Midnight Moses

There are rock songs that walk into the room like they own the furniture, and then there is "Midnight Moses." Third cut on The Sensational Alex Harvey Band's debut album Framed, it does not ask for your attention. It kicks the door with a stop-start blues lick, a bass line that feels like a fist on a bar top, and a gang chorus of hey-hey-heys that sound less like a hook than a dare. Alex Harvey, already a veteran of Glasgow dance halls, Hamburg cellars and the London stage when this band even had a name, steps up and introduces a character who cannot lose. Under the green veranda he is singing for mad Miranda. They call him the Midnight Moses. Everything he touches is coming up roses. He has no map, he wishes he were a forest ranger, and danger is the only verse he knows. Then he takes a notion and flies the ocean toward Geneva, because a lucky man does not need a reason. Four minutes and change. No apology.

The song was not born with the band. Harvey had already cut "Midnight Moses," along with "Hammer Song," for his 1969 solo album Roman Wall Blues, a record that wandered between blues, rock and the kind of theatrical storytelling he never quite shook. When he walked into Morgan Studios in London in 1972 with a new group, those two old originals came with him. Framed, issued on Vertigo late that year and into early 1973 under catalogue 6360 081, opens with a Leiber and Stoller cover, the title track first cut by the Robins in 1954, then "Hammer Song," then this one. After "Midnight Moses" the side turns stranger still, into the three-part witch tale "Isobel Goudie." Side two brings Willie Dixon's "I Just Want to Make Love to You," a Harvey co-write called "Hole in Her Stocking," and the infamous long-titled number about Big Louie. The gatefold, designed by the Bloomsbury Group with a die-cut window onto a tenement photograph by Jim Wilson, looked like a crime scene you were invited to enter. Engineer Mike Bobak kept the tape rolling. Phil Kenzie added tenor saxophone elsewhere on the album, and Big Bud's Brass punched the horns, but "Midnight Moses" does not need the brass section. It is the straight rocker, the street sermon, the one you can hear from the parking lot.

The lineup that cut it was the one fans still mean when they say SAHB, pronounced like the car. Alex Harvey on the lead vocal, rough as a Gorbals pavement and twice as funny. Zal Cleminson on lead guitar, soon to paint his face like a silent-film pierrot and slash lines that sat somewhere between hard rock and music-hall menace. Chris Glen on bass. Hugh McKenna on electric piano. Ted McKenna, Hugh's cousin, on drums. Glen, Cleminson and Ted had come out of Tear Gas, a Glasgow progressive outfit loud enough to rattle the paint, with two albums already behind them. Hugh had been adjacent to that circle. Harvey had been looking for a last real shot. Manager Bill Fehilly, a bingo-hall man who also backed Nazareth and briefly ran the Mountain label, put the money and the nerve behind the match. SAHB formed in Glasgow in August 1972. Framed was the calling card, recorded fast, some accounts say in a matter of days, and released into a Britain already thick with glam, boogie and prog. This band was all three and none of them. Cabaret with a switchblade. Blues with a script.

Harvey had been paying dues since before his sidemen were out of short trousers. Born Alexander Harvey on 5 February 1935 in the Gorbals, then one of the hardest districts in Britain, he won a talent contest in the mid-1950s and got tagged, half as a compliment and half as a curse, the Tommy Steele of Scotland. Skiffle, rock and roll, jazz, soul: he ran them all. Alex Harvey and His Soul Band worked the same German circuit the Beatles had walked, a spell later remembered in his own songbook, and a 1963 Hamburg tape surfaced as a 1964 album. He cut a version of the Isley Brothers' "Shout" early enough that its arrangement echoed down into later party-band history. He spent years, on and off, in the band for the London production of Hair, the controversial hippie musical, at one point with a young Mike Oldfield standing in on guitar. By the end of the 1960s he was nearly a pin-up, nearly a pop star, nearly a hippie hero, and still not the thing he was built to be. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band was the fit. He was 37 when Framed came out. Charles Shaar Murray, catching them on the rise, wondered aloud how a man that age was still playing rock and roll while the old-timers drifted into cabaret or faded out. Harvey's answer was to make the cabaret part of the attack.

