Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  I set about enjoying myself, regrouping my band and planning my next assault on the citadel of rock’n’roll. I wrote to Gary Kurfirst and split with him, hired a solicitor-cum-big-brother called John Kennedy, and found myself a flat, a bright little cave on a leafy lane a mile from the centre of town. And that would be the end of one part of the story, and the beginning of all the others, but for this epilogue:

  Six months later I was in Frejus, southern France, where The Waterboys were to play in a Roman amphitheatre. I got a message at the hotel telling me someone called Kate Lovecraft would be at the concert and wanted to see me afterwards. When I walked out on stage I saw her immediately. She’d positioned herself on a platform next to the sound desk, elevated above the rest of the audience, straight ahead of me where I couldn’t fail to see her. There she sat, cross-legged, wearing shades, watching me intently. I played the show with Kate in my line of vision at almost every moment – not a comfortable experience. I didn’t know what she wanted, but I expected the old cocktail of drama, accusation and power. After the show I asked our tour manager to hold the guests till I’d eaten. Withstanding bad vibes is easier on a full stomach and I wanted all the protection I could muster. Finally I gave the OK and the tour manager brought Kate into the backstage enclosure, an English girlfriend of hers reluctantly in tow. The friend waited some distance away and Kate sat down beside me.

  She cut straight to the punch and told me she’d been diagnosed with tuberculosis and had less than two years to live. She’d wanted me to know so she’d come to Frejus from London, where she’d been visiting her friend, especially to tell me. What a complex of emotions moved through me as I heard these words! Suspicion that she was lying, swiftly followed by shame and embarrassment that I could think such a thing; guilt for having been churlish and mistrustful enough to seek to protect myself from her only minutes before; compassion and alarm for her condition; readiness to make reparations and remain in contact with her; desire to be a friend to her in her time of need. But no romantic attraction. That, for certain, was gone. I gave her my hitherto-secret Dublin address and phone number and told her she could call anytime. When she stood up to leave I hugged her and felt very sorry and very ashamed indeed.

  Two months later I’d been in London on musical business, and, returning to Dublin on an autumn afternoon, I found in my mailbox a letter with a New York postmark and the sender’s name: K. Lovecraft. Guts tight with apprehension, wondering what awful news it contained, I tore it open. It said: ‘I lied. I don’t have tuberculosis. I don’t even know if I can spell it correctly. Just because I make a joke, doesn’t mean I think what I did is funny. I am truly sorry.’

  As I read these words I felt eviscerated, as though a rough hand had forced its way into me and torn out my guts: tricked, relieved, confounded and assaulted all at once. I laid the letter down, walked to the window, drew the curtains and lay down on the sofa. I wrapped my arms round my head and lay in darkness, neither weeping nor sleeping, deep into the evening till a friend knocked on my door and time began again.

  Chapter 7: You Guys Are The Whizz!

  Dublin, Valentine’s night 1986, the back room of a city bar. I’m strumming and singing an old country song called ‘The Wayward Wind’. To my right Steve is drawing lazy western chords from his fiddle and on my left, conjuring luminous flashes of sound from his mandolin, is Anto. People cluster round: my new Irish girlfriend, Irene, Steve’s wife Barbara, various mates, musicians, onlookers and scene-makers. For tonight is a Happening, a rumour-turned-manifestation of The Waterboys, currently the musical talk of the town. We can fill Dublin’s concert halls but here we are where we shouldn’t be, playing in a tiny bar.

  Sitting as close to us as he can physically get is B.P. Fallon, an Irish disc jockey and star-fancier in his late thirties who once worked as PR man for Marc Bolan and Led Zeppelin and who seems to have been present, Zelig-like, at every significant moment in rock since 1965. B.P. is wearing drainpipe jeans, teddy boy jacket and a bootlace tie. What hair he has left is slicked back from his gnomic face while his eyes, ravenous black jewels in which desire, humour and wickedness dance, are locked intently on the musical action. He leans forward, rapt and shining as if he is both feeding our energy and feeding on it like some kind of semi-depraved human transformer.

