Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  Four weeks later he flew back into Dublin. He didn’t book into a hotel, but stayed instead in the spare bedroom of my flat. I figured this was because he wanted us to be close friends – it never struck me he might be broke – and it was a thrill to have this inspirational man lodging with me. One afternoon Bob called me into his bedroom and asked me to think about what his royalty rate, his percentage of the earnings, on the finished records should be. ‘How much do you want?’ I asked him. But he wouldn’t say and told me to decide how much he was worth to me. I looked at him and noticed there was a tear in his eye. He saw me watching him and brushed the tear away, saying, ‘Ah’m just a foolish ol’ man.’ I was distressed by this. A business decision had just become an emotional one and I found myself in a position of not wanting to let down an older man I looked up to, whose approval and belief meant a lot to me. By my choice of what to pay him, it seemed, I would be worthy of his mentoring and affection, or not. The matter perplexed me for several weeks until I bit the bullet and instructed my solicitor to pay Bob a percentage in the upper strata of acceptable producer royalties.

  Meanwhile we were ready for the studio, Bob revving us up, shouting, ‘Ah’m gonna git that sound WIDE OPEN and you can do anything you WANT!’ We were inching towards experiencing the old master at work and seeing what musical wonders would come through the gates he opened. And at first the sessions were a success. Bob mixed the recordings from the day we’d done Fisherman’s Blues and made them sound great. He knew how to use tone to heighten the sound of Steve’s fiddle, Anto’s electric mandolin and my voice, and his deployment of echo and reverb was exquisite: old school and classic, with a freshness akin to the great Elvis Presley Sun recordings. B.P. Fallon turned up in the midst of the work, his antennae twitching at the prospects of a ‘vibe’. B.P. had once done an interview with Leonard Cohen, during which Cohen had waxed lyrical about Bob. B.P. brought the tape of the interview to the studio, fast-forwarded to the relevant comments, placed the cassette player on Bob’s knee and pressed play. As Bob guffawed to hear Cohen describing him, B.P. sat with his camera a few inches from Bob’s head and, like an American Indian counting coup, took photographs of Bob Johnston listening to Leonard Cohen talking about Bob Johnston to B.P. Fallon.

  B.P. was conscripted to add handclaps to our hoedown version of an old black spiritual song ‘Meet Me At The Station’. Bob balanced the sound and played it back to us at full volume, yelling, ‘THIS IS A WORLDWIDE NUMBER ONE SMASH!’ above the din. In fact he had both sets of speakers – the massive industrial ones built into the wall and the regular ones on top of the mixing desk – running at full volume plus a set of headphones, also at full, wrapped round his ears. Bono dropped by from U2’s management offices upstairs to see what the commotion was. To his great credit he gamely withstood the volume levels, sent for a bottle of champagne (these seemed to follow Bono around) toasted us all and shouted, ‘Congratulations!’ But when we started to record things began to get weird.

  The Waterboys’ method of recording at the time was to set up all together like at a show or rehearsal and play for real. I’d have a sheaf of papers with songs written on them which the band might or might not have heard before and I’d whip them out as the mood took me. Or I’d write songs on the spot and trust the band to pick them up fast and come up with hooks and parts in real time as the tapes rolled. This was absolutely against the run of recording techniques in the mid eighties, an era of structured and tightly controlled recordings heavily dependent on technology and drum machines.

  With all his experience of producing musicians in the days when playing together was the norm, Bob was a natural partner in this, and he encouraged me to take risks, to compose out of thin air, to arrange music from scratch in the studio. When successful, like on the Fisherman’s Blues day, this method produced recordings with a fresh, spontaneous sound and a spirit that shone through the music. When it didn’t work, when the on-the-spot songs weren’t of the highest standard or the band chemistry took a vacation, the results could be terrible. Our debut recording with Bob was a bit of both … and then some. As we soundchecked, first one piece of studio equipment then another broke down. Then the headphone system wouldn’t work. Then a microphone blew out. Then several channels on the mixing desk malfunctioned. Poor engineer Pearse, mortified that this should happen on the day the legendary producer was present, ran around desperately trying to get the gear going. Meanwhile Bob, just being himself, was loudly asking when we were going to start, pacing the studio impatiently like a great brooding cat. His strident Texan voice lacerated Pearse’s gentle Celtic sensitivities. As Pearse became progressively more terrified, Bob got more cantankerous and displeased, and as the relationship between these two broke down, so more and more gear started to malfunction. It was as if Bob’s frustration and Pearse’s terror were short-circuiting the studio equipment, or maybe the wild mismatch of their diametrically opposed personalities had triggered an energy malfunction in the bones of the building.

  The band played on regardless, pulling our music round us like a circle of wagons. Drawing on the atmosphere, I pulled out a song I’d written six months earlier that seemed to harmonise with the sense of gathering doom, the appropriately named ‘We Will Not Be Lovers’. The other musicians hadn’t played it before but they joined in. Steve and Anto hit an insistent fiddle and mandolin riff that channelled the fractious mood, and for nine minutes we dealt out the ideal soundtrack to the day: a pummelling wild groove teetering on the brink of chaos.

