The inroads made through ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ and Jailbreak had not been sustained. ‘Don’t Believe a Word’ did not chart in the States, and Johnny the Fox failed to make any meaningful impact. Creem’s review of the album was indicative of a general attitude of must-try-harder surrounding the band. ‘Ideally, Thin Lizzy should have released an EP, and continued releasing EPs, until they got it right,’ wrote the reviewer Susan Whitall. ‘They’re almost there.’5
As Lynott implied with his desire to display ‘reliability’, with the cancellation of two tours in under six months Thin Lizzy were starting to look like a gamble to their US label, Warner Brothers, who weren’t especially inclined to put their promotional muscle behind a band who couldn’t seem to get all four members on a stage at the same time. Thin Lizzy didn’t help by fluffing their leading lines. When the Queen tour reached its most significant venue on 5 February 1977, New York’s 19,000-capacity Madison Square Garden, the band had one of their rare off nights. When it mattered most, they misfired, and did not play an encore.
A greater reality check occurred on their next visit to New York in the autumn, on a US tour with Graham Parker and the Rumour in support, reprising the bill that had travelled around the UK eighteen months earlier. Headlining the Palladium in New York on 22 October, Thin Lizzy were summarily dismissed by the cool metropolitan crowd. ‘Unfortunately the audience had come to see us because we were the hip thing in those major cities,’ says Parker. ‘Half of them walked out for Thin Lizzy. Which sucked. I felt like, oh, you idiots, they’re good! They’re different from us, but they’re still a fucking great rock ‘n’ roll band. Phil later said our audience were 1960s snobs, and I thought, he’s right! I agree, totally. It wasn’t good, but it was just New York City. They killed us in Texas, the South and the Midwest.’
All the great shows in Dallas and Phoenix, however, couldn’t compensate for two misfiring New York appearances in quick succession, but the music was strong and good, and there was fun to be had each night in the bars, clubs and hotels of each town. Several songs from the autumn dates at the Seneca College Fieldhouse, Toronto, and the Tower Theater, Philadelphia, are preserved on Live and Dangerous (in the case of Philadelphia, the entire show was later released as Still Dangerous). The Rumour performed with horns, and their Irish saxophonist John Earle would join Thin Lizzy each night to play their new single, ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’. ‘Thin Lizzy and Graham Parker and the Rumour, plus the horn section, was one of the greatest double bills there ever was,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘It was just fantastic. Pure entertainment from both bands.’
‘Phil was such a showman and I learned a lot off of him,’ says Parker. ‘How to grab the audience and stare them in the face. When I started I was nailed behind an acoustic guitar, and gradually I came out of that. Phil was nailed to his bass, but he still looked like he was stalking the stage, handling the audience. On top of that, they were an incredibly tight band, and everyone was professional. They all played their hearts out every night.’
Their prospects in Britain continued to thrive. Released on 2 September 1977, Bad Reputation was Thin Lizzy’s highest charting UK album to date, reaching number four. They had recorded it over the summer in Toronto, slipping through another tax loophole.
They stayed at the Hotel Plaza II on Bloor Street and recorded at Toronto Sound with Tony Visconti, who had worked extensively with David Bowie and Marc Bolan and was one of the most successful and innovative producers around. The choice was a promising one, indicative of Lynott’s desire to push the band in new directions. Bowie, readying to make “Heroes”, was reportedly baffled by his producer’s decision to work with a group he himself did not rate, but Visconti had loved ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ and had fallen for Lynott’s stoned garrulousness on the sole occasion they had previously met. ‘He was Prince Charming,’ says Visconti. ‘Full of enthusiasm, really outgoing and friendly. He wanted to make it work and oozed with confidence.’
He arrived for preliminary discussions at Visconti’s London studio straight from lunch at the Carlton House Hotel, where Thin Lizzy had won the Best Newcomer category at the Melody Maker awards – an accolade which amused Lynott, given that they were just about to make their eighth album. The record company had provided a limousine for the day. When Lynott and Gorham climbed out a little the worse for wear, Visconti wondered what he might have got himself into, but he ended up impressed at their organization. ‘All the songs were written, and apparently rehearsed,’ he says. ‘The arrangements were more or less worked out. I might change the length of intros or reorder a few sections of the songs, but they were in great shape. Philip was very methodical.’
