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Hoople Greatest Hits
To download this album via iTunes, click here: 
To buy this album from Amazon.com, click here: Greatest Hits
__________________________________________________
Mott The Hoople
Greatest Hits
Columbia/Legacy
CK 61575
__________________________________________________
1. ALL THE WAY FROM MEMPHIS (3:25)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded and mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 2, March 1973.
(P) 1973.
2. HONALOOCHIE BOOGIE (2:43)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded by Alan Harris. Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 1, February 1973. (P) 1973.
3. HYMN FOR THE DUDES (5:23)
(I. Hunter –V. Allen)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded and mixed by Alan Harris in Air London Studio No. 2, March 1973.
(P) 1973.
4. BORN LATE ‘58 (3:59)
(P. Watts)
Produced by Ian Hunter, Overend Watts, and Dale Griffin
Recorded by Alan Harris and Mike Dunne in Advision Studios.
Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 2, January/February 1974.
(P) 1974.
5. ALL THE YOUNG DUDES (3:33)
(D. Bowie)
Produced by David Bowie
Recorded and mixed by Keith Harwood at Olympic No. 2 Studio, May 1972.
(P) 1972.
6. ROLL AWAY THE STONE (3:13)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded by Alan Harris. Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 1, May/June 1973. (P) 1973.
7. BALLAD OF MOTT (5:23)
(I. Hunter–P. Watts–M. Ralphs–T. Griffin–V. Allen)
(MARCH 26TH, 1972 ZURICH)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded by Alan Harris.
Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 1, February 1973.
(P) 1973.
8. GOLDEN AGE OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL (3:26)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Ian Hunter, Overend Watts, and Dale Griffin
Recorded by Alan Harris and Mike Dunne in Advision Studios.
Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 2, January/February 1974. (P) 1974.
9. FOXY FOXY (3:31)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Ian Hunter, Overend Watts, and Dale Griffin
Recorded by Alan Harris in Advision Studios.
Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 2, January/February 1974.
(P) 1974.
10. SATURDAY GIGS (4:20)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 2, August/September 1974. (P) 1974.
Bonus Tracks
11. SWEET JANE (4:22)
(L. Reed)
Produced by David Bowie
Recorded at Olympic Studios and Trident Studios.
Engineers: Ted Sharp with Keith Harwood and David Hentschel. (P) 1972.
12. ONE OF THE BOYS (2:50)
(I. Hunter–M. Ralphs)
Produced by David Bowie
Recorded at Olympic Studios and Trident Studios.
Engineers: Ted Sharp with Keith Harwood and David Hentschel. (P) 1972.
__________________________________________________
Produced for Compact Disc by Bob Irwin
Mastered by Vic Anesini at Sony Music Studios, New York
Legacy A&R: Steve Berkowitz
A&R Coordination: Patti Matheny & Darren Salmieri
Art Direction: Howard Fritzson
Design: Lisa Sparagano
Photography: front cover: Norman Seeff (from original LP); page 3: J. Stevens/Globe Photos; page 4 & spine sheet: NBC/Globe Photos; page 7: Chuck Pulin/Starfile
Packaging Manager: Fong Y. Lee
__________________________________________________
Mixing equal parts glitter and guts, Mott The Hoople were one of the few British glam-rock bands to find a sizeable American audience. Led by singer Ian Hunter, the group had more than enough rock & roll swagger to transcend labels and produce a body of work that stands tall alongside contemporaries like Lou Reed, T. Rex and David Bowie. It was Bowie’s own composition “All The Young Dudes” that provided both Mott and the glam-rock genre with its quintessential song. Greatest Hits, now remastered and expanded with bonus tracks, captures all the band’s FM radio staples.
This package consists of previously released material.
Also Available:
CK 31750 – All The Young Dudes
CK 32425 – Mott
CK 32871 – The Hoople
CK 33282 – Live
CK 34368 – Greatest Hits
CK 65273 – Super Hits
C2K 46973 – The Ballad Of Mott
legacyrecordings.com/rockexperience
__________________________________________________
Thirty years on, the music of Mott The Hoople remains as unclassifiable as its name.
