Ian Hunter is a kind of paradox. Very few have sung with as much cynicism and candor about the cost of the rock and roll dream. In songs like “All the Way to Memphis,” “The Ballad of Mott the Hoople,” and “Hymn for the Dudes” the man in the shades has called rock stardom a sham and “a loser’s game,” and fickle to boot (“You ain’t the nazz/You’re just a buzz/Some kinda temporary”). It’s a mighty long way down rock and roll has always been his message, and about all you can look forward to on the way is losing your illusions, and your hair.
Yet Hunter has never given up. He didn’t give up during the dark days before David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes” saved Mott the Hoople from giving up the ghost, and he didn’t throw in his shades when his solo career refused to take off, much as the early Mott the Hoople had. Loser’s game or not, Hunter kept on keeping on because he has no choice. He told us as much in “The Ballad of Mott the Hoople”:
“Behind these shades the visions fade
As I learn a thing or two
Oh but if I had my time again
You all know just what I’d do.”
He’d do it all over again, is what he’d do, and so he did as a solo artist, pushing through doomed jazz-influenced missteps like 1976’s All American Alien Boy, putting together so-so bands and not scoring hits, but he never took his eyes off the promised land that he knew better than anybody was an illusion. Hunter has always been the ultimate realist who can’t help but behave like a starry eyed-dreamer, and he’s been doing it since the start.
He never became a superstar, but he came close with several brilliant Mott the Hoople albums and again with his 1979 solo LP You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic. It’s most likely the finest solo LP he’ll ever produce, although I’d never write the bastard off—even at his superannuated age, I suspect he’s capable of shocking us all. But with You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic he finally found all the right people and finally did what everybody knew he could do—wrote a parcel of songs the best of which could stand up with the finest work he did with Mott the Hoople.
The right people were pal and ex-Spider from Mars guitarist/arranger Mick Ronson, who’d played a short stint in the Mott the Hoople towards the end, and played as well on Hunter’s 1975 eponymous debut. Ronson played guitar and co-produced with Hunter, and the remainder of Hunter’s backup band was made up of members of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, to wit keyboardist Roy Bittan, bassist Garry Tallent, and drummer Max Weinberg. They were the perfect choice—that rhythm section in particular makes me think of the line from Mott’s “One of the Boys”—they don’t say much, but they make a big noise.
Hunter has always been one of the smartest and most thoughtful rockers out there, and this hasn’t always worked to his benefit—ballads like “Hymn to the Dudes” and “The Ballad of Mott the Hoople” brim with intelligence, and who else would be guilty of writing a great hard rocker called “Death May Be Your Santa Claus” and another great hard rocker called “The Moon Upstairs” that appears to end by insulting its audience (“We ain’t bleeding you we’re feeding you/But you’re too fucking slow”)? Great songs all, but none with a chance in hell of topping the pop charts. They were too thorny, too damned smart for mass public consumption.
But on You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic Hunter opens the album with a one-two-three punch of hard rockers that any plod can relate to, even morons from Cleveland, then tosses in a ballad so accessible one Barry Manilow saw fit to swipe it and turn it into a hit, and in general steers clear of the recondite just long enough (he retreats to old ways soon enough) to produce an album even the factory worker Hunter himself narrowly escaped becoming could love.
Not since “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” from his 1975 solo debut had Hunter come up with a song of such immediacy as “Just Another Night.” Weinberg’s opening drums have punch and then some, the piano is pure first-generation rock and roll, and Hunter comes in with a roar. The song’s a hard rocking, hard driving thing of beauty from beginning to end—I can’t tell you what it’s about, mind you, just that it’s a party song whose lyrics point at something darker, but who cares with a sing-along this big, especially when it comes with a pounding rhythm that never, ever lets up.
If “Just Another Night” sounds like it’s on steroids, follow-up “Wild East” is wilder, it’s right there in the title. Weinberg hits the drums just as hard, and the piano is downright demonic, but Hunter isn’t roaring he’s explaining his predicament to the accompaniment of tenor and baritone saxophones, which give the song a frenetic “New York’s alright if you like saxophones” vibe. This one’s more of a throwback to such Mott glamabilly numbers as “All the Way to Memphis,” and comes complete with the great lines,
“Now some cynic from the methadone clinic
He keeps on bothering me
He writes all my lyrics backwards on diapers
And hangs ’em from the local trees
Watch out, white boy
Don’t argue with a sawn off piece
I’m a crazy son, Mama
I love the grease of Wild East.”
And just like “Just Another Night” it comes complete with a long take-out where you get to shout out the same lines over and over, which is to say it makes for an irresistible party song for Everyman.
