03.06.12

They don’t make ’em like Ronnie Montrose now

Posted in Rock 'n' Roll at 4:42 pm by George Smith

Ronnie Montrose died over the weekend. (This link is to a Rolling Stone piece by Sammy Hagar, a memoir focused mostly on the debut album, Montrose, a landmark in American hard rock.)

Without Montrose, no Van Halen as that band emerged in ’77.

I still have most of his albums.

Never repeating himself, Ronnie Montrose was certainly not a man who needed social approval in the way of a big audience to stay energized.

As a result he made albums that were all over the place. Montrose, the band, was pure hard rock. As it neared the end of Montrose’s patience with it, a more electric keyboard sound dominated until the man axed the singer and wrote an all instrumental record.

By the Eighties, Montrose was back into the rock band format in Gamma, a quartet which — surprisingly — again provided a vehicle for art and synth work as much as the thick dominating Les Paul riff-tone for which he became known.

Always exciting, Montrose’s power chords were hand grenades and over the course of the Seventies and Eighties I saw him on the big stage about half a dozen times.

The most memorable show was one at the Tower in ’77 or ’78 in support of his Open Fire solo album.

The show was audacious in 1978, particularly for rock audiences used to the classic format with a frontman/lead singer.

Montrose wasn’t working jazz and there was only one band given a get-out-of-jail free card to perform fusion for the rock crowd and that was the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Still, Open Fire was a fair album. It actually made a much better show, though.

Back then Montrose was sandwiched between Journey, the headliner, and Van Halen in support of its debut album.

Eddie van Halen was a tough act to follow. Ronnie Montrose handled it with aplomb. He was every bit at the same level of heavyweight guitar playing as the younger star.

Here’s some film from the Open Fire tour.

Today, it still entertains with many things.

You have the fruity rockstar clothes of the late Seventies, the power guitar coupled to a bit of an arty take on some things Emerson, Lake & Palmer, an antagonizing mountain of synths and keyboards piled onstage, and the fact that it probably did a lot to inspire emerging punk rockers who were rebelling against everything like it.

Great stuff!

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