Mott the Hoople
by Donny Kutzbach
“Television man is crazy saying we’re juvenile delinquent wrecks/Oh man I need TV when I got T.Rex”—from “All the Young Dudes”
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Urgency was key at the time: Hunter and his band had toiled in relative obscurity and muddled through four albums that didn’t break them through to mainstream. This 1972 salvo had followed a dramatic breakup—later chronicled in the self-referential and masterful “Ballad of Mott the Hoople (March 26th 1972 Zurich)” from the group’s next album, Mott—that inspired Mott patron Bowie to give the band the song and produce the album of the same name.
On October 17, 1973, Kleinhan’s Music Hall in Buffalo hosted a three-band bill that is now legendary in local rock-and-roll circles. The opener was a scrappy, Stones-clone from Boston named Aerosmith. The next was a cross-dressing batch of NYC sleazoids called the New York Dolls. The headliner was Mott the Hoople. Forget where history has written the other two, everyone I’ve talked to who was there says Mott was and remains the best of the lot.
But back to the glam…In 1973, England was enraptured with all things associated with the latest gender-rock movement, from Marc Bolan’s elfin Les Paul straddling to the pop savvy of Sweet and the laddish noize and stomp of Slade. Mott the Hoople were hardly a part of this scene, which instilled the perception of the group as an over-the-hill, washed-up act from times past. That all changed when Bowie, the ascendant glitter king of the moment, caught the band’s set in Croydon and offered his song and his services. Bowie could see that Mott the Hoople had all the pieces, that they were a muscular five-piece rock band that should have been stars, but that they were lacking something; maybe it was a proper focus or maybe it was that song.
Yet the album All the Young Dudes, and its anthemic title track, might not have been the complete glam-rock reinvention of Mott the Hoople that it has been made out to be. Even with the Bowie touch, Mott the Hoople retained its core identity as one swaggeringly hip, hard and heavy shit-hot band. It just took one little nudge and a pinch of sparkle to prove it.
Still, All the Young Dudes was a major turn of the corner and owes a lot to Bowie’s sheen, polish and street sense. Opening up the album with the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” complete with Hunter’s detached sense of cool that might even surpass Lou Reed’s, was a pure Bowie nod and it shows why he is/was a genius. On the other hand, it’s Mick Ralphs’ soaring guitar solo that lifts the title track beyond mere glitter fodder, and his ripping over “Just One of the Boys” shows that he was a premier player. Likewise, while keyboard player Verden Allen delivers some stunning piano on “Sea Diver,” he had shown that majestic playing style on previous efforts. For some reason, though, on Dudes the band’s bulb burned brighter.
The sticker on the reissue of 1973’s Mott barks that it’s “Mott the Hoople’s masterpiece” and that is the fact. There isn’t a wasted moment here and it ranks among the greatest albums of the 1970s, a decade already crowded with masterpieces. The difference with Mott’s Mott entry into the sweepstakes is that it dug right into the heart of rock and roll for its inspiration, energy and story. It’s ripe material. Hundreds of acts since, from Pink Floyd to Wilco, have written records about unraveling sanity, absurdity and a life spent playing in a band. Mott, however, was one of the first and maybe finest albums about the high triumphs and lowdown travails of playing rock and roll. The rousing “All the Way from Memphis” has Hunter deriding matter-of-factly that “You look like a star/ But you’re still on the dole.” The songwriter knew this story well because he’d been living it. The hook at the heart of “Honaloochie Boogie” is a buoyant guitar line from Ralphs while Hunter is left to wile away on the memories of carefree days. A wistfully winding mandolin provides the intro for “I Wish I Was Your Mother” but gives way to a heartbreaking and bitter kiss-off of a song wherein Hunter deftly manages mournfulness with an oddly joyful lilt. This is the stuff that puts the vastly underrated Ian Hunter into the A-Class of songwriters.
In a somewhat bizarre turn, but arguably a harbinger of the future of the music industry, the third album in the Mott rehaul, 1974’s glitzy turn The Hoople, has been reissued as a download-only album and is available online exclusively through iTunes. It’s a bit of a mishmash and rehash of the formulas of the band’s two prior highwater marks. The blitzing metallic overload of “Crash Street Kids” is matched by the minor-key mini-symphony of “Roll Away the Stone.”
The Mott tale carried on after The Hoople when Mick Ralphs exited to form “supergroup” Bad Company with Paul Rodgers. Ariel Bender and Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson joined the fold to fill the void, but Mott the Hoople had imploded by 1975 when Hunter went solo. The band’s story continued, though; within a year, the sneering punk set would grip England and the world. Punk’s obvious forebear was Mott’s driving guitars and rhythm, the bruising honesty and brash, no-nonsense delivery. This was nowhere more apparent than in the work of a former Mott groupie named Michael Jones. Jones nicked more than a trick or two from the Hoople’s handbook and helped make the Clash “the only band that mattered.” Of course, if you asked Jonesy, he’d say that Mott the Hoople mattered, too. I’m not one to argue.
—donny kutzbach
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