The name came from an obscure novel by Willard Manus, discovered on the shelf of a prison library in 1969 by wonderfully eccentric English record producer Guy Stevens, then enjoying Her Majesty’s hospitality as the result of a drug bust. Stevens was a rock & roll mad hatter who exhaled ideas and concepts and schemes as regularly as most people breathe.
One of his grander notions was that it might be a very exciting proposition indeed to have Bob Dylan fronting the Rolling Stones, or at least to have Dylan’s “Blonde On Blonde” instrumentation suffused with the energy of the Stones.
To that end, he paired the members of a promising band from Hereford, England called Silence – guitarist Mick Ralphs, bassist Pete “Overend” Watts, organist Verden Allen and drummer Dale “Buffin” Griffin – with a singer/pianist named Ian Hunter, with his perpetual shades and corkscrew curls, was the right man for the plan Stevens was hatching. Like so many good monsters, however, the creation he dubbed Mott The Hoople would eventually take on a life of its own.
The band’s all-out stage performances earned them a rabid following on the English touring circuit, but Guy Stevens was a better theoretician than a hands-on record producer, their live excitement was never successfully replicated on tape. Ian Hunter and Mick Ralphs both showed considerable songwriting flair, but neither had come up with the signature song that would establish the band as record-makers and take them to the next level. After four albums for Island Records that failed to catch a fire commercially, Mott The Hoople called it quits in early 1972, an occasion lamented by their fans but largely unnoticed by the rock & roll circus.
That’s where this story begins.
One of the fans who mourned Mott’s passing actually possessed the power to do something about it. David Bowie was then in the first flush of the glitter-rock superstardom conferred on him by his “character” Ziggy Stardust, and was using his newfound fame to lend a helping hand to some of his less fortunate heroes. Through his management company, MainMan, he was producing what would be the breakthrough album for Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed, and was attempting to do the same for Iggy Pop & the Stooges. He proposed writing and producing a record that would resurrect Mott The Hoople, but the band rejected his initial suggestion of “Suffragette City.” When the future Thin White Duke sat down with an acoustic guitar and played “All The Young Dudes,” however, the members of Mott knew they’d found the song they’d always been searching for.
It wasn’t that the record was a hit – it zoomed to #3 in the UK, and cracked the Top 40 in the US – or even that it became the glam anthem it was intended to be. The real revelation of “All The Young Dudes” occurred as the band watched Bowie operate in the studio. “He worked incredibly hard to get each and every piece of the record right,” Ian Hunter recalls. “We were amazed because we never knew you did all this. We’d always just walked in, tuned up and gone for it. We began, at long last, to understand how to use the studio.” The lesson would not be lost on Mott The Hoople.
The All The Young Dudes album, their first for Columbia Records, was the band’s best yet, featuring their distinctly British take on Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane,” and “One Of The Boys,” a Hunter/Ralphs composition that finally began to harness an appreciable measure of Mott’s live energies. Despite the success of the album, the band bridled at the perception that they were a Bowie creation. They left the MainMan stable, determined to rise or fall on their merits alone. Many questioned the wisdom, and certainly the timing, of this assertion of independence.
“There was enormous pressure,” Hunter acknowledges. “If we failed, we’d have been written off forever as one-hit wonders, with a hit we didn’t even write ourselves.” They didn’t fail. Despite the loss of organist Verden Allen, the band closed ranks and delivered Mott, the self-produced album that is regarded as their high water mark. “Honaloochie Boogie” and the self-mythologizing “All The Way From Memphis” became sizable UK hits and staples of American rock radio, while the de-mythologizing “Hymn For The Dudes” and especially “Ballad Of Mott” – with its famous line about rock & roll being a “loser’s game” – showed the artistic maturity and self-confidence they’d finally acquired after years of struggle.
Sadly, it was not to last. Mick Ralphs quit to form Bad Company with Paul Rogers (where his riff from “One Of The Boys” was recast as their breakthrough hit “Can’t Get Enough”). The band enlisted former Spooky Tooth lead guitarist Luther Grosvenor, whom they renamed Ariel Bender. Morgan Fisher joined on keys when Hunter shifted to rhythm guitar. This lineup soldiered on admirably through a studio album (The Hoople) and live package, opened up Broadway to rock & roll in 1974, and gave us the superb singles “Roll Away The Stone,” “The Golden Age Of Rock N’ Roll,” the Spector-inspired “Foxy Foxy,” and sturdy rock vehicles like Overend Watts’ “Born Late ‘58.”
