Some Of The Good Ones Are Still Kicking

IAN HUNTER

Some Of The Good Ones Are Still Kicking

by Iman Lababedi

His management's offices exude prosperity and fake sophistication: the waiting area all leather couches and reprints of 19th Century French paintings, the open plan work habitat spotted with typists and gold discs, and the conference room so oddly planned that I can't use the large center table because there's no socket for my tape recorder's plug. Odder still are the publicity posters of Faye Dunaway movies framed and plastered along the walls, each baring a pithy legend from the star to the manager she shares with the man I'm here to interview. On the poster of the straight-to-HBO disaster The First Deadly Sin, Faye has scribbled "And into the '80s with my No. 1 guy." On the arty alienated Puzzle Of A Downfall Child she admits "This was a puzzle to me.. .at first. Thank you for believing in me." I hear the muffled sounds of a table tennis game in progress nearby, I worry about ego and self-deception, I wonder if I've garnered any clues to the real Bonnie Parker from her large, legible yet girlish handwriting, I search for the poster from the great Eyes Of Laura Mars, and I turn as the door opens to find myself face to face with Ian Hunter.

The first thing I notice about Ian Hunter is how he looks precisely the way I'd imagined he would: the Tweety Bird-colored, very permed hair flowing in ringlets around his face, the ubiquitous glasses so he can see out and you can't see in. The casually glamourous attire. It might be '71 and Guy Stevens might be wreaking havoc in the well dressed room.

The next thing I notice is that I hadn't been quite right in the first thing I'd notice; the drag of 15 years doing that rock 'n' roll thang has worn on Ian, even though he wears it well. The physique is the personification: one moment the working class aristocrat, the next a stocky truck driver with the beginnings of a beer belly. And the face, no longer gaunt cheekbones and oval handsomeness; now creased and lined with appearance that's almost weary, almost had enough— almost cynical.

Ian holds a handful of orange chips and offers me one. I decline. He pushes them, "They're those new Jack Klugman cheese popcorn. I don't usually like popcorn either, but these are real good." It's one way of making money. Ian nods: "Not that he needs any." Then he drops into a chair near the too small table I'm using, pushes another chair towards him with his foot and plonks his legs on it, takes one of my Marlboros, and looks up expectantly.

☆ ☆ ☆

In 1969 John Lennon had yet to announce that the dream was over, but for a man like Ian who was "worse than working class, way down there" and "didn't know shit," the English version of the teenage dream had meant working in factories, marriage at 18, and life as a semi-pro bassist playing with Freddie Fingers Ray ("the British equivalent of Jerry Lee Lewis") during forays to Germany—"where they only paid you half of the time, but they paid you well." He couldn't even get on welfare. "They laughed me out of the building when I said I was a musician," he recalls with a mixture of amusement and anger. "The way I was living was the way the average black in America lives and, just like them, the only way out was sports or music. Rock 'n' roll couldn't have come at a better time, without it, it wouldn't have even been music—rock was up for grabs."

It was in 1969 that Ian became vocalist for a Herefordshire band known as the Silencers, who'd changed their name to Mott The Hoople (from the old William Manus novel) at the suggestion of their producer/manager, the late Guy Stevens. "We started to move in '70, when it was all hippies and bluesers. Our idea was to get some fun into the music gain—flash it up, flash _sn clothes. It was frowned upon at first, the J glasses and stuff like that. The glasses were 2 considered flash! We would do things like ® if the spotlights weren't bright enough we'd :§ turn them up. If I was singing and the lights 5 weren't on me I'd stop the song and shout 'Hey look, I'm doing the fucking singing."

"People minded at first, then they really

liked it. It was a backlash against all that hippie shit. I didn't consider the bluesers could play all that well anyway; there were a lot of out-of-work guitarists when that stopped, because they were OK playing slow, but when things got a bit faster they couldn't handle it." Ian is being a trifle ingenuous here, at least in that his writing—as opposed to guitarist Mick Ralphs'—on the first two albums (especially Mad Shadows) owed a debt to electric Dylan. I consider that period Hoople a serious good time.

"I firmly believe that whatever you want to do you should be allowed to do."

