Ian Hunter seems to have reached that point in his life and career where he feels the need to talk to the listener directly: He begins his first solo album with a spoken "Hallo" and toward the close of the LP takes over from the music altogether to read what sounds like a late-night page from some haunted diary. All of this is not surprising, given Hunter's recent sudden departure from Mott the Hoople, a concurrent nervous breakdown, the formation of a partnership and new band with Mick Ronson and the highly confessional nature of many of his later Mott songs. "Sea Diver," "Hymn for the Dudes," "Ballad of Mott the Hoople" and the extraordinary "I Wish I Was Your Mother" are works so drenched in introspection and relative defeat that it is no wonder he has to talk about it.

From the start in 1969, Hunter apparently recognized his demons and pursued his recurrent themes of madness, loss of self, the ultimate cost of sex and rock & roll and the complex relationship between success and failure. In the first of his own recorded songs, the Bob Dylan-influenced "Backsliding Fearlessly," he sings, "I wait for the rebel's conventional ways/For he loses his mind while the devious stay," then asks: "If the world saluted you/What would you do/If you could be there? .../Would you still want me?" In "Half Moon Bay," also from the Atlantic Mott the Hoople album, the singer realizes his dreams will never end but senses "the better half has already played."

Both of these early songs are immature and imitative, as is "When My Mind's Gone" ("If this feeling lasts/I won't have to find a thing to say") from Mad Shadows, the second Mott LP, but the thematic compulsiveness is evident. Two other songs from Shadows, "No Wheels to Ride" and "You Are One of Us," touch on an inspirational, self-resurrection motif. Re the third album, Wildlife, and Hunter's contributions to it, the less said the better; but on Brain Capers, he scores heavily with "Sweet Angeline," the first of his great songs about rock & roll women, and "The Journey," a schizophrenic sequel to just about everything that has preceded it. Actually two songs forced into one, "The Journey" artfully combines the singer's concern with madness and loss ("Well, I can see the end for the very first time/But I know I lost just a little bit on the journey") with the obsession to make someone—in this case, not himself but a woman—believe in herself. Also on Capers is the strange, out-of-control "The Moon Upstairs," in which Mott berate their audience for being "too fucking slow" and provide a raging, if premature, musical "epitaph."

After such a finale and singular lack of commercial success, many wondered what could be left for an obviously talented but troubled band that, up until this point, had not shown the stability to concentrate their strengths into a coherent whole. If all things come to those who wait, the Hoople had surely paid their dues; and the answer came with careful reevaluation, a label change and—most importantly—David Bowie, who took over from Guy Stevens as the group's producer. Bowie immediately channeled Hunter and Mick Ralphs's rock & roll chaos into constructive, comprehensible musical energy, arranged and tightened their songs, had them record Lou Reed's classic "Sweet Jane" and wrote a hit single for them—the title song on Columbia's All the Young Dudes. Fame came but it was apparently a case of too much too late.

"Sea Diver," Hunter's final song on Dudes and one of his most telling, could serve as a primer for the heavy concern with the meaninglessness of success, which comprises much of Mott, the band's self-produced sixth LP. The singer's heartbreaking depiction of an almost untenable position — "I'm like a sea diver/Who's lost in space/Oh Lord, I wish I could escape this iron veil/Ride on, my son.../Ride until you fail"—leads him, in "Ballad of Mott," to question the validity of the whole "rock & roll circus": "You know all the tales we tell/You know the band so well/And still I feel somehow we let you down." He sees himself "a star ... on parole" in "All the Way from Memphis" and realizes that in such a situation, "You'll forget just who you are/You ain't the nazz/You're just a buzz/Some kinda temporary ..." ("Hymn for the Dudes"). On Mott, Hunter seems to feel about rock & roll as a moth does about a flame:

Rock 'n' roll's a loser's game

It mesmerizes and I can't explain

The reasons for the sights and for the sounds

The greasepaint still sticks to my face

So what the hell? I can't erase

The rock & roll feeling from my mind

Fully half of the album's songs reflect a growing dissatisfaction with his and the group's profession. The LP closes with what is arguably the high point of the writer's career, "I Wish I Was Your Mother," a love song so emotionally powerful and unique it defies almost any satisfactory summation. The outlook is bleak, however. "Is there a happy ending?" Hunter asks. His answer, "I don't think so."