Still, there was no denying that something crucial had been lost with Ralph’s departure. The arrival of former Bowie guitar foil Mick Ronson at the end of 1974 gave momentary hope that the band would reanimate itself one more time. But the often grueling six year snakes ‘n’ ladders slog had taken a spiritual toll that was not always apparent to the public, and the group succumbed to its internal injuries. “Saturday Gigs,” recorded with Ronson as a summing-up of the band’s career to that point and meant to mark another new beginning, instead became Mott The Hoople’s epitaph.
It does not diminish their hard-earned triumphs to admit that Mott never really broke through all the way. Even at their peaks, they were somehow a heartbeat out of step with their surroundings. When Hunter wrote that “rock & roll was a loser’s game,” he meant that it was a refuge for misfits and outsiders. A bit of that other-ness always clung to Mott The Hoople, and if this occasionally kept them from receiving all that was rightfully theirs, in the larger view it becomes their abiding strength. It provided Ian Hunter with enough distance to write his brutally insightful commentaries on the rock & roll madness they found themselves in the midst of, and gave the band enough breathing room to never be anything less than honest. The music of Mott The Hoople, unclassifiable and always a little out of step with its time, has become timeless, an inspiration to each succeeding generation of rock & roll outsiders.
– Ben Edmonds
(Ian Hunter interviewed by Jaan Uhelszki)
__________________________________________________
What are you going to listen to next?
For a complete listing of titles from Legacy recordings, please visit us at:
legacyrecordings.com
sonymusic.com
© 2003 Sony Music Entertainment Inc./ (P) 1972, 1973, 1974, 2003 Sony Music Entertainment Inc./Manufactured by Columbia Records/550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211/”Columbia,” “Legacy” and L Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Marca Registrada./”Rock Experience” and design Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Marca Registrada./WARNING: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.
Columbia/Legacy
CK 61575
To buy this album from Amazon.com, click here: Greatest Hits
__________________________________________________
Mott The Hoople
Greatest Hits
Columbia/Legacy
CK 61575
__________________________________________________
1. ALL THE WAY FROM MEMPHIS (3:25)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded and mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 2, March 1973.
(P) 1973.
2. HONALOOCHIE BOOGIE (2:43)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded by Alan Harris. Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 1, February 1973. (P) 1973.
3. HYMN FOR THE DUDES (5:23)
(I. Hunter –V. Allen)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded and mixed by Alan Harris in Air London Studio No. 2, March 1973.
(P) 1973.
4. BORN LATE ‘58 (3:59)
(P. Watts)
Produced by Ian Hunter, Overend Watts, and Dale Griffin
Recorded by Alan Harris and Mike Dunne in Advision Studios.
Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 2, January/February 1974.
(P) 1974.
5. ALL THE YOUNG DUDES (3:33)
(D. Bowie)
Produced by David Bowie
Recorded and mixed by Keith Harwood at Olympic No. 2 Studio, May 1972.
(P) 1972.
6. ROLL AWAY THE STONE (3:13)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded by Alan Harris. Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 1, May/June 1973. (P) 1973.
7. BALLAD OF MOTT (5:23)
(I. Hunter–P. Watts–M. Ralphs–T. Griffin–V. Allen)
(MARCH 26TH, 1972 ZURICH)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded by Alan Harris.
Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 1, February 1973.
(P) 1973.
8. GOLDEN AGE OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL (3:26)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Ian Hunter, Overend Watts, and Dale Griffin
Recorded by Alan Harris and Mike Dunne in Advision Studios.
Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 2, January/February 1974. (P) 1974.
9. FOXY FOXY (3:31)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Ian Hunter, Overend Watts, and Dale Griffin
Recorded by Alan Harris in Advision Studios.
Mixed by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 2, January/February 1974.
(P) 1974.
10. SATURDAY GIGS (4:20)
(I. Hunter)
Produced by Mott The Hoople
Recorded by Bill Price in Air London Studio No. 2, August/September 1974. (P) 1974.
