“The Ballad of Mott”
MOTT THE HOOPLE
From Mott

All Ian Hunter ever wanted to write about was rock. His eye and ear were so good, his romanticism so utterly devotional, that you forgive him his excesses. In this song, indeed, excess, lugubriousness, self-pity, and even bad writing are present. But something else is, too, and that something else is a perspective on a dubious industry, at a time, the early 1970s, at which it was just beginning to separate from itself and head down into a freaking swirling vortex of excess, lugubriousness, self pity and bad writing.

Did anyone write about rock this way before Ian Hunter? We shall see:

Rock and roll’s a loser’s game
It mesmerizes and I can’t explain
The reasons for the sight and the sounds.

“It mesmerizes and I can’t explain.” Those bottomless words, complete with a tip o’ the hat to Pete Townsend, resonate still, don’t they? (Or do they?) People forget something important about Hunter, who came to stardom with his glam-rock quintet, Mott the Hoople, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in an inspired and frequently hilarious second wave of grand British rock. (Remember that it was David Bowie, then a star, who gifted Mott with their commercial breakthrough song, “All the Young Dudes.”)

But he was in fact not a coeval of Bowie, or Marc Bolan, for example. He wasn’t even of the generation of the Beatles and the Stones and Rod Stewart and the Kinks, either; Ian Hunter was a musical lifer in the late 1960s, more than a decade in the game, born in 1937, about five years before Mick and Keith and John and Paul and just after Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Hunter’s eye on the business was at once dispassionate and personal; he had many years to reflect on the music’s glittery false promises and inexplicable pull.

Those excesses? Let’s get that out of the way. The song’s full title is “The Ballad of Mott (March 26th 1972 Zurich).” It gets worse, as in the following verse. Younger readers will want to know that the litany of names that follows, enunciated with (unintentionally) comical seriousness, is a rundown of Hunter’s fellows in the band:

Buffin lost his childlike dream
And Mick lost his guitar
And Verdon grew a line or two
And Overend’s just a rock ‘n’ roll star

Wow—”Buffin’s childlike dreams.” I think that what Buffin dreamed about was less childlike and more adolescent and porny, but whatever. The rest of the song, however, is serious. There’s a stillness in the open spaces, an articulate and regretful guitar solo, and an honestly in the arrangements and presentation that explains why to this day Hunter is a hero to the alt-country crowd. But his concerns, confused, redolent and moving, keep coming: “I feel somehow we let you down,” Hunter says. And: “The rock ‘n’ roll circus is in town.” And: “I can’t erase the rock ‘n’ roll feeling from my mind.”

That chorus mesmerizes still, and Hunter would return to these themes, again and again, as we shall see.

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Last week’s “Song about rock.”

The complete “Songs about rock.”