Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  Bell was experiencing mainstream success and earning good money, but he felt something was missing. The Dreams offered no outlet for his more expressive tendencies. He was told what to play. If he dared add some feedback to a track, or attempt a particularly inventive solo, his band-mates would mutter, ‘Knock it off, Ravi Shankar.’ His hair was moderately long but neatly combed. The band dressed conservatively in smart suits and wore their shirts tucked in. Commercially, the Dreams were on a different plane to Orphanage. According to the cultural battle lines of the day, however, they were firmly on the wrong side. Bell was a terrific and versatile guitar player. He was a bluesman who liked a joke, a drink and a smoke. He was sensitive and a little wild. He looked at the Dreams and saw the square root of square.

  Bell saved up his weekly wage of £35 until he could afford to quit the band. ‘I was fed up with the music we were playing,’ he says. ‘I was trying to form a rock trio, and I started going around Dublin looking for bass players and drummers to form a three-piece band. Everybody I asked wasn’t interested, and my money was running out. I thought I’d made this horrendous mistake. I was very impulsive in those days.’

  One night while Bell was doing his rounds, he bumped into keyboard player Eric Wrixon. Another Belfast man, and another former member of Them, Wrixon had recently been working in England with his band the Trixons. He and Bell knew each other socially, and ended up having a few drinks and sharing a tab of acid. They walked down to the Countdown Club, where Orphanage happened to have a booking that night.

  ‘I didn’t even know there was a band playing,’ says Bell. ‘We just went to the club because we knew the owner and he’d let us in for nothing. Orphanage were playing things like Bob Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”, and they were excellent at it. I don’t think they did any of Philip’s songs, and he wasn’t playing bass at the time, he was just singing. He had a bit of [stage presence], but it certainly wasn’t honed. He was a good-looking guy, and he wore this kind of kaftan on stage and did these Egyptian dances. He was certainly working at being a frontman, and I was really knocked out by Brian’s drumming.’

  During the break, Pat Quigley and Joe Staunton wandered off to get a drink. Lynott was alone with Downey in the changing room when Bell entered – unannounced, if not entirely unknown. Gary Moore was a mutual friend and, though they had never met, Lynott and Bell were aware of one another by reputation. At some point during the conversation, the Northern Irish guitarist progressed from asking whether Lynott knew any musicians who might be interested in being in a band with him, to walking away with a commitment that the three people in the room form a new group.

  Brian Downey was sceptical but was persuaded by Lynott, who joined with Bell only after setting out two very explicit conditions. Lynott would be the bassist, and the band would play some of his original compositions.

  The following Monday, he visited Bell’s flat in Manor Street with a reel-to-reel tape containing three of his songs, performed acoustically. They were ‘Dublin’, ‘Chatting Today’, and either ‘Diddy Levine’ or ‘Saga of the Ageing Orphan’. Rich, poetic, melodic. ‘Oh man,’ Bell recalls. ‘They were so good. I knew right away I could put my guitar style into them. That was that.’

  On 1 January 1970, New Spotlight magazine announced that Eric Bell was leaving the Dreams to form an as yet unnamed new band. Eric Wrixon would also be joining on keyboards. For the first few months of their existence, Thin Lizzy were a four-piece.

  Their early rehearsals took place in a basement below the Band Centre shop, Mrs Quigley’s Synnott Place tenement and Temple Oak Tennis Club. They tested their strengths, poked at their limitations. ‘We discovered that Eric Bell was a really, really good guitar player,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘I knew that Eric played in the Dreams showband, who were a huge pop group in Ireland at the time. It was only later that I found out he played with Van Morrison and Them in Belfast.’ In contrast, Lynott’s bass-playing was, according to Downey, ‘pretty raw to say the least. He was just feeling his way. In the early days we mostly just played blues jams.’

  A bond of friendship quickly developed. ‘When I first met Philip he was a fabulous guy,’ says Bell. ‘A real man’s man, an eye for the women. He loved clothes. Very poetic. Great company, full of life, yet very soft spoken. A really nice guy.’

