15/07/2025
JULY 1973 (52 YEARS AGO)
Mott The Hoople: Mott is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 5/5
# Allmusic 5/5 stars
# Rolling Stone (see original review below)
Mott is an album by Mott the Hoople, released in the US in July 1973. It reached #35 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart and #7 on the UK Albums chart. In 2003, the album was ranked number 366 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
It was clear by the time Mott was released that Ian Hunter had become the dominant figure of the band. Aside from the lead track, the album includes introspective songs such as "Ballad Of Mott The Hoople", which exposes Mott’s near break-up, and the peculiar "I Wish I Was Your Mother", featuring multi-tracked mandolin, in which Hunter sings of his wish to see his love as a child. Hard rockers are given their due with "Whizz Kid", "Drivin’ Sister", "Violence" and "Honaloochie Boogie", the last-named being another UK single. A fine performance is delivered by Hunter in the almost religious "Hymn For The Dudes."
Mott The Hoople are often associated with the '70s glam movement, but their only real connection to that style was their involvement with David Bowie. In fact, the band was much more closely tied to the post-folkie work of Bob Dylan. Singer Ian Hunter had his British version of Dylan's transcendent moan down to a science. Though they were essentially a pure rock & roll band (and one of the main influences on the Clash), Mott sported detailed lyrics informed by the Dylan school, almost to the point of self-consciousness. One of the band's great strengths was its knack for self-mythology, as borne out by "All The Way From Memphis," a Chuck Berry-ish number about the travails of the road. "Ballad of Mott the Hoople" is an ironic but poignant look at the way the band failed to meet the expectations of both themselves and their fans. Amidst all this heady introspection, there's plenty of arresting hard rock guitar courtesy of Mick Ralphs. Things end on a quirky, oddly sentimental note with "I Wish I Was Your Mother," a folkie, idiosyncratic love song colored by chiming mandolin and marked by some of Hunter's most inspired writing. Even while singing of heartbreak and despair, Mott got as loose and rocking as they ever did on this 1973 powerhouse.
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THE COVER
The album has featured different covers among the number of UK and U.S. releases. The US cover featured a photo of the four band members. In the UK the front cover featured a motif based on the bust of a Roman Emperor, and initial copies had a gatefold sleeve with the Emperor motif printed on a transparent plastic sheet.
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RECORD MIRROR UK, July 21 1973
Mott the Hoople fight that camp rock tag
By Rick Sanders
"WE were doing this concert in some town in the States with, Mahavishnu Orchestra, which was a strange piece of billing in the first place - and there was one guy who kept shouting at us through the set. Finally he threw a bottle and it hit my guitar. It all happened so quickly that I didn't realise at first what it was. We all suddenly stopped playing and we decided that we'd have to do something.
A lot of bands would have just stood there on stage, but we went down and bopped him one and then got back on stage and carried on playing where we'd left off. I suppose they might have gone for us, but the audience started cheering after we'd done it. You have to show a little authority."
Status
Mick Ralphs, softly - spoken guitarist and songwriter with Mott the Hoople, seems anything but aggressive as we're sitting in Kensington sipping tea and talking about the life and occasionally hard times of a most excellent rock band who, four years after they came down to London from Hereford, are at last beginning to enjoy the status they might have had a long time ago. The next big thing, say many. The early Mott was a band intending to follow the steps laid by Bob Dylan's Highway 61. They played good outgoing rock music that had a bit of depth to it, a bit of subtlety to follow the physical buzz of the beat. As time went by and the group, despite their amazingly turbulent live appearances, failed to sell records as they sold promoters' tickets, disillusion and gloom set in.
Quitting
"We were on the point of calling it a day," says Mick, "when David Bowie told us he'd always liked the band and even if we were going to break up, why not have a last try with this song he'd written for us. "
"All The Young Dudes, Mott the Hoople's Bowie-produced and written breakthrough hit single, saved the band's bacon. After numerous toings and froings with managements and record companies, the group had landed David as a producer, Tony DeFries.as manager, a new contract with CBS, and there they were, oh boy, in dem charts.
Then, not only did organ player and founder member Verden Allen decide to split from his band - his songwriting didn't fit and he felt smothered - but Tony DeFries had to give up managing them. Mick says, "Both David and us are demanding artists: we're the sort who need a manager to look after us ex- clusively, and Tony just didn't have the time. We were a bit upset because we liked the way Tony'd been looking after us. For example, he used to come and see us play as often as he could. A band can get depressed and lose heart if there's nobody there behind you to tell you that you played a good set.
"It's very different the day after you've done a gig than it is when everybody's bopping away on the night. You can feel very deflated when you get over the spirit of the occasion," he says.
Without David, the group decided to produce themselves on record. Judging by the success of Honaloochie Boogie, they're good at it. How does Mick feel about a group doing their own production?
