by Mike Scott
After that we jammed for several hours and tried unsuccessfully to get magic to flow. Clearly I needed some fresh inspiration and on the morning of day two I found it. Before the session I took a stroll through the Berkeley streets and noticed a dog-eared book in a junk shop window. It was titled Folk Song Jamboree and according to the cover contained ‘songs from many lands’. I bought it and started flicking through it as I walked to the studio. On page fifty-seven was a song called ‘When Will We Be Married’, apparently from South Africa. I couldn’t read the music but I liked the words. I took the title and a couple of lines, added some more of my own and by the time I got to Fantasy I’d fashioned it into a lyric. As chance would have it, Steve was in best Fellow-who-Fiddles mode that morning, cheerfully skirling out rustic jigs and reels as we warmed up. I tried singing my new concoction over one of these and to my delight it fitted. Prairie Prince joined in with some Scottish-style military drumming, and suddenly we’d made something special.
But it was an oasis in a musical desert. The rest of day two, and all of days three and four, were spent in vain pursuit of alchemy. I tried some new songs but they were unfinished, and the extra lyrics they needed didn’t flow into my imagination on the spot like they usually did. I tried plucking favourite oldies out of the air like Bob Dylan’s country waltz, ‘Wallflower’, and the old Irish ballad, ‘When I First Said I Loved Only You Maggie’, but nothing caught fire. We replaced Prairie and Ross with another couple of guys but were still becalmed.
Meanwhile the studio had calcified into two sharply delineated territories: the control room was Bob’s domain and I hardly ever went in there (and took a deep breath for courage before I did), while the live room was the band’s domain, which Bob rarely entered. The two camps existed almost independent of each other, a wall of glass and a thousand miles separating us. We played with no direction from Bob and he worked on the sound and recorded the music with no involvement from us. On the rare occasions Bob approached me in the studio I could feel a raw aggressive energy radiating from him, which I interpreted as frustration directed at me. And I began to object to it. Though nothing was said, I started to feel he was blaming me for the sessions not taking off. It was no one’s fault. The situation was beyond our control because our different worlds were too far apart. A band from the eighties couldn’t merge with a producer from the sixties anymore than oil would mix with water. The Waterboys needed the kind of pro-active production guidance – input on arrangements, song selection and performance – that Bob didn’t or couldn’t give, while he needed from us the discipline and maturity a band achieves only after years of playing live together in studios. Our shared musical endeavour had been doomed before we’d recorded a note, and the dream of making something great together was a delicious unattainable mirage.
To confound things further, none of us was thinking or feeling clearly, for Bob had brought the dreaded ‘buds’ with him and the reefers were passing round till the air turned purple. What’s more, the tapes were rolling non-stop, capturing every blip and doodle we made, the worthy and the worthless, with no quality control whatsoever. By the end of day four we’d gone through a cool fifty fourteen-inch master reels and counting, with nary a releasable musical moment to show for it. That night Bob suggested we try yet another rhythm section. He recommended a young bassist called John Patitucci, who we liked the sound of, and the veteran drummer Jim Keltner. I knew Keltner’s name from many of my most beloved records including John Lennon’s Imagine and George Harrison’s Concert For Bangladesh, but I fancied working with someone our own age and said so. Bob looked at me like I’d grown horns and put the argument to bed, saying simply: ‘Jim Keltner is a motherfucker drummer.’
And he was. Next morning, day five, we reconvened with our new guests. Patitucci was nineteen, fresh as a lamb, golly-gosh happy, and played like a funky angel. Keltner was cool, dressed in dark blue jeans and denim shirt, black waistcoat, frontiersman’s beard and impenetrable shades, which he never took off. He had that slow-talking, word-weighing American style familiar from Clint Eastwood movies and I loved him instantly, recognising my resistance from the night before as the absurdity it was. And when Jim started playing, a different wavelength of musical reality opened up. His grooves, his drum fills, his timing, his sound and his radar – the ability to intuitively discern the direction of the music as we played – were from another universe. Patitucci, addressing him as ‘Uncle Jim’, slotted in sweetly on bass. Suddenly we were on the move.