  Orphanage didn’t so much break up as slowly disperse, like smoke in the wind. They had outstanding dates to fulfil and the lines of demarcation became hazy. When they played the Tabu Club in Limerick in January, Bell came along for the ride for a rare overnight stay. After the show Lynott, Bell and Downey started working up a number for their new band. ‘As far as I’m concerned that was one of the first Thin Lizzy rehearsals, in Ryan’s Hotel in Limerick,’ says Fran Quigley, who was there as the roadie. ‘I was tired, and after the gig I went up to my room and there they were. Brian banging away with his drum sticks on the side of the bedside table, Philip with the bass guitar, unamplified. They were working on a number. It was three o’clock in the morning, but they were intent on getting going as quickly as possible. They were already discussing the music they were going to play.’

  On 4 February 1970 Orphanage played at Dublin’s Liberty Hall on a bill that included Tara Telephone. Less than a fortnight later, on 16 February, Thin Lizzy made their debut.

  There were no recriminations. In those days, bands came and they went. ‘I said to Philip, “Don’t mind me or [Joe] Staunton, get yourself a band,”’ says Pat Quigley. ‘I had a day job, I was on a career drive, but Phil and Downey had nothing to lose. There was no hard feelings, nobody hated anybody or anything like that.’

  Quigley’s younger brother Fran stayed on as part-time crew, swayed by Lynott’s obvious quality and apparent professionalism: ‘Philip came to me at one of the Orphanage gigs out in Finglas – dive of a place – and said, “I’m forming a new band, will you be our roadie? The deal is that I’ll give you 5 per cent.” That impressed me! I was still at school, but he really had his head together. He had a big mind, he thought like a star. In his head he was a star. The way he walked, the way he talked – he had “something”, that’s the phrase everybody used. He had the ability to inspire people. Even when he wasn’t on stage he was on stage, he was selling himself the whole time. He was just made to be successful.’

  The buzz around town was: Philip Lynott has a new band. They’re going to be very cool.

  The road to Wembley Arena, Madison Square Garden and Sydney Opera House began in a school hall in Cloghran, a dot on the map north of Dublin. The first Thin Lizzy gig was little more than a live rehearsal, a chance to throw something out there to see what might stick.

  They had toyed with calling themselves Gulliver’s Travels but couldn’t quite commit to it. In the end they took their name from a cartoon model robot in the Dandy called Tin Lizzie – ‘the metal maid’. It was Bell’s idea. ‘Nobody liked it, nobody wanted it, but for some reason we used it,’ he says. It was, in part, a local in-joke – the hard ‘T’ sound of the Dublin pronunciation of ‘thin’ and ‘tin’ is essentially identical, a phonetic quirk which resulted in the band being billed as both Tin Lizzie and Thin Lizzy, and assorted variations on those spellings, for at least two years. The announcement on 21 February 1970 in the Evening Herald about this new ‘local super group’ named them as Thin Lizzy, but they were called Thin Lizzie on the sleeve of their first single, ‘The Farmer’.

  They could have chosen any number of songs for their debut. Between late 1969 and early 1970, Lynott made several recordings with an assortment of musical friends and acquaintances. It’s striking how many options he had available to him, and how many creative urges he was seeking to serve: poetic folk singer; rootsy singer-songwriter; blues-rocker; pop singer. He and Bell would even play around the pubs together for a few pounds. In time, he would channel all of these identities into Thin Lizzy. For now, they existed independently of one another.

  He appeared alone on RTÉ’s Like Now! to
perform a new piece called ‘The Friendly Ranger’, which at this point was literally half the song it became. On another occasion, Eamon Carr and Peter Fallon accompanied Lynott to Avondale Studios for an exploratory session. ‘He’d got a promise from the Irish branch of a label [most likely EMI Ireland] to put together a compilation album,’ says Carr. ‘We turned up at this little voiceover studio. Gary Moore was there with his acoustic guitar, and a couple of ballad singers from [a cappella vocal group] the Press Gang. I don’t remember what we did, there was a lot of fucking around. I don’t think anything was ever used.’

  A friend of Lynott’s called John D’Ardis had opened a small eight-track studio on Hagan’s Court, just off Baggot Street, called Trend. Looking to establish credibility in the market place, he offered Thin Lizzy some free studio time at Trend if they spread the word. Several early Lynott songs were recorded here by an embryonic version of Thin Lizzy, in what would now be called ‘unplugged’ recordings: Lynott and Bell play acoustic guitars, backed by Downey on bongos, and Wrixon on flute and piano.

