On that June Saturday at that festival my all-time rock & roll best friend Dave Blackburn and I also witnessed Mountain, The Stooges, Ten Years After, Traffic, and Alice Cooper, among many others. (For a more complete list, see blog entry The First Time I Saw The Stooges, August 24th, 2012.) Were Mott The Hoople better than all of them? Yeah, except for The Stooges and Traffic, they were. Were they maybe the best live band we had seen since The Who in 1969? Yeah, they just might have been. Dave and I pooled our money and bought the first Mott album (with that incredibly cool M.C. Escher gatefold cover) a coupla days after we got back from the show and another life-long rock & roll love affair was born.
(blogger's note: Astute readers of Growing Old With Rock & Roll have brought to my attention that some of my early blog entries have had the accompanying videos stripped from them, I guess from YouTube rights attrition, including the January 6th, 2012, entry for Mott's "Sweet Angeline." So here's a repeat of that, book-ended with "All The Young Dudes" and "Drivin' Sister" for good measure. I remember being enthralled with this segment when it aired on Don Kirshner's hopelessly pathetic Rock Concert back in 1973, now it just strikes me as listless and dull. Please note how sterile & unimaginative the camera work and general presentation are compared with German programs like Rockpalast and Musikladen, which aired at roughly the same time. (See previous Bonus Video Friday segments for visual living proof.) Even English programs like Old Grey Whistle Test, now available for viewing on YouTube, were superior in every way to Rock Concert. Midnight Special might have been a little better, but really not that much. Sad.)
(further blogger's note, May 18th, 2021: It has now been brought to my attention that my SECOND substitiute Mott/Kirshner video has been deleted from GOWR&R, and now all that's left is this clip of "All The Way From Memphis" from that show. I'm leaving in the text about "Sweet Angeline" below in the hopes that SOMEDAY that tune will be reinstated to YouTube (or I can find it somewhere else) and I can add it back in. For now, let me just say, it was one of my Five Favorite Stage Bits Ever.)
(FURTHER further blogger's note, September 2nd, 2022: I find now that somebody has re-posted the original Kirshner three-song video sometime in late 2021 and I missed it. Let's try this one more time.)
I witnessed Mott The Hoople doing this "Sweet Angeline" stage bit (bringing a woman out of the audience for Ian Hunter to sing to) twice, in 1973 and 1974. It went great both times; the participants were in their twenties, loved being serenaded by Ian, loved being onstage with the band. The teenager in this video, however, is THE MOST uncomfortable person I have ever seen in a TV clip. I've seen kidnap footage where people appear to be having a better time than this girl.
inspirational verse, stage patter division; "It's nice to be back in Los Angeles. We really mean that.
Ummm. Actually we don't mean it, it's always a drag to be back in Los Angeles, but one must
go to these places in the course of one's business. No, it's alright." - Ian Hunter, 1973
(Who - except for Mott The Hoople, and Ian Hunter in particular - travels from England to the heart of
the television industry, Los Angeles, and then proceeds to badmouth said city ON TELEVISION?!? Classic. I wonder why Mott The Hoople weren't seen on more American music programs?)
inspirational verse; "A crystal-colored, cardboard queen attacked me from my plate / And I think
that I am going mad among the swollen States / Oh, rescue me or bury me, I care not what you do / There's just one thing that I wanna know; Well, am I really YOU?" - Ian Hunter, 1972
© 2013 Ricki C.
Great site! I saw Mott in 1974 at the Shubert Theater in Philadelphia. The warm-up band was supposed to be Queen, but Bria May was ill so REO Speedwagon opened instead. They were fantastic, but Mott was in their prime, even though Mick Ralphs had left for Bad Company. Ariel Bender, born Luther Grosvenor, had honed his chops with Spooky Tooth ("Spooky Two" is one of the most underrated albums ever. He shines on that disc.) Anyway, Mott released what I essentially heard a year or so later on their live album. The medley that ends the concert I attended and the record is one of the most chilling and powerful sonic sleigh rides of all time. Bender crushes it in th end. If you have not heard the live medley, access it on YouTube, some of it in two parts, some the whole thing. To be played at maximum volume!
ReplyDeleteHey Anonymous, thanks for writing! I didn't really understand the nature of blogs when I started GOWR&R back in 2012. The guys from Watershed - the band I was a roadie for at the time - convinced me to write down some of the rock & roll stories I told them in the van (they were almost 20 years younger than me) before they were lost to time (or a bad heart & cancer).
DeleteI never really thought people would still be reading the blog ten years down the line as they are now. (I still get anywhere between 15 to 50 hits a day, some banner days I hit a hundred; it's kinda gratifying.)
I saw that tour you're talking about here in Columbus; Queen's "replacement" band here was Kansas, who I hated then and despise to this day. (I've always seen "Dust In The Wind" as the anthem for Midwest stoners to just smoke themselves into a stupor and never really TRY to DO anything constructive. In that respect it was the polar opposite of punk, which at least TRIED to spur rockers on to some kind of activism.)
But I digress.......THANKS FOR READING & COMMENTING! (I wish more people would send their own stories in to GOWR&R.)