And a lot of the reason was the omnipotent Guy Stevens. "Guy was one of those unsung heroes. He was responsible for a lot of things, but you couldn't put a name on |t. He never 'produced' Mott The Hoople. I mean, we spent most of the time helping him; Mott basically produced themselves with a very clever man named Bill Price. Guy was kind of like a madman who'd stay in the studio and generate all this chaos. Guy was responsible for an album like Mad Shadows, crazy kind of album that wouldn't do much across the boards at all but was great fun to make, and in retrospect, is a pretty good record.

"He did London Calling the same way, he'd leap about and pull clocks off the walls, wreck the equipment and..." There's a million Stevens stories, this is one of them: "We had a fire one night, and I remember I had to ring up Chris Blackwell and tell him. Chris asked 'Is it the console room or the studio. Was it totally necessary?' Ves. 'Well fine. There was chairs all piled up clocks, all the things upstairs on Baisley Street. He did the same with Bad Company and he did the same with the Clash—and usually you had to kick him out to get any work done. I mean when Island made their London offices bigger he broke in and wrecked them. Blackwell put up with a lot from him.

"Guy had this strange charisma. He found the names Procol Harum and Mott The Hoople and put those bands together. And though he was pretty shrewd—I was getting nothing and Guy was getting it all from the Hoople, but we weren't making any money—he never really had a buck."

It took David Bowie producing and writing the hit title track from their fifth LP, All The Young Dudes, for the band, and the follow-up Mott— after which Mick Ralphs went off to form Bad Company. After a foray with Luther "Ariel Bender" Grosvenor, Mick Ronson—Bowie's Spiders From Mars guitarist—was brought in to replace the other Mick, until Ian left the band in late '74.

He emmigrated to the States, "London was a very gray area," Ian deadpans, "the Romans left, you know." And then, seriously: "No, it was when I came back from an American tour. I felt very alive, very bright, and people were trying to pull me down again." He'd also received the first big check of his life, and was damned if he'd let the British government swallow 89 percent of it.

"When I got the check I nearly died. I hadn't realized we were making money, and I didn't quite know what to do with it." He chuckles, "I didn't see why I should give it all back, especially since they were pissing it on the wall at the time." Ian has no abiding love for his old home. "The people are considered to be total idiots by the government. Just the same as always for that country. Racism of all kinds, including class-ism: it's seeped in it, it's a sick country. At least America's bigger, you can get lost, you can make a buck. I firmly believe that whatever you want to do you should be allowed to do, England doesn't believe in that, and thus a lot of brains—I don't mean dumb rockers, I mean brains— have left that country over the last 20 years. If you've got any brains you know what's going on."

Ian took the first Atlantic crossing available straight into a New Jersey hospital, suffering from exhaustion. A bit of a break, as it happens—since he was being sued by just about everybody after backing out of a soldout Mott The Hoople tour of Europe. The hospital gave a letter informing the promoters that Ian wasn't well enough to perform. End of court case. A week after he quit, so did Ronson, who joined him Stateside. "I was still dodgy but I felt we should be doing something," says Ian, stretching his long, lean legs and taking another of my cigarettes. "Ronson suggested a record but we didn't have any songs to make a record with. Then we said 'fuck it, let's get ^ into a studio and see what happens.' And j we did." They recorded the fine Ian Hunter, after which Ronson left to play on Dylan's § awful Rolling Thunder Tour. Ian then -^recorded the highly political, highly ignored, highly underrated All American Alien Boy, and started on a solo career which has only started to get interesting with his current album, All Of The Good Ones Are Taken.

Somewhere in between that punk happened. "I'd seen it coming," Ian brashly ad^ mits with either foresight or hindsight. "We'd have long discussions with Lester Bangs, who worked on your paper at that time. It was obvious. There was a song on the Hoople album called 'The Clash Street Kids Are Coming.' They had to, something had to happen because the country was buggered. The Pistols had it down. I never figured how you could scream and shout at that country without them saying 'Fuck you and your records, we ain't buying them.' The Pistols somehow managed to, and that's just how we felt: we felt like what they did; they went right out on a limb and it worked.