Objective
"It helps you to be more objective about your music. You have to be able to detach yourself from what you've been playing and look at it as an outsider, which means that you get better about self-indulgence. The natural inclination as you listen to a track is to want to add a guitar here and effects there; when you're producing you have to be less hasty. "
Mick is a little sad but philosophical about the break-up with David Bowie and Mainman. The only doubt that lingers is that "a lot of people seem to think that we're into the campy glitter trip because of our association with David, and we're most definitely not.
"I think a lot of the groups who are riding that particular bandwagon, dressing themselves up in weird costumes, are soon going to look very silly. It was different with David. He knew well enough what he was doing to be able to ride the camp thing and use it. He was big enough to do that.
"I'd just like to say that we're a masculine group. We'd rather be straightforward and hopefully avoid getting bagged with too much of a particular image. It takes longer that way, but eventually we hope that Mott the Hoople will be known just for ourselves.
"DeFries had a lot of ideas for us. He decided that we were over-exposed in England, that we'd given too many interviews and played too often, so he said 'no press'. It would have been good - we do want to preserve a sort of elusiveness, we don't want to be nailed down - but the isolation tactics had a better chance of working with' David, who was pretty well unknown, than they would with Mott. Everybody knew us already. "
The next step for Mott is to crack America. They've been over every year since 1970, working hard around all the halls as support band and getting themselves felt, and as you read this they're just starting on another trip. It'll be their first as headliners.
Shuttle
All the stories you've heard about bands being shuttled from Toronto to California to New York and to Texas on successive nights are true. It does actually happen that way, as Mick well knows, particularly if you're only a support act and you have to go wherever the work maybe. "We've got to a stage now where we're putting our foot down a little more," says Mick,the veteran. "We're making sure we have a week to rehearse in the States before the tour starts and that the schedule is a bit less demanding and thedates follow a logical route. "
Confident
The band are more confident about America this time. Mick says that the first time they were in NewYork, nobody in the band dared leave thehotel room after dark. Now he doesn't think twice about going down to Times Square for pizza at three in the morning. "You get the people asking for money and a fewshnurds bothering you, but I've come to like New Yorkers - they seem very short andaggressive at first, but after a while their sense of humour comes through.
"I suppose the sensible thing to do is take the dollars and run," he laughs. "But I like a lot of things about America.
"There's a feeling, says Mick, that makes it easier for you to put on a show when you're out of your own country. America seems to pump th eadrenalin in and draw the best out of a band. There's just the problem of bursting backoff the plane at Heathrow, cruising into London and wondering what on earth to do after all the high-energy weirdness of a tour.
"You get back home," he says, "and you're there sitting in your room all a-buzz and trying to figure out where all the action went."
This time in America, where they'll be touring for a month, there should be plenty of action - Mott are taking a pianist and an organist with them, leaving Ian Hunter free to play guitar and fill the gap left by Verden Allen ("Ian finds it hard to move about much with a piano", says Mick), and Mott will have a three-piece girl backing group to add vocal lustre.
So - look out Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia and Boston, all you rock and roller strongholds. Mott are coming through
~ Rick Sanders
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BILLBOARD, August 4, 1973
MOTT THE HOOPLE -Mott, Columbia, KC 32425.
For Mott the Hoople fans, this is a combination of both the old and new styles in the group which means a combination of the early Dylanesque vocals from Ian Hunter characteristic of their first few sets and the weirdo talk-sing sound reminiscent of the group's period with David Bowie as producer. In this set, they have assimilated both styles, and with Ian Hunter's top vocals and the band's solid rock background, have put together what might be their most commercial LP. Several cuts on this set are potential hit singles, something the group has always lacked, and several are beautiful ballads.
Best cuts: "All the Way From Memphis," "Hymn for the Dudes," "Ballad of Mott the Hoople."
Dealers: Band has almost a cultist following, stemming from their initial release four years ago to their recent identification with Bowie. Display heavily and watch for upcoming tour
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ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW
What an array of weapons this band has: awesome firepower, an ever-increasing depth of expression, timely themes and an artistic way of mixing these qualities on record. In terms of my own bias, Mott the Hoople has been the most productive band of the last three years, with only the Rolling Stones -- a significant source of inspiration for Mott -- in the same category. In six attempts, Mott has made four excellent albums, and the latest may be the best.
The band has long had a near-obsessive interest in contemporary mythic figures such as Dylan (singer Ian Hunter's chief vocal model) and James Dean, and in contemporary mythic roles, primarily that of the rock & roll band. In terms of the latter, which dominates Mott's work, the subject matter ranges from the trivial to the universal. "Whiskey Woman," one of guitarist Mick Ralph's earlier songs, portrays the virtuous rock star imbued with such a sense of mission that he easily squelches the temptation to be sidetracked by carnivorous young girls, while his "Rock 'n' Roll Queen" focuses more facetiously on the same subject.
Ian Hunter's songs take a more metaphysical view of the same general area. Several of them from earlier albums -- "The Journey," "Half Moon Bay," "Waterlow" and "Sea Diver" -- are rock anthems with a double edge: They project power with a sense of anguish, intimate songs colored by a startling sense of mortality.