  Gary Moore may have also appeared on some of these tracks, which are uniformly lovely, particularly two charming songs never subsequently recorded or officially released. The enormously catchy ‘It’s Really Worthwhile’ has a good-time Mungo Jerry feel. It’s sweet and warm, an easeful country-blues with campfire harmonies and some witty lines:

  She was very faithful until she met a boy called Jim

  It was he who said to her, ‘Don’t give out, just give in.’

  And only the guilty can tell you that it’s a sin.

  ‘Mama and Papa’ resurrects the refined, amusingly affected anglicized vocal style Lynott used on Skid Row’s ‘New Places, Old Faces’. Musically, it’s a jumpy psychedelic-folk number; lyrically it’s a hippie pastoral, with much talk of ‘waterfalls’, ‘valleys’ and the ‘Lady tree’. A first draft of ‘The Friendly Ranger’ begins with the same words as the version recorded for Thin Lizzy, but includes an extra stanza, while the last two verses of the released recording are absent. The tentative melody is almost unrecognizable and there is no mention of Clontarf Castle in the lyric or the title, presumably because Lynott was not yet living in that part of Dublin. ‘Saga of the Ageing Orphan’ is graced with Wrixon’s piano, but otherwise closely resembles the recorded version, as does the haunting ‘Dublin’.

  ‘In the context of what was going on around him, those recordings were very different,’ says D’Ardis. ‘Philip had a vision even back then. He could have had an earlier career doing that kind of material and morphed into a rock career later. He was such a fantastic songwriter.’

  The song Thin Lizzy chose to release as their first single sounded like the work of another group entirely. ‘The Farmer’ was a loping country-rock song heavily influenced, both musically and lyrically, by the Band. Whereas in the Band’s ‘The Weight’, ‘Luke’s waitin’ on the Judgement Day’, here Lynott affects a moonshiner Southern drawl to sing about ‘Reverend Luke way up north in Tennessee’.

  It’s a pleasant song and Lynott sells it well, but he sounds like someone trying on another man’s clothes for size, while the B-side, ‘I Need You’, wasn’t a Thin Lizzy recording at all, but rather an existing backing track created by John D’Ardis with another group of musicians. ‘It was a kind of Blood, Sweat & Tears pastiche,’ he says. ‘I asked Philip if he would sing on it, because he had a very soulful voice. He had no problem with that, and Eric overdubbed guitar. That was the end of it for a while. Then they got a single deal with EMI to release “The Farmer”, and they didn’t have anything else finished to go on the B-side, so they asked if they could use that demo. It was never intended for release.’

  ‘I Need You’ is, unsurprisingly, an oddity, a rather dishevelled jazz-pop number in the vein of Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, with warm organ and blasting horns. If nothing else, it offers an intriguing glimpse of Lynott as he might have sounded with the Black Eagles or early Skid Row, transformed into a finger-snapping soul man, belting out Ray Charles and Otis Redding.

  Released as a one-off single on 31 July 1970 by EMI Ireland, the Irish arm of Parlophone Records, 500 copies of ‘The Farmer’ were pressed and only 283 sold, despite some local radio play and a concerted publicity drive which involved illegally fly-posting most of O’Connell Street. By the time the single was released Thin Lizzy were evolving again. Eric Wrixon had contributed organ and a roadhouse piano break to ‘The Farmer’, but before the track saw the light of day he was asked to leave – which is why he can be heard on the track but is nowhere to be seen on the vogueish psychedelic cover photo. Wrixon was the first Thin Lizzy member to be excised from publicity shots, though not the last. Money was too tight to stretch four ways, he was told, and the blend of personalities wasn’t quite working out.

  It was as a trio that Thin Lizzy began to gel. ‘We used to jam on stage for about fifteen minutes, just the three of us, getting into this thing,’ says Eric Bell. ‘We tried new sounds every night. It was very natural, the interplay between us. It was magical when it started.’

  They quickly gained a following. In June Thin Lizzy appeared in the top three in New Spotlight’s poll of best Irish bands. By autumn, the half-full venues they had played eight or ten weeks previously had queues snaking around the street. ‘It was so exciting to see this new band taking off, and people just loving what we did,’ says Bell. ‘I think in a way we took it for granted. We started becoming a bit blasé about it, but by the same token we were genuinely surprised that this little buzz was starting to happen. Things just fell into place.’

