This newsletter is an extension of the 2022 Summer Album Guide, and will evolve to include writing about the community, the city and the world in areas other than hot vinyl and vital music. But for now consider it a gesture to continue the art of the album review, forever disappearing from our print newspapers. - Dave Bidini
If you want to subscribe to the print edition of the West End Phoenix, just head over to www.westendphoenix.com and subscribe for a full year of local, independent print journalism!
Ian Hunter
Defiance, Pt 1.
When I was fourteen, I read every music book I could find. CIRCUS magazine published a series of airport reads, thin-broth bios of Alice Cooper and Robert Plant which, to a kid who didn’t know much about anything, were fun, nourishing books that leaned towards the outrageous, like how, every night on tour, Alice Cooper would leave two buckets by his bedside: one to vomit in, the other filled with cold Bud. This path led me to Diary of a Rock and Roll Star by Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter, a rambunctious and wryly philosophical American tour book, notable less so for its prose than its perspective, written by a musician looking up from an apple crate rather than down from a peak. It showed a mundane, frustrating existence trying to get from breakfast to breakfast without growing disillusioned, trading on that Englishman Abroad tradition where, no matter what happens, there’s always tea and Blighty. I applied this view in my first book On A Cold Road, where, if touring with the Tragically Hip might have not catapulted the Rheostatics to commercial acclaim, we always had hockey and each other. Between bus rides and arena shows, we mindfully boiled it all down to keeping upright despite not knowing where any of it would lead. Money for nothing and your sticks for free.
It took me ages before discovering Mott’s music. I owe it to the film Breaking the Waves for using “All the Way From Memphis” during one of its still postcard scenes. Immediately taken, I followed the song down to “Roll Away the Stone,” “Honaloochie Boogie” and other jukebox singles; records that, because of Hunter’s piano frontage, gave the band’s glam pop just the right dash of Music Hall innocence and bounce. There’s also “All the Young Dudes,” a song they recorded after rejecting Bowie’s other offering, “Suffragette City.” It’s one of the few compositions I always listen to twice, partly because I love the words, and partly because I still can’t understand them.
Ian Hunter is now 84 and while tinnitus forced him to end a tour last year, he just released Defiance, Part 1, which will be followed next year with Defiance, Part 2, likely, but not definitively, his final act. Hunter’s been making better-than-expected records for awhile now — try the stirring 60s memoir “Wash Us Away” from “Rant” — and this one surprises with the same strengths: squared-off social/relationship polemics with Boston beat drumming and the singer’s trademark friendly-wolf snarl. The album’s closer, the signature “I Hate Hate,” has Jeff Tweedy on it, but damned if I can notice him, drawn inside the jaws of Hunter’s delivery which, back in 1978, would have been great for punk if he hadn’t already been rock and roll’s cool British uncle. No composition ever gets close to tearing apart the seams, but songs like “Bed of Roses,” in which Ringo takes a turn on the kit, don’t have to. Defiance takes many forms. Just showing up can go a long way.
Listen and purchase on his website HERE
Ratboys
Black Earth, WI
I was pipped to this very long song (8 minutes, and that’s probably the last time I’ll ever use the phrase “pipped”), by its producer, Chris Walla, who pointed to its gorgeous, and gorgeously long, guitar solo, which starts the way most guitar solos do-- a few bendy figures around the fat of the neck, followed by more bendy figures around another part of the neck-- but the listener gets lost in the playing before the section finds its central melody, which loops trance-like as the band pushes it over a cliff, falling towards the naked shoreline in a fog of transistor distortion, followed by a cloudy silence that gives way to singer Julie Steiner’s high school chemistry partner vocal. The song’s handful of chords become layered with a secondary melody — processed through a Vocoder — that appears out of nowhere, and the only time it happens. Black Earth, WI is no “Court of the Crimson King” or Little Feat’s “The Fan” —two of the greatest long songs of all-time — but it calls you to study the places it visits along the way: a dinosaur park, an old drive-in, a fun fair, some paintball. Great music should always take the soul for a drive. Even when it’s clear where you went and how you got there, the trip is too good not to take over and over.
Listen and purchase from Bandcamp HERE