Mott

Mott The Hoople

Columbia, 1973

http://www.mottthehoople.com

REVIEW BY: Jason Warburg

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 04/08/2009

“Ian Hunter, Mick Ralphs, Verden Allen, Overend Watts, Dale (Buffin) Griffin -- you just won the rock and roll lottery when man of the hour David Bowie handed you a hit single and produced your new album -- what’re you gonna do now?”

Not that the latter days of Mott The Hoople were much like Disneyland -- unless maybe you crossed the roller-coaster effect of Space Mountain with the binge-drinking anarchy of Pirates of the Caribbean -- but the above question does come to mind when one considers how predictably every triumph achieved by this band was followed by bitter disappointment of one sort or another.

Strong sales of the Bowie-produced All The Young Dudes ensured Mott could continue after the commercial failure of the nonetheless critically-admired group’s earlier albums.  But it seemed as though Bowie’s eleventh-hour rescue might have only staved off the inevitable, as the band immediately began losing pieces like an old car barreling down the highway.

First to go, after the Dudes tour but before the recording of Mott began in earnest, was founding keyboardist Verden Allen.  The band would record Mott as a four-piece, with guitarist Ralphs playing organ and synth where needed in the studio, and keyboardist Morgan Fisher joining up for the subsequent tour.

That hardly inhibited the remaining quartet’s inclination to kick off the album with a musical victory lap, though, as the boys let loose with the jaunty boogie-woogie-piano-driven “All The Way From Memphis,” still a fixture of composer Ian Hunter’s live set 35 years later.  The basic drive is augmented by Roxy Music sax-man Andy Mackay’s sweet solo, but it’s Ralphs’ galloping riffs that bring the song home, and appropriately so for a tune that’s nominally about him losing and trying to chase down a favorite ax.

What the song – and in fact the whole album – seem to really be about, though, is the dark, despairing truths that underlie the rock and roll dreams the boys are by now wondering if they’ve clung to for too long.  After four years of marathon touring to enthusiastic crowds but little commercial response were suddenly turned on their head by the unlikely triumph of the my_heart_sings_the_harmony_web_ad_alt_250 Dudes album, Hunter, Ralphs and company seemed to be saying “is this all there is?” -- “Yes it’s a mighty long way down rock’n’roll / As your name gets so hot your heart gets cold / And you’ve got to stay young, man, you can never grow old.”

Hunter’s increasingly bitter disillusionment with the very scene he had suddenly become a leading figure within makes for some biting (and increasingly self-referential) story-telling.  His punchy “Whizz Kidd” narrates the tale of a determined groupie willing to break up the band to get her man, while “Hymn For The Dudes” carries the threads of the Young Dudes narrative forward with a near-gospel ballad about an aging star who’s realized the acid truth of his station in life: “For so long they’ll come from near and far / But you’ll forget just who you are / You ain’t the nazz / You’re just a buzz / Some kinda temporary...”

“Honaloochie Boogie” is another “Memphis” type rocker, leading into the melodramatic power-chords-and-crazy-violin chaos of the cheeky “Violence.”  Next up, “Drivin’ Sister” is pretty much what it sounds like, amped-up Chuck Berry with a British accent.  Not many bands could get away with a song as self-referential as “Ballad Of Mott (26th March 1972 Zurich),” but the story of Mott’s “from the ashes” turnabout was one worth telling, and Hunter’s lyric is a starkly realistic, self-effacing tale of the rise and fall and rise of a band.  “Rock’n’roll’s a loser’s game, it mesmerizes and I can’t explain,” he declares, before resigning himself to the reality that “I can’t erase / The rock’n’roll feeling from my mind.”

Ralph’s sole lead vocal performance here, “I’m A Cadillac,” is solid, but the Spanish guitar showcase he tacks on the end is the one “huh?” moment on the whole album, foreshadowing his imminent departure from the band.  Said departure occurred before this album even hit the streets, as disagreements over the mixing of “Violence” and the band’s adoption of the trappings of glam rock -- elaborate costuming and stage production -- brought home to Ralphs his diminished role within the band, and led him to walk midway through the subsequent tour.

As they often did, the album closes out with a memorable ballad from Hunter, whose creative presence had become the dominant one in the band by this point.  “I Wish I Was Your Mother” exposes the other side of Hunter’s genius, his ability to find surprisingly different and resonant narrative frames for talking about relationships.  Here he tries to duck the shrapnel of an exploding relationship by imagining the tender feelings he might still have for his soon-to-be ex-lover if he’d known her as a child.

For all the tumult surrounding it -- 40 percent of the band left between the first and last day’s work on the album -- Mott was in the end the band’s artistic high-water mark.  Much like Fleetwood Mac, Mott’s finest moment as a band came when the group was in the process of spontaneously combusting.  The net result was (a) near-chaos within the band, and (b) an album Rolling Stone ranked number 366 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time -- 366 sounding like the perfect middle-of-the-pack greatness quotient for a superb album by a band whose own principals would be the first to assert never did live up to the fullness of its promise.

Rating: A-

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