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Ian Hunter, as good as ever, at World Cafe Live

Back in the Bicentennial year of 1976, English rocker and Mott the Hoople leader Ian Hunter called his second solo album All American Alien Boy.

Back in the Bicentennial year of 1976, English rocker and Mott the Hoople leader Ian Hunter called his second solo album

All American Alien Boy

.

In the title song, one of several showstoppers the guitarist and piano player - still frizzy-haired at 73 - performed while looking out from behind trademark sunglasses at World Cafe Live on Thursday, Hunter portrayed himself as an expatriate with eyes wide in wonder in the land of fast food and firearms. "Just a whitey from Blighty, heading out west," he sang in a raspy voice, with a hint of a Bob Dylan sneer. "Got my little green card and my bulletproof vest."

The WCL was all but sold out. "We're one short, so one of you go out and pay again and then come back in," Hunter jokingly commanded. And a fair share of the baby boomers - seated in chairs on the floor, despite the high energy of Hunter's ace Rant Band, and standing at the back - displayed know-all-the-words familiarity with the front man's oeuvre.

The nearly two-hour show stretched back to Mott's early-'70s heyday, including the rollicking Jerry Lee Lewis piano rumble "All the Way From Memphis" and Hunter's David Bowie-penned signature song "All the Young Dudes," the still fabulous classic glam-rock closer after all these years.

What's so impressive about Hunter in 2012 is not his back catalog; it's the way his string of recent albums, including the exemplary new When I'm President ("Look at Billboard next week," he joked. "No. 153 with a bullet!"), are of a piece with his early work without any drop in craftsmanship or quality.

As if to make that point, Hunter and his five-piece band, including slick lead guitarist Mark Bosch and bandleader James Mastro, opened with the new album's brawling "Comfortable (Flying Scotsman)," which segued effortlessly into 1975's "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" (a hit for hair-metal band Great White in 1989).

Highlights were many, including Mott's gorgeously pained "I Wish I Was Your Mother," which Hunter described as "a song about jealousy" and which was distinguished by Mastro's ringing mandolin. And an interlude with Hunter at the piano included a stately take on John Lennon's "Isolation" that was not so harrowing as the original but effective, nonetheless, with the added grace note of a Mastro slide guitar fill that quoted George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord."

The centerpiece of the show, though, was the title cut to When I'm President, a fanciful rant in which the first-generation British rocker raised on American rock-and-roll circles back to his expat persona. "A stranger in a strange land, I feel like an alien," Hunter sang Thursday. "I'm on the outside looking in."

As it pushes forward with never-in-a-hurry momentum, "When I'm President" takes a measured view of political gridlock: "You go in with the right intent . . . something happens to you up on the Hill / It's business as usual." Still, Hunter couldn't help but indulge in a little fantasy: "Washington, Jefferson, watch out baby, 'cause here I come / Abraham, Theodore, you know you'll see my ugly mug up on Mount Rushmore."

Better get that South Dakota granite mountain fitted with a pair of shades, because an All-American alien boy is moving in.