Greatest Hits - Molly Hatchet

 

Provenance: Does anyone recall that you could message people you were torrenting from in Napster? Some guy in the USA was downloading an Alice Cooper track from my account (this was around the turn of the twenty-first century, kids), and asked me what else I listened to. 

Being a mere stripling I didn't have a huge amount to say, but on the basis of my tastes he recommended three acts to me; Ted Nugent, Bob Seger and Molly Hatchet. I downloaded tracks from all three - 'Free For All', 'Old Time Rock 'N' Roll' and 'Flirtin' With Disaster' (a process that took about two days).

The Molly Hatchet track, with its twisty turnarounds and twin-lead breaks, was the standout. Evidently I couldn't shut up about 'em, because my girlfriend at the time bought me this - Molly Hatchet's Greatest Hits - for Christmas!

Review: Molly Hatchet, what a band.

I went to see a version of them with one original member (very good, by the way). They still tour today with zero original members. They have a mortality rate higher than Hot Shots: Part Deux, the Hatchet lead singer position akin to that of the drum stool in Spinal Tap. The Frank Frazetta album covers promise blood-soaked heavy metal, but what you get is southern-fried boogie. Bobby Ingram has two haircuts.

Yet, and yet, and yet - on the evidence of Greatest Hits, Molly Hatchet absolutely smoke ass. They're a southern rock band alright, lyrics replete with tall tales of desperadoes, whiskey drinkers and bush-dwellin 'gators - but a pretty heavy one, leaning more towards the Blackfoot end of the spectrum than, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd. (On the basis of their first three albums alone, Skynyrd should be considered one of the great classic rock acts, full stop. Up there with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. I'm being serious.) The riffs are bluesy but beefed-up, solos are flashy and trim, and selling all this is a whole load of cornpone aggrandisement about southron life.

There are two covers here, the first being a pretty good version of the Allman Brothers' 'Dreams I'll Never See'. I may even prefer it to the rather churchy original. The other is a  superb live version of cowboy saga 'Edge of Sundown', which was originally a Danny Joe Brown Band number (DJB was the singer of Molly Hatchet, quit due to diabetes, released a solo record and rejoined two years later). Two of the four songwriters were in Molly Hatchet at one point or another, but frankly, having been in the same room as them for two hours I may have briefly been a member.

That leaves ten joints of pure Hatchetry, and they're all pretty strong. You've got songs about the wayward town floozy ('Shake the House Down'), a thinly-veiled car-as-metaphor-for-woman stomper ('Ragtop Deluxe'), a swaggering number about drinking too much ('Whiskey Man') and so forth. Without listening to a single note of music, on the basis of these song titles alone try imagining what they sound like, and I guarantee you're pretty much on the money. The only element you might not have considered is Brown's quirk of whistling the guitar solo in, like he's directing a sheepdog. 

Now, 'Gator Country' is a song that has taken a few years to work its charms on me, but I now fully appreciate it. Virtually every southern rock band does a song about how cool it is to be from the south, or if not, they've recorded its related cousin, having a pop against critics. Skynyrd did it. Charlie Daniels did it. Drive By-Truckers did a whole album about it. In many ways Molly Hatchet, natives of northern Florida, outflank everyone on 'Gator Country' by picking off nearby states (and their associated musicians) and bodying them one-by-one. Nothing like a bit of internecine cattiness, eh? In fact, 'Gator Country' is almost the complete inverse of the Charlie Daniels' band earlier number 'The South's Gonna Do It', virtually namechecking every musician that Daniels saw fit to praise. (Daniels later expressed resentment that the Ku Klux Klan used 'The South's Gonna Do It' on radio commercials - that such a thing existed is, frankly, sad and bizarre.)

Speaking of southern rock tropes - ever since 'Free Bird' it feels like every southern band (bar, perhaps, ZZ Top - but are they really southern rock? Answers on a postcard...) feels the imperative to write The Big One, a lengthy song that shows off their chops. Molly Hatchet are no exception, and it comes in the form of album closer 'Fall of the Peacemakers'. A nice enough tune with a fair sentiment alright, but after forty minutes of shit-kickin' and raising hell, it feels like a slightly anaemic way to bring proceedings to an end. I just want one more whammer-jammer about some narrow-eyed dude living outside of the law, y'know?

Listen, if you like hokum about bounty hunters and bar brawls, you're gonna lap this up. If you're seeking musical complexity and refined sentiment, it ain't here, hoss. Good drivin' music. Good grillin' music. Good for any activity where an apostrophe suffices in the present continuous tense. Hellllllll yeah!!! 

(Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd) - Lynyrd Skynyrd

Provenance: As a young guitar player I wanted to play 'Free Bird'.