  Next to B.P., sitting on a low stool, is a very different beast altogether. This heavily bearded American looks like a mountain man or an intrepid hunter. Long Viking hair, broad shoulders, thick plaid shirt and brown jerkin. His expression is a mix of intense concentration and grave emotion, and he’s aiming a little cassette recorder at us as if getting our ragged performance on tape is the most important work in the world. Three days in town, his name is Bob Johnston and in his golden late-sixties heyday, as staff producer for CBS Records, he made album after album with Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen. Now he’s wooing my band, seeking to be our record producer.

  As the song ends and the room of listeners claps and cheers, Bob slaps his knee, guffaws heartily, and leans over to me. Shouting over the noise he yells in my ear, each word louder than the last as his sentence rises to its climax: ‘Man, you guys should do that on the GRAND OLE OPRY!’

  Yes indeed, we are in a different landscape now.

  By the time I moved to Dublin I’d taken the rock sound of the first three Waterboys albums as far as I could. After This Is The Sea – the song itself, with nine acoustic guitars simulating an ocean and an accompanying soundscape of brass and string orchestrations – I stood on top of the sonic mountain with nowhere else to climb. I’d finally learned how to reproduce on record the sound in my imagination and somewhere deep inside me a bus-riding, foot-stomping schoolboy was happy. But already the music in my head was changing and I was falling in love with older styles like country, blues and gospel. Frustrated that I couldn’t reproduce the full-blown sound of Waterboys records on stage, I envied these forms of music their simplicity. At the same time I was keen to depart from the formula-repeating script that managers, agents, record companies and even Waterboys fans were imagining for me. I didn’t want to keep repeating myself like some kind of hack. I remembered the stylistic turns Dylan and The Beatles had taken in the sixties, or Neil Young and Bowie in the seventies, and that was my model of how an artist should evolve.

  So when I discovered that Anto’s mandolin, my guitar and Wickham’s fiddle added up to our own style of acoustic music, the gateway to the new swung open. And paradoxically, it required us to travel some very old paths indeed. The three of us immersed ourselves in roots music, listening to albums of twenties gospel singers on tiny labels then reworking their songs for our set; and initiating ourselves into the mysteries of Woody Guthrie, Little Walter, the great Hank Williams, colourfully named Cajun bandleaders like Rockin’ Dopsie and Dewey Balfa, and the Irish gypsy singer Margaret Barry. We poured our music into the forms we learned from these artists then reshaped it into something of our own.

  This sound, primed and honed in hotel bedrooms, backstage jam sessions and Dublin bars, emerged fully formed on our first visit to Windmill Lane Studios in January 1986. Joined by Trevor Hutchinson and Pete McKinney on bass and drums, a pair of Belfast lads befriended by Steve who sounded from the start like they’d been with us for years, we recorded a dozen tracks in one myth-like day. A motherlode of originals and newly learned Hank Williams songs and gospel spirituals seemed to tumble out of the air like magic. Everything we tried worked, and a new Waterboys identity was born. Two of the songs recorded that day – ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ and a version of Van Morrison’s ‘Sweet Thing’ – would be key tracks on our next album. But that album, though we had no idea at the time, wouldn’t be completed till almost three years and several lifetimes later. Along the way we would be changed and changed again by music, events, places and people. And not the least among these was Bob Johnston.

  Johnston had got in contact with me through a San Francisco-based agent called Kathy Bishop, one of several allies I had in
the American music business at the time. He called me, unbelievably, at my mother’s house in Scotland during the 1985 Christmas holiday. He’d heard This Is The Sea and wanted to work with us. ‘You guys are the whizz!’ he exclaimed and my heart, an easy conquest, was won. I knew his work. I’d been listening to Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde, which Johnston had produced in Nashville in 1966, since I was twelve years old and it had always sounded divine to my ears, a transmission from some secret higher realm, with its stream-of-consciousness lyric play and semi-improvised country rock music. That the man who’d overseen and produced this masterpiece, who had enabled it, now wanted to work with me and my band was like a heady dream. A few weeks later, by which time I’d gone to Dublin and it was clear I was going to stick around for a while, I called Bob and in early February he flew into Ireland from California. He booked into a hotel close to where I was staying and I went to meet him with Steve, Anto and our latest friend, the ever-present B.P. Fallon.

