Postbellum aggression

Flirtin' With Disaster
Molly Hatchet
(Epic, 1979)

Wild-Eyed Southern Boys
.38 Special
(A&M, 1981)

And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Molly Hatchet
With .38 Special and the Johnny Van Zant Band…

--Patterson Hood, "Let There Be Rock" by Drive-By Truckers

And I never got into Molly Hatchet until today, and when I did I replayed the title track to Flirtin' With Disaster three times in a row.

Here's another example of how album covers can be misleading. Molly Hatchet had a special relationship with artist Frank Frazetta, who specialized in very detailed depictions of foreboding fantasy figures. There wasn't a sorcerer or conjurer Frazetta couldn't cozy up to. Molly Hatchet used Frazetta's work for their album covers in the 70s and 80s, including Flirtin', and each one showed a solitary, knight-type figure, in various poses of grandeur. All Frazetta's subjects look ready for the kill, which fits the MH MO, but they all look one hasty step removed from a somewhat hipper D&D party, or medieval night at your favorite bondage outlet.

Surely you can see the empowering suggestibility at work with Frazetta's art, but when I was the prime target for Molly Hatchet's activities – i.e., a white male teenager – looking at those covers reminded me of Meat Loaf's slightly gayer but no less thunderous Bat Out Of Hell cover. I was thinking heraldry and bombast, and the unpleasantness that goes along with inviting Jim Steinman into your home, which if you do, forget dinner conversation, unless you're willing to talk at Gilmore Girls pace about getting laid in the backseat of a Dart.

Imagine my delight and surprise to find out Molly Hatchet was just a back-to-basics Southern boogie band who covered Bobby Womack songs, and had a three-guitar attack that was better than just about anybody of their time. Frazetta's cover work, grimily regal as it is, grossly overcompensates for the actual musical styles contained within. There's really nothing frilly at all about Molly Hatchet, unless you listen to the remarkably complicated guitar exchanges. Two competing leads go at each other in "One Man's Pleasure," and the title cut has about sixteen different electric guitar hooks going on throughout the whole song, all of them good. I even like Danny Joe Brown's unrefined, vowel-powered growl. So what if it reminds me of a drunk Jim Nabors calling out bingo numbers? It fits the material.

.38 Special also hailed from Jacksonville, and also wanted to convey an ultimately inaccurate image via their album cover for Wild-Eyed Southern Boys. All the members of the band are drawn, ogling at a woman in prime-period Daisy Dukes with her back to the viewer. Let there be no mistake about .38 Special's amorous bent. They're red-blooded American men, virile, not above biting off the caps from longnecks of whup-ass with their teeth. I don't doubt for a minute that .38 Special are young, whiskey-bent, and straight. It's just that sometimes they sound like Toto.

They made two great singles, though, one of which was called "Hold On Loosely" and kicks off this album. (The other's called "Caught Up In You" and opened their next album, Special Forces, which coincidentally also featured a painting of the band ogling a woman in Daisy Dukes, except a giant chassis in the shape of the band logo has crashed into the ground, missing her by mere feet.) "Hold On Loosely" doesn't ring false because Donnie Van Zant sings with gusto, and even if they're modulating into a chord you don't ever find within the usual three, the guitars keep it up. It's a great precursor of what Hickey would call "confidence rock," except it doesn't suck.

But then they back off, and the weird compromises they make in the edge department make the beer bottles crash to the floor when the tablecloth's been pulled. But the champagne glasses don't stay up either. So you get an unthreatening, glossy track about their being "Wild-Eyed Southern Boys" that actually sounds like the work of dough-cheeked Ivy Leaguers. There ain't room in JAX for both Lynyrd Skynyrd and Steely Dan. Choose yer side, Yankee.

Most of the rest of Wild-Eyed plays with the ineffective tension of hard guitar and dentist-ready pop, and it doesn't declare too many winners. "Fantasy Girl" is a good one, though. It can also be found on the .38 Special chapter of Universal's 20th Century Masters Millennium Collection. In fact, when .38 Special committed later on in the 80s to their pop formula, the best stuff actually got put out as singles. If you're going to set aside some time for our lapsed chauvinists, any of their anthologies should more than take care of ya.

And the battle between Molly Hatchet's soldiers of fortune and .38 Special's headless bar floozies will take place in a heaven that looks a lot like Jacksonville. Imagine the tailgate party.