Mott the Hoople. Good old Mott. “Oh yea, aren’t they the band that...” Almost everybody, it seems, has their own “oh yea” for Mott the Hoople. A convenient tag, a cozy little spot on a dusty shelf where they could be filed away and forgotten until their next go-round. They’re finally being greeted by a sea of open arms this time around, but that’s not what’s to be told here. We’re talking about the fact that this band kept coming back. You can all take part in the triumph, but this story is about survival.

The very first time out the door, they met with jibes from all the selfappointed Dylanologists, who marveled snidely at the great debt that this band surely owed Blonde on Blonde. The band never denied this inspiration, except to suggest that perhaps there was a little bit more to it than common theft. Which of course there was.

Enter Guy Stevens, an English sceneproducer and lovable madman. It was Stevens who hatched the Mott Plot in 1969, and he did so with the passion and pre-meditation of .a man who’d finally seen the means to realizing his most treasured dream. He already had a rambunctious hard rock band called Silence — guitarist Mick Ralphs, keyboard man Verden Allen, bassist Overend Watts and drummer Buffin — under contract and ready to be unleashed at the proper time. Ian Hunter appeared in response to a newspaper ad, blew everyone back with an instant rendition of “Like A Rolling Stone,” and was handed a job. The alliance became Mott the Hoople, and it fit Stevens’ designs perfectly.

“Guy Stevens,” admits Buffin without hesitation, “was the total motivating force behind Mott the Hoople at that time. He was Mott the Hoople. He had this notion that the ideal band would be the Rolling Stones featuring Bob Dylan. What he wanted to do was capture that kind of a feel, and that was the idea behind our first album.”

Add to that their on-stage affection ,for Who-like bursts of movement and color, and you have a three-way synthesis that may have been slightly derivative but was nonetheless distinctive in its fusion of elements. Guy Stevens, you see, hadn’t (as certain British critics suggested) manufactured the band to fit a Monkees consciousness. He had the idea, and simply served as the catalyst for the proper — and already existing — elements. The band made it happen because they thoroughly understood the nature of their source material, as it applied directly to them and, crucially, their audience.

“All we ever had,” according to Ian, “at least in the beginning, was our ability to relate to audiences.” While the English press hemmed and hawed about the merits of their album, the band went ahead and developed a following without their support. A fairly wellreceived tour of America — where critical response to the album had been considerably more positive — and it looked like Mott the Hoople would break the barriers on their own merits.

But when the band went back into the studio to attempt to consolidate those gains, they received their first lesson in the extra-musical insanity that can foul even the best-laid plans of the superstars. “Mad Shadows, ” Buffin says of that album, “was a traumatic experience. We were very young and just up from the country, and here was this lunatic pill-head in the studio driving us and himself crazy. Mad Shadows was mad.

“There was a great organ solo on ‘Thunderbuck Ram’ that nobody’s ever heard because Guy Stevens forgot to turn the track up. When Verden heard it — we were all over at Guy’s house — he just ripped it off the record player and smashed it in Guy’s face. And that was the end of Guy Stevens.”

Ian Hunter once observed Mad Shadows to be “a scream for help” on the part of the band. They answered that scream as best they could themselves, issuing a self-produced and stranglehold-arranged album called Wildlife. Internal dissatisfaction with that one was immediate, to the point where they began referring to it as Mildlife. While this album failed as dismally as its predecessor to get them attention in the States — and, in fact, Tailed to hit the English charts either — they maintained a large and loyal audience on their home soil.

It was about this time that it became very fashionable in England to say that Mott the Hoople was Britain’s answer to Grand Funk Railroad. Not that this had anything much to do with their music; their musical excellence was entirely self-evident. No, what made a lot of people nervpus was Mott’s relationship with their audience.

Even when their albums were buried at the bottom of the charts, their concert houses were always full. The audience seemed to materialize out of nowhere. All those sweaty kids, making rude fools of themselves (in public, no less) for a band that nobody else knew anything about. No wonder the journalists got nervous. With absolutely no distance between Mott and its audience, there was very little room for the tastemakers to mythologize. The mythology existed; but you had to be on the inside to see it. That was the secret. And that may help to explain why, although Mott the Hoople was a monster live attraction, their record sales always managed to lag behind. For their audiences, even the records were too fars away. It had to be now.

Even with such a following, however, they came to the realization (which all bands eventually are shocked into) that the level of success they attained didn’t Necessarily have anything to do with the music they made and the performances they gave. “Island (their British label) never had any confidence in us,” by Buffin’s account. “They looked at us as some kind of freaks, they didn’t want us. Before, they’d always had groups that didn’t want to be big. And we wanted to be big; we’ve always wanted to be the Rolling Stones more than Traffic. They could handle Traffic, but they didn’t understand us because we wanted to be rock &-roll stars. They’d phone us and say, ‘Just take it easy and be good boys and next year you’ll make $50 a week extra.’ They always wanted us to be laid-back and quiet like little mice,, and we wanted to come on strong.”

