It’s 1980, and George Porter, Jr., already one of the world’s most celebrated bassists and part architect of the famous Meters rhythm section, is temporarily fed up with the music business, having seen plenty of highs and lows during the band’s flirtation with mainstream acceptance in the mid-’70s. So what does he do? The same thing any New Orleans musician worth his salt does: he goes out and plays anyway.

It’s easy, then, to look at this heretofore unreleased album as a therapeutic exercise—an assemblage of four local musicians, all with comparably impressive track records, sharing Porter’s multigenre passions, art for improvisation, and love of landing on the one. But it’s also a missing link in the city’s then-nascent jam-band scene, a group of musicians steeped in funk, matured on rock, and willing to try just about anything once, as long as it’s with each other.

That doesn’t mean this is a lost classic, even if it did sit on a shelf for a quarter-century. (The one single released from it, a funky cover of “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” b/w “Money Money,” sank like a stone upon its original release.) It does help fill in a few blank spots in the city’s post-funk, pre-Reagan scene, however, and it’s a good listen for jamband fanatics who’ve heard all their bootleg tapes a jillion times or Porter fans who want to get a grasp on the full extent of his range.

That range turns out to be quite large. “Money Money,” the opener, sounds like a slicker rock version of the Ohio Players’ “Skin Tight,” while the ballad “Always Dreaming” recalls a slightly swamp pop Heatwave and “Everybody’s Searching (For A Joy Ride)” feels like Curtis Mayfield at a crawfish boil. There’s even a nod to the outgoing disco craze in “I Get High” and a spooky classical-boogie instrumental called “Sam’s Dream.” And the closest thing to a lost classic here, “The Sound Doctor,” recalls nothing so much as The Band of “Up On Cripple Creek.” You can still file this one under funk, though, despite the group’s wandering tastes, and even with the rather airbrushed production typical of the era, Joy Ride has a thick enough groove to make any fan of New Orleans music happy. Maybe, considering the range of this group, all of them at once.