{"id":41456,"date":"2009-04-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/all-american-alien-boy\/"},"modified":"2009-04-14T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-14T00:00:00","slug":"all-american-alien-boy","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/all-american-alien-boy\/","title":{"rendered":"All American Alien Boy"},"content":{"rendered":"

This one begins with a memory: my first music review.\u00a0 Well, sort of \u2013 I was coming out of a record store in San Rafael<\/st1:place><\/st1:city> in 1977 when the Marin Independent Journal<\/i>\u2019s question man stuck a camera in my face and asked me \u201cWhat\u2019s the last record album you bought?\u201d\u00a0 I said \u201cAn Ian Hunter album called All American Alien Boy<\/i>.\u201c \u00a0Then he asked me what I thought of it and I said \u201cIt was all right, just not as good as I thought it was going to be.\u201d\u00a0 (And yes, I still have the clip\u2026)<\/p>\n

Thirty years later that assessment — all right, but not as good as I\u2019d thought it would be — holds up pretty well, but let\u2019s see if we can\u2019t expand on it a bit\u2026<\/p>\n

Ian Hunter\u2019s self-titled 1975 solo debut took the critics by storm as his alliance with former David Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson produced one of the \u201970s\u2019 great rock and roll records.\u00a0 And yet\u2026 within a year he and Ronson — once rumored to have been a leading candidate to replace Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones — had split and Hunter had left England for good for a new life and new album in New York.<\/p>\n

The details of the split — which apparently had much more to do with their respective managers than with the two principals — aren\u2019t as important as the after-effects. For while All American Alien Boy<\/i> has flashes of brilliance, Hunter misses Ronson — the best foil he ever had, he\u2019s said so himself — terribly.\u00a0 Convening a band of session players in New York<\/st1:place><\/st1:state>, Hunter produced an album that\u2019s largely missing the passion and enthusiasm of his debut.<\/p>\n

In place of the drive and energy that fired Ian Hunter<\/i>, we instead find Hunter indulging in rather maudlin mid-tempo fare such as \u201cLetter To Brittania From The Union Jack,\u201d \u201cRape\u201d and the too-aptly-named \u201cApathy 83.\u201d \u00a0The band — Chris Stainton on keys, Jaco Pastorius on bass and Aynsley Dunbar on drums — has talent aplenty, but the songs the man in charge has delivered for them to play just aren\u2019t up to his usual standards.\u00a0 Even the witty title track goes on far too long with its explication of Hunter\u2019s \u201cstranger in a strange land\u201d introduction to life in America<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region><\/p>\n

Hunter is nothing if not a craftsman, so naturally some of the tracks transcend the lesser material.\u00a0 \u201cRestless Youth\u201d offers a pleasant throwback to Hunter\u2019s Mott The Hoople days with its anthemic guitar thump and snotty vocals, even if it feels drier than it should.\u00a0 The otherwise unremarkable \u201cYou Nearly Did Me In\u201d benefits from David Sanborn\u2019s snappy sax accents and the fun of Freddie Mercury, Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen sitting in on background vocals.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

But really, there are only two tracks of genuine note on this entire album.\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t you know it, they\u2019re both — to borrow a bit of the vernacular — bloody masterpieces.<\/p>\n

\u201cIrene Wilde,\u201d Hunter\u2019s iconic coming-of-age ballad, is perhaps even more impressive on 1980\u2019s live album Welcome To The Club<\/i>, but it\u2019s still an amazing piece of work here in its original studio incarnation.\u00a0 The saga of the best humiliating turndown he ever experienced \u2013 the one that set him on the road to songwriting and performing — Hunter\u2019s narrative retains richness and immediacy while also being leavened by the wisdom perspective brings.\u00a0 \u201cIn my mother\u2019s living room, I composed so many tunes \/ All the same, just a frame, for her name, and just to say \/ Gonna be somebody, someday.\u201d\u00a0 Yeah\u2026<\/p>\n

Masterpiece number two comes along in a highly unlikely form for a fellow with Hunter\u2019s admittedly overblown reputation as a rock and roll hooligan.\u00a0\u00a0 Always a huge Dylan fan, Hunter offers up another winning homage with the smart, witty and surprisingly moving spiritual rumination \u201cGod (Take 1),\u201d which also features one of the great first lines and first verses in the history of rock: \u201cGod said to me, gonna kick your ass \/ \u2018Cause all you do is ask, ask, ask \/ All that energy looking for me \/ When I\u2019m sitting here inside you, plain to see.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the rest of the disc lived up to the quality of these two tracks, it would be a no-brainer \u201cA.\u201d\u00a0 As it is, All American Alien Boy<\/i> was indeed \u201cnot as good as I thought it would be,\u201d and in retrospect merely the first of two stepping-stones between Ian Hunter\u2019s initial solo triumph and the next stage of his restless post-Mott career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5920],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-41456","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-ian-hunter","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41456"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}