Music Reissues Weekly: Hawkwind - Hall of the Mountain Grill

Issued in September 1974, Hall of the Mountain Grill was Hawkwind’s fifth LP. The follow-up to 1973’s live double album The Space Ritual Alive in Liverpool and London, it found the band in a position which seemed unlikely considering their roots in, and continued commitment to, West London’s freak scene. Their June 1972 single “Silver Machine” had charted and, irrespective of what they represented or espoused, Hawkwind had breached the mainstream.

Nonetheless, Hall of the Mountain Grill didn’t chart high – in the UK, it peaked at 16 in late September 1974: when Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge and Tubular Bells were at numbers one and two respectively. Hawkwind’s album had left the charts by the end of October. It was awarded a silver disc, for sales of 60,000, in October 1978. It has never been awarded gold status, for sales of 100,000. The closest to a tie-in single was the non-charting “The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear in Smoke),” issued back in August.

When the album was released, Hawkwind probably weren’t thinking about potential sales figures or chart positions – they were touring the US at the time. As Hall of the Mountain Grill hit shops, home-country fans didn’t get a chance to see them live. On their return to Europe in November, it was straight off to play dates in Belgium, France and Germany.

Three months after the album’s release, Hawkwind began touring the UK. An early pointer towards Britain’s musical future was along for the ride. Their support band was Dr Feelgood, who had signed to the headliner’s label United Artists earlier in the year. The contrast was marked. Hawkwind defined space rock, and were embedded in the freak scene of West London’s Ladbroke Grove – where the titular Mountain Grill café was located. Dr Feelgood played an aggressive, stripped-down, Sixties-style R&B. They had short – for the time – hair and looked like gone-to-seed clerical staff. The future was knocking on Hawkwind’s door: one that, in time, birthed punk rock.

While the dissimilarity between Hawkwind and Dr. Feelgood was conspicuous, another disjunction exemplified Hawkwind’s seeming abandonment of their core audience at the time Hall of the Mountain Grill was released. They had played two lengthy US tours in 1974: the first over March and April, the second over September, October and early November. Although nothing was issued in America to coincide with the tours, the UK was no longer their prime focus.

The exhaustive seven-CD, two Blu-ray disc box set dedicated to Hall of the Mountain Grill includes, in full over four CDs, recordings made on a mobile 16-track facility of two live shows from the first run of US dates: The Auditorium, Chicago, 21 March (where the band’s fee was $4500: the show, in much inferior sound quality, was previously released as Space Party 1999) and The Allen Theatre, Cleveland, 22 March (the book with the set gives no reason why these shows were recorded: it must have cost a bomb to do so). The album, supplemented by a series of interesting bonus tracks, is on Disc One.

Discs Two and Three feature a show from The Sundown in Edmonton, North London, recorded on 25 January 1974 – a couple of tracks recorded at the same venue the next day were included on Hall of the Mountain Grill (“It’s so Easy,” a third selection from this show, ended up as the B-side to “The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear in Smoke)” single). The two Blu-ray discs include a remaster of the album itself and a new 5.1 surround-sound mix of the album (a “demix” from the album master tape: presumably the multi-tracks no longer survive – again, nothing is said about this in the book) and 5.1 surround-sound and stereo mixes of the Cleveland show. The Blu-rays are side dishes rather than the main course. The box set’s format and presentation style – despite the disappointingly poor resolution of some of its book’s images suggesting an internet source – is in keeping with previous packages dedicated to the earlier Hawkwind albums X in Search of Space, Doremi Fasol Latido and The Space Ritual Alive in Liverpool and London.

Whatever its context, Hall of the Mountain Grill was and remains fantastic. It’s Hawkwind's most satisfying album as such, a linear listening experience with an ebb and flow. There’s the rocking Lemmy co-write “Lost Johnny,” classic Hawkwind in the form of “The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear in Smoke)” (confoundingly, it loses the “The” from its title in the box set’s listings) and brushes with uniting ambience and a misty prog-rock, in which new member Simon House had a large role. His Mellotron adds texture to the familiar Hawkwind musical arsenal. The album both consolidated Hawkwind’s identity and stretched it out. The new remaster is more sonically dynamic than a first pressing of the album, with a much greater clarity.

The bonuses on the album disc – all of which have been out before – include a tentative, disjointed studio version of “It’s so Easy,” recorded In September 1973 (the Edmonton Sundown live version was on the flip of the “The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear in Smoke)" single). As there are no other tracks from this session, perhaps Hawkwind were considering the track as a single? The same applies to a November 1973 version of “You’d Better Believe it” (similarly, the Edmonton Sundown live version was on the album). It seems Hawkwind main-main Dave Brock was not happy with either of these in their studio iterations. The other five bonuses are an alternate version of the album’s “Wind of Change” and tracks which appeared on singles in the UK and Germany.

On the live discs, the 25 January 1974 Edmonton show catches a very different band to the one experienced by the US audiences at Chicago and Cleveland in March. In London, the band are driving but rough, and joined by their on-off member Robert Calvert – who delivers a tedious, flow-breaking monologue about the recently imprisoned Timothy Leary (whose partner introduces the show). The bumpiness of the band – nonetheless, still thrilling – is exemplified by the closing two tracks, “Orgone Accumulator" and "Silver Machine." Both are more about hammering things out then fashioning an even ride. The implication of this unevenness is that Hawkwind were saying goodbye to the Space Ritual era. The two US shows reveal a Hawkwind which wants to push forward as fast as possible. “The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear in Smoke)” is here, as are other songs which later appeared on Hall of the Mountain Grill – none of this was yet on record; there was no pandering to audience expectations by trotting out the familiar. In Chicago and Cleveland, Hawkwind are more textured than the band heard on the 1973 shows collected on the previous box sets in this series (and on the Edmonton show here too). They are at one of the peak moments. “Bright and professional” is the box set’s book’s description of the band at Cleveland .

This box set is really about the lead up to Hall of the Mountain Grill as much as it is the album itself – the album was recorded in May and June 1974, after the year’s first US tour. Everything else dates from before the album sessions. The shelved studio tracks on Disc One and the three sets of live recordings show in real time how the band was defining its future, putting 1973’s space-naut characterisation behind them. Herewith, another essential addition to the Hawkwind catalogue.

• Next week: The Complete Epic Recordings – two CDs dedicated to short-lived early Eighties electropop duo Leisure Process
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