Friday Night: Ian Hunter Plays Glam-Rock for All Ages at the Fillmore

Romana Machado

Ian Hunter and the Rant Band at the Fillmore Friday.

​Ian Hunter and the Rant Band

Kelley Stoltz

January 28, 2011

@ The Fillmore

Better than: Your first copy of Station to Station.

If Ian Hunter needs any introduction these days, it isn't for the benefit of the long line of all-ages dandies and their molls snaking up Geary Street early evening on Friday. Keyboardist/frontman for 1970s hard rock progenitors Mott the Hoople, Hunter was the glam movement's first iconic face and a principal designer of the chord-heavy blunderbuss sound that displaced the holdover hippie bullshit then clogging the transatlantic rock scene. It would be the faintest praise to say the headliner's music helped invent metal and its less stylish variants, and his impishly aristocratic persona made rock stardom look like something in an era when everyone else was stagily pretending the opposite.

As it filtered in to about three-quarters full during the opening act, the audience brought little of the usual nostalgia-show atmosphere that surrounds live display of a heritage-rock act. This was more like a public gathering of everyone within driving distance for whom glam rock ever meant anything, which as of 2011 cuts a generational swatch somewhere between the first year of college and the last decade before retirement. The one unifying visual tag was a hard, natty manner of dress -- a kind of mid-1970s cool the star personified and I myself adopted long ago. To this day, people remark on my resemblance to Billy Idol and I can only seethe.