Review: I almost decided to go with something by Electric Wizard or Lee Dorsey this week, as I couldn't be arsed with this album title. Even the band's name gives me a minor headache. So, henceforth, (Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd) will be Pronounced..., and I may well just stick to 'Skynyrd' for the band.

It's my belief that Lynyrd Skynyrd are one of the more unfairly maligned bands out there. Certainly, their current incarnation does them little favours, having seemingly succumbed to the temptations of the Nuge crowd a decade ago with a wretched platter called God & Guns. In all probability it was a savvy move; it resonates both with the classic rock crowd (a conservative old bunch) and the fans who didn't quite get them the first time around. A victim of their own success, one might say, as Skynyrd are often portrayed as the archetypal white trash favourite, their semi-idiot fans drunkenly braying for 'Free Bird' a whole two songs into their shows.

At least in the early days, before little brother took over as the frontman, Skynyrd were a more nuanced operation. 'Saturday Night Special' was as anti-handgun as anything out there; 'Tuesday's Gone' and 'I Need You' are wonderful slices of balladry, teetering just about on this side of maudlin; 'Sweet Home Alabama' is much more ambiguous than its title suggests; and of course, they beat the Sex Pistols to the punch by slagging off their own record label with the incredible riff-monster 'Workin' For MCA'.

So, here's where it all began - with some wonderfully greasy drumming that kicks off both Pronounced... and 'I Ain't The One', a tough blues-rocker that serves as the template for a raft of Skynyrd tunes. They would get a little more complex on subsequent releases, but it's really all here; swaggering riffs interpolated by wiry, slippery blues soloing and Billy Powell's honky-tonk piano. The cherry on top is Ronnie Van Zandt's vocal; he has no real range, aside from a switch-up to a country falsetto holler, and one imagines his speaking voice wasn't too far from his singing voice. But that's the charm! His voice is no more or less 'honest' or 'authentic' than Jobriath's, or Gladys Knight's or Ian Curtis', but here it feels entirely at a piece with the style, context and ideas behind the music.

It is this unpretentious and plaintive delivery that entirely elevates the otherwise slightly pedestrian 'Tuesday's Gone' - a big ol' ballad about leaving your woman in the 'By The Time I Get to Memphis' mould - into a real heartwrencher, and good enough for Metallica to cover. It's also an effective deadpan, as on the comic-buffo 'Gimme Three Steps' (about approaching the wrong guy's woman in a bar); you can almost picture the raised eyebrow as he intones "ah said, excuuuuse me" just before a lead break. If I am going to bring authenticity into play, it's that as a native son of Alabama Van Zandt totally gets away with the couplet "Hey there fella / With the hair coloured yella". And by 'gets away', I mean it's a real kicky little moment in an already knockabout number.

Now, I know that 'Free Bird' is part of the gilded iconography of southron rock, alongside 'Whippin' Post' by the Allman Brothers, the band's very own 'Sweet Home Alabama' and Charlie Daniels' deranged Twitter feed, but for my money the better song is 'Simple Man'. It's in the same vein of cornpone balladry as 'Tuesday's Gone', but features some satisfyingly crunchy choruses and a sentimental lyric that's atypical in classic rock which recounts the advice the singer received from his mama about living a good life. Nothing here to rival Montaigne in terms of profundity you understand, but it's direct and sincere.

It's about this time that Pronounced... sags into a rhythm that approaches the formulaic, but there's nuggets of gold strewn throughout the back end, such as Powell's Dr John impression on 'Things Goin' On'. Of this little bunch of tracks that lead up to 'Free Bird', 'Poison Whiskey' is probably the most interesting for Skynyrd fans as it most obviously points towards the sound on their next album, Second Helping. There's a muscularity and aggression in the attack, and it introduces the knotty turnarounds that festoon Second Helping, which incidentally make some of the best Skynyrd songs deceptively tricksy to play.

I feel like it's a hopeless task writing about 'Free Bird', thanks to its ubiquity and notoriety. I'll say this, then; the verses, underscored by Hammond organ, are Skynyrd doing their best Allmans impersonation, and I like 'em best when they're sounding like Skynyrd. It's not bad, but on an album with two slower-paced numbers already in the mix, it drags a little. The lengthy coda, however, consisting of a galloping guitar dual, remains a treat. What impresses are not the pyrotechnics on display - it's not actually a particularly difficult solo in technical terms - but how it's constructed. The different motifs locking together, weaving in and out of each other, building both momentum and tension - and then the final release (albeit slightly anticlimactic) are what makes 'Free Bird' a perennial. You want proof? Here's some proof.

Pronounced... is a minor classic, albeit one that exists in the shadow of the monster it spawned. In this scribe's humble opinion Skynyrd actually get better on Second Helping, but that's all for another time. Yeah, this is really first-rate deep-fried southern rock, and not half as boneheaded as you may have been led to expect.