Midnight Mott

Digging Mott the Hoople, War and so much more on an Oct. '73 episode of The Midnight Special.

One of the most gratifying developments of the past year — at least from an entertainment/music history perspective — has been the arrival of a Midnight Special channel on YouTube, which has been regularly posting hi-res clips and full episodes of the TV show of the same name since last March.

For those of you who weren’t there at the time — or who were, but could use a refresher course — The Midnight Special was a weekly music variety series created and produced by Burt Sugarman, which ran on NBC in the wee hours of Friday night/Saturday morning from 1972 to 1981.

While I was aware of the show’s existence (and that of its syndicated rival Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert) when I was a kid, my interest in popular music — much like my interest in staying awake past midnight — didn’t really kick in until after The Midnight Special had transitioned to focusing primarily on disco acts, most of whom lip-synched their performances for the cameras. Unlike, say, Saturday Night Live or SCTV, it wasn’t the sort of thing that my friends circa 1978-81 would talk much about at school on Mondays, so I never felt like I was missing much by not watching it.

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There was a time, however, when The Midnight Special was absolutely essential viewing for anyone who was into pop music. Not only did the show book an impressively wide array of artists, both established and up-and-coming, but it also — at least until the late ‘70s — captured them performing live in front of a studio audience.

Though famed DJ Wolfman Jack served as the show’s emcee, each episode had a musical “host,” who would perform three or four songs of their own over the course of the show as well as introduce the other acts. The artists in question typically performed their latest hits, but sometimes they’d also throw in old favorites or new surprises; and since the episodes (much like the AM radio stations of the day) weren’t devoted to a specific genre, you’d almost inevitably be introduced to something that was outside of your listening experience or comfort zone if you sat through the whole thing.

While it’s been a thrill to see individual Midnight Special performance clips — many of which I’d only experienced over the years via wobbly VHS tapes shared with me by collector friends — now posted with gorgeous color and crisp resolution, the full-length show episodes are absolutely invaluable for the way they really capture (and transport you back to) a moment in time. This past weekend, my girlfriend and I watched an episode that originally aired on October 19, 1973, and marveled at what a trip it must have been to absorb the whole thing “live” when it first ran.

The episode is hosted by LA funk ensemble War, who are coming off The World is a Ghetto — the best-selling album of 1972 — and have just released their new LP, Deliver the Word. And their guests, in order of appearance, are:

Glammed-up proto-punks The New York Dolls, whose self-titled debut album will have already stalled at #116 on the Billboard 200 by the time this episode airs.

British rockers Mott the Hoople, who are still basking in the afterglow of their 1972 success via the David Bowie-penned “All the Dudes,” and are currently back in the States promoting their new album Mott.

Singer-songwriter Danny O’Keefe, who enjoyed a massive 1972 hit with the country-flavored “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” and is now out pushing his Arif-Mardin-produced Atlantic Records debut Breezy Stories.

Stafford, England’s abysmally-named Climax Blues Band, who — once they drop their present brand of hopped-up Status Quo-meets Foghat blues racket —will go on to score mainstream hits with the poppy “Couldn’t Get It Right” and “I Love You”.

Burly Canadians Bachman-Turner Overdrive, who are caught here in their transition between the Randy Bachman/C.F. Turner-led Brave Belt and the money-minting boogie machine that BTO will become in just a few months when their album BTO II hits the shelves.

And closing out the show are Piper, perhaps the only known purveyors of bagpipe prog (a subgenre absolutely no one asked for) who bear zero relation at all to the Billy Squier-led band of the same name that will emerge several years later.

Though the whole episode is well worth watching, it’s the first three bands who pretty much steal the show for me. War are undeniably at the peak of their funky powers, and their performances of “The Cisco Kid” and “The World is a Ghetto” are especially stunning, even without the presence of master percussionist Papa Dee Allen, whose absence is mentioned but goes unexplained.

As a huge Dolls fan since my late teens, I was absolutely ecstatic the first time I ever saw their Midnight Special performances of “Trash” and “Personality Crisis” — the A- and B-sides of their first US single — via one of those aforementioned wobbly VHS tapes. But watching those performances in the context of the other acts on this episode (and hearing War guitarist Howard Scott introduce the band by saying “Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re here to stay”) really illustrates how shocking they seemed at the time. Their aggressive sound is pure buzzsaw punk, and their androgyny recalls the razor-toting “What the fuck are YOU lookin’ at?” attitude of 14th Street hookers far more than the ethereal beauty of Ziggy Stardust.

And then, as if to further demonstrate that they’re playing on another field entirely, gum-chomping frontman David Johansen pauses during “Trash” to dramatically recite some lines from The Jive Five’s 1961 street-corner doo-wopper “My True Story”. Imagine being 15 years old, buzzed on Schlitz Malt Liquor and Midwestern dirt weed, and seeing this on your TV screen; we’d all like to think we would have been cool enough to immediately “get” the band’s musical and conceptual brilliance, of course, like the front-row chick in the red mullet who knows every word to “Personality Crisis”. But history is anything to go by, a glazed drawl of “What the fuck was THAT?” is likely how most of us would have actually reacted.

[Edit: Many folks have pointed out that there’s a sixth Doll in these performances. That’s roadie Peter Jordan “covering” for bassist Arthur Kane, whose girlfriend Connie had tried to slice his thumb off right before the band left on their US tour with Mott the Hoople. Arthur still “performed” onstage with the band, but likely wasn’t actually plugged in.]

It’s especially interesting to see Mott the Hoople take the stage immediately after the Dolls. There’s plenty of androgyny to go around here, as well — witness the thigh-high stack-heel boots of bassist Pete Overend Watts, the frilly pink ensemble worn by frontman Ian Hunter, and the spaced-out flounciness of new guitarist Ariel Bender — not to mention plenty of rock aggression. So why did Mott make it in America while the Dolls were largely viewed as no-talent freaks?

Much of it, surely, had to do with David Bowie’s stamp of approval; even though Bowie wasn’t yet the mega-star on this side of the Atlantic that he would eventually become, his name and association carried enough weight in 1972 to put both Mott and Lou Reed in the US charts. But Mott was also more of a “traditional” rock band than the Dolls; their melodic songs relied as much upon the dynamic interplay of piano and organ as they did upon the brash attack of guitars and drums, and the band’s attitude towards their audiences was always more “You are one of us” than “Fuck you if you don’t like it.” Both of those messages would play an equally important part in the foundation of punk rock, of course, but Mott’s inclusiveness was both radical and profoundly appealing to a lot of outcasts in the early ‘70s.

Which is not to say that Mott played it safe, because their Midnight Special performance of “Rose” is one of the ballsiest things I’ve ever seen. After igniting the crowd with a stomping “All the Way to Memphis,” they could have easily whipped out another great uptempo rocker… but instead, they chose to serve up a deeply melancholy ballad about wasted beauty and broken dreams, a song which at this point would have only been heard by fans who’d seen them live or spun the flip side of their earlier single “Honaloochie Boogie”.

I’d always pictured Ian Hunter singing sorrowful lines like “Rock n’ roll slag/Oh my you’re such a drag/Trying to find a corner to inject” while crouched behind the protective barrier of a piano. But here, Our Lord of the Perpetual Shades stands in the spotlight without even a guitar for protection, gesticulating with awkward sincerity and pouring his aching heart into every word.

Hey Rose

You’re finer than you know

And I hate to see you cold

On a summer’s day

Goddamnit, I think I’ve got something in my eye…

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