Ian Hunter has lived an archetypal rock & Roll life. As much as any performer of rock's second generation, he has tried to act upon the idea that rock's magic is liberating, all-absolving and transcendent, a set of half-truths he has relinquished only at a great cost. I think Hunter is as much a fan as a performer, almost a collector. But rather than records, Hunter has assembled influences: Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Ray Davies, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Lou Reed.

This album is an almost perfect synthesis of what he has learned from his heroes, combining the energetic passion of the rock & rollers he loves with the relentlessly moral quest of the folk-based songwriters he admires. It's no accident that Hunter is the first rock star to deal with the dilemma of the British tax exile. If nothing else, this album has the most appropriate title of the year.

There are snatches here of everything from Blonde on Blonde rock to New Orleans jazz. But the best songs ("Restless Youth," "Apathy 83," "You Nearly Did Me In") are Anglo-American in the spirit of Bowie, Lennon and Reed. It is the most successful music Hunter has made since the next-to-last Mott the Hoople record, Mott, and while this new album lacks a rocking blockbuster like "All the Way from Memphis" or an emotional one like "I Wish I Was Your Mother," it contains only one major mistake. That's the frequently abrasive intrusion of soul-style female harmony—no white Anglo-American rocker has yet used it effectively—and even that works when coupled with David Sanborn's gorgeous saxophone solo on "You Nearly Did Me In."

Such an incessant pursuit of the rock dream can render minor musical gaffes irrelevant. All of the above songs share in that quest, but Hunter's magnificent obsession reaches a new peak, of some sort, in "Apathy 83." On its most obvious level, the song is a put-down of the Rolling Stones—"apathy for the devil," a slogan apparently derived from a comment of Dylan's—but it is also a eulogy for lost innocence of all sorts. There's action in the song, and it all takes place in a haunted landscape that might have been drawn from William Burroughs's The Wild Boys: "Wired out—tired out-transcendental mental—only laughing in your sleep."

Hunter hit the top this year, performing with Dylan's rolling revue. "Apathy 83" is about what he learned, from many seasons at the bottom and one at the top:

Old enough to hate tomorrow—young enough not to know where to run

Oh there ain't no rock 'n' roll no more—just the music of the young

It's easy to say things like that, especially for those of us who find in the musical fads of the present the dizzy déjà vu of our own childhood embarrassments, but it's hard to get out of them. I think Hunter's music does—as it charges to its various climaxes, there's a spirit present that always belies his doomsaying. Hunter may believe with John Lennon that the dream is over, or with Dylan that it's only just begun, but he's damned if he'll act like it. That is the old man's game and he knows it. With Bruce Springsteen, Roxy Music, Don Harrison and maybe Rod Stewart, he stands up and embodies rock & roll history—it's the spark of all those contradictions that lights the path of the future. (RS 217)

DAVE MARSH