They began the sessions in Toronto in May as a three-piece. Lynott had not forgiven Brian Robertson, and was aware that even before the guitar player had cut his hand their combative working relationship had become almost untenable. Gary Moore had been a stop-gap replacement for the Queen tour. In the studio, they decided that Scott Gorham would record all the guitar parts himself, overdubbing whatever was needed. This was how the album started. In the end, on Gorham’s insistence, Robertson was drafted in on a session basis, adding guitar and keyboards to several songs. The truce was uneasy.
‘Brian Robertson was always on the side-lines,’ says Visconti. ‘I didn’t understand why, I was a bit naive about the group politics, but Brian kept himself separate. He didn’t really hang out – he would go to his room and drink. In the studio he would do his solo and go to another room. He wasn’t really clicking with the band.’ Robertson was deliberately excluded from the punky, bleached-out cover photograph, which showed only Lynott, Gorham and Downey, but the signals were mixed. In June, Thin Lizzy announced publicly that they were officially a three-piece. The following month, they announced publicly that Brian Robertson was back in the band.
Lynott’s relatively sober post-hepatitis period was over. During recording, his discipline in the studio, a source of pride for so long, began to waver. ‘Philip was a medium drug user on Bad Reputation,’ says Visconti. ‘When we were in Toronto, the drug of choice was cocaine, which was almost impossible to get. So the band smoked and drank. It was mainly an alcohol-fuelled album. There was a period when they were out of control because they were drinking too much. I threatened to leave the album. I called their managers in London, and said, “I can’t work with these guys, they’re falling down drunk.” Chris O’Donnell flew over from London and sorted them out.’ ‘They just wanted affirmation,’ says O’Donnell. ‘I just had to say, “It’s a great record, it’s fantastic, and by the way, that’s the single – ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’.”’
The day after O’Donnell’s departure, Lynott came to Visconti to berate the excessive behaviour of the rest of the band. ‘I can handle it but they can’t,’ he said. Visconti told him he was part of the problem, which rather took Lynott aback. He promised to cut down, ‘but it’s impossible to cut it out completely’.
Bad Reputation does not sound like an undisciplined record. Pleasingly concise at thirty-six minutes and nine songs, the album introduced a tighter, more rhythmic dynamic. It is certainly Thin Lizzy’s best-sounding studio record. Visconti, a bass player himself, brought Lynott’s lines to the fore throughout, giving his bass a thicker, more contemporary sonic identity on ‘Southbound’, ‘Dear Lord’ and ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ in particular.
The latter is one of Lynott’s greatest achievements. It does not strive to impress, it seeks only to uplift and entertain. It’s hard to think of any other rock band of the 1970s in possession of such wit and lightness of touch. Lynott was not entirely sure of the track – he insisted that the hard-driving ‘Bad Reputation’ was released with it as a double A-side to circumnavigate any accusations of softening up – but it was a timely reminder of his most persuasive and enduring gifts: he was a pop craftsman when it came to mood and melody, and a singer of rare versatility. The way he would bite down on the words, roll them around his mouth, chew on each syllable a
nd stretch it out. It was an art form. It certainly impressed Visconti. ‘He was like the Sinatra of the rock world,’ he says. ‘A highly nuanced voice, and so expressive.’ When Supertramp played Toronto, Thin Lizzy asked saxophonist John Helliwell to overdub a horn part, a pitch-perfect textural counterpoint to Lynott’s vocal.
‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ is not just a fond, finger-clicking recollection of teenage misadventure on the streets of south Dublin, but an exuberant love letter to life. Little else on the album contained even a hint at such optimism, veering between razor-edged nihilism and rather oppressive melancholy. Bad Reputation shifted Thin Lizzy away from the streets towards a warzone. Aware that he was in danger of self-parody, Lynott had wisely ditched the gum-chewing case studies. ‘I wrote so many Johnnies and Rockies that I’ll probably drop the character thing for a while till it really interests me again,’ he said in December 1977.6
In their place, the atmosphere on much of the album is martial, staking out the territory of heavy metal. The wonderfully evocative ‘Soldier of Fortune’ and less persuasive ‘Killer without a Cause’ are set in extremity, recounting mercenary lives mired in death and violence. The juddering riff of the title track is a template for the coming New Wave of British Heavy Metal. ‘Opium Trail’ is equally grim, a romanticized blood-and-thunder account of the heroin trade, written after watching two television documentaries on the Hong Kong Triads and the Golden States of Shan. ‘It’s an anti-drug song, that’s the funny thing …’ said Lynott. ‘It was kind of to make me aware that you can flirt around with these sorts of things but eventually they’ll trap you, there’s no two ways that it won’t trap you.’7 The words to ‘Opium Trail’ gave Tony Visconti pause. ‘I read the lyrics and I thought, He’s trying to tell us something here. I didn’t see evidence that he was using an opiate, but I felt he was probably … having some kind of internal conflict.’
The sense of a man in turmoil is evident elsewhere. On one level, the tugging Wild West sadness of ‘Southbound’ works as a sequel to ‘Fool’s Gold’, but cuts closer to the bone. ‘The gold rush it is over and depression days draw near,’ sings Lynott, ‘Drifting like a drover / chasing my career.’ Musically, ‘Dear Lord’ betrayed the influence of Queen in its mock-pompous opening salvo and stack of layered vocals, provided by Visconti’s wife Mary Hopkin, but lyrically it’s one long prayer.
Give me dignity, restore my sanity
Oh Lord, come rescue me
Dear Lord, my vanity is killing me
No matter that Lynott’s belief in a higher power had been ingrained during his upbringing, and that the sense of a spiritual lack was real, his soul-bearing on Bad Reputation was greeted with the kind of critical mockery specially reserved for macho rock stars exploring their sensitive side. Such indulgences were unfashionable by 1977. More acceptable was the sharpened sense of attack displayed elsewhere on the album, and its new-found bleakness. ‘[Thin Lizzy] make perfect sense in The Age of Punk, just as they did a year or two years or three years ago,’ wrote Charles Shaar Murray in New Musical Express.8
Punk was increasingly on Lynott’s mind. He told friends it was just rock and roll wearing different trousers. Immediately before the Queen tour, in January 1977, he had spent an evening jamming at the Hope and Anchor pub in Islington with Rat Scabies from the Damned. ‘There was initially going to be a band for Philip and Rat,’ says Frank Murray. ‘Somewhere along the line that got lost. They didn’t rehearse or anything like that, it was probably just talk.’ Nick Lowe, whom Lynott revered, was also there that night. A fellow bass player, Lowe’s 1976 solo single, ‘So it Goes’, not only sounded like Thin Lizzy, but began with a description of going to see the band before their gig at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1975.
Security’s so tight tonight
Oh, they’re ready for a tussle
Gotta keep your backstage passes
‘Cause your promoter had the muscle
At the Hope and Anchor, the pair discussed recording a single together for the fledgling Stiff label until ‘my managers found out about it and went berserk, and the record company heard about it, so it was shelved,’ said Lynott. ‘Nick Lowe is just great. I really like him as a person. I like characters. I think it’s better to be a character than a drone.’9
A few days later, in New York to rehearse for the Queen tour, Lynott had gone to see Talking Heads at CBGB and Mink DeVille at Max’s Kansas City. Back in London, in 1977 and 1978 he fell into friendships with Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of the Clash, Sid Vicious, Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, and Malcolm Owen of the Ruts. On 15 April 1978, he guested at the Roundhouse with Elvis Costello and the Attractions, playing bass on ‘Mystery Dance’.
Partly this was the kind of canny manoeuvring that harked back to the days when Lynott poked a finger into every pie available in Dublin’s arts and music scene. ‘Was it calculating?’ says Frank Murray. ‘Of course it was. Philip could be a very calculating person.’
‘I suspect he was interested in both ways,’ says Graham Parker. ‘I suspect he was interested musically, in terms of, what’s going on with this? And I think he might also have thought, what can I take from this? What can I learn? That’s a good musician. He didn’t discount it. And also, where does this leave me in the grand scheme of things? That means you’re smart. You keep your ears and your eyes open.’