Except for one thing. My songs were still uncooked and I was exhausted after four days of diminishing returns, frazzled by the vibes with Bob and spaced out by the prodigious reefer intake. And a strange thing: I felt so in awe of Keltner’s greatness that though I could still play my ass off I could hardly sing. I felt unworthy. But the show had to go on, and so we tried two half-written new numbers, ‘Blues For Your Baby’ and ‘Lonesome Old Wind’. These were good ones and we played them for hours, turning them inside, upside, backwards, forwards, extending them into twenty, thirty-minute improvisations, exploring every nuance and possibility in the music. Keltner powered us like a musical buffalo god, his shoulders heaving in the drum booth, sticks blurred, drum-skins and cymbals reflected in his shades, maracas and shakers bound to his arms and legs with gaffer tape, creating a choogling sonic aura around his beat.
When Keltner played a crack opened and the soul of America shone through. All the wild untamed land that once was the American continent was invoked in his crashing, rumbling, unstoppable groove: prairies, cattle drives, mile-wide rivers, the spirits of great Indians, buttes and canyons, rattlesnakes, badlands and the heavy boom of distant thunder. His drumming expressed a sense of space, sacredness and power as great as the great land itself. Patitucci’s warm, human bass playing, full of the nuances of jazz and pop, ensouled this sonic landscape with the beating heart’s pulse of steamboats and gamblers, street processions and Mardi Gras, the chorus lines of Broadway musicals, flappers, gospel-hollerers and churches in the wildwood. And though at the end of the fifth day we had captured nothing that came close to a record radio-friendly rock single, nothing that harmonised with the sounds or styles of the time, and nothing sufficiently structured to put on a record, nevertheless The Fellow Who Fiddles, the Human Saxophone and I had had the most profound musical experience of our lives.
On the final day, like a defeated army charging into a valley for one last vainglorious hurrah, we played almost non-stop for nine hours. I pulled out every new composition I had floating around my head and a slew of classic country and gospel songs. We fused with Keltner and Patitucci and expanded the music to awesome proportions, reconfiguring songs on Olympian scales. We played a forty minute blow-out of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, a half-hour improv on the spiritual ‘Soon As I Get Home’, and mighty moss-gathering tumbleweed journeys through Hank Williams’s ‘Honky Tonkin’’, The Carter Family’s ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’ and Blind Roger Hay’s ‘I’m On My Way To Heaven’. We reinvented classic American roots music that day and recast it as a single sacred flowing river of power.
After one extended workout I asked Keltner, ‘what’s the longest you’ve ever played non-stop?’ ‘Uh, well, Michael,’ came the answer, ‘I think it might be the one we just played.’ And when the last chord of the last song died away there came the sweetest of all moments when Jim stepped out from behind his drums and walked quietly to the piano. ‘You guys,’ he said slowly, with unimpeachable coolness, ‘are serious groovers.’ Yet still, nothing we could put on a record. I knew it, Bob knew it, Steve and Anto knew it. No one asked them, but I’m sure Keltner and Patitucci knew it. We’d gone on a mighty journey but brought back nothing we could show to the world.
For our last night in California I moved back into my old room at Bob’s, our relationship restored to cordiality now the pressure of recording was off, and in the morning he drove us to San Francisco airport. We all knew the experience was over, that there would be no more,
but neither Bob nor we had the heart to say it. I promised him I’d listen through to the music when I got home, with a view to selecting stuff for our album, but it was a hollow promise. I would listen, yes, but as soon as I could, I’d move on and finish the record in Dublin without Bob. At the airport Bob helped us lift our bags from the car. We piled them onto a couple of trolleys, each of us gave him a hug, then we headed down the concrete tunnel into the airport. We turned halfway and waved back to him and Bob called out, ‘Thank you for your music!’, his Texan voice echoing after us down the tunnel and down the years.