I can remember a Christmas party thrown by Island Records in 1971 that seems to substantiate Buffin’s story. The party was to preview a new batch of releases from Island, among which there was a Mott album. Everything else was run through at least two or three times, but no sign of Mott. Out of desperation, I slipped the album on. Not five minutes into the first side, an Island employee ran over and took the record off the turntable. “No no,” she scolded me, “you don’t want to listen to that,” and promptly put on one of their more “presentable” albums. I promptly went back to sleep.

A couple of desperation singles followed, but their failure left matters at an all-time low. Thfey reunited with Guy Stevens for Brain Capers, an album that Buffin characterizes as having been recorded with “a little time and a lot of wine.” The record was an absolute crusher — non-stop energy; crude and sloppy but somehow right — but again a commercial dud. And as they continued to make the same rounds drawing the same audiences to the same old venues, their once-healthy legion of supporters began to thin as well. To all concerned, it seemed like the end of the line.

“We’d decided to pack it in,” Buffin recalls, “but then we were coerced into doing the Rock & Roll Circus tour of England. With us was a comedian, a knife-throwing act, and we had a fireeater for awhile but he walked out. It was intended to be a mini-circus, but on a poverty scale because we had no bread. It was rather a cut-rate affair.”

The final wake-up to their oblivion express came in Zurich. Buffin: “We just couldn’t take it any longer. We were in. Switzerland and they had us playing in a gas cannister! It was a complete loser gig. We came all the way to Switzerland just to play in a gas cannister? So we talked about it and realized that we were just going around in circles. Our agency had just sent us there to get us out of the way for a few days, / so we wouldn’t be on their backs.” So they threw in the towel, got drunk on the trainride home, and assumed that they’d go back to doing whatever it was that they did before they were Mott the Hoople.

Most of you know the part of the story that follows next. They were persuaded by David Bowie, then heating up as a rent-a-star, to hang together for one more shot. That shot was “All The Young Dudes,” their first hit in the States and a top-5 reinstatement in England. Their affairs were being managed by MainMan (the Tony DeFries-controlled agency that guides Bowie), and a solid album (this one for Columbia) and American tour won them a larger level of success than they’d ever seen. For the first time it appeared that the machinery of the music industry was working to their advantage.

“I Thought it was great,” Ian now says of the experience. “I enjoyed it. For nine months it was mad, it was insane. We were spending money like there was no tomorrow. It was Rome.” Through the flash and fanfare, however, there were doubts. Sitting in a Detroit hotel room on that tour, Buffin wa$ nervous despite their seeming success: “We’ll really have to break through next year, otherwise we’ll have to forget it because the band is just too old to go through the bullshit again.” And the band expressed a certain amount of discomfort around Bowie, citing his android-like distance as “inhuman,” and the very opposite of everything that Mott the Hoople stood for.

Such pressures finally found release. First organist Verden Allen left — an action he’d periodically threatened in the past — to take his unMott-like songs somewhere they’d be appreciated. (He’s still looking, by the way.) Then the band and Tony DeFries parted company. Popular assumption had DeFries letting the boys go, but the unmanipulated truth actually worked the other way.

“We left DeFries,” Ian states flatly. “After we’d toured America, we badly wanted to come back in April. We felt right for April again. He wouldn’t do it, and we were bored out of our brains in London. So we rang him up from the studio one night and said, ‘Look, if you don’t get it together then there’s no point in carrying on, because you’re paying too much attention to Bowie and not enough to us.’ That’s common knowledge; everyone knows it. I mean, David went so quick, so fast. I don’t blame DeFries. I think there’s a lot wrong with the way he operates — I think he’s a fool in certain aspects — but there can be no doubt that he’s a great manager.

“The main problem — Verden was still with us at the time — was that he always had to ring five people. With Iggy he only had to get ahold of Iggy, with David he only had to get ahold of David, but with us he had to ring five people. And we never agree about anything. Which is probably why we’ve been mucking about for so long. You see, we never operated on a 3-2 principle. We operated on a 5-nill principle, which has been very awkward at times.”

Then there was the fact that MainMan was basically unequipped to deal with what Mott was doing. Ian: “We were in the wrong camp, because they weren’t into rock and roll. It was like, if you ain’t Judy Garland, forget it! And we weren’t. Our whole intention, from the start, was to play rock and roll that people could like and respect.”

