Bad Motor Scooter by Montrose
Vroooooooooooommmmmm! Vrooooooooooooooooommmmmmm! Vrooooommmm!
Ronnie Montrose figured out how to make his guitar sound like a motorcycle. It was loud, it was roaring, it scorched the earth as producer Ted Templeman panned it across the stereo speakers. That’s the first sound you hear when you put on the classic album Montrose, the debut album in 1973 by the four piece band named after the guitarist who had already played on Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey album and on Edgar Winter’s huge hit “Frankenstein.” There was nothing else like it. Motorcycle sound effects had been on record before – think “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las – but amplifiers and recording technology had only recently gotten to the point where somebody could play a guitar like that.
The singer was a then-newcomer named Sammy Hagar. It has long been my contention that if Hagar had died suddenly or otherwise retired after recording this first album, he would be deserving of a spot in my personal Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. Never mind his later days trumpeting the delights of the color red or demeaning the speed limit, not to mention taking all the joie de vivre out of the vocalist role in Van Halen. Here, he was young, he was on fire with the expressive ability of singing in a powerful rock band, and he contributed four original songs that stand to this day with the best of heavy music.
Dude had pipes, and Montrose had tone and chops. Rounding out the lineup was bassist Bill Church, who had played with Montrose on the Van Morrison record, and drummer Denny Carmassi, who had tried to recruit Hagar into a different band but wound up following the singer into this one. They have been compared to an American Led Zeppelin, but honestly, they remind me a little more of an American Free. Both those bands were more diverse than Montrose – this particular foursome locked into the combination of exuberant melody from the Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie and the four-square raunch of Alice Cooper.
Ted Templeman was the secret weapon. Originally a drummer in the band Harper’s Bizarre whose biggest hit had been a version of Paul Simon’s “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” by the early 1970s, he was producing many of the best and biggest records on the Warner Brothers label. That afore-mentioned Tupelo Honey acquainted him with Ronnie Montrose and Bill Church. But he also worked on other Van Morrison records, Captain Beefheart and Little Feat albums, and the early works of the Doobie Brothers. In a short time, he figured out how to increase the power of rock bands through a combination of drum sound perfection, a love of the electricity in guitars and bass, and an ability to mix the singer in a way that sounded both of the band and above it.
Hagar was the writer of “Bad Motor Scooter.” The lyric is a pretty simple tale of a young man whose lover lives on a farm with her father. The singer’s fear of the parent leads him to entice the woman to hop on her motorcycle (I know, the word is scooter, but Montrose’s guitar doesn’t sound like a little machine; it conjures up the heaviest Harley-Davidson engines of the day). When she gets to him, they will both be feeling all right, all right, all right, all right. The metaphor of the motorcycle ride for their sexual delights couldn’t be clearer. It’s the sound of the record, the thrill of that guitar tone, and the intensity of Hagar’s desire expressed in every note he belts out that makes the record work.
Like the punk rock that would come into existence only a few years later, “Bad Motor Scooter” only has four chords, all major. It takes about two minutes to learn how to play it, though probably a lifetime to make it sound as perfect as this band does. I’m not well versed in music theory, but I assume the fact that every line of the song ends on D, and that the guitar solo is played there, means the key of the song is D. I’m sure somebody out there can correct me. The verse is C and D, and the chorus is F, G, and D. Hagar said in an interview about this band that he was really into T. Rex at the time, and I could easily hear a completely different version of this song moving in that direction.
The one time I saw Ronnie Montrose play, in something like 1988, he was not playing any songs with only four chords, nor was he playing anything with as simple and direct a guitar solo as the one he plays here. He moved into a jazz fusion world after this band broke up – Hagar left after only one more album, Paper Money, and the various membership changes of the next few years generated many more sales than the debut, which famously stalled at #133 on the Billboard chart, did. History is a funny thing, though – nowadays, only Montrose sells regularly in used record bins.
This live video, presumably from the time frame of the first album tour, finds the band in an even more punkish style than the record. The motorcycle guitar sound is missing, and there aren’t two overdubbed guitars behind Montrose’s tough solo. It’s fun, though, to see these guys, who sound like they were built to play arenas and stadiums, taking up such a small stage and playing in tight connection with each other. It’s also fun to notice the complete lack of rock star glamor in the outfits they were wearing. They looked like four reasonably cool guys who just happened to make one of the most exhilarating records of 1973, a year filled with great music.
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