Ronnie Montrose earned the reputation as a diversely talented guitarist on Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey and for backing Boz Scaggs and Edgar Winter. But with the 1973 debut album for the group that bore his surname, Montrose put himself at the head of a new pack of heavy metal acts, sledge-hammering the blues into urgent killer riffs on the opening track, the anthemic “Rock the Nation.”
The spotty lyric had less to do with rock as music than with rock as hard-thrusting sex, and was delivered with appropriate swagger by a then-unknown vocalist, Sammy Hagar. Hagar wrote the album’s best song, “Bad Motor Scooter,” another lusty declaration powered by Montrose’s imaginatively noisy guitar playing.
Montrose emerged from the San Francisco Bay area and vague allusions to post-psychedelia bookend “Space Station #5,” a solid fist-shacking rocker with a dystopian science-fiction theme. The newly released Deluxe Edition includes a second disc of bonus tracks, mostly demos and live radio sessions.
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