MICK RONSON
Only After Dark
CHERRY RED 7/10 From Bowie to Dylan with rock’s most reluctant frontman
DAVID Bowie once described Mick Ronson as “the perfect foil” for his Ziggy character, creating a “rock’n’roll dualism” which he claimed rivalled Jagger and Richards. It was a hell of a compliment, although in truth Ronson – a salt-of-the-earth northerner with a defiantly masculine personality under his peroxide blond barnet – possessed the kind of simpático diffidence to be a foil to almost anyone. Could any other guitar hero have gone from backing Bob Dylan one week to David Cassidy the next, as Ronson did in the course of 1976?
Between his stints with Bowie and Dylan, though, Ronson made a brace of solo albums during 1974–75 that now come repackaged in a four-disc boxset, augmented by 44 contemporaneous demos, outtakes, aborted studio recordings and live performances from the era. Reluctantly pushed into the role of frontman by Bowie’s Mainman management, Ronson’s two officially released albums were gloriously all-over-theshop. Slaughter On Tenth Avenue opened with a perverse glam-rock arrangement of “Love Me Tender” and ended with the title track on which he mangled Richard Rodgers’ ballet tune in the style of Hendrix’s destruction of “The Star Spangled Banner”. In between, Bowie’s fingerprints were everywhere, translating an
Italian ballad, contributing the lyrics to “Hey Ma, Get
Papa” and gifting his foil the period glam-rocker “Growing Up And I’m Fine”, a vague and distant cousin of “All The Young Dudes”.
The follow-up, Play Don’t Worry, relied less heavily on Bowie but was every bit as eccentric. A souped-up “White Light/white Heat”, with Ronson singing made-up lyrics to a backing track left over from Pin Ups, was the main connection to his past, but the post-spiders band took their place alongside a brace of songs by American country-rockers the Pure Prairie League.
If such a leap seemed improbable, it made more sense in the light of Ronson’s next move as the only Englishman in Dylan’s band on the Rolling Thunder Tour. Among the more interesting bonus tracks here are half a dozen demos recorded with T Bone Burnett and the rest of the Rolling Thunder backing crew, including a Ronsonsung version of Ziggy’s “Soul Love”, done Flying Burritos style, complete with pedal steel. Once his stint with Dylan was done and after briefly serving with David Cassidy, Ronson headed for Woodstock and the Bearsville studio, where he cut an album that remained unreleased for 23 years until its posthumous appearance in 1999, six years after his death from liver cancer at the age of 46. Included here in its entirety, it’s a mystery why nobody would release it at the time, for it’s a more than respectable roots-rock album, the highlights of which are cracking takes on Moby Grape’s “Hey Granma” and T-bone Walker’s “All Night Long”.