The combination of the deeply personal and the mythic has never been more fully developed than on the new album, Mott. The album opens with "All the Way from Memphis," a general but still subjective rock & roll chronicle: "...It's a mighty long way down rock & roll/From the Liverpool docks to the Hollywood Bowl/And you climb up the mountains and you fall down the hole/All the way from Memphis..." Like the diary Hunter wrote of Mott's last tour (which will soon be published as a book), Mott's key songs, all written by Hunter and including the one above, are documents of a specific span of time and a specific state of mind. But, like the personal, detailed songs of Dylan and Davies, they expand forcefully beyond the specific. In "Hymn for the Dudes," for example, Hunter's singing of nightmarish lyrics in which a king and a rock star hover above trenches and barbed wire, quits gradually to just above a whisper, and when Hunter describes the place of the star in the overall scheme of things -- "...You aint the nazz.../You're just a buzz..."some kinda temporary..." -- he's suddenly interrupted by a jolting boom of electric instruments. At this pint, the song shoots instantly to the upper reaches of intensity, and the song's concern, the superstar, becomes a supercharged metaphor.
If All the Young Dudes generated an optimism through David Bowie's wonderful title song, then that album's closer, "Sea Diver," provides a bridge to Mott, which is pervaded by the melancholy of defeat and dashed hopes. "Sea Diver"'s simply worded refrain -- "...Ride on, my son, ride until you fall..." -- succinctly encapsulates the story of the band, which is both literalized and mythologized here in "The Ballad of Mott the Hoople." The song unites the naive idealism of the rock & roll celebration song (e.g., "Do You Believe in Magic") with the battered voice of bitter experience. The singer knows not only that he's hooked but that he's irretrievably lost -- and he wouldn't have it any other way: "...Rock & roll's a loser's game, it mesmerizes -- I can't explain/The reasons for the sights and for the sounds/The greasepaint still sticks to my face/So what the hell, I can't erase/The rock & roll feeling from my mind..." As Hunter repeats the last three words, the band's dynamic level increases progressively and his straining finally turns into a hoarse scream. It's really something.
The album's final song, "I Wish I Was Your Mother," eschews rock & roll metaphor (and for that matter, rock instrumentation -- the sound is all mandolins and bells) to deal overtly with a love relationship. In this song more than any other save perhaps "Sea Diver," Hunter exposes his romanticism and its corollary, an awareness of inevitable tragedy. He perceives the shape of the traditional loving relationship through the muck of his world and that perception only makes him sadder when considering the future possibilities for his life together with his loved one:
..It's no use me pretending
You give, and I do the spending
Is there a happy ending?
I don't think so
'Cause even if we make it
I'll be too far out to take it
You'll have to try to shake it from my head...
I hope quoting from these lyrics in no way takes away from the music, which greatly expands the power of the words and which is as accessible as the songs are ambitious. Hunter's singing is still another primary aspect of the album. He's used Dylan and Bowie -- each a dramatically offbeat emphasizer -- as explicit sources of inspiration in the past; herre he inflects individualistically and quite dangerously throughout, sounding like a cross between a charged-up Dylan or McGuinn and a distracted Method actor desperately auditioning for "The Glass Menagerie." Despite his daring, I don't consider Hunter's approach excessive because, consciously or intuitively, he's in control of every drawl, mince, pause and mumble.
Mott the Hoople's path -- from audacity and optimism, through a series of false starts, pitfalls, wrong turns and missed opportunities, to its present point of view, permeated by weariness, sadness and a frighteningly full well of irony -- seems a necessary part of the band's specialness. It's now apparent that Mott the Hoople is not playing out the role it once thought it was (emerging superstars) but that of those who dream and struggle only to watch options run out -- in other words, the loser. That they became aware of this crucial paradox and were able to capitalize on it aesthetically is impressive enough. That they turned what appeared to be just a highly ironic misfortune into a deeply personal, haunting, all but tragic one casts them in a singular light. Literally and symbolically, Mott sounds very much like a terminal statement.
The album is so well done and so absorbing on every level, however, that Mott the Hoople may well have to deal with still another irony: success following a full acceptance of failure -- a success in the very terms by which that failure has been defined. I'd welcome that irony because I would hate to watch this very special band die.
~ Bud Scoppa, Rolling Stone, 9/13/73.
TRACKS:
All songs written by Ian Hunter, except where indicated
Side One
"All the Way from Memphis" – 5:02
"Whizz Kid" – 3:25
"Hymn For The Dudes" (Verden Allen, Hunter) – 5:24
"Honaloochie Boogie" – 2:43
"Violence" (Hunter, Ralphs) – 4:48
Side Two
"Drivin’ Sister" (Hunter, Ralphs) – 3:53
"Ballad Of Mott The Hoople" (Mott The Hoople) – 5:24
"I’m A Cadillac / El Camino Dolo Roso" (Ralphs) – 9:41
"I Wish I Was Your Mother" – 4:52
