YouTube - Montrose- Space Station # 5
To many hardcore fans of 70`s american hard rock, this album is anything
but a lost treasure. But to the majority of casual rock fans who believe
everything they hear on the radio from that era gets a decent amount
of airplay, this is the album to prove the optimists wrong. Montrose No.
1 from 1973 is considered by many to be the first successful attempt
to mix rock and metal together on american soil with a degree of
commercial sensibility. Montrose proved to be a mixed bag of artistic
fortunes for the 4 members of the band:- Ronnie Montrose, the name-
sake guitarist who just a couple of years before had played a totally
diffrent muse on Van Morrison`s sterile `Tupelo Honey`, came out
and cranked up his guitar like Pete Townsend on steroids for this in-
credibly lively groundbreaking heavy rock guitar debut. Sammy Hagar,
who would go on to replace Dave Roth in Van Halen by the mid 1980`s,
never sounded any better or more confident as a vocalist until just
more recently when he become a member of the retro Chickenfoot
than he did on this his first of only two studio Montrose outings.
Drummer Denny Carmassi carved out a successful career with a
few other bands and musicians, including Heart & Montrose`s own
hard rock moonlighting band, Gamma, after the predicted demise of
Montrose in 1977, a band which never quite recovered from the ab-
sense of Hagar after he quit two years earlier. Bill Church, like so
many bass guitarists who end up being forgotten quickly most of
the time when their own star is outshone by a well known lead sing-
er and lead guitarist, continued to have plenty of session work in
the years following Montrose but like Ronnie Montrose himself went
into relative reclusion, except for the occasional blast from the
past. Montrose`s 1974 follow-up `Paper Money`, which did feature
Hagar on vocals, wasn`t half bad but it just didn`t have anything
which the debut didn`t do better. Montrose self titled only has 8
songs on it, which is good, because as much as it`s revolutionary
and state of the art for its time, 12 songs of the same material
might have made the album `bit too much of a good thing`. You
might say the one tiny criticism of the album is that Montrose
was technically limited on guitar, even though very energetic
and adventurous. Hagar in fact wrote most of the songs on the
album, including the famous `Bad Motor Scooter`, a song which
inspired the title of the Soundgarden album in the early 90`s
`Bad Motor Finger`. My favourite songs on here is the futuris-
tic `Space Station #5`, which features on the clip above, and
the blues heavy and rollicking `Rock Candy`, which is just no-
nonsense 2-chord guitar rock showcasing one of the best intros
on drums you will ever hear in your life. Carmassi booked the
attention of many a hard rock band just by being the one who
was responsible for this thunderously inspiring drumbeat. It
didn`t end there, the Bad Company influenced `Make It Last`
and how could i forget, the opening gem `Rock The Nation`,
a song which sounds so much like the boogie rock of UFO.
A brilliant album for its time, hasn`t aged as well perhaps
as Van Halen`s debut, another hard rock wonder which
come out some five years later, but to me it`s up there
in the heavy rock guitar top five of all time category.
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