Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  He enjoyed an aura of invincibility in his hometown, but he wasn’t bulletproof. The day after the festival, Lynott was relaxing in the Brazen Head pub with Chalkie Davies and Chris Salewicz, who were covering the events of the weekend for NME, when he saw an article in that day’s Irish Independent concerning the events at Castledown House. The headline read, ‘SIX HELD IN DRUGS RAID ON POP PARTY’, going on to mention the ‘thousands of pounds worth of cannabis and cocaine seized’. Noticing that his own name was prominently displayed, Lynott immediately marched across Dublin. ‘He went charging up to the newspaper offices,’ says Salewicz. ‘I remember this very traditional editor in his striped shirt and tie, and Lynott shouting, “My fucking granny saw that, and it’s not fucking true, I didn’t have any fucking drugs.” Obviously it was completely true, he just got someone else to carry them. Blows were struck. It was all very Irish. A local skirmish. But the big thing was, my fucking granny saw that.’

  The vision of Lynott as the honourable gunslinger pursuing a righteous cause was rather undermined a week later when he attacked a Melody Maker journalist at the Reading Festival over disparaging remarks that had been published about him. ‘He wasn’t the kind of guy who would keep it in,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘That was not a Phil-ism. If he was bugged you knew about it. It could be acting like an idiot in front of him, or a bad review, or not doing what you said you would. He would rant and rave – ”I’ll fucking kill this guy, I’ll beat the shite out of him” – and let rip. Sometimes he had to be restrained from doing it. He was not the kind of guy you wanted to piss off.’ Chris O’Donnell recalls Lynott beating up Charlie McLennan on one occasion because ‘he was taking the piss’. Few people ever recall him apologizing. ‘Philip never said sorry about anything – ever,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘His idea of an apology was to say, “Here man, I bought you this.” We had some silly-assed business argument once, and he drove over to the house and gave me two bedside tables. That was his way of saying the argument was over.’

  The scuffle at the offices of the Irish Independent only added to the instantly mythical status of a long weekend that established Thin Lizzy as Ireland’s biggest ever band, and crowned Lynott as the country’s first genuine rock star. He emerged for the encore at Dalymount with a light, almost ceremonial dusting of white powder on his moustache.

  He embraced the role of paterfamilias to the Irish rock scene. For the rest of his life he went out of his way to mentor, encourage and support Irish musicians, be they folk groups, punk bands, electronic acts or rock and rollers. At the time of Dalymount, in a community hall in north Dublin, four teenage boys calling themselves the Hype were trying to master ‘Don’t Believe a Word’ and ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’. They would soon change their name to U2, and in little more than a year would be playing with Lynott at McGonagle’s and the Stardust Ballroom. Bottom of the bill at Dalymount had been another up-and-coming Irish punk band, the Radiators from Space. Later in 1977 Lynott hired them to open for Thin Lizzy on their UK tour.

  He was entirely comfortable being the benevolent sugar daddy, dispensing largesse to those who needed a helping hand up the ladder. He was less secure when it came to dealing with the really big beasts, especially when they came lumbering onto his patch. When the Rolling Stones played Slane Castle in County Meath in the early 1980s, Lynott, his wife, friends, family and colleagues arranged a grand day out to see them. ‘All the Lizzy crew turned up, we were all ready to go,’ says Helen Ruttle, a close friend and neighbour of the Lynotts when they moved to Dublin. ‘But was Philip ready? No. There was somebody much bigger than Philip in town that day and he wasn’t interested. We got there just about in time for the Stones. It was always the same if there was an artist bigger than him. He wasn’t keen.’

  Bob Geldof sensed a shift in mood when the Boomtown Rats started having their own commercial success. In the Record Mirror end-of-year poll in 1977, Thin Lizzy and Boomtown Rats were jointly awarded Best Album for Bad Reputation and Boomtown Rats respectively. Geldof, improbably, was voted best singer; Lynott came in at number two. Even more problematic was the amount of press the motor-mouthed Geldof generated in Ireland. ‘[Philip] was supposed to be king of the castle on his home territory, but there we were on the telly, in the charts and in all the papers,’ Geldof said. ‘He was very jealous and suddenly he wasn’t so helpful.’12 Lynott would later admit to friends that he found Geldof tiresome.

