Celebrating Mick Ralphs on his 79th birthday. —Ed.
The ballad of Mott the Hoople—the English glam band that gave us one of the most ecstatic moments in rock history with Ian Hunter’s “I’ve wanted to do this for years!” in “All the Young Dudes”—begins not in 1969, when the band was formed, but 3 years earlier, when one Willard Manus wrote a novel called Mott the Hoople, which rock visionary and total madman Guy “There Are Only Two Phil Spectors in the World and I Am One of Them” Stevens happened to pick up and read while in gaol for drug offenses.
We will never know what Stevens, a kind of manager, producer, and talent scout famed for his prodigious intake of mind-altering substances and eccentric behavior—his favorite method of inspiring a band in the studio was to destroy every piece of equipment in sight, or in the case of The Clash, pour beer on the piano—thought of Manus’ novel. But we do know Stevens loved its title, so much so that he saved it as a name for a truly special band. That band turned out to be Silence, which had been fecklessly wandering to and fro across the earth in search of a record contract. That is until Stevens, who worked for Island Records, saw something in them that no one else did.
That said, Stevens knew they needed molding, and he wasted no time doing it. The first thing he did after changing their name to Mott the Hoople—which nobody in Silence particularly liked—was dismiss vocalist Stan Tippins, and put out an advertisement for a new singer. The ad was answered by one Ian Hunter, a wild-haired punter who couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be Bob Dylan or Sonny Bono (seriously). He auditioned by performing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which made him just the person Stevens was looking for, because it was the crazed producer’s goal to create a band that fused the sounds of Dylan and the Rolling Stones.
The rest is, as they, history. Except it almost wasn’t. Mott the Hoople recorded four LPs with Stevens, but they never became the Rolling Stones/Dylan fusion he was aiming for, and all four albums are maddeningly inconsistent, and sound like the work of a band in search of an identity. None were commercial successes, and Mott the Hoople was ready to throw in the towel after a particularly disastrous gig in a disused gas holder in Switzerland—later immortalized by Hunter’s great “Ballad of Mott the Hoople (26th March 1972, Zürich)”—when David Bowie, a big fan, interceded and urged them to keep going, and more importantly offered them “All The Young Dudes” as an incentive.
The song was a smash and Mott the Hoople happily climbed aboard the Glitter Train, this despite the fact that they were at heart about as glam as a crew of bricklayers. Ah, but thanks to “All the Young Dudes” and an outlay in outrageous gear (which made them look like a crew of bricklayers in drag) they were suddenly the nazz, and the only sad part of the story is that Stevens’ connection with his creation ended at the precise moment they became stars.
But it’s the band’s pre-Glam era music I’ve been listening to lately, because uneven as they were, those first four LPs include such unearthly wonderful songs as “The Moon Upstairs,” “Death May Be Your Santa Claus,” the so-Dylanesque its brilliant “Backsliding Fearlessly,” and “Walkin’ With a Mountain,” which morphs into a searing take on the Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash.” And they performed some wonderful covers too, the most brilliant of them being Dion’s “Your Own Backyard,” although Mott’s takes on The Sir Douglas Quintet’s “At the Crossroads,” Melanie’s “Lay Down,” and most remarkably (because it not only works, it’s actually moving!) Sonny Bono’s “Laugh at Me” are also wonderful.
For your entertainment, I have chosen Mott’s most inconsistent (but also most interesting) pre-Glam LP, their self-titled 1970 debut, to write about. It’s nowhere near as solid an LP as Brain Capers or even Mad Shadows, but it’s one fascinating mess, largely because the band (Hunter on vocals, piano, guitar, and bass guitar; Pete Overend Watts on bass, vocals, and guitar; Mick Ralphs on guitar, vocals and keyboards; Verden Allen on organ and backing vocals; and Dale “Buffin” Griffin on drums, percussion, and backing vocals) had just begun to write its own songs. Hunter was just finding his feet as a songwriter and Ralphs wasn’t exactly prolific either, which is why four of the eight songs on Mott the Hoople are covers, that is if you count Guy Stevens’ brief album closer “Wrath and Wroll” as a cover.
It there’s one thing I’ve never understood about Mott’s debut, it’s why they chose to open it with the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” done as an instrumental no less. Aside from Ralphs’ truly monstrous guitar—which kicks ass from beginning to end—and some nifty organ as the tune exits stage left, “You Really Got Me” is bar band material, and hardly a song likely to distinguish Mott the Hoople from the rest of the hard rock herd. Follow-up “At the Crossroads” is a cover too, but it’s a fantastic cover, and beats Doug Sahm’s original by a Texas mile. It begins quietly, and then opens up to show the world what Mott the Hoople did have to offer—namely, some amazing guitar work by Ralphs, Allen’s omnipresent organ, and Hunter’s wonderfully expressive vocals and great R&B piano work. It also demonstrated the band’s facility for starting a song quietly only to let it build and build to one or more ecstatic peaks.