With DeFries preferring a star frontman with an interchangeable back-up to any kind of a real band concept, it might have been logical for him to single out Ian Hunter for this role. Hunter certainly fit the bill. Where the other members of the band looked like they could’ve been country cousins, Ian stood out immediately: his long red curls and constant shades giving rise to a Dylan-like facade that could’ve been exploited grandly. And being that he wrote most of the songs and sang lead on almost all of them, it might even have worked. But he never got far enough to find out, because Mott the Hoople is a band and don’t want ta hear it any other way.

But Ian makes no pretenses about the effect these disruptions had on the band. “We were weak, very weak. But then suddenly one morning I woke up and I was raging angry. We blew exactly what everyone was thinking — ‘Oh, Bowie’s gone, it’s all over’ — and that made us mad as hell. And it was the anger that got us through. Out of the anger the writing came, the album came, everything came. This is a funny band. Just when it looks like it’s ail over, something happens to pull it all together. But this is the first time that we actually solved our own problems.”

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The first problem to be settled was an album. Many producers were discussed (and they even went so far as to work out a couple times with Roy Wood), but they wound up keeping it to themselves. And it’s where their “we’ll show you” fury was vented most effectively. “I psyched up against Bowie for the album,” admits Ian. “I mean, I even told him about it. And he’s completely knocked out by what’s happened. You see, his only intention ever was to help. DeFries might’ve used us; but David only wanted to give us a hand.”

Whatever the impetus, Mott (as the album is called) is art impressive accomplishment. Where there were always a couple of songs that literally jumped off every previous Mott album, this one is the picture of consistency. It’s one of the first new-age classics, and without it your record collection is lacking indeed.

Their control over their affairs tightened drastically, a process that had begun with their association with MainMan. According to Ian, “What happened with Bowie was a revolution in efficiency. His imagination could come out of His head and actually be done, and it was the first time that had happened. It never happened in the past. It’s always been thought that people in bands couldn’t comprehend business. But there are so many ways you can be wanked around —. you can take our career as an example — that they force you into a situation where you have to see the whole picture if you want to survive. And now you can go in and tell them. Like when we were there with Atlantic, it never dawned on me to go up there an say, ‘Look you idiots, you’re doing it all wrong.’ I’d do it now, and I will. Nobody’s gonna mess us up anymore.

“When we were in LA, I met Keith Moon for the first time. And I said to him, ‘How did you ;get that house and all those cars you’ve got, ’cause you’re only the drummer and don’t get songwriting royalties or anything.’ Because he lives to excess, that guy; he’s just thrown hundreds of thousands of quid here and there and everywhere. And he turned around and laid this incredible 40 minute rap on me. I couldn’t believe that this was the same Mooney who everyone thinks is just a looner.

“I didn’t know what he was talking about. And then it slowly dawned on me that we had to, have the same kind of awareness. That we had to start walking out on people, and being nasty if that’s what it takes to get things done. We’d always been nice, and had done exactly wHat we were told to do. And where had it gotten us? And since that day, we’ve never looked back.”

This doesn’t mean that Mott were magically transformed into a crew of cigar-chomping, fire-breathing monsters. It simply meajis that they finally acknowledged enough pride and concern at what they were doing to say that it wouldn’t be done unless it was done right.

And even their live show, which has always been exemplary in terms of what the band gave to their audience, had benefited. The sound is still big but clear and clean, and their lights are coordinated extremely well. They still offer the same non-stop up that has always been their trademark, but now all elements are tuned to making what the band does that much more effective.

Although it might seem perfectly natural for the storyto end here, with nothing but open sky and positive feelings in front, it’s not quite over yet. Following the most successful American tour the band had ever done, guitarist Mick Ralphs left to join Paul Rodgers in a band which may turn Out .„to be yet another mutation of Free. He was immediately replaced with Ariel Bender, an excellent guitarist (in previous incarnations he played with Spooky and Stealer’s Wheel) and a longstanding friend.

Followers of Mott may be justified in mourning the loss of one so talented as Ralphs, but the days when such a loss would have a debilitating effect on this band are a part'of the past. “I’ve always thought of Mott the Hoople as a thing," says Ian Hunter. “It isn’t particularly anybody in it. We all owe allegiance to that name. I feel loyalty towards it. Even if I hated the rest of the guys in the band, I’d still feel loyalty to Mott the Hoople.”

What really matters is that they’d still feel loyalty to their audience. Through all the changes and complications, Mott has always been honest with the people who paid their money to see them perform. This relationship has allowed them to see exactly what the needs of their audience have been, and they’ve always done their best to fulfill them. It’s a rarity among rarities, but Mott the Hoople is one band that you can always feel secure about supporting, whether it be by buying the records or tickets to their shows. You can feel secure because, no matter What the odds, Mott the Hoople has delivered quality. And ihey aren’t about to stop now.