  Yet no matter who came in their wake, and how much farther they travelled, Thin Lizzy had got there first. Regardless of their chosen form of musical expression, Irish bands looked at Lynott and thought, maybe, just maybe, we can do this too. ‘Jailbreak was the one, and “The Boys Are Back in Town”,’ says Geldof. ‘Then they’re off and running. Once they’ve done that, then you go, “Wow, an Irish band can break through.” That was the big thing. It was a breakout.’

  By the time Lynott returned from Thin Lizzy’s second US tour of 1977 with Graham Parker and the Rumour in early November, those around him noticed a change in his behaviour. It had been a starry year. While rehearsing in New York in January prior to the Queen tour, a limousine, rather than the customary station wagon, had been made available to the band. He rather liked this, and it became his favoured mode of transport in the US henceforth. ‘Philip had these philosophies,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘Like, even if they didn’t have the money, they needed to turn up and leave in a limousine so they looked like stars.’

  He observed the mega-watt star power of Freddie Mercury at close quarters. It was a first-hand masterclass in advanced rock diva-dom. By the time Lynott returned to the States in September 1977 on Thin Lizzy’s headlining tour, he was starting to flex his muscles, circumnavigating management to demand things he didn’t necessarily want or need as a test of loyalty and an affirmation of status. ‘Up until then Phil had left it to me and Chris Morrison to deliver what was needed for the band,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘Then Phil started to see if you were incredibly difficult you got treated differently. That became a real sea change.’

  ‘To me, rock is just a game,’ he said.13 He enjoying raising the stakes. Big-hitting industry players like Rod Stewart’s manager, Billy Gaff, were turning his head at LA parties. The legendarily combative Don Arden was circling. Lynott stayed loyal to Morrison and O’Donnell, as they did to him, but he made sure they were aware of his pulling power.

  ‘The rock star thing started to raise its ugly head post-Queen,’ says Frank Murray. ‘They were a band who were far, far bigger than us, and Freddie first of all was a monster star. I just think Philip saw [how] they were being treated and decided, I want a bit of that for myself. Which is natural enough, but I was seeing him as my old friend and I disagreed with an awful lot of his actions. I knew he was only doing them for effect. Stupid things became important, like the size of the hotel bed … By the end of 1977, me and him were really niggling each other.’

  Having been on the sharp end of Queen’s policy of keeping the support band on a tight leash, Lynott meted out similar behaviour to Graham Parker and the Rumour. ‘It was obviously the Phil Lynott show,’ says Parker. ‘He liked to soundcheck quite a long time, and we never got long enough. There’s also a trick with being the opening act, you don’t get as many lights. You don’t get as much of anything. In New York there was a real to-do [over this], but I was the kind of guy who was like, “Hey, I’m having a blast,” and Phil was like, “Well, I’m having a blast, too.” We didn’t get into it personally in any way.’

  A disillusioned Frank Murray would shortly leave his role as tour manager. The two men remained friends, but his departure was the start of a gradual exit of some of Lynott’s most trusted coterie, a process one member likens to the break-up of a family unit.

  The use of cocaine – virtually ubiquitous throughout the music industry by this time – did not help. ‘There were drugs everywhere,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘People were coming up with all sorts of dope, and we were just human.’ Scott Gorham maintains it was still ‘ca
sual stuff’, but Lynott was transitioning from dabbler to enthusiast. It was another status symbol: he once paid a vast sum of money for a rock of pure Peruvian flake cocaine. He started taking tranquilizers to take the edge off the highs and to help him sleep, which left him groggy and in a foul mood the next morning.

  He could be ‘bossy, shouty and arrogant,’ says Paul Scully, but on a one-to-one basis, Lynott remained charming, polite, engaged and inquisitive. ‘He was a very sensitive person, I thought,’ says Parker. ‘Certainly he wasn’t just a strutting rock star. He brought a lot of intelligence to things. The cocaine phase was a peripheral thing that didn’t seem to happen very often.’

