Hymn for the Dudes: Mott The Hoople’s Mott at 50
Looking back on a perfect rock ‘n’ roll record
Mott the Hoople, who released the classic Mott LP 50 years ago today, had hardly been an overnight success story.
They’d gone through four albums without breakthrough success, almost calling it a day when the strongest of the four — 1971’s Brain Capers — failed to chart.
It had to be particularly frustrating for lead singer Ian Hunter, who was already in his 30s, between five and nine years older than the rest of the band. He’d bounced around through various groups, but was working day jobs when the opportunity to join Mott the Hoople came. Yet despite some critical acclaim, the quartet had decided to pull the plug after a dispiriting run of shows.
Rock fans know what happened next. David Bowie, who happened to be a Mott The Hoople fan, offered them the song that would be their biggest hit — “All The Young Dudes.” He’d produce the album of the same name, a success that revived their career.
By late ’72, Mott The Hoople would be ready to record the follow-up, albeit as a four-piece with organist Verden Allen leaving while the “Dudes” single was still on the charts.
Bowie was in the middle of the Ziggy Stardust tour, as well as working on what would become his next persona/album – Aladdin Sane. Mott the Hoople was anxious to remind folks that they weren’t extensions of Bowie or willing rock star action figures for manager Tony DeFries.
Hunter insisted that the band produce themselves in the studio, with no songwriting contributions from outside the band. They began working on songs with something to prove, seeking to maintain their success without compromising the core of who they were.
The first song they got on tape would be “All The Way From Memphis” in December, 1972.
VIDEO: Mott The Hoople “All The Way From Memphis”
The song, inspired by an actual cockup where Hunter’s guitar got misdirected on the road while lead guitarist Mick Ralphs’ made its intended destination. It took Hunter a month to get his guitar back.
Built off insistent boogie piano, the song is a wry sketch of being in a struggling band (“And you look like a star but you’re still on the dole”).
That piano intro was there from the start, but it took Hunter a couple of months to be able to come up with the melody and lyrics. He told Songwriter Universe in 2017, punctuating his comments with a laugh, “Sometimes, the ideal song comes quickly. I wrote “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” and it all came together in 10 hours…that’s the way you want them to come. But they all don’t come like that. With “Memphis,” the music was done, and I was sitting there trying to get the hang of the song.”
Hunter would go on to change the song’s one bum note, changing one verse’s use of a racist slur (the one found in a standard deck of playing cards) and using the word “dude” instead while performing the song live. It remains as catchy as ever, a staple in Hunter’s shows to this day.
They reconvened the following February, finishing up the 10-song album in April.
Funnily enough, Mott plays lyrically like the follow-up to Brain Capers, a portrait of a group on a frustrating treadmill where the brass ring seemed tantalizingly just out of reach. It’s leavened with the same humor and heightened by the same honesty that Hunter brought to his 1974 book Diary of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star.
The key here is that, as tiring as the treadmill years and the initial efforts to maintain that initial stardom were, the band never sounds less than invigorated. Ralphs was in sharp, tough form, whether on leads, fills or solos. He also took over most of the keyboard duties. Bassist Pete “Overend” Watts and drummer Dale “Buffin” Griffin hold things together on the bottom end. Then throw in some well chosen additional contributors, like Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay on saxophone and an appearance from the British studio backing trio Thunderthighs (then known for the “Doo do doo do doo do do doo” parts on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”).
There’s a certain snarl to the “I’ve been shacking up with a privileged rich girl and this might have been a mistake” sketch of “Whizz Kids”, which showed Hunter had clearly paid attention to Ziggy-era Bowie, with his croon and those backing vocals (along with Ralphs’ riff).
The winning ballad “Hymn For the Dudes” makes those lessons even more obvious, with the way Hunter almost drawls some of the lines (although Bowie didn’t have Thunderthighs at his disposal for those soulful backing vocals). There’s also the direct nod in the direction of a certain orange-haired alter ego. Where Ziggy Stardust had been “the nazz with God-given ass”, Hunter sang of his song’s Christian, “You ain’t the Nazz/You’re just a buzz/Some kinda temporary.”
Ralphs is front-and-center on “Violence”, parrying with Hunter’s vocals attempting to go into the red and eventually Buffin’s pounding drums and violin from Graham Preskett (who’d go on to arrange and compose for film soundtracks).
He’s even more upfront on “Drivin’ Sister”, the riffage front and center before things get quiet for a gliding slide solo before going right back to the lead, even louder than before.
“Honaloochie Boogie” mines similar then-classic-rock in ’73 turf as “Memphis”, only at slower tempo,more reverb on Hunter’s voice, but keeping the same strong backing vocals on the chorus.
