Pete Wilde is a Oakland, CA-based singer/songwriter and guitarist, whose life and experiences have deeply influenced his own creative work. And as the story goes, although he was raised by a loving mother, his childhood was defined by a distant father, tormented by his own demons. Years later, after witnessing the murder of his best friend, the only thing that seemed to evoke and capture his own anger was rock ‘n’ roll — and although his stepfather, the saxophonist Eddie Minifield (he once played with Sheila E. and Kat Dyson) encouraged him to seek solace in music; however, a young Wilde was  also fueled by drugs and alcohol, and he eventually wound up in prison.

While serving his sentence, Wilde feverishly wrote songs influenced by black history and black artists, the emotions of his childhood, the feminism that his mother ingrained in him — and he quickly recognized that he had an urgent purpose: to make rock ‘n’ roll black again.  As Pete Wilde explains “I’m making rock music with groove and a ‘black’ sound that just isn’t funk or pop, but real, original rock ‘n’ roll.” And from the sensual and funky “Lucy,” Wilde’s sound brings to mind the bluesy stomp of Howlin’ Wolf and Sister Rossetta Tharpe with a good mixture of the swaggering soulfulness of black folk  paired with power chords and an anthemic hook. It’s a powerful and necessary reminder that black culture is American culture, that the primordial essence of rock is from the blues — and most important that rock is desperately in need of brothers and sisters to bring soul back into it.