Published on Nov 18, 2002
How do you follow an album that exceeds all expectations — the
record label’s, the management’s, even the artist’s?
For a lot of acts over the years, the answer has been, clone it.
Milk the formula that got you there the first time, and meet
perhaps the most important expectations of all – your audience’s.
Of course, none of those acts were led by Ronnie Montrose.
Montrose the musician has always been about pushing the envelope
and exploring the unexplored. If there’s one statement you can make
that covers all of his work, from hard rock with Montrose and
Gamma, to jazz-fusion and a variety of experiments with texture and
tone as a solo artist, it’s this: he’s never made the same album
twice. That fact has won him all sorts of praise from fellow
artists, and unending difficulty building momentum and/or
sustaining commercial success. People who like milk chocolate
M&Ms generally aren’t all that happy if you hand them a
whole-wheat granola bar the next time around. They want more
M&Ms.
As a follow-up to the band’s landmark 1973 debut, the
self-titled
Montrose album,
Paper Money is a firm statement of artistic independence —
defiance, even. Where
Montrose remains rightly famous for its unrelenting
eight-song hard rock assault,
Paper Money is all over the map, delving into quirky,
melodic pop, a pair of ballads and an instrumental. And while
individual moments of brilliance do emerge, the overall impact of
the album is diluted by its very diversity.
A significant part of the problem lies in the sequencing. Having
created a certain set of expectations with the first album,
Montrose proceeded to dash them immediately by opening their
sophomore effort with “Underground,” a blatantly poppy outside
composition whose vaguely macabre lyric seems to puzzle even lead
vocalist Sammy Hagar. The second song is even more perplexing from
the perspective of a Montrose fan, a reverent cover of the largely
acoustic Rolling Stones ballad “Connection.” It’s well-executed
musically, offering nimble guitar work by Montrose, a nice guest
shot on piano by Mark Jordan, and the debut of new bass player Alan
Fitzgerald on synthesizer – but it also effectively kills whatever
momentum the new album might have had.
Next up are another mismatched pair. “The Dreamer” is a heavy,
mid-tempo Hagar-Montrose piece that features strong electric
riffage from Montrose on the verses and chorus, but inexplicably
drops into an almost pastoral synthesizer solo on the bridge.
Sometimes contrast works; not here. Closing out side one of the
vinyl LP, the instrumental excursion “Starliner” is an enjoyable
piece carrying echoes of both Ronnie Montrose’s past (the influence
of the Edgar Winter’s Group’s “Frankenstein” is apparent) and his
future as a solo artist. Nonetheless, it feels distinctly out of
place on a band album.
Just when you think maybe the band has entirely abandoned the
sound that made their first album so memorable, though, along comes
“I Got The Fire,” quite possibly the best song anyone involved ever
recorded. Three minutes of surging, propulsive electric guitar
built around a complex, brilliant central riff culminate in a force
ten hurricane of a solo, an aural ass-kicking that has inspired
legions of air guitarists ever since. The lyric is also among
Ronnie Montrose’s best, an unequivocal statement of personal
independence and passion.
The album closes out strong, going heavy with the
steady-building “Spaceage Sacrifice,” then soft with the gentle,
introspective ballad “We’re Going Home” (featuring another
excellent Montrose solo and his only recorded lead vocal
performance), then hard again with the tribal beat of the
thundering title track, driven by the relentless drumming of Denny
Carmassi.
Paper Money was destined to be the last hurrah for the
Hagar-Montrose partnership; they parted ways at the end of the
ensuing tour. As a closing statement, it’s a reasonably strong one,
more diverse and challenging lyrically than the party-soundtrack
first album, and filled with the kind of restless musical
experimentation that would characterize the next 25 years of Ronnie
Montrose’s band and solo career. However difficult that exploratory
urge (and the dashed expectations left in its wake) was to make
Ronnie Montrose’s career path over the decades to follow, it proved
right here at the start that the journey would never be less than
interesting.