Hounds: It'd Be Easier to Find an Elton John Record

Looking back at the musics which would actually work at cultivating whatever counted as punk in the seventies, there’s actually a really odd range. Everything from bar bands, to poppy, matching suited acts in addition to the Stooges, the Velvets and both Lou and Iggy’s solo stuff. With the latter pair’s recording during the seventies, though, it’s pretty easy to find at least a slight similarity to a few Elton John songs. Piano workouts weren’t unfamiliar to anyone just mentioned. Iggy’s glittery seventies persona also didn’t seem to veer clear of the British pianist’s either. So, it’s in this atmosphere that bands like Hounds, a Chicago based rock act, can find themselves lumped into the punk thing. The cover to the band’s Unleashed looks like it belongs. But that might be the extent of the bands proper relation to the genre.

Apparently, the lead off track on this 1978 album, “Drugland Weekend,” which does just sound like Elton John, as one of the most requested tunes on local stations in and around ’77. It’s not a surprise since the band apes a good attitude while still tossing in so much pop sucrose as to make anything it recorded digestable. All of this, though, points to the fact that punk as a commodity had already been co-opted by the time the Sex Pistols went and attempted a States’ side tour.

Let’s dismiss the fact that all this dog imagery was clearly a gimmick – just like having some broad wearing a dog collar on the cover of its first album was meant to be edgy and enticing all at once - “Bite the Dog” is just a hard rock track from the period. There’s no way Hounds was unfamiliar with “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” but it’s reworking of Iggy’s concept veered dangerously close to easily outstripped guitar wank and preening vocalizations better suited to spandex a few years later than leather upon its release.

After the band’s two album deal with Columbia was fulfilled it seems that most folks involved with Hounds basically ceased their musical careers. There really wasn’t anywhere to go for these folks anyway. They’d plundered dumb rock to the point that only Meatloaf was fit to carry on this sort of tripe. Of course, the tremendous amount of over production at work on Unleashed, all it’s back-up singers and the like, probably didn’t do Hounds any favors, but still, this was pretty hackey.