Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  Thin Lizzy spent the next year learning how to be the band they wanted to be. Part of the process involved the two new arrivals working out how Lynott ticked.

  ‘Phil was a guy of multiple personalities,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘He was that hard guy from the songs. You didn’t say the wrong thing to him at the wrong time. Nobody did. If you were to say anything derogatory to him about Ireland, that was fighting talk. He would not take any shit from anybody about the whole Irish thing. He could be the hard man when it suited him, and wild. He was out every night raising hell. That was the nature of the beast. He was the one who taught me the basic rules of going out at night. I don’t think he had any restrictions whatsoever. On the other side of it, he was a real gentle kind of guy too.’

  While Thin Lizzy were still in the process of establishing their identity and orientation, they made two records. Nightlife, released on 8 November 1974, and Fighting, released on 12 September 1975, are half-formed place markers. Produced by Ron Nevison, an American who had worked with Bad Company and the Who, Nightlife is a tepid record, the fussy, layered production largely neutering the band’s already tentative sense of self. It’s a provisional and uncertain work. Phonogram heard the uneven mix of under-powered blues, saccharine ballads, aimless instrumentals and misfiring Sham-rockers and shrugged. Aside from ‘Still in Love with You’, which became a career-long concert highlight, ‘Nightlife was a pretty mediocre record,’ says Nigel Grainge. ‘There was no singles material on it, nothing that would take them beyond where they were at the time. We did nothing with it.’

  Fighting swung in the other direction. It was an equally self-conscious record in many ways, but stronger and more confident. Much of that assurance stemmed from the six-week US tour Thin Lizzy had undertaken shortly before it was recorded, supporting Bachman-Turner Overdrive in March 1975. If watching Slade had forced Lynott to reassess his stage craft, then this was a challenge on a far greater scale. Playing arenas and stadiums with capacities rising to 20,000, bottom of a three-act bill which included Bob Seger, Thin Lizzy came of age as a live band. ‘The impact on Phil was huge,’ says Gorham. ‘He couldn’t wait to get out there. We hadn’t sold any records, but we were on this big tour, playing these arenas, and it hit Phil in a big way.’

  The Bachman-Turner Overdrive/Thin Lizzy bill transferred to British venues throughout April and May. By the time prospective producer John Alcock saw the band for the first time later in 1975, he was struck not by the songs – which he felt were average and tended to merge into a homogenized sonic soup – but by the command the lead singer had over the crowd.

  ‘He did that crouch, splitting the legs, and he had a black Fender Precision bass with a mirrored pick-guard on it,’ says Alcock. ‘He did the thing that every rock band since has done, where you will see the guitar player with the instrument between his legs, pointing it like a machine gun. Because Phil was tall and skinny, it emphasized the look. He was prowling around the front of the stage, pointing this thing like a weapon. I thought, this guy is a rock star. I was very impressed, straight off the bat.’

  Lynott was profoundly affected by his first visit to the States. The country that had played such a formative role in shaping his imagination through its popular culture cast an even more seductive spell up close. In Los Angeles, he sought out 77 Sunset Strip, the address which lent its name to the comedy-detective TV series Lynott had loved as a teenager. He went there looking for Kookie Kookson, the show’s fictional star, and instead found Dino’s Lodge, the Hollywood club named after Dean Martin.

  Dino’s quickly found its way into a song. Many of America’s clubs, bars and restaurants seemed unfathomably exotic: Barney’s Beanery, the Rainbow Bar & Grill, the Manhattan Deli, the Troubadour and the Whiskey A Go Go. He immersed himself in the crackling energy of the Chicago blues clubs, relished the blaring Detroit street noise, savoured the cotton-wool heat of the South. The clothes, the buildings, the food, the language, the brazenly upfront women. For six weeks he let it wash over him, recording it all in his notebooks.

  There is a distinct whiff of America on Fighting. The opening cover of Bob Seger’s ‘Rosalie’ was uncomplicated FM rock, purpose-built for cruising along the freeway. ‘He heard it and immediately said, “We could do that,”’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘He knew they could take that song and make it their own, and that it contained the seed of something new for them.’

