This one should have been great. Recorded in England’s Hammersmith Odeon and Broadway’s Uris Theater in 1974, it captures Mott the Hoople at the height of their powers. They deliver on many of their biggest crowd pleasers; unfortunately, and this is almost the band’s undoing, two of the LP’s nine tracks are B-Sides, and another is far from one of the band’s best. What’s more, the closing six-song medley does an injustice to at least three of its songs, and includes two non-Mott songs that shouldn’t be on it in the first place. Given their catalogue of great songs, Mott the Hoople managed to shoot themselves in the foot.
That said, the band sounds great; guitarist Mick Ralphs had split for Bad Company but Mott had found a deft replacement in Ariel Bender, whose six-string razor adds flash to their material. If Ralphs played hard rock, Bender leaned more towards finesse—he’s more of a showman, and he fits perfectly into Hunter’s glam scheme of things. The rest of the band is tight, and the added organists—Blue Weaver in the US and Mick Bolton in the UK–help fill out the sound.
The A-side opens with ultimate road song “All the Way to Memphis,” which puts Morgan Fisher’s honky-tonk piano up front but packs far more of a hard rock punch than the studio version. Bender’s guitar solo is ferocious while Hunter tells the ugly truth about the R&R dream: “Yeah its a mighty long way down rock ‘n’ roll/As your name gets hot so your heart grows cold/’N you gotta stay young man, you can never be old”—no one else I can think of has ever so clinically diagnosed the hollow heart of stardom. The band follows with the menacing S&M-themed “Sucker,” which boasts killer power chords, Weaver’s organ and backing vocals that might have come straight from David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs.
Piano and Phantom of the Opera-school organ dominate ballad “Rest in Peace.” The song’s presence on Live is a puzzler–what the B-side from “The Golden Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll” from 1974’s The Hoople is doing here is beyond me, although there’s no denying the emotional power of lines like “Cause you know, we ain’t gonna be here all that long/And when I go I want to know I sung/If there’s a road ahead, I’ll jump right in/Just got to win, this is my hymn.”
It’s followed by “All the Young Dudes,” which is easily the most joyous, liberating, and greatest youth anthem ever written—better than “My Generation” or anything written by The Beatles, Stones, or Dylan—better tham “Louie Louie” even. Mott closes the A-side with the hard rock stomp “Walkin’ with a Mountain,” which opens with a Chuck Berry guitar lick and proceeds to crush Broadway underfoot. Unfortunately it goes out on a Bender’s guitar solo that’s too show-offy by half.
And it doesn’t help that the B-side opens with the uninspired “Sweet Angeline” from 1971’s Brain Capers. What makes it doubly aggravating is that they might have gone with the superior “Death May Be Your Santa Claus” or “The Moon Upstairs” from the same LP, or any number of other songs (e.g., “Hymn for the Dudes” or “Honaloochie Boogie”) from 1973’s Mott. Then, just to make matters worse, they follow “Sweet Angeline” with the maudlin little number “Rose,” the B-Side from “Honaloochie Boogie.”
The medley is… unfortunate. Who plays medleys? They’re hopelessly showbiz, and hardly the stuff of which great rock and roll is made. I saw the Carpenters’ perform one live, but the old-fashioned brother/sister duo may as well have come from a generation when medleys were still commonplace. The only other one that comes to mind appears on Elton John’s 1971 LP 11-17-70, which oddly enough also includes an excerpt from The Beatles’ “Get Back.”
The Mott medley opens with some two minutes of the Rolling Stones-like rave-up “Jerkin’ Crocus,” then segues into the ‘eavy duty juvenile delinquent anthem “One of the Boys” (“I’m one of the boys/One of the boys/I don’t say much but I make a big noise”), which includes a great Hunter stutter and a guitar solo for the ages. The band then switches gears after some lengthy guitar feedback zoom into the big-bottomed and bone-crushing “Rock & Roll Queen,” which slows into short (and distracting) snippets of “Get Back” and the Jerry Lee Lewis vehicle “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On.” Hunter then name checks “Jean Genie” before shutting down shop screaming out the ending of “Violence.” All four Mott songs deserved to be played in full, and had I been there I’d have walked out feeling cheated.
Live proves Mott the Hoople were a tremendous concert band, one of the best of their time, but it also demonstrates that Hunter was no great curator of his own material. Transforming what was a very good show into a great one would have been as simple as replacing the B-sides with full-length versions of the songs in the medley, or with any of a good dozen better songs they chose not to play. Even the overplayed “Sweet Jane” would have surpassed songs like “Sweet Angeline” and “Rose”—it would certainly been a bigger crowd pleaser. It’s easy enough to explain how what should have been a classic live album managed to elude Mott the Hoople’s grasp. Feed your audience the red meat, boys, and never forget to do the “Honaloochie Boogie.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