After Mott, Mick Ralphs left the band and the group went on to make two more albums, neither artistically successful. Ariel Bender, the new guitarist, is almost invisible on The Hoople, appearing on only three songs. The production tries vainly to fill in the gaps with saxophones, synthesizers and an onslaught of backup vocals but the sound is all wrong and even Hunter's songs—with the possible exception of the anthemlike "Golden Age of Rock 'n' Roll"—seem flat and anticlimactic. Mott the Hoople Live, in-concert recordings from New York and London, is a letdown on almost every level.

If Hunter reached his peak thematically, musically and lyrically on All the Young Dudes and Mott, two of the greatest LPs in rock & roll history, he does not fall very far below it on his initial solo effort. The Hunter/Ronson production is spare and muscular, Ronson picking his holes with care, pile driving the guitars and relying on few overdubs. Ian Hunter lacks the calculated, tragic/triumphant, guitar-textured majesty of the aforementioned classics but its crafty fusion of often foreboding, straight-ahead rock & roll with tense, exhilarating songs of self-redemption carries a considerable, rogue Lazarus charm of its own. Perhaps psychologically wary, the singer mesmerizes but does not always explain, sometimes preferring to keep a careful esthetic boundary between himself and feelings that may run too dangerously deep. Thus, the album begins with Hunter in a casual, untroubled pose, the "Once Bitten Twice Shy" lover dealing cannily with women ("Who Do You Love," "Lounge Lizard") in three terrific, basically nonserious rock & roll songs.

But Hunter was always more concerned with philosophy than sex, with his own perceptions of the world rather than the world itself. In "Boy" he discards Dionysian revelry for Apollonian self-examination and the mood quickly darkens: "Genocidal tendencies are quite silly to extreme .../Boy, you're getting out of hand." The singer's predicament worsens ("You're number one and your hands are shaking") and Hunter implores, in a case of remarkable musical self-therapy, "Stand and deliver.../Shoot a rocket clean out of your brain," i.e., if one has the courage to take an impossible risk, one may realize one's goals—an altogether different conclusion from that of "Sea Diver" and most of the early songs.

Side two opens with two unhappy love songs—an acoustic, Dylanesque ballad, "3000 Miles from Here," and a real slammer, "The Truth, the Whole Truth, Nuthin' but the Truth"—but the anxiety level has been lowered again. "It Ain't Easy When You Fall" is reminiscent of both "The Journey" and "Boy." The singer tries to save someone — a friend? himself? — and once again deploys the somewhat evangelical strategy of the latter song, everything building into an uplifting, one-must-not-fail crescendo before Hunter pulls the plug ("But now it's too late") and starts reading a macabre page from that late night diary ("Shades Off"):

For it never was easy to live with a head

So I've kept to the back room and live there instead...

It is here I see pictures, my madness is clear

And there's no longer logic and therefore no fear

And I'm almost dead with uncontrollable light

Sometimes when I've written a song—it's alright.

From this stark poetry, Hunter moves into the exuberant, Slade-like "I Get So Excited" and the singer's salvation through rock & roll is apparently complete. But only apparently. "Get off of your past," he exhorts himself but the joyful raucousness of the music shifts suddenly from a mood of outrageous contentment into one of encapsulating terror. Things are frantically, ominously out of control and the LP ends with some omniscient power savagely cutting short the last song in midchord frenzy.

If the spiritual odyssey of Ian Hunter has produced a slightly schizophrenic album — part rock & roll, part psychological pep talk (but "Once Bitten," "Boy," "It Ain't Easy" and "So Excited" are near masterpieces)—one can be thankful his intelligence has not waned and he is still mining the vein of his richest subject matter: himself. He still gets excited, no matter the cost, and Ian Hunter would seem to be well worth it. Best of luck to him. (RS 189)

PAUL NELSON