  The album has its fair share of dollars and diners, but more significant was Lynott’s decision to consciously shape his writing to accentuate his more assertive stage persona. Watching Thin Lizzy’s show at London’s Roundhouse on 1 June 1975, Chris O’Donnell recognized that Lynott’s confident, increasingly theatrical and unashamedly masculine showmanship was a potent weapon. Their manager ‘realized that whenever Phil’s aggression came through the crowd went wild, yet whenever he trailed off into his more sentimental moments, the audience didn’t respond as well. After the show I had a long chat with Philip and I encouraged him to concentrate more on the macho side of his image, because I could see that’s what the fans wanted from him.’13

  Thin Lizzy became a hard-rock band through an act of calculated careerism. ‘We knew that we could write soft songs and record them, but we took the decision to unify the whole image, to put the stage and recording image as one identifiable thing,’ said Lynott. ‘That’s the way we planned it. Because the stage act was so live and so raunchy, and we were only doing one slow song, we decided that we’d only put one slow song on an album. We knew we had to make a rock and roll album to make it.’14

  From the ludicrous cover image – which Lynott loathed – of the band sneering on a building site with their singer baring his puffed-out chest, to the flashes of coiled rock and roll within, Fighting reimagined what Thin Lizzy could be. It is a flawed and partial portrait, one which loses momentum towards the end, partly because the songwriting weakens and the music does not punch as hard as the tough boys on the cover would have us believe. Lynott had opted to produce the record himself and he fluffed it, failing to draw out the live power of the band. ‘I thought I was experienced enough to handle it,’ he said. ‘Little did I know.’15 But the album staked out a path to follow. Thin Lizzy’s previous melange of styles confused people. Fighting was intended to cohere, if nothing else, and on that level it just about succeeded.

  To this end, Lynott proved amenable to compromise. His original idea of a cover featuring close-ups of the four band members bruised and bloodied was shot but rejected by the record company, so he acceded to Mick Rock’s ‘indescribably bad’ alternative. When Thin Lizzy delivered the original album to Phonogram, the band were told it simply wasn’t good enough and they would have to record four more songs. Lynott nodded icily. ‘He didn’t pick me up by the scruff of the neck,’ says Nigel Grainge. ‘He just said, “What are we going to do?” He wasn’t big time in any way. To their credit they went back in, and came back with “King’s Vengeance” and a couple of others. The resulting album was much better than the last one. It broke them open and continued on the up. At that stage the band really started to get serious. Live they were going down really well, they had been to the States, and everybody was that much more serious about their career.’

  ‘Really, Fighting was the first album where we had a bit of direction,’ says Brian Robertson. ‘Still hadn’t quite clicked, but it was headed [somewhere].’

  The songs of vengeance, violence, suicide and fierce independence heralded a burgeoning creative understanding between Lynott, Robertson and Scott Gorham. ‘A lot of times he would bring in a chorus and a melody,’ says Gorham. ‘I would suggest a bridge or a middle eight and we’d go from there. Or I’d bring in a riff and he’d say, rather shyly, “Do you want me to write a lyric to that?” Well, yes, please, Phil! It worked in different ways. A lot of times he had the whole thing done, and your only job was to put on lead guitar or figure out harmony lines to weave in and out of chord patterns or lyrics. He had a rudimentary understanding of the g
uitar, and he was able to pound down the chords at least enough for me or Brian Robertson to get a sense of where it was going and make some judgements along the way.’

  Fighting also marked the first time on record that using two guitar players in tandem started to pay off. The Allman Brothers Band and Wishbone Ash had pioneered a similar close-knitted double harmony style, but Thin Lizzy would mould it into something even more distinctive. ‘The two guys were so different,’ says Downey. ‘Brian was from Scotland and was based on the British blues sound, where Scott was American and into the US West Coast sound. Totally different, but perfect matches in the long run.’