Punk operated a scorched earth policy to bands not terribly dissimilar to Thin Lizzy, but while Brian Downey admits that ‘we were side-lined a bit by the press’, many of the musicians were prepared to overlook the drum solos, long hair and passé ‘chick’ talk. They gave Lynott a bye because ‘he was like a punk anyway,’ says Downey. ‘He had that kind of image, and the punks realized that.’
Though nobody would ever define Lynott as a politically motivated or particularly socially conscious songwriter, there was an aggression in their recent albums that resonated with the mood of the times. Thin Lizzy played without any pretence. They radiated an aura of independence. They didn’t toe the line. The chaos surrounding their line-up, the bar-room brawls and amped-up, confrontational sensibility spoke of a maverick spirit. There was no attempt to crawl to the United States by softening their live sound with female backing vocalists, conceptual stage shows or synthesizers. If they were to make it, they would make it on their own terms.
The attitude chimed with punk, as did the way they interacted with their audience and fellow musicians. Lynott defined Thin Lizzy as the people’s band and called fans ‘supporters’, as though the group were a football team and their concerts were FA Cup finals. The mass chant of ‘Lizzy, Lizzy, Lizzy’ at the start of Live and Dangerous was closer to the terrace than a rock concert.
At his insistence, after each concert they operated an open-house policy. ‘It didn’t matter how long they stayed in the venue, just as long as everyone who wanted an autograph or photograph got one,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘They queued up and they came through the dressing room. That was part of the ritual. He never scribbled: he always signed “Philip” very beautifully. I never saw him rush it. He never acted the star, then he’d hang out in clubs and talk to anybody who would talk to him.’ Only occasionally would particularly persistent fans be given short shrift.
Above all, he gained respect from punks through proximity. David Gilmour and Freddie Mercury weren’t hanging out at the Camden Palace, Music Machine, Club for Heroes or the Vortex, but as an innately social animal Lynott mixed with them all. He enjoyed their energy and identified with the iconoclastic spirit. ‘Everything they’re singing about I actually do,’ he said. ‘I do what I want to do. I never wanted to be like anybody else. I don’t give a fuck about good, bad or indifferent music, I just like what I like.’10
In the short term Lynott emerged personally unscathed by punk, but he was aware that in the long run it left Thin Lizzy more out of step with the times than they had been a year ago. ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ had been voted 1976 single of the year in the NME readers’ poll. Such pl
audits would not be repeated again after the great purge of 1977. ‘When we came back [from Canada], everything we were aiming for was being shut down by the press and people in the know,’ said Lynott. ‘Instead of going for perfect production it was going back to rawness.’11 It was the beginning of a period where he increasingly tried to orientate himself with fast-changing musical trends.
Shortly before the release of Bad Reputation, on 21 August 1977, Thin Lizzy headlined what was billed as ‘Dublin’s First Official Open-air Rock Festival’ (the debacle in 1970 at Richmond Park had clearly been written out of history) before a crowd of 11,000 at Dalymount Park, home of Bohemians FC, in the north of the city. The bill included the Boomtown Rats, Ireland’s first breakout punk band, whom Lynott had befriended when they had moved to London. ‘I was freaked out when he came down to see us,’ says Bob Geldof. ‘He always checked out the opposition. Even though we were potential rivals, he befriended us, gave us great advice.’ Thin Lizzy had been instrumental in getting the Boomtown Rats a record deal, bringing the band and their demo tape to Nigel Grainge in 1976, who subsequently signed them to his new label, Ensign.
In Dublin for the long weekend, Lynott relished the role of homecoming king. The night before Dalymount was his twenty-eighth birthday. He held court in the Bailey, then jammed with the Boomtown Rats at Moran’s Hotel, a stunt organized by his old friend Smiley Bolger. Word spread around Dublin in minutes. Such was the crush – Moran’s held no more than 300 people – that Bolger abandoned any attempt at collecting money at the door and let everyone in for free. Later that night Lynott attended a party at Castledown House in County Kildare, owned by the Guinness family. He was entertaining in his accustomed style in the hayloft when the Gardaí entered, looking for drugs. Lynott was searched and, with a certain inevitability, found to be clean.
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