All The Old Dudes

When I wrote something about the deaths of Brian Wilson and Sly Stone a couple of weeks ago, I began by saying I didn't want to get into the habit of posting every time some significant performer or artist died because there are just too damn many of them. It's an unfortunate artifact of decade after decade of pop culture, a snowball rolling down the hill that's never going to stop.

I went on to say that I'd try to stick to "marking the departure of people, the news of whose death has some more than usual personal resonance for me" and I do hope to stick to that, which is why I'm writing this post. Either that or because I've got a half-decent anecdote. Could be both.

Almost the first thing I read this morning, when I started to go through my entertainment news feeds, was that Mick Ralphs had died. The news did not create a strong reaction. My first thought was a very mildly nostalgic "Aww... Mick Ralphs died...", immediately followed by "I didn't know he was still alive." Not exactly visceral.

As I read the report on Stereogum, it became apparent why I hadn't heard anything about Mick in a while. He had a major stroke almost a decade ago and hadn't been active since. He was "bedridden", in Stereogum's curiously Victorian phrase, until his death at the age of 81. 

Mick Ralphs doesn't have the name recognition of superstars like Brian Wilson or Sly Stone but he was a founder-member of one of those bands who had their fifteen minutes as "The Biggest Band in The World". That was back in 1974, when Bad Company's first album went quintuple platinum. I am very much not remembering Mick today because of that. I didn't like Bad Company then and they certainly haven't gotten any better with the benefit of time, for all that this year will see their induction into the Rock Hall of Fame.

My affection for Ralphs rests wholly on the work he did before then, when he was lead guitarist and co-songwriter with Mott the Hoople. At one time, when I was in my mid-adolescence, Mott were close to being my favorite band. Never quite, but always close.

As the obituaries are explaining today, Mick was with Mott long before they settled on their idiosyncratic name. Mind you, the one they started with wasn't much better. I knew they were called "Silence" before they were called Mott but until today I didn't know they started out as "The Doc Thomas Group". Clearly this was in the days before focus-group marketing.

Whatever they were calling themselves, like most people, I only became aware of  their existence when longtime fan David Bowie chose to sprinkle a little of his glitter dust over them in the form of All The Young Dudes and production duties on the album of the same name. That was in 1972, when I would have been about fourteen and just emerging from my thankfully brief heavy metal and prog rock phase into the sunlit uplands of art rock and New York sleaze.

I was also entering my cultural hunter-gatherer phase, something I have yet to grow out of more than half a century later. Back in the early seventies the pop culture slag heap was nothing like the environmental hazard to young minds it is today but it was still pretty damn huge and I spent most of my free time picking at it like a half-starved crow. 

Having latched onto Mott thanks to one very catchy single, I proceeded to chase down just about everything they'd done, which was a lot. They'd released four largely unsuccessful albums and were on the verge of breaking up when Bowie tossed them a lifeline. 

Mick Ralphs plays at least some guitar on every Mott album, even the one released after he left the band, but for the first half-dozen (Out of seven.) he's the keystone of the group. Ian Hunter, recruited in 1969, almost immediately became the face and de facto leader of the band but Ralphs was always the heart, which was why, almost as soon as he left, the heart went out of the band and they called it quits.

Or so it seemed from a fan's perspective, anyway. There's a lot of reportage and personal testimony from the insider point of view that suggests a much more complex narrative but I was a fan so I'll have it my way. 

I can remember being pretty gutted when Mick left Mott, not least because at that time I hadn't yet managed to see them live and now my chance at the classic line-up was gone. Also, by then I'd bought and listened to most of the back catalogue and it was pretty clear that, while Hunter was a great rock lyricist, Mick had the best tunes.

Or so I thought at the time, although it's an analysis largely unsupported by the evidence. My favorite Mott album has always been Wildlife, their third and the one with the strongest country/folk feel. It's drenched with Ralphs' unmistakable, ringing, lyrical lead guitar and that always led me to think of it as an album filled with his compositions. 