  Their growing empathy is particularly evident, if still embryonic, on ‘For Those Who Love to Live’, ‘Freedom Song’ and ‘Wild One’. ‘It was really an accident,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘Brian was out in the studio doing a take, and the engineer left a delay on his guitar, a millisecond, so he was harmonizing with himself. We thought it was really cool, so we had Brian go out and do his original line, and I went out and put the harmony to it. We kept doing it on other songs, although we weren’t thinking about it as a Thin Lizzy sound until we read it in the paper, where the reviewer talked about that “patented twin guitar harmony Thin Lizzy sound”. I called Brian and said, “Hey man, we’ve got a sound!”’

  Fighting was not a commercial success. It reached number sixty in the UK album chart and sold something in the region of 20,000 copies in the aftermath of its release, and Scott Gorham still regards the album and Nightlife as ‘two humongous failures’. Yet it consolidated the breakthrough which everyone sensed was happening on stage, and increased the word-of-mouth acclaim around the band.

  When they toured the UK on their Rocktober series of dates in September and October 1975, Thin Lizzy were headlining venues that included the Newcastle City Hall and Manchester Free Trade Hall. At the latter, Lynott walked on stage to be met by a crowd standing virtually in silence. He plugged in his bass, peered into the darkness, and asked, ‘Are you out there?’

  ‘It was the first time he had ever said that, and there was this unbelievable roar,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘It kind of threw him a bit. We did the set and went back to his mother’s hotel, and he said, “What do you think that was about?” I told him, “The audience want you to take them somewhere. Most of them are boys. You’re a gang, and they’ve decided you are the gang leader. They’ve given you permission to do that.”’

  As the headlining act, Thin Lizzy were now playing to audiences who had paid their pound specifically to see the band. They had found their fan base. The thought emboldened Lynott, who grew into the role of Master of Ceremonies. The cry of ‘Are you out there?’ soon became the ritual call of every Thin Lizzy show, akin to a general summoning his army. He would clench his fist and shake it at the crowd. He asked for their ‘helping hands’. He recognized that, framed correctly, the smallest gesture – a raised finger, a twist of his wrist – could make an enormous impact, even right up in the dress circle.

  In December they returned to Dublin and sold all 2,500 tickets at the National Stadium, in a concert recorded for television broadcast on RTÉ. The crowd picked up on the aggression of a set that opened with ‘Fighting My Way Back’ and included ‘It’s Only Money’, ‘Suicide’, ‘The Rocker’ and ‘Sha La La’ by half-tearing the place to pieces. As though engaging in an act of contrition, Lynott then dedicated an epic ‘Still in Love with You’ to his mother in the crowd.

  In a landmark venue situated within walking distance of Leighlin Road, he had irrefutably arrived as a hometown hero. Yet when John Alcock caught up with Thin Lizzy only a few days later on a rainy night in Bracknell, observing the band with a view to producing their next record, his perception was of a group ‘that was always around but never really did much. They were a live band, I didn’t look upon them as a recording band. Lizzy was always on the road. You opened up the back of Melody Maker, where you had page after page of live gigs, and Thin Lizzy was always there, playing all over England, Scotland and Ireland.’

  Within the industry, they were still regarded as hardy road-warriors that had fluked a hit with an old Irish pub tune, and were gamely plugging away on the back of it almost three years later.

  For that to change, they required a song to match their show.

  11

  ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ is the quintessential example of Philip Lynott’s ability to transform a blurred Friday night into a showreel of romanticized episodes of enduring clarity. The craft is deceptive. At first hearing, it sounds like verbatim saloon-bar reportage; off-the-cuff, even. Thin Lizzy’s most beloved song appears effortless and unforced in the way that all the best conversations do, but its author sweated over every word.