  ‘There was still a very tender side to him,’ says Chris Morrison. ‘My parents came to the Thin Lizzy concert at Lewisham Odeon in 1977, and on stage Phil came forward and said, “There’s two people in the audience I’d like to dedicate this to, and that’s Mr and Mrs Morrison.” And then he played “Still in Love with You”. It was a fantastic thing to do. Those kind of things end up meaning more to you than a lot of things that happened.’

  Lynott’s insistence on practising with an amplifier rather than headphones led to a deterioration in neighbourly relations at Embassy House. Shortly before Christmas 1977, he moved to a rented terraced house on Anson Road in Cricklewood. He shared with Chalkie Davies. In time other people, such as Gary Holton from the band Heavy Metal Kids, moved in. ‘He had always been in a gang,’ says Davies. ‘I don’t think he was a loner. He might not come downstairs for a few days, he would just rest and girls would come over or whatever, but he liked to have his mates around him.’

  One new resident changed the Anson Road dynamic. Caroline Crowther was the eighteen-year-old daughter of television personality Leslie Crowther, one time Crackerjack presenter, and soon to be host of prime-time ITV hits The Price Is Right and Stars in Their Eyes. Crowther was working at Tony Brainsby’s office, and through that connection first met Lynott at a party. She was attracted by the combination of powerful masculinity and the suggestion of something softer, more playful. Lynott almost immediately began showing up more often at the office.

  Tall, slender, with an elegant English rose complexion, Crowther lived in Richmond. She was privately educated, intelligent and self-possessed, the antithesis of the stereotypical ditzy PR blonde. Brainsby’s office was involved with several punk and New Wave acts. Crowther was working and socializing with a group that included Bob Geldof’s future wife, Paula Yates, and Magenta Devine, the girlfriend of Generation X’s Tony James, and later the presenter of Reportage on BBC2. She ran with a fashionable crowd and had already done her fair share of fast living before she met Lynott.

  The relationship quickly became serious. ‘It was obvious that he had fallen in love, despite his theoretical, “I’m not going to let that happen again,”’ says Chalkie Davies. On 11 February 1978, Lynott took Crowther to Stamford Bridge to watch Manchester United play Chelsea. ‘I went with them and I thought, hmm, there you go,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘He was smitten instantly. She was the one, I just knew.’

  13

  What had been conceived as a swift stop-gap turned into Thin Lizzy’s masterpiece. Lynott wanted to collaborate with Tony Visconti again, but the producer was due to begin work with David Bowie in the spring of 1978, taping a series of concerts for the Stage album. Rather than prolong the making of a new studio album by recording either side of Visconti’s prior commitment, they decided to make a quick live record.

  Bad Reputation was the third album of original material Thin Lizzy had recorded in a little over twelve months. ‘I thought he might have been exhausted, but Philip never took time off,’ says Frank Murray. ‘The only time he’d take time off would be to [make] a record, and that was work.’

  ‘I remember a conversation with Chris Morrison early in 1978, and he was concerned that they weren’t giving Phil enough time to sit down with his notebook the way he used to,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘He was writing music first and lyrics later, and it shouldn’t be like that.’

  The next album, at least, relieved that burden. In February, Visconti was given the tapes from several Thin Lizzy shows, dating back to the Hammersmith Odeon in the autumn of 1976, with a view to assembling a live double album. The process was tricky. The concerts had been recorded in Europe and North America using a variety of equipment. ‘The tapes were in different formats at different speeds, some had Dolby, some didn’t,’ says Visconti. ‘It was a nightmare. We hit the wall with technical obstacles, but once we’d sorted out what performances we’d be using, Phil started saying, “I’m not too in love with my bass parts. When I sing and play I make mistakes.” Which is valid. It’s hard to play bass and sing at the same time.’

  Which is how what Visconti calls the ‘overdubbing miasma’ began. Live and Dangerous has become notorious for the amount of embellishment grafted on to the raw recordings; somewhat unfairly, given that the majority of live albums are finessed to some degree.

  Chalkie Davies watched Lynott leave Anson Road for work each day and wondered why he was taking so long to mix an in-concert record. ‘He was spending an inordinate amount of time in the studio, and he always took his instrument with him,’ says Davies. ‘He didn’t just go down and mix. I think it got out of hand. He got obsessive about cleaning it up and making it perfect.’ The man who would open a backstage inquest into one stray note was keen to make the album as powerful as it could be.