In fact, he wrote four tracks, Hunter three, and the rest is covers (Including their version of Melanie's Lay Down, which suggests another reason why I found her death so affecting a while back.) What's more, the tracks I like best on Wildlife (Waterlow, Angel of Eighth Avenue) turn out, on investigation, to be Hunter's, whereas Mick's contributions, particularly the opener, Whisky Women, can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, to prefigure his much more commercially successful, yet much less aesthetically pleasing, work with Bad Company. 

All of which was just the kind of thing I filled my head with when I was in my teens. Lucky for me the internet wasn't around back then or I'd probably never have gotten out of the house.

As it was, I got out a lot and mostly what I got out to do was go to gigs. I saw a lot of bands in the seventies and eighties, some of them many times, but sadly I only got to see Mott the Hoople once and that was after Mick Ralphs had left. They'd just released what was destined to be their last album, the follow-up to their most commercially successful, Mott. They chose to call it "The Hoople". No, it didn't seem like a great idea then, either.

When it came time to tour the new album, Mick was off forming his supergroup Bad Company with Paul Rogers, Simon Kirke at al and Mott were stuck with the job of replacing him. As other bands have proved, successfully replacing even a key founding member is not an impossible task but Mott really fluffed it by bringing in Aerial Bender. 

As you may have guessed, Aerial Bender was not the name he was given by his parents, who knew him as Luther Grosvenor, which was also what he was called when he played guitar in the not very well-remembered rock group Spooky Tooth. Weirdly, Mick Ralphs was indirectly responsible for Grosvenor's name change. 

The scarcely-believable story, which also involves diminutive singer-songwriter Lynsey de Paul, involves Ralphs walking down a street in Germany, bending the aerials on a series of parked cars for reasons unknown. Apparently Lynsey, who was there with the band following a German TV appearance, used the phrase "aerial bender" about the incident in Ian Hunter's hearing and for some inconceivable reason he remembered it and later offered it to Grosvenor, who needed to work with Mott under a name other than his own for contractual reasons.

For even more inconceivably, Grosvenor accepted the suggestion and that's what he called himself for quite a while, even after his short stint with Mott was over. He was still with them when I finally got to see them, though, and let's just say he wasn't very good. Maybe it was an off night.

I was exceptionally unlucky to catch Mott in this short window of mis-opportunity. Immediately after Bender departed, he was briefly replaced by Mick Ronson so I missed the chance to see two of the best guitarists of their generation live. Except I didn't.

When Mott broke up soon after Ronson joined them, he and Ian Hunter formed the Hunter-Ronson Band, who I saw play live on their first UK tour. They were excellent. A lot better than the dying Mott had been, except for one moment in that gig - the encore.

In a scene that later came to feel like an eerie pre-echo of one in Spinal Tap, after a not very impressive showing from Aerial Bender, an assessment of their performance I remember being obvious from the stage if not from the audience, Ian Hunter came to the mic to announce a very special guest for the encore: Mick Ralphs. The audience's inevitable reaction must have been very uncomfortable for the great man's stand-in.

So I did get to see the classic line-up or something closely approximating it at least, if only for a couple of songs. Sadly, the brief appearance did not lead to a Tufnel/St Hubbins style reunion for the band. Mick went back to Bad Company and the immense commercial success it brought him, while Ian Hunter left Mott to carry on pretty much as before, only without the hits. The rest of Mott struggled on for a while without either of them then called it a day until the inevitable re-union bandwagon brought various combinations back together again in the new century.

By all accounts, Mick Ralphs was a jolly nice chap who played guitar really, really well. He also wrote some good songs. He had a good voice too, when he chose to use it. He made it big as a rock star without ever being anything like a rock star but I don't think I'd be writing about him now, all these years later, if it wasn't for the work he did with Mott in those five years at the start of the seventies. 

And especially if it wasn't for those few minutes at the end of one gig, when his unexpected appearance really did make me feel like the roof of the venue had opened up and the sun was shining down on me in a great ray of light from heaven. 

For that moment, Mick, many thanks and rest easy.