Bonus Tracks
11. SWEET JANE (4:22)
(L. Reed)
Produced by David Bowie
Recorded at Olympic Studios and Trident Studios.
Engineers: Ted Sharp with Keith Harwood and David Hentschel. (P) 1972.
12. ONE OF THE BOYS (2:50)
(I. Hunter–M. Ralphs)
Produced by David Bowie
Recorded at Olympic Studios and Trident Studios.
Engineers: Ted Sharp with Keith Harwood and David Hentschel. (P) 1972.
__________________________________________________
Produced for Compact Disc by Bob Irwin
Mastered by Vic Anesini at Sony Music Studios, New York
Legacy A&R: Steve Berkowitz
A&R Coordination: Patti Matheny & Darren Salmieri
Art Direction: Howard Fritzson
Design: Lisa Sparagano
Photography: front cover: Norman Seeff (from original LP); page 3: J. Stevens/Globe Photos; page 4 & spine sheet: NBC/Globe Photos; page 7: Chuck Pulin/Starfile
Packaging Manager: Fong Y. Lee
__________________________________________________
Mixing equal parts glitter and guts, Mott The Hoople were one of the few British glam-rock bands to find a sizeable American audience. Led by singer Ian Hunter, the group had more than enough rock & roll swagger to transcend labels and produce a body of work that stands tall alongside contemporaries like Lou Reed, T. Rex and David Bowie. It was Bowie’s own composition “All The Young Dudes” that provided both Mott and the glam-rock genre with its quintessential song. Greatest Hits, now remastered and expanded with bonus tracks, captures all the band’s FM radio staples.
This package consists of previously released material.
Also Available:
CK 31750 – All The Young Dudes
CK 32425 – Mott
CK 32871 – The Hoople
CK 33282 – Live
CK 34368 – Greatest Hits
CK 65273 – Super Hits
C2K 46973 – The Ballad Of Mott
legacyrecordings.com/rockexperience
__________________________________________________
Thirty years on, the music of Mott The Hoople remains as unclassifiable as its name.
The name came from an obscure novel by Willard Manus, discovered on the shelf of a prison library in 1969 by wonderfully eccentric English record producer Guy Stevens, then enjoying Her Majesty’s hospitality as the result of a drug bust. Stevens was a rock & roll mad hatter who exhaled ideas and concepts and schemes as regularly as most people breathe.
One of his grander notions was that it might be a very exciting proposition indeed to have Bob Dylan fronting the Rolling Stones, or at least to have Dylan’s “Blonde On Blonde” instrumentation suffused with the energy of the Stones.
To that end, he paired the members of a promising band from Hereford, England called Silence – guitarist Mick Ralphs, bassist Pete “Overend” Watts, organist Verden Allen and drummer Dale “Buffin” Griffin – with a singer/pianist named Ian Hunter, with his perpetual shades and corkscrew curls, was the right man for the plan Stevens was hatching. Like so many good monsters, however, the creation he dubbed Mott The Hoople would eventually take on a life of its own.
The band’s all-out stage performances earned them a rabid following on the English touring circuit, but Guy Stevens was a better theoretician than a hands-on record producer, their live excitement was never successfully replicated on tape. Ian Hunter and Mick Ralphs both showed considerable songwriting flair, but neither had come up with the signature song that would establish the band as record-makers and take them to the next level. After four albums for Island Records that failed to catch a fire commercially, Mott The Hoople called it quits in early 1972, an occasion lamented by their fans but largely unnoticed by the rock & roll circus.
That’s where this story begins.
One of the fans who mourned Mott’s passing actually possessed the power to do something about it. David Bowie was then in the first flush of the glitter-rock superstardom conferred on him by his “character” Ziggy Stardust, and was using his newfound fame to lend a helping hand to some of his less fortunate heroes. Through his management company, MainMan, he was producing what would be the breakthrough album for Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed, and was attempting to do the same for Iggy Pop & the Stooges. He proposed writing and producing a record that would resurrect Mott The Hoople, but the band rejected his initial suggestion of “Suffragette City.” When the future Thin White Duke sat down with an acoustic guitar and played “All The Young Dudes,” however, the members of Mott knew they’d found the song they’d always been searching for.