The band does this wonderfully on the album’s exquisitely lovely third track, “Laugh at Me”—that’s right, they actually released an LP that opens with three straight covers—which Hunter and organist Allen effectively “Dylanize,” the former with his vocal delivery and the latter with that swirling organ sound that non-keyboardist Al Kooper—in one of the most iconic moments in rock history—created on the spot during the recording of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Hunter’s vocals become increasingly impassioned until he’s practically howling; the rhythm section slowly jacks up the intensity; and Allen comes Dylaning in and out as the song builds to several crescendos which are finally followed by a closing jam, during which Ralphs plays a guitar solo so mind-bending it actually succeeds in leading me to forgive him for all the harm he would later inflect on innocent ears while a member of Bad Company.
Even more Dylanesque is Hunter’s first-ever stab at songwriting, “Backsliding Fearlessly,” which boasts one great title and is one excellent tune, that is if you can forget for three-plus minutes that the melody has Dylan’s name stamped on it, Hunter’s vocals are 100% Bob, and Allen’s organ work is once again a blatant rip of the sound Kooper created several years before. That said the song still possesses the power to move, especially during the choruses, when the band sings, “If the world saluted you” and Hunter responds, “Well what would you do if you could be there?/Well would you still take me?/Would you still take me anywhere?” Follower “Rock and Roll Queen” is a hard-rocking, foot-stomping number that evolves into a great jam, and I’d like it more if its lyrics weren’t a series of Spam and potatoes clichés, of the sort that Ralphs (who wrote the tune) was to make hay with later in Bad Company. But Hunter was an intelligent fellow, just as Mott the Hoople was a thinking man’s band, and “Rock and Roll Queen,” ass-kicking as it is, has always struck a wrong note with me, just as Ralph’s panzer tank of a song “Ready for Love” has always stuck out like a rabbi at the Wansee Conference on All the Young Dudes.
As for the brief “Rabbit Foot and Toby Time,” the less said the better. It’s a fast moving instrumental that fails to showcase any of the band members’ musical talents, and sounds like the backing track of an unfinished tune, by the Faces say. Then there’s the 10-minute plus “Half Moon Bay,” a mid-tempo tune which has its moments (Hunter’s vocals are nasal and powerful, and the periodic crescendos are truly awe-inspiring) but would probably be a better tune if it were half as long. Or maybe not; maybe all it needed was a producer willing to say no to the slow piano interlude in the song’s middle, as it bogs the song down every bit as effectively as the Russian winter did Napoleon’s army. Then again, I cannot describe to you the relief one feels when the band re-enters, and plays a droning repetitive riff over which Hunter croons like a man truly singing for his supper, drawling out words to three times their length before giving out a couple of great cries as the band kicks into one killer finale, complete with some mad drum work and the big droning sound of Allen’s organ. Finally there’s “Wrath and Roll,” which sounds like a snippet of a fantastic jam from a live show during which Hunter goes Jerry Lee Lewis on the piano while Ralphs blazes away on the guitar, and succeeds only in making me want to hear the whole damn song.
Mott the Hoople’s stay in the limelight was relatively brief—after All the Young Dudes they recorded the equally remarkable Mott, but it was largely downhill from there. 1974’s The Hoople has half-dozen good songs on it—most notably “Roll Away the Stone”—but no great ones. And in place of the naked autobiographical songs that make Mott such a landmark one gets nostalgia in the form of tunes like “The Golden Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Born Late ‘58” (just like me!).
In any event, Mott the Hoople’s decline as England’s best glam band this side of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars began before The Hoople was recorded, as first Allen left (to be replaced by Morgan Fisher and thereafter by two more organists), followed by Ralphs, who was replaced by ex-Spooky Tooth guitarist Ariel Bender, who in return was replaced following Mott the Hoople’s final LP, 1974’s Live, by the great Bowie sideman Mick Ronson. Still, the band might have kept it together had Hunter and Ronson not both decided to quit, to work on a project of their own.
In the end Mott the Hoople left us with two brilliant LPs and five decent ones. But there was and is and always will be something unique about Mott the Hoople—they’re just plain fucking cool—and they live on in the heart’s of fans like yours truly as well as in songs like Queen’s “Now I’m Here,” Reunion’s great “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me),” and R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon,” all of which name-check the Hoop. And if their fame was short-lived nobody was more philosophical about it than Hunter, who especially on Mott returned again and again to the shabby reality behind rock’s glamour and the fleeting nature of fame. On “Hymn for the Dudes” he sings, “You ain’t the nazz/You’re just a buzz/Some kinda temporary,” and he knew damn well he was singing about himself. And that’s class, big-time class, although it will never beat that cry of pure exultation, “I’ve wanted to do this for years!”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