It was the follow-up single to “All The Young Dudes”, but Hunter wasn’t sold on it, which led to disagreements in the studio.
“I’d written it and I just didn’t see the point, couldn’t understand,” he told Songwriting Magazine in 2016. “And they were going, ‘Well there is no point.’ And this is all new to me. ‘But it doesn’t make any sense.’ Honaloochie was a word that fit at the time. The whole idea was that eventually it would become a proper song with a proper title, but we couldn’t find anything. I’m going, ‘It doesn’t mean anything!’ and Pete and Buff were going, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ So there it went and it was a hit.”
It was a lesson that sometimes in rock-and-roll, the hook didn’t need to make sense, as long as it sounded cool and was sold with conviction (“A Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom,” indeed)
Things grew even more self-referential on “Ballad Of Mott The Hoople (March 26th, 1972, Zürich)”, in which Hunter & Co. go back to less than a year before, when they were still touring Brain Capers on the verge of breaking up, feeling full of resignation.
Mott The Hoople changed things up towards the album’s finish. Ralphs sings lead on his “I’m a Cadillac/El Camino Dolo Roso”. It starts as a Hunter-style rocker (albeit without that piano) before it downshifts three minutes in, sounding like a proggier version of where he’d go with Bad Company.
The working rocker portraiture goes by the wayside on the concluding breakup song “I Wish I Was Your Mother”, a musical reminder that Bob Dylan was always an influence for Hunter. It’s strikingly poignant, with regret, not bitterness, the primary driver.
The album would outpace All The Young Dudes to become Mott the Hoople’s most successful to that point. Unfortunately, it would also be the last for this iteration of the band.
“(Mott) was a pinnacle for us all, I suppose,”Ralphs said in the 2010 BBC documentary The Ballad of Mott The Hoople. “We’d struggled and struggled and argued. We fought and then we ended up with it. It was quite an achievement. We were all very pleased with it and we think the record company was, too” A pause, biting his upper lip, before he added with a chuckle, “And then I left.”
Hunter said in the doc, “Mick thought it was more my input than his on that record, which it was. It could have been his, but I just got there first, you know?”
Ralphs was coming up with good material which Hunter liked, but felt he didn’t have the right vocal range for. Thus, the guitarist left to form Bad Company with former Free singer Paul Rodgers. When that band released its self-titled debut in 1974, three of its hits and future classic rock standards — “Can’t Get Enough”, “Movin’ On” and “Ready For Love” — were written by Ralphs. The latter had appeared on the Dudes album with Ralphs on lead vocals.
Luther Grosvenor, most notably the lead guitarist for Spooky Tooth in its initial 1967-70 run, as well as a brief run as Gerry Rafferty’s replacement in Stealers Wheel, came in. Hunter supplied him with the stage name he needed for contractual reasons — Ariel Bender.
There would be a parting shot with one last winner — 1974’s The Hoople. There’d never be a chance for a new iteration with Bender’s post-live album replacement, Mick Ronson. The former Bowie guitarist had just put out his Slaughter On Tenth Avenue on RCA, a different label. With competing label interests and management and Ronson’s reported aloofness to at least some of the band, it never clicked as Hunter hoped for.
There was also the fact that Mott the Hoople hadn’t taken a break. Starting with Brain Capers, they’d put out four albums over a span of 28 months, complete with a lot of touring in between. Hunter was hospitalized for exhaustion in New Jersey and eventually came to the realization that he had to step off that particular treadmill. Ronson would join Hunter for his first solo album, the start of off-and-on collaborations that would continue until Ronson’s death from liver cancer in 1993.
The remaining members attempted to make a go of it, releasing two albums as Mott and two more as British Lions, but couldn’t overcome the loss of their two main songwriters and biggest talents in a short period of time.
There’d be no more albums, only scattered reunion shows starting in 2009, which became more difficult due to health problems. Buffin, who’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, only played encores in 2009. He died of cancer in 2016. Ralphs suffered a stroke while on tour with Bad Company later that year, which has put him under constant care ever since. Watts would die a few months later.
The most recent shows in 2018-19 were an imprecise reunion of The Hoople era, with Allen, Grosvenor and organist Morgan Fisher part of the lineup with Hunter.
2019 was also the year Mott the Hoople entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted by longtime fan and advocate for their inclusion, Joe Elliott from Def Leppard.
For a band that lasted six years, Mott the Hoople clearly had the resume for induction, starting with the overlooked best of their pre-Dudes material and continuing with their ’72-74 peak.
Five decades later, Mott remains the centerpiece of that resume, with Hunter in strong form, Ralphs the perfect foil and Buff and Pete backing them up.
It may not have been instant success, and it might have lasted, but the album still makes the strongest case for why Mott The Hoople mattered.
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