The 1970s were so jam-packed with outstanding live albums — and the bulk of this album was recorded in November 1979, even if it wasn\u2019t issued until 1980 — that sometimes great ones still get lost in the historical shuffle.\u00a0 Let\u2019s see if we can\u2019t correct that, shall we?<\/p>\n
Welcome To The Club<\/i> — at least the core of it — represents one of the many apexes of Ian Hunter\u2019s musical career.\u00a0 After climbing out of the smoking wreckage of Mott The Hoople, he\u2019d trudged off to make a stellar solo debut album with musical brother-in-arms, guitarist and arranger Mick Ronson, only to see their alliance splinter amidst conflicting management and label commitments.\u00a0 Hunter made two more successively less impressive solo discs on his own before reuniting with Ronson for 1979\u2019s brilliant, best-selling You\u2019re Never Alone With A Schizophrenic<\/i>.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
This set was recorded at the tail end of the Schizophrenic<\/i> tour and documents \u201cThe Ian Hunter Band featuring Mick Ronson\u201d — as the announcer introduces them at the kick-off \u2013 at the absolute height of their musical powers.\u00a0 Hunter is the face and voice and primary songwriter of the group, but Ronson is nonetheless its musical engine.<\/p>\n
At this point in Hunter\u2019s career, his solo output consisted of four albums — one of which (Overnight Angels<\/i>) he himself all but disawoved — versus the seven LPs he completed as frontman for Mott The Hoople, the band Ronson joined just in time for it all to fall apart.\u00a0 Thus it\u2019s not that surprising to discover the live setlist here actually features more Mott cuts (seven) than Hunter solo tracks (six).\u00a0 There are also a pair of instrumental Ronson featurettes bookending the show — the driving opening jam \u201cF.B.I.,\u201d which harks back to Mott\u2019s habit of opening with their instrumental version of The Kinks\u2019 \u201cYou Really Got Me,\u201d and the pretty closer \u201cSlaughter On Tenth Avenue,\u201d the title track from Ronson\u2019s 1974 solo album.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
In between, you get one what sounds like one of the great rock and roll shows of the era.<\/p>\n
As \u201cF.B.I.\u201d crescendos and finishes, they dive right into the strummed, tension-building riff that opens \u201cOnce Bitten Twice Shy,\u201d with the crowd clapping along hard and loud as the song builds through the first verse and chorus — sung solo over the spare, taut accompaniment of just Ronson and drummer Eric Parker \u2013 until at the start of the second verse the entire seven-piece band kicks in full force and slams the crowd against the back wall.\u00a0 Yeah!<\/p>\n
The momentum grows from there like a snowball rolling downhill as the band plows into the harp-and-organ\/Dylan-on-\u2018roids Mott classic \u201cAngeline\u201d — and then, from Mott\u2019s debut album, their brilliant reimagining of Sonny Bono\u2019s \u201cLaugh At Me\u201d \u2013 and then the thundering Mott anthem \u201cAll The Way From Memphis.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fourth Mott cut in a row, the shimmering ballad \u201cI Wish I Was Your Mother,\u201d calms the crowd down some, but not enough to keep them from screaming all over the next cut, the group\u2019s otherwise gorgeous rendering of the best song from Hunter\u2019s second *or* third solo albums, the autobiographical coming-of-age ballad \u201cIrene Wilde.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then we\u2019re into the Schizophrenic<\/i> material, as the band delivers the sing-along-worthy \u201cJust Another Night\u201d to roaring response and follows with a delirious rendition of \u201cCleveland Rocks.\u201d\u00a0 You can almost feel the Roxy\u2019s walls shaking as Hunter leads the crowd through a succession of city names, chanting \u201c Next up, \u201cStandin\u2019 In My Light\u201d and \u201cBastard\u201d are decent album cuts from Schizo<\/i>, followed by what appear to have been the encores \u2013 a storming medley of the Mott anthems \u201cWalkin\u2019 With A Mountain\u201d and \u201cRock\u2019n\u2019Roll Queen,\u201d followed by the obligatory nod to Mott patron David Bowie, \u201cAll The Young Dudes.\u201d<\/p>\n But wait, there\u2019s more!<\/p>\n The original vinyl release of this album included three sides of live cuts drawn from the band\u2019s November 1979 seven-night stand at the Roxy in LA, plus a fourth side featuring four new songs intended to fill out the double-LP format.\u00a0 The 1994 CD release adds four rare or unreleased live cuts taken from the same shows, including two Mott cuts (appropriately raucous readings of \u201cOne Of The Boys\u201d and \u201cThe Golden Age Of Rock\u2019N\u2019Roll\u201d) and two solo entries (the rather plodding \u201cWhen The Daylight Comes\u201d and an odd edited-together medley of \u201cOnce Bitten Twice Shy,\u201d \u201cBastard\u201d and \u201cCleveland Rocks\u201d that was created for a B-side).<\/p>\n The closing quartet remain — as they were on the original release — the four new tracks, three of them recorded live in the studio over the course of two days in January 1980 in order to finish off the LP release.\u00a0 In his characteristically frank liner notes for the CD release, Hunter cops to these four new tracks\u2019 unevenness and admits he was stuck for new material at the time.<\/p>\n The lack of cohesion in the latter half of this literally stitched-together collection does muck things up a bit, but the core of this album — the first fourteen live tracks, the original sides one through three of the double LP — are so strong that the obvious flaws present in the rest of the collection are easily forgiven.\u00a0 The historical significance of this album is acute as well when you consider this is the only substantial documentary evidence of what a Hunter-Ronson-led Mott The Hoople might have sounded like.\u00a0 The answer?\u00a0 Explosive as a ten-megaton warhead — and a lot more fun. <\/p>\n Warts and all, Welcome To The Club<\/i> is a more-than-worthy addition to any collection of classic \u201970s live albums, and the most complete live document of one of the most potent musical partnerships of the rock and roll era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5920],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-41459","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-ian-hunter","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41459","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=41459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41459"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}