  ‘They were the best band in the land, because it was all about coolness and credibility,’ says Fran Quigley. ‘Whatever band Philip was associated with would have been the coolest band. He had the cool label. It was a small scene and you could make an impact pretty quickly.’

  ‘Philip had a certain amount of pulling power,’ says Frank Murray. ‘People would be aware that this was his new band. Brian and Eric, too, had [recognition]. The public knew about these guys, they weren’t a bunch of unknowns.’

  In the beginning the standard Thin Lizzy set was the typical broth of shared influences: ‘Street Fighting Man’ by the Rolling Stones, songs by Spirit, Hendrix, Jeff Beck and the Flying Burrito Brothers, plus an occasional representative of Lynott’s more off-piste tastes, such as Roger Miller’s ‘Little Green Apples’, or a slow, spacey version of ‘I Put a Spell on You’ by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. When they travelled outside Dublin and played ‘Dancing in the Street’ by Martha and the Vandellas, Lynott would replace the original track’s roll call of Detroit, Chicago, New York City, Baltimore and Philadelphia with Cork, Galway, Limerick and Kerry. Equating the urban centres of black America with the provincial towns of white Ireland gave everyone in the crowd a kick of recognition, symbolically fusing the twin elements of his own racial identity in the process.

  ‘When we started off, we’d sing everybody else’s numbers,’ Lynott later recalled. ‘Then, gradually, we introduced our own songs, dropping favourites as we went along, until half the set was original.’1

  New rockers like ‘Look What the Wind Blew In’ joined ‘The Farmer’ and relative oldies such as ‘Saga of the Ageing Orphan’, ‘Dublin’ and ‘Chatting Today’. Thin Lizzy started to become what Lynott had always craved: a powerful rock band that was also a platform for self-expression. ‘When I saw Lizzy for the first time I thought, oh, that’s interesting, they’ve tightened up the arrangements, they’ve tightened up the playing,’ says Eamon Carr. ‘They weren’t quite a power trio, but they had the intensity of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Stuff like “Look What the Wind Blew In” had an identity to it. Philip was already very solid on the bass. He wasn’t Jack Bruce, but he was rooting it fine.’ Before every Thin Lizzy show he would practise in the dressing room. At home, he spent hours at a time playing bass at the band’s new communal house in Clontarf. ‘He started becoming very proficient,’ says Bell. ‘He worked very hard at it.’

 
Lynott had left 85 Leighlin Road by the time Thin Lizzy formed. He rented a place in Kenilworth Square in Rathgar, and later stayed at 111 Anglesea Road in Donnybrook. These were areas befitting a budding local rock star. ‘Kenilworth Square was pretty posh,’ says Peter Fallon. ‘He really liked that address.’ As the band began to gel, he was taken with the idea of creating a headquarters. Groups such as Traffic, the Band and the Grateful Dead had pioneered the idea of living communally, the better to immerse themselves in music and forge a collective identity.

  ‘We were in a pub one night, and Philip said, “Do you fancy getting a house together?”’ says Eric Bell. Within a week Lynott had pocketed the keys to the upper floor of a large, red-brick Victorian villa at 28 Castle Avenue in Clontarf, a distinguished coastal suburb of south Dublin. Bell moved out of his flat on Manor Street in May 1970, and the two men started living together in one of Dublin’s prime residential areas. The rather austere castle sat at the end of the road. The cricket club was across the street, the sea a stone’s throw away.

  The Castle Avenue flat was spacious, with a large living room, a ramshackle kitchen, one bedroom and a quirky conservatory -a Victorian ‘plant room’ – built on the side of the building on the first floor, where Eric Wrixon stayed for a time prior to leaving the band. Today, the property is worth at least 4 million euro, and has listed building status. In 1970 its elegance was a little rougher around the edges, but still – Crumlin boys didn’t usually end up with plant rooms in Clontarf.

  These were, Bell recalls, ‘magic days. We shared a room at this point, there were two beds. Every morning we’d wake up, I’d go and make the tea, and Philip would roll this big joint. Then I’d come back in, get back into bed, and we’d pass the joint back and forth and put on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison, and just fly away. It was like that every morning. Incredibly creative, looking back on it. We had a television, an old black-and-white thing, and it was only on twice, I would say, in about a year. The record player was permanently turned on and hundreds of different records were being played, all day and all night. We were just surrounded completely by music, all the time.’