The opening of the anthemic hard rocker “Cleveland Rocks” comes straight from Cleveland’s own Alan Freed, and what the song seems to do is unite punk present with the city’s Moondog Matinee past: “All this energy callin’ me/Back where it comes from/It’s such a crude attitude/It’s back where it belongs.” The backing vocals give the song an almost glam feel in places, but Ronson’s guitar riff has a punkish edge that fits the lyric “She’s livin’ in sin with a safety pin, she’s going/Cleveland rocks, Cleveland rocks.” And what I think “Cleveland Rocks” is, at heart, is a hosannah to the wondrous continuity of rock and roll past, present and future—speed it up, just a mite, and it’s a punk song. Hell, it’s a punk song just as it is, but most of all it’s a celebration of rock and roll, same as it ever was, same as it will always be, Amen. A pure joy, this one.
“Ships” is, depending on your ears and your emotional sensibilities, either touching or sappy. I lean towards the latter myself. Drenched in backing vocals and Moogs and ARPs and organs, it has Hunter singing about his distant relationship with his father, but the “ships passing in the night” metaphor is trite and the song has no bite—it seems the sort of thing Eric Clapton would foist upon an innocent world. Small wonder Barry Manilow seized upon it; large wonder Rod Stewart, who has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Barry Manilow Industrial Complex, never has.
“When the Daylight Comes” is a lightweight love song with wings, but not much meat on said wings, and rather a surprise for Hunter—straight-up pop songs like this one aren’t his sort of thing, just as “Ships” isn’t his sort of thing. It’s a better song than “Ships”—it’s catchy, bright, and part of its charm comes from the fact that Ronson handles lead vocals on several verses, and Ronson possesses a thin but likable voice. And even Hunter, when he sings, seems to shed some of that characteristic rasp. The lyrics too have their charm—that “Please share my bed and I swear/That I won’t touch you nowhere” is likeably clumsy, while the not clumsy at all lines “Some people say that we’re sinners/Some people say that we’re winners/We make good gossip at dinners” make them a couple you’d like to know.
“Life After Death” is a big post-glam production number, ambitiously constructed, and as far from the straight-up rock numbers that open side one as possible. Think, yes, the Sweet, with all kinds of vocal going-ons and far more fun than you’re expect given that title. It’s likably jumpy, too, what with Hunter excitedly rushing through the lyrics, before he closes things down with the words “I’ve run out of breath.” Witty and weird, this is the sort of song Hunter simply can’t stop himself from writing, even if it’s not likely to sell to many of the same people he’s selling “Cleveland Rocks” to.
“Standing in My Light” is a standout track that builds and builds—Hunter sings in a meditative tone over some synths and stuff, sounding like he’s in some far-off place, about a relationship that’s keeping him in the shadows, and as he sings he becomes more forceful. Over some very Pink Floyd backing vocals he tosses off cryptic lines like “You took my pictures from your walls/Ain’t gonna trade with the pain of the New York Dolls.” But what makes the song is repetition, repetition, repetition—that “Move over ‘cause you’re standing in my light” becomes a chant, an insistent incantation, increasingly urgent, incandescent, powerful.
“Bastard” is a kind of hybrid rock/disco track that works better than it should—the rhythm section just bashes it out over and over and over to a boy keep swinging beat while Ronson contributes a choppy guitar riff as Hunter lays into the subject of the song. The song does a very odd thing—maintains a disco beat while developing a sinister feel (especially when it comes to Hunter’s vocals) that almost takes into the PiL territory, and while I think it’s a failure it’s an interesting one because once again it’s surpassingly strange, a beast far weirder than such sadly predictable disco forays as the Stones’ “Miss You” or The Who’s “Who Are You.” It’s meaner for sure. And not as austere.
Closer “The Outsider” doesn’t work, from its slow piano opening and Hunter’s “Death be my mistress, guns be my wife” on down. Hunter gives free range to all his most pretentious inclinations in this portentous outlaw ballad, and even Ronson’s almost always tasteful guitar work sounds overblown—and when does that ever happen? As an album ender it drives home the album’s chief weakness—a highly uneven B side that makes it clear that Hunter, always an idiosyncratic songwriter, was never going to be able to narrow his focus to writing the kinds of hard-hitting rockers that open the album.
It’s always been Hunter’s genius—and curse—that not only is he not your average rocker, he couldn’t be your average rocker if he tried. Your average rocker couldn’t have written “The Ballad of Mott the Hoople” or “The Moon Upstairs” or the mind-blowing “I Wish I Was Your Mother.” He’s too ambitious, and his mind works in odd ways.
Ian Hunter is a true one-of-a-kind. His entire career has been a study in contradictions. He was a Dylan wannabe fronting an English working class hard rock band, then the 33-year-old who somehow ended up being the pied piper of the England’s lost little glam kids with “All the Young Dudes,” and he remains a songwriter who never became a superstar because he’s too damned idiosyncratic for his own good. In his own way he’s more of an original than David Bowie ever was, because while Bowie managed to mold himself into a plastic superstar in the mid-eighties, Hunter never could have pulled such a thing off.
Ian Hunter is the real cracked actor, the true madman across the water, and the irony is he’s one of the sanest and most level-headed rock stars to ever to walk the earth. Read his Diary of a Rock’n’Roll Star if you ever get the chance—it’s so down-to-earth it borders on dull. His songs, different story. Maybe he’s schizophrenic after all.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
