It started when I had to review The High Strung for Current magazine. They had a great semi-glammy sound that I loved, and the lead singer’s voice was so familiar that I thought he’d been knocking off someone that I remembered but couldn’t quite place.

So, I picked up a copy of Mott, the sixth (?!) album by Mott the Hoople, sort of at random. It was what the record store had, y’know? And much as I love Cousins, sometimes I’m impatient and want to have an album right then.

The High Strung singer didn’t sync up, so I guess it was a wasted experiment for research (I guess I won’t be able to write that off on my taxes this year), but I fell in love with the album.

First off, it’s big. It’s hard to remember (though T. Rex is a better reminder than Mott) that at one point, boogie and backing singers didn’t sound cheesy. You could have saxophones in rock and roll, and they fit instead of feeling affected. The arrangments add such a sense of power behind these pop suites that it’s a shame similar tricks from Sufjan Stevens just leave me feeling underwhelmed and tweed off.

Second off, and this is harder to quantify, Mott does an amazing job of putting out a meta-rock album. The lyrical leidmotif is rock and roll itself (a losers’ game), and that’s a hard thing to pull off. Think of the Ashlee Simpson treatises on the perils of fame or the fey complaints of Lindsay Lohan about paparazzi for examples of how not to be sympathetic while complaining about your fame. That this has become de riguer for a certain subset of pop divas has only served to make it harder to recommend Mott sincerely, even though that’s what I’m trying to do. The seperation point is that Mott makes a love of rock seem like the tragic flaw of an Oedipus or Antigone, something that pushes you forward even as you know that it will ruin you. Weariness, dissatisfaction, resignation… all right after the breakthrough success of “All the Young Dudes”? Yeah, but from the giddyup there’s that reverence for, say, the rock roots of Memphis or swamp boogie (in Honaloochie, which I assume is an invented bayou).

Even the songs that depart from the overall theme are fucking killer, totally justifying the traditional line about Mott being bastard sons of Bowie and Dylan (the amazing “I Wish I Was Your Mother” has the genius instrumentation that Dylan never mastered, and the lyrical bite that Bowie couldn’t manage). “I’m a Cadillac” has the clipped fun of Warren Zevon, again with bigger and better production than anything I’ve ever heard from him (but I think Zevon’s my next listening project).
Now, granted, I haven’t been able to convince my girlfriend or my father, who form my primary music listening community. My dad has dismissed Mott as my rehashing his hash adventuures, arguing that it’s no good without the drugs (I’ve listened both sober and stoned, and I think it’s great either way). My girlfriend hates Ian Hunter’s voice, clearly a sign of her irrational tastes, but I hope that playing the album softly around the house will weaken her resolve.

It had better, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop playing it.