 Hot Mont...A Man with a Message
:
(A Primer for Beginning Your Hot Mont Studies)
reprinted
with permission from Rolling Rock Magazine issue # 27
9/9/93 by S. Mackeson
(This article summarizes Hot Mont's music
& philosophy as well as any writings )
It was the late sixties. Life was in
turmoil. The war... hippies... sit-ins... society starting to rot.
Make love...not war. The beginning of the "ME" generation. Oh
yeah... the shit looked good...you know... "peace, man"...but behind
it all the 'what's in it for ME" people began to flourish. Hot Mont
cut though all that crap.
War keeps the economy churning. So let us
be what we are...war mongers...purveyors of death and destruction...
Every person is expendable... Let's control that petroleum... and
let's kick some ass to do it. With war we get to pump more petrol,
shape more steel, design bigger and better weaponry...
all this keeps the people working creating economic boons for
all.
In the early seventies, the "ME" people
wanted the cake and to eat it as well (peace AND prosperity). The
"ME" people continued to cry that the war was unjust and lacked
purpose. The idiotic masses succeeded in getting the war shut down,
& just as Hot Mont predicted in his lyrics,
inflation skyrocketed, unemployment reached highest levels since The
Great Depression.
Once again the "ME" people cried
"What's in it for ME". The government decided there had to be
something done to "help" the "ME" people. Therefore, the taxation
increased to create a larger welfare state, driving increasingly
more people to the brink of destruction.
Here is where the story ends or, if you
prefer, it begins. Hot Mont disappears from the face of the earth
sometime in 1977, taking with him the "sounds of prosperity" (as he
called his musical genre). This music was the social commentary that
really told it like it was and described what Mont would have done
to preserve the prosperity. Most people loved the music but ignored
the message.
Everyone who loved to listen and dance to
the diversified sounds of Hot Mont did not capture the
concepts being delivered in the profound and prophetic lyrics. Hot
Mont's utopia was never to be again and he knew it. The "Beav" had
died.
After nearly a fifteen-year search, the
last recording studio where Mont recorded was found. There had been
an attempt to bomb the building about the same time,
apparently. Hot (as he was affectionately referred to)
disappeared. Unfortunately, engineers were only able to salvage a
few tapes from all the masters that were found. A new process is
being used to hopefully recover some of the music from the
decaying mess that was found in what was once one of the most
advanced underground studios in the nation. There are
one or two songs from each of his four most well known albums plus a
couple of cuts from an unreleased work-in-progress. As for restoring
the album graphics (which were phenomenal for that time) volunteer
graphics artists have regenerated them from fragments of the
covers found in the rubble.
Another astonishing discovery was the
fact that of all the people that were interviewed, not one still had
or even knew what happened to their collected materials from Hot
Mont. Some people had extensive collections of vinyl and knew that
they had at one time owned a full collection of Hot Mont but the
collections had somehow mysteriously
disappeared.
With all the time that has been spent
researching this lost moment in our lives, all the clues point to
the fact that Hot Mont is still out there, hiding somewhere in the
corporate world (probably wearing a gray suit and black wing-tipped
shoes).
-Mackeson/1993 | 
2015: 
