ALL
THE YOUNG DUDES – Mott The Hoople (Columbia/Legacy remaster)
MOTT – Mott The Hoople (Columbia/Legacy remaster)
By
now, the story of David Bowie throwing Mott The Hoople a bone with glam anthem “All
The Young Dudes,” in turn 
preventing their career
from swirling down the crapper faster than last night’s dinner, is
a part of rock and roll lore damn near on par with Robert Johnson brokering
his soul to the Beelzebub down at the crossroads. Of course Johnson never
had to deal with Guy Stevens, so draw your own conclusions as to who got
the short end of the stick.
“All The Young Dudes” and “Mott,” along with 1975’s “The Hoople,” also remastered by Columbia but puzzlingly only available online as a downloadable, neutered, compressed (read “worthless”) file, find Mott staring down an early expiration date and rustling up the finest three-album run of the decade by anyone not named Alice Cooper, The Rolling Stones, or The Dictators.
Looking back
to 1972, it’s certainly understandable why the band felt
the need to cozy up to old Carrot Top; although “Brain Capers” (1971)
- and in particular “Sweet Angeline,” “Death May Be Your
Santa Claus,” “The Journey,” and “Wheel Of The Quivering
Meat Conception” -
rocked like a casino full of brawling one-percenters, they were anything
but solvent despite steady touring and recording, discouraged and barely
able to spring for a pack of cigs or a pint of lager, in the gutter but looking
at the stars.
In a move eerily prescient of his later adoption and domestication of Iggy Pop, Bowie steered a rudderless Mott The Hoople toward a reasonable facsimile of cosmic purpose with arrangement and production on “All The Young Dudes” so brusque and vascular that the album reverberates, rumbles, and resonates with a majestic hum, even on vinyl. I haven’t a clue what Columbia was pressing their records on back in the 70’s, but my copy refused to say “uncle” when used for either entertainment purposes or a jazz cigarette rolling kit.
If you could mix “Jerkin’ Crocus” (featuring the only known use of the words “nazz puller” in pop music history), “One Of The Boys” (Ian Hunter’s manic cackle would raise the hackles on Charles Manson’s neck), Mick Ralphs’ stadium rock light bulb moment (“Ready For Love/After Lights”), and the acoustically-driven dismantling of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane” with whiskey in a to-go cup, you might very well end any and all dialogue toward the legalization of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin.
The bonus tracks?
Perhaps even more exhilarating than the album proper, at least to hopeless
no-lifers like yours truly; demo and UK single versions of “One
Of The Boys,” demos of“Black Scorpion” (i.e.,
a peppier “Momma’s Little Jewel”) and “Ride On The
Sun” (aka “Sea Diver”),
an alternate take of the title track with Bowie on the verses, and two tracks
from a 1973 Hammersmith Odeon show which very well may have ushered in the
Rapture - “Sucker” and “Sweet Jane” - the latter
featuring one of Ariel Bender’s (stepping in for a Bad Company-bound
Ralphs) patented clueless, yet
glorious and endearingly heroic, guitar solos.
By the time
of 1973’s “Mott,” the band was reduced to
a four-piece after a disgruntled Verden Allen flew the Hoople, all the while
grousing about his role in their stage act. While it’s certainly arguable
that, as Keith Smith postulates in his liner notes, this is the band’s
best sounding album, it just may be their most accomplished in terms of songwriting
and
playing. Full marks all around for standing up to CBS and producing it themselves
with some uh, mothering from Bill Price and Alan Harris.
Hunter’s career-long schizoid methodology comes to full fruition with 1972 tour memoir “All The Way From Memphis” (ever notice the best sax players always seem to be named Mackay?), scruff rockers “Whizz Kid” and “Honaloochie Boogie,” and the self-mythologizing “Ballad Of Mott The Hoople.”
“Violence” is one mean, cold, slit-eyed mother of a tune, hitting with all the subtlety and sensitivity of a flaming 747 full of orphans crashing into a mountain, “Drivin’ Sister” may just be the best car song outside of the Chuck Berry or Bruce Springsteen catalogs, “Hymn For The Dudes” still gives me the chills 33 years on, and “I Wish I Was Your Mother”…well, great song (Ralphs wrestling a mandolin into a tap-out) but Freud may be needed to sort out Hunter’s lyric sheet.
Bonus tracks, while not as bountiful as those on “Dudes,” are crackers; the studio version of live staple “Rose,” demos of “Honaloochie Boogie” and “Nightmare,” and a live “Drivin’ Sister” from that meteoric Hammersmith gig.
Although being
devoted to Mott The Hoople nearly ruined my high school education, kicks
and guitar licks waging war with arithmetic, it sure beat coping with a
steady diet of purple microdot and Mad Dog 20/20.-
Clark Paull
(both)