Chapter 8: The Power Of The Music Gives Everybody Wings
It’s midnight on International Aids Day, the second of April 1987, and Edinburgh is hosting a series of concerts. Two hours ago The Waterboys came off stage at The Usher Hall and now Wickham and I are in the Assembly Rooms on George Street where the rest of the night’s shows are taking place. We’re in the backstage artists’ hangout, a long grand hall with ornate wallpaper and dark velvet curtains. Half the bands in Edinburgh seem to be here, sitting round drink-filled tables in their own little camps, looking warily and competitively at each other, trying to be cool. Most of them have already played, a few are awaiting their stage calls. Billy Mackenzie of The Associates lounges on a sofa wearing a sailor’s cap, a couple of dolly birds on his arm. The frosty atmosphere between the Edinburgh bands hasn’t changed much since I lived here in the late seventies. How different it is from London where bands want to be cool but at least appear to wish each other well, or friendly Dublin where the inter-band philosophy can be summed up in six words as, ‘sure, we’re all in it together!’
I’m musing on why this might be, when a familiar sound brushes my ears. It’s The Fellow Who Fiddles easing into a slithery Irish jig with no respect whatsoever for the cold-war conventions of the Edinburgh music scene. After a few beats he’s joined by Aidan, the suedeheaded mandolin player from We Free Kings, and the two of them jig merrily away in a rough but passionate approximation of Irish traditional music. Their little corner of cheerfulness is a lone flame in an arctic snowfield. The Edinburgh bands either ignore this outlandish development or watch it stony-faced. But wait, another fiddler is joining in; a thin-faced character with a pompadour haircut and a cagoule. And here’s Geoff Pagan, the splendidly named We Free Kings violin player, grabbing himself a seat and lashing into the tune with them. The two have become four and the flame is now a fire.
Another couple of Kings pick up their instruments – a mandolin, a tin whistle – and feeling the impulse too I pull my guitar from its case and join in. The music is flying now, a heartily-roaring blaze of sound, and the Edinburgh bands are presented with a conundrum: do they attempt to stay cool in the face of an overwhelming and superior counter-attack by the forces of merriment, or do they surrender and join in the fun? While they’re wrestling with this philosophical issue we’re joined by yet another fiddler – a chap with a gold-painted violin no less – and Wickham propels us into a shit-kicking set of reels, the temperature rising by several degrees. This is too much temptation for a couple of Edinburgh bandsters who grab their guitars, join the expanding circle and start blasting away. Now we are ten, or eleven, and our booted feet are stomping in rhythm on the wooden floor like jackhammers. Non-musicians are beginning to gather round, clapping and yelling as indeed they should, and the next time I look up there are several new musicians in the circle: a bequiffed gent with banjo and tartan cape, and a couple of the formerly stoniest-faced coolest-of-the-cool Edinburgh dudes, strumming along on guitars self-consciously but thawing fast.
We sound like a cross between a Scottish fiddlers rally and several rockabilly bands all playing at the same time, and the music is now a rip-roaring furnace of sound, a mighty and communal explosion reaching every corner of the great room. The Fellow Who Fiddles has pulled it off: he has brought joy and brotherhood down from the realm of dreams and made them hard reality. With no greater weapons than a wooden fiddle, a horsehair bow and the spark of his good nature, he’s triggered a chain of events that has united a room full of strangers, turning thousand-yard stares into whoops of excitement and celebration. Verily, the power of the music gives everybody wings!
We’d arrived in Edinburgh the night before and checked into the Carlton Highland Hotel, a rambling Victorian eyrie perched on the North Bridge where, in what now seemed a previous life, Z and I had once tracked down the American punk rocker Richard Hell. But now I was the star flying in from another land and it was sweet and strange to arrive in the city of my birth accompanied by my Irish entourage and see the old town through their eyes: a dark northern fastness, impossibly atmospheric and romantic, like something from a book by George MacDonald or Edgar Allen Poe.
