To all the folks who heard me this playing this in my car with the convertible roof down a little loud this week – I’m sorry. I genuinely thought volume would help.
Disc 1933 is…The Deed Is Done
Artist: Molly Hatchet
Year of Release: 1984
What’s up with the Cover? Molly Hatchet loves a good fantasy cover and here we have another winner.
A Death Dealer adjacent character (some dude in black plate mail with an axe) standing in a volcanic region looking tough. He appears to have a pet vulture, but it could just be this bird and the two in the sky behind him are like remoras following a shark. This guy probably kills a lot of folks and following him around would provide plenty of carrion to eat.
It is painted by Ezra Tucker, not Frank Frazetta as the cognitive dissonance in my lazy brain patterns wanted to believe.
How I Came To Know It: I have been a fan of Molly Hatchet since I was a kid, and I vaguely remember seeing this one back in the day, although I never owned it. I recently found this copy in the used section of the local record store at a good price and figured what the hell. It’s Molly Hatchet – how bad could it be?
How It Stacks Up: I have six Molly Hatchet records (their first six). Of those, “The Deed is Done” comes in at #6.
Ratings: 1 star
Sometimes a record sounds like it was made by someone with an old soul, and sometimes a record sounds like it was just made by someone who’s tired. The latter is “The Deed is Done”, which confirmed for me that when I bought my fifth Molly Hatchet record the deed was done, and I should have stopped.
I am usually a sucker for Molly Hatchet’s brand of metal-adjacent swamp-blues boogie. I have lots of it and it is mostly good. Sadly, “The Deed is Done” is a hollowed out soulless version of those earlier efforts.
The worst part is it starts promising. The record’s second song, “Backstabber” rides the ridge of pop anthem and crunchy guitar riff. It’s a dangerous ridge, and the production is steeped in the mistakes of the middle of the 1980s, but I was willing to overlook it and join in with the crowd and clap along – in time or slightly behind the beat depending on how late in the set in the evening it comes on.
However, no other songs were able to overcome the poor decisions made on this record. The opener, “Satisfied Man” should have warned me off, with its rent-a-song lack of originality and “ooh ooh” chants in place of lyrics (also featured on “Backstabber” – but done better). The guitar work is still grimy and good – a staple of Molly Hatchet records – but even that can’t overcome the sheer obviousness of the song’s construction.
At this point, dear reader, I was still feeling charitable and perfectly willing to give out two stars and a kind-hearted ribbing. I do this often – as recently as my last review in fact.
But then “She Does She Does” came along. Another uninspired entry, I was already fidgeting uncomfortably when, two minutes in, the first saxophone solo hit me. If there is a kind of music less suited to this kind of eighties saxophone noodle than Molly Hatchet, I can’t think of what it is. That sax bit is answered by a guitar solo that sounds like someone practicing scales. Almost like the guitars were finally giving up in the face of all the bad decisions.
At 4:30 in, the song was still happening to me when the second saxophone solo hit. Worse and less focused than the last, it goes on for almost two full minutes before ending in the biggest songwriting cop-out available: the fade-out. “She Does She Does” is a song that should never have been born and doesn’t even have the decency to know how to die.
From here I wasn’t feeling too charitable, and it was going to be a long uphill climb back to respectability for the remaining eight tracks. Much love to Molly Hatchet, but they did not pull it off.
Molly Hatchet has always been a sort of throwback band, and bringing their seventies rock vibe into the eighties is a challenge they’ve ably and capably accomplished. Here, they just sounded like a tired bar band, out of touch and spent, but still getting gigs on a Wednesday night.
There were moments where the opportunity was there. “Good Smoke and Whiskey” is a song that is set up to be a good time from the title alone. But nope – we get another tired song, in this case a narrator complaining that he’s losing his car and colour t.v. in the divorce settlement. The kind of guy you’ll meet in one of those seedy bars noted above, who’ll tell you all about it if you make the mistake of returning his smile while ordering a drink.
Each time the guitars chimed in my heart awoke, hoping they’d recapture their former glory, but it would all descend into a sort of Rick Springfield-adjacent radio anthem drowning out all the tough hard-scrabble charm the band is known for.
I have defended Molly Hatchet against all comers for the better part of four decades. I will still defend them overall, but should my debating opponent bring up “The Deed is Done” I will concede the point: this is a bad record.
Best tracks: Backstabber
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