On stage he poured a can of beer over his head, raked it into a quiff, and introduced the group in a voice that could go quiet and dangerous: the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Good boys and girls, then the roof came off. "Midnight Moses" sat in that set like a calling card for the character work. Vambo, the street kid, would come later. The Faith Healer would hypnotize rooms. Delilah, the Tom Jones number turned into a UK top-ten single in 1975, would finally put them on the radio in a way Framed never managed. But the debut already had the method. Harvey did not just sing a lucky drifter. He inhabited him. The green veranda, the mad girl, the ranger fantasy, the flight across the water: it is brag, blues and cartoon in the same breath, and the band plays it like they believe every line. Cleminson's guitar bites harder than most of the covers that followed. Glen and Ted McKenna swing and stomp at once. Hugh McKenna colors the corners without turning it into a piano ballad. American radio never quite knew what to do with them. Continental Europe did. Australia did. A young Bon Scott was listening. So was a schoolboy in Melbourne named Nick Cave, whose early groups, under whatever name they were using before the Birthday Party, covered a stack of Framed songs in the live set, "Midnight Moses" among them, Cave in a cropped shirt and the guitarist in Cleminson's clown paint. Cave later put "Hammer Song" on Kicking Against the Pricks. The debt was never subtle.

The catalog after Framed is the one that made the legend. Next in 1973, with the Jacques Brel song and "The Faith Healer." The Impossible Dream. Tomorrow Belongs to Me. Live, the record that caught the Glasgow Apollo roar. SAHB Stories. They were, for a stretch in the middle of the decade, among the biggest-grossing live acts in Britain, and still a cult item on the charts until Delilah cracked the door. Harvey walked away late in 1976 with his health in pieces. The others cut Fourplay as SAHB without Alex. He came back in 1977, Hugh McKenna stepped aside for Tommy Eyre, and Rock Drill arrived in 1978 before the whole thing came apart again. Harvey kept going at a slower pace, including a strange spoken-word record about the Loch Ness Monster and the albums The Mafia Stole My Guitar and the posthumous Soldier on the Wall. On 4 February 1982, a day before his 47th birthday, waiting on a ferry at Zeebrugge after a show in Vienna, he suffered a heart attack and a second, fatal one in the ambulance. Ted McKenna died in January 2019. Hugh McKenna died later that same year. Cleminson and Glen have carried the repertoire in various reunions and side projects ever since.

"Midnight Moses" never became the single. It did not need to. It is the song that proves the debut was not a warm-up. A 2002 compact-disc issue of Framed briefly credited the title track to Ritchie Valens, who had only covered it; the correction back to Leiber and Stoller was a small reminder that this band's history is easy to scramble and hard to fake. In the 2010s the Dead Daisies picked up "Midnight Moses" and ran it out to a new audience, a loud, faithful tip of the hat that sent plenty of listeners backward to the Vertigo swirl label. The original still hits harder. Zal's tone has more bite. Harvey sounds like a man who has already lived the verse.

That is the cut on the desk at THE ZOO, the listener-supported, commercial-free stream that still treats album rock as a long conversation rather than a playlist. Framed belongs in that conversation: a Glasgow debut, a Vertigo gatefold, a singer from the Gorbals who waited half a life for the right band and then burned through the 1970s like a man who knew the clock. There is no living official SAHB social feed from the classic years. Harvey was gone before any of that existed. The catalog and the live legacy are kept in view by Madfish, whose artist page for the band sits at madfishmusic.com, and by the working tribute The Sensational Alex Harvey Experience, endorsed by Chris Glen and by Alex Harvey Jr., at facebook.com/sahbexperience. Put "Midnight Moses" on. Let the green veranda do the rest. Vambo may rule the later records. This one rules the opening side.