Let It Ride Cover 

This week's “Remake of a Classic” was originally released on BTO's 1973 album, Bachman Turner Overdrive II. Written by Randy Bachman and Fred Turner, the title of the tune was the result of a mild case of road rage that happened during a tour with the Doobie Brothers. As Bachman tells it, they were driving on a highway, heading to a show in New Orleans, when a group of truckers decided to have some fun with the musicians, who were riding in a little van with Canadian plates. The truckers boxed them in and slowed down to a crawl. When the truckers finally turned into a truck stop, Bachman and Turner followed with the idea of confronting them. When they got out of the van, they knew it was a mistake. According to Bachman, one trucker looked "Like a Volkswagen with a head." As the truckers stood around laughing, one of them told the band that they needed to learn to just "Let it ride." I guess being from Canada Bachman and Turner had never heard the expression before, but they liked the sound of it. When they got to New Orleans, they wrote the song in their dressing room.
BTW, if this tune's intro sounds a bit like "Long Train Runnin'" by the Doobie Brothers, it's because the Doobies and BTO shared the same dressing room in New Orleans and, according to Bachman, the Doobies swiped the riff. Of course it's not exactly the same, but you can definitely hear the influence.
There are a couple of different versions of this song...the album version and the radio version. I chose to go with the radio version.
For this tune I broke out the 80s Squier Strat (a beautiful guitar w/original Fender hardware, a perfect burly maple neck and killer tone). For the solo I'm using the '79 Ibanez running though a Line 6 POD and an envelope filter (to get the wah effect). Because BTO was my brother's favorite band, I grew up listening to this song over and over and over and over again; so I knew it like the back of my hand. I got lucky in that I did each vocal track in one take, and the drums and bass in two. That's usually not the case.
For those interested, six years ago I did an acoustic version of “Let it Ride” for my brother. There's an audio-only video of it here on RU-vid (there's also an acoustic version of “Looking out for number one” on here as well). It's not on my normal channel...just give it a search.