  ‘We fixed a couple of bass notes, and then Phil said, “That was great, why don’t I just replay it?”’ says Visconti. ‘I’d say he replayed around 50 per cent of the songs, ballpark figure.’ Lynott played at full volume and used a radio transmitter, which enabled him to prowl around the top level of the three-tiered control room in Visconti’s Good Earth studios in Soho. It was a performance. Then he started replacing some vocals. ‘We put up the identical mike that he would sing into live.’

  Visconti claims that Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham later asked to flesh out their original guitar parts. ‘I can’t remember how much. They fixed some mistakes, and also did double-tracking. So what you hear on the average track on Live and Dangerous is a fixed vocal, most likely a replayed bass part, and mostly the original guitars and drums. I know this to be true because I was in the control room at all times. This is no great crime. Everyone does it. The live feel is there, just a few things are fixed, and it still sounds absolutely great.’

  The album was finished at Studio Des Dames in Paris. Visconti brought his wife, Mary Hopkin, Lynott brought Caroline Crowther, and they dined on gin and oysters at La Coupole. ‘In the end it took longer than five weeks, more like seven weeks,’ says Visconti. ‘Bowie was extremely pissed off, but at that point Live and Dangerous was turning into a work of art and we had to finish it.’

  The difference, in the end, was a question of emphasis rather than authenticity. Listening to the original tapes of all three Hammersmith Odeon shows from November 1976, or the full set from Philadelphia’s Tower Theater a year later, it is not hard to identify where certain bum notes or glitches have been rectified, but it’s equally apparent that no wholesale whitewash or act of dishonesty has occurred. The overall impact of the unrefined recordings remains astonishingly powerful.

  Perhaps even more so than Jailbreak, Live and Dangerous is the record that seals Thin Lizzy’s reputation. A double album, it’s an alternative greatest hits with an effervescent in-the-room ambience, a document of a band at their peak and in their natural habitat. It routinely features high, and sometimes at the top, of lists of the greatest ever live albums, and is a perennial musicians’ favourite. ‘Bono and The Edge told me that that album was the primer for their band,’ says Visconti. ‘It had a massive effect on a lot of people, it changed a few things, and it certainly wouldn’t have done that if it had just been a throwaway live album.’

  ‘Nobody wants the warts and all,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘That lasts for a minute. It became a document of a great group that would stand the
test of time.’ It was a record that made absolute sense in the wake of punk because it captured not just a sound but an attitude that was essentially territorial. The music hits hard, but it also slides on ‘Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed’, swings on ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ and sighs on ‘Still in Love with You’. Lynott had worked hard to allow room for that kind of space and tenderness. Thin Lizzy had earned the right to be more than just a narrow definition of a rock group, and on Live and Dangerous they recouped.

  The record felt like the summation of the past four years’ hard work. It is the defining statement of the band that had formed in 1974. The only track acknowledging that there had once been another kind of band called Thin Lizzy was ‘The Rocker’, and even that now sounded very different.

  Even the title was a masterstroke. Thin Lizzy’s management wanted to make a concert film to accompany the live album, featuring the Clash supporting Thin Lizzy at the Roundhouse in London. The idea was to create a 1970s version of the Rolling Stones’s 1968 multi-act extravaganza, Rock and Roll Circus. The Clash’s manager Bernard Rhodes, a dream-spinner and hustler in the finest Svengali tradition, suggested instead that the film showed Thin Lizzy playing live, and then followed the band as they went to watch the Clash performing at the Marquee. It was a joke with a point; the cultural weathervane was spinning. Rhodes went on to declare that the Clash couldn’t do a film with Thin Lizzy because they were ‘political animals, and everything we do has to have an element of danger about it,’ O’Donnell recalls. ‘That was it. The light came on.’

  Up to that point the album had been called Thin Lizzy Live. There is an early proof of the album with that name, with a front cover featuring the group shot that ultimately ended up above the track listing on the back. Inspired by Rhodes, at the last moment the album was given a new title – Live and Dangerous – and the cover image was changed to the classic Chalkie Davies close-up shot of Lynott on his knees. Downey and Gorham weren’t consulted on the change, and were furious, although they were mollified somewhat by sales of 600,000 copies of the live double album.