Ready for Love / After Lights

The Zoo Crew has got “Ready for Love / After Lights” spinning right now for the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, and if you have ever sat with side two of Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes, you already know this one does not behave like a regular album cut. Mick Ralphs wrote it, Mick Ralphs sang it, and then the thing slides, without a hard stop, into his own instrumental, “After Lights.” On the original 1972 Columbia and CBS pressing it is listed as one track, running about six minutes and forty-seven seconds. Dave Thompson later called that instrumental tail a virtuoso afterglow and one of Ralphs’ most tasteful displays. Bud Scoppa, reviewing the album for Rolling Stone that December, said “Ready for Love” was the best thing Ralphs had ever done. Stephen Thomas Erlewine has called the whole pairing a highlight of the record. That is high praise on an album that also carries David Bowie’s title song, a Lou Reed cover, and Ian Hunter stretching out on “One of the Boys” and “Sea Diver.”

Here is the part the Freaks always lean in for. That is not Hunter on the lead vocal. Ralphs wanted Hunter to sing it. Hunter would not, or could not. The melody sat outside his range, and he has been quoted over the years as finding the tune too soulful for the way he sang. Ralphs took the vocal himself, in that thin, high, almost hesitant voice of his, and he hated how it came out. Critics have since argued the opposite. Thompson’s take is that the uncertainty in Ralphs’ singing puts weight on the lyric that a bigger voice can flatten. The words are simple enough. He is ready for love, ready to leave the old scene behind, asking someone to come with him before the lights go down. Then the band does exactly that. The song exhales into “After Lights,” guitar and keys hanging in the room like the club has emptied and somebody left an amp on. Bowie and Mick Ronson produced the album, and you can hear that hand in the backing voices and the way the instrumental is framed. It is still a Mott track, though. Rural English hard rock with a little glitter on the collar, not a Ziggy outtake.

The song also helped end the classic lineup. Ralphs was sitting on material Hunter could not comfortably sing, including the riff that became “Can’t Get Enough.” In 1973 he crossed paths with Paul Rodgers, late of Free. Rodgers sang “Ready for Love,” and Ralphs heard the voice he had been missing. He left Mott, took the song with him, and recut it with Bad Company for their 1974 debut, this time without the “After Lights” coda, a little moodier, Rodgers walking the vocal like a man who has waited long enough. People still call the Bad Company cut a cover. It is not. It is the writer reclaiming his own tune. The Mott version stayed the stranger, more private one, and a live reading later turned up on the band’s Greatest Hits Live set, which one reviewer called poignant. On the original album it sits between Verden Allen’s “Soft Ground,” the only time Allen took a lead vocal in the classic years aside from the much later reunion record, and Hunter’s quiet closer “Sea Diver.” Side two of that LP is a whole mood if you let it play through.

None of that happens if the band does not get dragged out of Herefordshire in the first place. The roots go back to local outfits in Hereford and Ross-on-Wye. Mick Ralphs and singer Stan Tippins had been in the Buddies. Pete Overend Watts came out of the Soulents with drummer Dale Griffin. By 1966 they were the Doc Thomas Group, with a residency at an Italian nightclub and a self-titled album on the Italian label Dischi Interrecord in early 1967. Griffin and organist Verden Allen were in by 1968. Back in England they worked as Silence, cutting demos and knocking around the clubs. Island Records producer Guy Stevens heard them and liked the attitude more than the singer. He advertised for a frontman who was image-minded and hungry. Ian Hunter Patterson showed up at Regent Sound on Denmark Street in a brown corduroy suit, bluffed through Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and Sonny Bono’s “Laugh at Me,” and Stevens liked the shades and the nerve. Tippins stepped aside and became the road manager, which turned out to be a smart bit of loyalty. He was still around years later, singing the backing answers on “All the Young Dudes” from the wings.

Stevens named them. While he was locked up in Wormwood Scrubs on a drug charge in 1968, he read a Willard Manus novel about an eccentric loser who works a circus freak show and sails off in a hot-air balloon. The character was Norman Mott. Hoople was American slang for a loser. Stevens had already tossed aside names like Brain Haulage and Ball and Chain. Silence reluctantly became Mott the Hoople. He also handed out new handles. Patterson became Ian Hunter. Terry Allen took his middle name and became Verden. Terry Griffin became Buffin, a childhood nickname. Watts moved Overend up front. They cut the debut album before they had even played a gig as the new band, Stevens chasing a collision between the Rolling Stones and electric Dylan. The sleeve nodded at an Escher lithograph. The record picked up a cult, especially live, and then the next three albums stalled. By early 1972, after a fight onstage in Zurich, they were done.

Bowie had already sent them a tape of “Suffragette City.” Overend Watts rang him, turned the song down, and asked if the Spiders needed a bass player. Bowie told them to hold on, wrote “All the Young Dudes” in a hurry, and played it for the band cross-legged on an office floor in Regent Street, blue guitar, the works. He and Ronson produced the album that followed. “Ready for Love / After Lights” is the proof that Mott were not just borrowing Bowie’s anthem. Ralphs still had his own songs, and this one is the doorway he eventually walked out of. Allen left after the album. Ralphs left in 1973. Hunter and the rest carried Mott through 1974, took Queen out as support on the American tour, and then that version ended too. The Freaks still argue about which vocal wins. The Zoo Crew will tell you the Mott cut is the one that feels like the lights just went down and nobody has gone home yet.

If you want the band’s own trail, the official site is Mott the Hoople, where the story of the Bowie-penned “All the Young Dudes” and the years around that album are still part of the band history. Their official Facebook page is Mott The Hoople, the official Instagram is mottthehoople74, and the official X account is Mott The Hoople ’74. Longtime fans keep a deep archive, with the album and “All the Young Dudes” written all through it, at hunter-mott.com. Put the needle back on side two. The lights can wait.