E,F,B,NL,S), who have been dedicated to rock & blues for 49 years. True and beautiful, with that certain dirt and whiskey in his voice, that’s real rhythm & blues and that’s exactly what Mitch Ryder does. The passionate singer and the Berlin band are a perfect musical match. According to Keith Richards, the original rocker from Detroit is one of the most exciting singers to have emerged on the music scene. Inspired by James Brown and Motown, Mitch Ryder still does what he does best: You only had to read the faces of the fans in front of the stage to know that the rock foghorn from Detroit hadn’t been this good for a long time.
Up and down the country, Mitch Ryder celebrated pain-soaked masses of rock music in winter. 28 concerts in 32 days. He takes to the stage and gives it his all. For two hours. After the concert, the crowd went home exhilarated. “This is what Jim Morrison would sound like at 71”, wrote the venerable ZEIT, the WDR dedicated an hour-long radio report to the rock warhorse and the Berliner Zeitung asked: “When was the last time the Stones performed ‘Gimme Shelter’ like this, perhaps forty years ago?” Now the singer with the lurking vibrato in his voice is back on the road through the clubs and halls with his brand new live album “The Roof Is On Fire” – 2 CD / 2LP -(Rufrecords 26.1.2024) in his tour luggage, recorded on Tor 2019/2020! “This is perhaps my most important and certainly one of the best albums I’ve ever made,” says Mitch Ryder about this album, which bears comparison with his 1979 masterpiece “Naked But Not Dead”.
45 years have now passed since the “Vacation” LP and Ryder’s legendary TV appearance on ARD’s Rockpalast. That night of the full moon, that nightmarishly enraptured concert in Essen’s Grugahalle, has long since been transfigured into a legend. In the 60-minute documentary by WDR on ARD to mark the 40th anniversary of Rockpalast in July 2017, Mitch Ryder’s performance was described as one of the most important and best ever!
For Mitch Ryder, it was the beginning of his relationship with Germany, which has not been broken off since. Now on triple CD and double DVD!
“That night was an opportunity for me,” he says today, “the kind you only get once in a lifetime.” In America, his fans mainly want to hear the old hits from the sixties. “In Europe, I make completely different music,” says Ryder. “Here they allow me to be an artist. That’s why I love Europe.” For 30 years now (551 concerts) he has been accompanied in Europe by the (East) Berlin band Engerling – there are no musicians in the world who have been on stage with him more often!
“Sweating, sobbing and screaming, he wanders through the feverish swamps of his songs, bites into the words, sucks them in and expels them again, every word is a weapon. and his opponent is himself.” Berliner Zeitung
“When I tried my comeback, I didn’t care at all whether I made money with it or not. It was like calling an old lover and saying, ‘Hey honey, I’m back. And she was there. She had been waiting for me.”
Mitch Ryder on WDR
“Then he’s up at the mic. ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ is all he says, in a voice that seems to come straight from the depths of hell. ‘My name is Mitch Ryder, I’m from Detroit’. And suddenly everything is fine.”
Business magazine brand eins
“Ryder’s greatest talent is dynamism, the silence behind the scream. Bodag organizes the blue-black mass, Manne Pokrandt plays fat bass, guitarists Heiner Witte and Gisbert Piatkowski keep Ryder’s heavy locomotive under steam and on double track. As if stunned, the crowd clenches in the hot smoke.”
DIE ZEIT
Gert Leiser Brunnenstr.184, 10119 Berlin Mobil: + 49 172 3811472
eMail: gert.leiser@t-online.de, www.mitchryder.net www.engerling.de
