It might be one of rock ’n’ roll’s great mysteries: What happened to 38 Special frontman Don Barnes’ 1989 solo album “Ride the Storm”?
It was mixed and mastered and ready to go when his label, A&M Records, was sold to PolyGram and the album was shelved along with a record by R&B great Janet Jackson.
Barnes offered to buy the masters so he could shop the project to another label.
No dice.
Then there was a fire and tales of the masters being destroyed.
“I was heartbroken,” Barnes said, mostly because brothers Mike and Jeff Porcaro of the band Toto who recorded with him had died before the project could be released. “Ride the Storm” also featured Dann Huff, who went on to become an award-winning producer in Nashville (Keith Urban, Rascal Flatts); keyboardists Alan Pasqua and Jesse Harms; and former Heart drummer Denny Carmassi.
“We had all these songs. We slammed them out. Everybody had a great time,” he recalled.
Fast-forward to 2016 when Andrew McNiece of the Australian Melodic- Rock Records reached out to Barnes. He had heard a couple of the album’s tracks online and felt the project just had to see the light of day.
They tried to track down the masters; no luck. They were destroyed in that fire, the label insisted.
And then Barnes got to digging around in his basement. In a bin where he stored old junk, he came across a reel-to-reel audiotape.
After more than 30 years, lying in a junk heap was the long-gone unmixed and mastered studio recordings of “Ride the Storm.”
MelodicRock mixed and mastered the recordings and released the album in June 2017 to rave reviews.
A few cuts from the album will be on the set list when Barnes and his 38 Special bandmates take the stage at Desert Diamond Casino on Thursday, Sept. 12.
“The songs are just as relevant today. They don’t sound dated,” said the 66-year-old Barnes, who started the band in 1974 with his Florida neighbor Donnie Van Zant. Van Zant retired in 2013.
Barnes said he had initially wanted to infuse some Brit-rock sensibilities into the solo project, but “as much as I tried, it was my guitar playing, my voice, so it still sounds like 38 Special,” he said.
Which makes for a nice mix with 38 Special’s hits — “Hold On Loosely,” Teacher, Teacher,” “Rockin’ Into the Night,” “Wild-Eyed Southern Boys,” “Back to Paradise,” “Same Old Feeling” — that landed in the Top 30 at least 15 times in the 1970s and ’80s.
“We just go out and unfold that history, one after another,” Barnes said. “Songs bang into each other. It’s been 40 years or so. It’s a lot of hit songs. We take the audience for a ride.”
Truth be told, they also take themselves on a ride.
“Once you get (on stage), you can crank your guitar up to 10 and you’re 19 years old again,” Barnes said. “It’s what we as boys dreamed back then, to just go out there and kill it. It’s always the greatest time when the lights go down and it’s your time.”