  It was early evening and Bob was waiting for us in the hotel bar, a Texan in his early fifties with the charismatic southern accent of a defrocked preacher. His stocky frame contained a raging storm of compressed energy that might erupt at any moment and frequently did, in laughter, whoops and sudden exclamations. To listen to Bob was to enter a world of true-life music mythology. ‘I HAD DYLAN IN THAT ROOM!’ he’d begin in a voice loud enough to carry across a ship’s deck in a storm, and then enchant us with a tale in which Dylan (always presented as quiet-voiced and shy, but, as each story would reveal, with a will of absolute iron) would ask Johnston to organise a tuba player for a recording session at three in the morning.

  We were thrilled and flattered that this legendary operator wanted to work with us and that we were to enter the rarefied pantheon of artists he’d produced. We left the hotel and crammed into a taxi, Bob in the passenger seat, B.P. and the band squashed in the back, and drove to B.P.’s flat where we spent the night talking and listening to music. We nervously played Bob a tape of the country and gospel songs we’d just recorded in Dublin, including a couple of Dylan covers, the originals of which he’d produced twenty years before. He sat and listened to these, roaring enthusiastically, exclaiming ‘Oh, man!’ and ‘Dylan would dig that!’ and other encouragements that put us at our ease. Next day I called B.P. and asked him what he thought of Bob. His reply: ‘A mainline viber.’

  That lunchtime we met Bob at Bewleys restaurant on Grafton Street. Bewleys is a Dublin institution, a bustling dining hall with a vaulted ceiling and fantastical stained-glass windows. Ideal circumstances in which to eat egg and chips and hang out with wild Texan record producers. Johnston sat close to us like we were conspirators and talked about all the stuff he was working on, how he was going to set up a ‘Children’s Foundation’ in every major American city to help get kids off drugs, how Bob Marley, Willie Nelson and Dylan were visionaries, and how the world would soon go through great changes of consciousness. This was exciting stuff. Our mainline viber was a philosopher too.

  He stuck around for another couple of days and was with us for several of our impromptu music jams, which happened at the drop of a hat, usually Steve’s. And as I got to know Bob I discerned a greatness about him. It wasn’t the Marley-as-visionary, new-day-coming stuff that got to me, though. What impressed me was the residue from his sixties glory days that lingered about his persona. He’d been no small participant in a historical era, and the dust of those golden days gathered in the lines on Bob’s face, the contours of his voice and the creases of his mind. And from the way he talked to us I could tell this was a man who knew how to inspire musicians; who had fine-tuned to a science the Zen-like art of allowing them to reach their peak potential, then get it down on tape. I wanted to experience this art in action. I also asked myself why, out of all the upwardly mobile mid-eighties rock groups, Bob chose to work with us, and I figured it was because of two things: we worked in the lyrical song-based tradition he knew and understood, and I was known to be a Dylan fan.

  And The Waterboys were hot. If Bob was looking for a way back in we were as good a bet as any. Yet I wondered what he’d been up to since the early seventies and why, if he was still a good producer, I hadn’t been seeing his name on any records. I guessed that like many sixties survivors he’d found it hard to find a place in the changed landscapes of the following decades, and I was cocky enough to imagine my band and I might be able to help him on that score – that while he would use his veteran skills to draw the best out of us, our modern edge could rekindle the best in him and return him to prominence. A further sense of headiness was fostered by Bob’s penchant for slapping me on the back and shouting, ‘I had DYLAN, I had CASH, and now I’ve got SCOTT!’ I didn’t think of myself as the equal of Dylan or Cash but if Bob thought I was, that meant a lot, and added a degree of strut to my walk as I rambled the streets of Dublin, a new silver earring dangling from my left lobe and a pair of pointed leather boots on my feet.