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"We said it in a much politer way. We were saying it, but we were saying it a bit before it hit the roof, being slightly more subtle about it. I knew bands were coming that would be doing a lot of reggae because in England at the time the second and third generation West Indians were growing up with the white kids. It was bound to rub off."

And of course big Hoople fan Mick Jones produced Ian's nondescript '81 LP, Short Back And Sides. "It's funny, you know, I didn't have much to do with that last one. You see, my wife"—his second wife actually—"was having her first baby and for some weird reason I thought she was going to have trouble with the kid. There was no reason for me to think that, other than the fact that I was thinking it. She had him, perfectly normally, just after the record was finished, but during the recording I was only half there.

"I liked it, really, it's just that...Normally I'm real punchy on a record and I fight, but I didn't fight. Mick Jones is very strong, and I just let it slide when you get down to it."

The new LP, All Of The Good Ones Are Taken, is a pleasant surprise. Ian thinks it's a Mott The Hoople-type record, and I'd have to go along with that. Mick Ronson only appears on one track—"to show there's no hard feelings but this time it's going to be me," he says. The band sounds fresh, and if my enjoyment is partly nostalgic, it's still mostly honest. The title track is the closest Ian's got to a hit single since the '75; "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" (and the video, a take-off of the flick Arthur should help); "Fun" is about not having any, which makes it with a great Bowie yodel halfway thorough; "Death And Glory Boys," with its mock classical leanings, is an horrendous mess (but we're all allowed one fuck up); "Speechless" is infectious rockin'; and "Something Going On" a primo, knees-up rock out. It's no masterpiece as a whole, but it ain't half bad. "I'm pleased to hear that," sez Ian, "I didn't think CREEM liked my work anymore." I don't think CREEM has a blanket policy about anybody they cover.

And yes, back to "Death And Glory Boys." It's about The Empire Strikes Back. Not the movie, the Falklands war—which many young men lost, and only Margaret Thatcher and every other English musician from Costello to Crass to the Clash (you mean you haven't heard the Clash opus? Wait for the album.), won. Ian's version is dreadful but his motives are sincere. "It's a joke to send kids out. They're halfway across the ocean before they realize it's not fun and games. And then they can't go back. They're babies, and those old bastards get babies to go out and do their dirty work for them because they're the only age group that would. I'm not political, but I don't like stupidity. I'm old enough to have an 18-year-old son, and no way would I let him go. I'd hide him in the cellar, out in the woods—not unless it was for real. That's not right, sending kids out on rubbish like that, that's bullshit."

There's a lot of bullshit around. Ian tells of going to a radio station ("something affiliated with Rolling Stone") to play his 14 favorite songs. They told him which songs to choose and "when you've finished, say who you are, what you're doing, repeat the names of three songs you've just played in reverse and go to a commercial." They wouldn't play Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, or Eddie Cochran. Ian walked out. The previous week the Go-Go's didn't— but the only way they could get the station to play Smokey Robinson's "Going To AGoGo" was if they played half of the Stones vastly inferior live version.

Since Ian has been in the biz so long, my follow up question is regarding the Big Six Record Companies. "I find them very easy to work with, and I don't agree with a lot of the criticism they come in for. It's a fallacy within a magazine like CREEM to knock them. People think their tapes aren't heard but they are, they make their money out of the Men At Works, not the Paul McCartneys. I've never been forced into giving them an album in my life; they've wanted it, but they've never come down, thrust a contract in my face, and said 'deliver.'

"As far as the music goes, they've advised from time to time—and from time to time I've found them to be right. I'm being honest, and with the same honesty I'd apply to saying things that might be convenient for CREEM, I'll apply to things that aren't so convenient for CREEM." Very strange ideas our Ian has about the workings of a magazine named one of the all time faves in The Valley Girl Handbook.

I call the conversation over and out after about an hour ("I prefer longer interviews because I tend to ramble," sez Ian) with the information that a tour is being set up and a movie performance a strong possibility. After my record's shut down for the say, we begin to discuss politics, in which he shows a lively interest. Ian walks me to the door— not of the conference room, of the offices— a very polite thing to do. I whistle "Some Of The Good Ones Are Still Kicking,"— oops, wrong name, "All Of The Good Ones Are Taken"—all of the way home. Could be a hit, you know.