Steve and Anto were there and Trevor the bassist looking like the handsomest man in Ireland, and Trevor’s drumming mate Pete McKinney with his blade-sharp Belfast accent. There was B.P. Fallon in his teddy boy finery along for the ride in the exalted role of ‘viber’, and our Irish road crew: Jimmy Hickey, John Dunford and Steve Meany, three dark warrior gods from some ancient Celtic myth who’d been shot forwards and transplanted into the twentieth century. Wickham had introduced me to them a year earlier, regaling me with tales of Jimmy Hickey – ‘the world’s greatest roadie, man!’ – who could re-string a bouzouki while Donal Lunny of Moving Hearts was still playing it. We called them the Brown Brothers because they all wore the brown distressed leather bomber jackets popular at the time, and Dunford, the canny, bristle-jawed soundman, was their unofficial leader.
We’d been recording in Windmill Lane for two months and hadn’t played a concert since the previous July. So we were excited, almost demob-happy, to be out on the road, even for a one-off. Or a two-off – for on the night of our arrival we were invited to play unadvertised at a place called Calton Studios, halfway down the Royal Mile in the heart of old Edinburgh.
The gig was with We Free Kings, a Scottish band formed by a friend of mine called Joe Kingman. Joe was a tousle-headed punk rock barker and he’d gathered round him a ragtag band of misfits, seven in all, with a weird but brilliant sonic mix of cello, fiddle, flute, accordion, guitar and drums. They played Woody Guthrie numbers at breakneck pace, wrote their own urchin anthems and gleefully deconstructed old folk songs, putting everything through a punk thresher. The result was fantastic: seven characters in search of a comic strip, playing mad swirling music with a righteous intensity and a sense of mischief. They’d toured Ireland the autumn before, camping in tents, and Wickham and I had tagged along with them.
Calton Studios turned out to be a dingy but funky little cinema hidden down an alley. Word of mouth had produced a big crowd and the place was hopping. We threw in songs we’d never played before, like the ancient ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy’, with its fateful tale of the bride who leaves wealth and status for the charms of the ‘yellow gypsy’s lips’, and gospel oldie ‘I’m On My Way To Heaven’, transformed into a bloodthirsty hoedown. We played for thirty minutes and afterwards everyone in the place wanted to talk to us, a barrage of bright, enthusiastic, sweat-glistening Edinburgh faces crowding round. I recognised one guy from my early days, a shop assistant from Phoenix Records, a tiny prog-rock cave on the Royal Mile which Z and I had often sneered at during the punk wars. In fact when they’d declined to stock my first record back in ’79 I’d indulged my jilted feelings by anonymously letting off a stink bomb on their floor.
Next evening we played our main concert at the Usher Hall, a domed orchestral palace shaped like a jelly mould in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, where, aged twelve, I’d sung in the school choir at a Christmas concert. I remembered thrilling sense of imminent event as the audience gathered, the hubbub of their voices merging with the sound of the orchestra tuning up, a sense of awe sparked by the plush grandeur of the Hall. I felt the same now, except instead of an orchestra it was The Fellow Who Fiddles and the Human Saxophone tuning up as we stood in the dark corridor, hearts beating, waiting to go on. We were part of a
four-band bill and played a forty-five minute set. Most of it was from our unfinished new album and despite the absence of familiar songs the show was a success. Yet as I sat on the plane back to Dublin the following day, it was the Calton Studios performance and the post-gig bash in the Assembly Rooms that reverberated in my memory. I felt as if something new was trying to be born; that a promise had been vouchsafed in those unscripted moments of what The Waterboys could become.
By stepping out of the music business machinery at the end of 1985 we’d established our independence, but I’d felt for some time The Waterboys should evolve into something more organic than just another rock band putting out albums and touring in the prescribed way. Now suddenly I knew how it would look. I leaned back in my seat high above the Irish Sea and imagined The Waterboys recast as a colourful travelling musical explosion, rooted in the magical folklore of the British Isles and Ireland and expressing a holistic non-dogmatic spirituality, becoming legendary not through studio trickery or the artifice of promo videos but through what we wrote and played and by connecting directly with the audience. And all this while having a damn good time.