It wasn’t that the record was a hit – it zoomed to #3 in the UK, and cracked the Top 40 in the US – or even that it became the glam anthem it was intended to be. The real revelation of “All The Young Dudes” occurred as the band watched Bowie operate in the studio. “He worked incredibly hard to get each and every piece of the record right,” Ian Hunter recalls. “We were amazed because we never knew you did all this. We’d always just walked in, tuned up and gone for it. We began, at long last, to understand how to use the studio.” The lesson would not be lost on Mott The Hoople.
The All The Young Dudes album, their first for Columbia Records, was the band’s best yet, featuring their distinctly British take on Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane,” and “One Of The Boys,” a Hunter/Ralphs composition that finally began to harness an appreciable measure of Mott’s live energies. Despite the success of the album, the band bridled at the perception that they were a Bowie creation. They left the MainMan stable, determined to rise or fall on their merits alone. Many questioned the wisdom, and certainly the timing, of this assertion of independence.
“There was enormous pressure,” Hunter acknowledges. “If we failed, we’d have been written off forever as one-hit wonders, with a hit we didn’t even write ourselves.” They didn’t fail. Despite the loss of organist Verden Allen, the band closed ranks and delivered Mott, the self-produced album that is regarded as their high water mark. “Honaloochie Boogie” and the self-mythologizing “All The Way From Memphis” became sizable UK hits and staples of American rock radio, while the de-mythologizing “Hymn For The Dudes” and especially “Ballad Of Mott” – with its famous line about rock & roll being a “loser’s game” – showed the artistic maturity and self-confidence they’d finally acquired after years of struggle.
Sadly, it was not to last. Mick Ralphs quit to form Bad Company with Paul Rogers (where his riff from “One Of The Boys” was recast as their breakthrough hit “Can’t Get Enough”). The band enlisted former Spooky Tooth lead guitarist Luther Grosvenor, whom they renamed Ariel Bender. Morgan Fisher joined on keys when Hunter shifted to rhythm guitar. This lineup soldiered on admirably through a studio album (The Hoople) and live package, opened up Broadway to rock & roll in 1974, and gave us the superb singles “Roll Away The Stone,” “The Golden Age Of Rock N’ Roll,” the Spector-inspired “Foxy Foxy,” and sturdy rock vehicles like Overend Watts’ “Born Late ‘58.”
Still, there was no denying that something crucial had been lost with Ralph’s departure. The arrival of former Bowie guitar foil Mick Ronson at the end of 1974 gave momentary hope that the band would reanimate itself one more time. But the often grueling six year snakes ‘n’ ladders slog had taken a spiritual toll that was not always apparent to the public, and the group succumbed to its internal injuries. “Saturday Gigs,” recorded with Ronson as a summing-up of the band’s career to that point and meant to mark another new beginning, instead became Mott The Hoople’s epitaph.
It does not diminish their hard-earned triumphs to admit that Mott never really broke through all the way. Even at their peaks, they were somehow a heartbeat out of step with their surroundings. When Hunter wrote that “rock & roll was a loser’s game,” he meant that it was a refuge for misfits and outsiders. A bit of that other-ness always clung to Mott The Hoople, and if this occasionally kept them from receiving all that was rightfully theirs, in the larger view it becomes their abiding strength. It provided Ian Hunter with enough distance to write his brutally insightful commentaries on the rock & roll madness they found themselves in the midst of, and gave the band enough breathing room to never be anything less than honest. The music of Mott The Hoople, unclassifiable and always a little out of step with its time, has become timeless, an inspiration to each succeeding generation of rock & roll outsiders.
– Ben Edmonds
(Ian Hunter interviewed by Jaan Uhelszki)
__________________________________________________
What are you going to listen to next?
For a complete listing of titles from Legacy recordings, please visit us at:
legacyrecordings.com
sonymusic.com
© 2003 Sony Music Entertainment Inc./ (P) 1972, 1973, 1974, 2003 Sony Music Entertainment Inc./Manufactured by Columbia Records/550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211/”Columbia,” “Legacy” and L Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Marca Registrada./”Rock Experience” and design Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Marca Registrada./WARNING: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.
Columbia/Legacy
CK 61575