  Lynott was rarely without his bag containing notebooks and loose sheaves of paper scrawled with titles, verses, random words and phrases. Often these were recycled. Many early or unreleased versions of Thin Lizzy songs feature lines and ideas that would end up, years later, in a completely different song. In concert, the band would frequently add a third verse to ‘Still in Love with You’ so that Lynott could road-test new lyrical riffs. Some of these improvisations ended up in ‘Sweet Marie’ and ‘Don’t Believe a Word’. Drummer Mark Nauseef, who worked frequently with esoteric jazz artists, electronic experimenters and Indian mystics, rates Lynott as ‘an astounding improviser’ of words and melodies. ‘I don’t mean he was just a good jammer, it was like a high-level jazz player improvising on his instrument. He would just take a fragment, maybe even just a word, and run with it. Every time he did it, it would be based on that one motif, but he would build on it.’

  ‘He seemed to have this ability to really pull it out and hone it when it came time to get the job done,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘I can still see him with his headphones on in the vocal booth – singing a line, playing it back, bending over listening to it – and saying, “All right, let me try it this way”, and coming out with a completely different line.’

  In common with several other tracks on the Jailbreak album, ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ went through a series of these semi-extemporized evolutions. Brian Robertson remembers when it was called ‘Here in Dallas’. There was another early version called ‘G. I. Joe is Back’, inspired by the long-running comicstrip hero and action figure G. I. Joe. ‘It had the same chord pattern,’ says Scott Gorham, ‘but it was an anti-war lyric which he quickly dumped for the Friday-night good time thing.’ The almost finished version of the song was called ‘The Kid Is Back’, a longer variant with a different guitar melody towards the end and a slightly different lyric. Lynott knew ‘kid’ wasn’t right. The song simply didn’t work until it was switched to ‘boys’.

  Representations of several aspects of Lynott’s own life, and his preferred way of seeing himself, are hard-wired into ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’. Written by a man who had by now been a working musician for half his life, it might be the gold-standard portrayal of a touring rock band and its entourage as the modern-day Viking horde.

  This was absolutely the atmosphere Thin Lizzy cultivated publicly in the latter half of the 1970s, a volatile mix of fantasy and fact. The legend describes a band and crew sharing the bond of family, and closing ranks as an army. There was no hierarchy. Hotel rooms were open to all, invitations were extended wholesale and everyone did everything together: drinking, drugging, fucking and especially fighting. It was the domain of the male. Girlfriends and wives were not permitted on tour. They operated as a fiercely close-knit unit, which rolled from town to town defending individual and collective honour in the manner of modern-day musketeers.

  ‘Before I joined that band I’d been in maybe two fights in my whole life,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘Shit, I got in two fights in the first month in Lizzy. It was a whole attitude that I wasn’t quite used to: “This is our game and we’re going to stand up and defend it.” I had to hold up my end. Most of the time it wasn’t down to Phil. It was mostly that the fastest gun in town, out with his girlfriend, wanted
to make an impression. Things got stupidly out of hand at times.’

  On some primal level, this is how we want every rock and roll band to behave, and at times Thin Lizzy lived up to their billing. At other times, not so much. ‘There are a lot of myths,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘There were two fights in the entire fourteen years. After a gig they generally went back to the hotel bar. Drink. Bed. Phil was very private. He’d meet a girl, go back with her to his room, set up his little stereo – and you’d see him next morning at breakfast. We were working.’ Often the source of pleasure was disarmingly innocent, such as the warm glow of satisfaction felt by council-estate kids who suddenly realize they’re being paid to sit by a hotel pool in California on a Tuesday afternoon while the world toils around them.

  The truth runs through both depictions of Thin Lizzy on the road, but ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ celebrates the brash, brawling, myth-making part. It captured the gung-ho spirit that enabled the group to get to this point, even as it imagined a new, more muscular identity for them to step inside. As their horizons expanded to encompass territories from Toledo to Tokyo, the song was a potent piece of weaponry to call upon every night.

  Both a song of experience and a piece of acute observation, it is, in part, a reflection of the camaraderie the young Lynott felt making his mark in Crumlin, Walkinstown and Clontarf. It also conveys the excitement generated by the returning prodigal on his later visits back to Dublin. ‘No matter where he was in the world, he came straight from the airport into the Bailey for his pint of Smithwick’s,’ says Tom Collins. ‘He was interested in finding out what had been happening in Dublin, then he would hold court, then he had to go and see the gran.’