  On Bob’s last night in town he took us for a meal with our girlfriends, wives and B.P., and afterwards we had a celebratory party in Wickham’s flat. In the wee small hours Bob said his goodbyes. Standing at the door he pulled Steve, Anto and myself into our first communal hug and told us he believed in us and was going to do great things with our music. As he climbed the steps and headed into the Dublin dawn I felt we’d found a great soul who could bring the magic through us. The shivers ran up and down my spine. I turned to look at my two bandmates and they just said ‘Wow.’

  Before he’d left, Bob had invited us to come and stay with him at his house in Mill Valley, a fabled hippie enclave near San Francisco, where Janis Joplin had lived and where Jack Kerouac had written The Dharma Bums. I fancied an adventure, so a week later I flew out to visit him. He met me at the airport with a friend and we drove to the port of Sausalito on San Francisco Bay. There they left me in a waterside restaurant while they went off excitedly to get ‘buds’. This was a mystery, but when they came back for me and we piled back into the car I soon realised what ‘buds’ were. They were ultra-potent reefer-making clusters of freshly cut marijuana leaves and Bob was a serious aficionado. In a pungent cloud of smoke we drove on into Mill Valley and up Homestead Boulevard, a grandly named dirt track winding through the forested hillside, finally arriving at Bob’s two storey frontier-style wooden house, set amid eucalyptus trees like something out of an old sepia photograph, a huge American Flag draped over its upper deck.

  This was all wildly enchanting, especially after smoking reefers with the producer of Blonde On Blonde. As we stepped out I noticed a couple of neighbouring houses through the trees. I asked Bob who lived there. ‘Hell, I don’t know WHO they are or WHAT they do!’ he yelled with a loud laugh. I thought it was strange he didn’t know who his neighbours were, but what the heck – maybe it was a Californian thing. In the house I met Bob’s wife, Joy, and his two grown-up sons, Bobby and Andy. A meal was on the stove and Bob showed me to a little bedroom they’d prepared for me at the back of the house, futon on the floor, trees outside the window. I dumped my bags and guitar case and followed Bob into the upstairs living room. This was a vast open space with a long wooden dinner table, a grand piano on a raised podium, a giant sound system with towering speakers that looked like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a couple of leather sofas and a fireplace big enough to hold a tree trunk. The walls were festooned with the largest collection of framed gold discs I’d ever imagined, let alone seen, and a double door led to a wooden balcony that ran round the house, overlooking Mill Valley. The piano, Bob explained, came from CBS studios in Nashville and had been played by no less than Hank Williams himself. I had arrived in American music heaven, just in time for dinner of sweet potatoes and chicken.

  In the evenings, as lights flickered on the other side of Mill Valley, Bob played me country records: Hank, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Willie Nelson, Rattlesnake Annie, Doug Kershaw and Carl Perkins. We listened to the album of Johnny Cash At San Quentin, which Bob had produced, and he
talked me through everything that happens on (and off) the record as a live commentary, bringing alive visions of the condemned men from death row whooping and cheering when Cash sang ‘their’ song, the blackly humorous execution ballad ‘25 Minutes To Go’. I received the finest country music education right there in Johnston’s house, first hand from one who knew, with a log fire roaring and reefers perfuming the air. Bob also sang me his own songs. These were written in slow gospel/blues style and sung with a ‘voice of the rock’ tone, but with spacey lyrics. One was about how the rock’n’rollers of the fifties and sixties were aliens sent down to change the world. Another was about California breaking off and becoming an island after an earthquake. He would sing one, finish it, then get up from the piano laughing heartily, waving the song away with his hands as if it were a folly.

  I stayed at Bob’s for four or five days and we set a date to do some recording the following month. But I was torn between working in San Francisco with Bob’s team and working in Dublin. After the successful session in Windmill Lane I trusted the sound engineer there, a talented though delicately strung character called Pearse. I should have kept the two worlds separate, done some recording with Bob in California, and some without him in Dublin, but - and this proved an epic mistake – I merged the two worlds and asked Bob to work with us in Ireland.