  But this was as good as it got, and the rest of the music we managed to record between equipment breakdowns was disappointing. Bob tried his best, coming into the studio and yelling and swinging his arms round like a mad conductor as we played, but there was no more magic in the box. As the day whimpered to its close Bob walked round muttering, clearly unhappy with the experience, and, though he didn’t say it, surely feeling he hadn’t been given a fair shot and would have been better served with his own engineer and studio. After all the high promise of our first meetings, we were banjaxed. And at what a cost. Apart from the dashing of our Johnston hopes, poor Pearse was never confident on a Waterboys session again and the dread memory of the ‘Bob Johnston day’ would loom like a spectre over his future work with us.

  When I said farewell to Bob next morning an awkward feeling hung in the air between us. Was this the end or would there be more? We promised to stay in touch, that was all, and I waved him off at Dublin airport. A few weeks later I discovered he’d left a bunch of records in a corner of my flat. They were acetates: one-off test pressings of old sixties recordings by Dylan, Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, eight discs in all, many of them live and each one shockingly rare and very valuable. I wondered if Bob had deliberately left them as a surprise for me, intending that I’d listen to them and be inspired. Or might he have been short of money and brought them to sell in Ireland if his funds ran out? But this was too embarrassing a question to ask a man like Johnston, and with The Waterboys about to tour again I had other things on my mind anyway.

  The tour was a four-month roller coaster through Ireland, Britain and Europe, our chance to introduce audiences to our new rootsy sound. First we needed a manager and I knew who I wanted. I’d got to know Paul McGuinness when The Waterboys had supported U2 on some shows eighteen months before. He’d given me good advice and was everything I thought a manager should be: cunning but honourable, close with his band, imaginative, realistic and powerful. So when things didn’t work out with Gary Kurfirst, inviting Paul to manage The Waterboys seemed the obvious move. The only problem was his availability. ‘My hands are tied,’ he replied ruefully when I popped the question to him over lunch in a smart Dublin restaurant.

  I took this to mean that his deal with U2 didn’t allow him to manage other acts, let alone competitors like The Waterboys, but Paul was willing to get involved through the back door. ‘I’ve got a manager for you to meet,’ he told me on the phone a few days later, ‘if you think you can work
together, I’ll oversee him for you.’ It turned out to be a fellow who managed a top Irish band, some of whose members I was friendly with. But the way the guy stood in McGuinness’s living room, a glass of apple cordial in his hand, blithely assuring me he’d gone as far as he could with his band and was ready to drop them for The Waterboys, didn’t exactly fill me confidence. Apart from their being friends of mine, I knew that if he was able to dump this band, he’d dump me just as easily when something else came along. I declined. McGuinness didn’t give up and, offering the same ‘overseeing’ situation, set up a meeting with Fachtna O’Kelly, former handler of The Boomtown Rats and future manager of Sinead O’Connor. But Fachtna struck me as a troubled soul, uncertain about both the meeting and his future. The chemistry was wrong, and I said no again.

  Paul gave it his last throw and suggested a third surrogate. This was a chap I rather liked, a red-cheeked, shamrock-faced Irishman called Slim Doherty, but Slim had the persona of an enthusiastic yet unrealistic chancer and had approximately no management experience. I wasn’t betting on those odds. So we headed out manager-less on our tour, which turned out to be that marvellous moment in every band’s route to success when its reputation catches fire and its audience suddenly multiplies. And it happened for us just as the music hit overdrive. Promoters kept having to bump us up to bigger venues to keep up with ticket sales, extra shows were added every few days, and from Glastonbury to Jerusalem we were ablaze. Between April and July 1986 The Fellow Who Fiddles, the Human Saxophone, Trevor Hutchinson, Dave Ruffian and myself were the greatest band in the world.

  I wasn’t even thinking about Bob Johnston when he turned up unexpectedly at our London concert in May. The show was at the Hammersmith Palais, a famous dancehall, and Bob had flown in from America. After the show I got back to my hotel to find this note: ‘I came eight thousand miles to see you guys. I’m at the Portobello. Kick Steve and Anto in the ass for me.’ I rounded up the band and we caught a taxi to the trusty Portobello Hotel to be reunited with our wild friend. As we all squeezed into one of the Portobello’s tiny rooms, drinking and laughing, it was clear Bob had forgotten or put out of his mind the semi-disastrous session in Dublin and was keen to go ahead with new recording plans – but on his turf this time, he made that clear. I agreed to go and visit him again in San Francisco and check out the local studios when our tour finished.

  It was a re-run of my first visit except this time, tired of smoking reefers, I told Bob when I arrived I wouldn’t be doing any of that. To my surprise Bob foreswore his beloved ‘buds’ and we settled into a week of hanging out together with no artificial highs, the happiest days of our relationship. Bob gave me driving lessons on a piece of Mill Valley waste ground, cajoling me gregariously to drive much faster than was reasonable or safe. We went sailing motorboats on San Francisco Bay, traded songs in Bob’s living room, and we looked round potential recording studios like Record Plant in Sausalito, an old haunt of Sly Stone’s.

  One day we were driving in Bob’s car, talking about schooldays. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I guess you were pretty crazy at school, huh? What kinda things did you do to your teachers?’ ‘Well,’ I responded proudly, thinking I had a good one, ‘once we shut one of our teachers in a cupboard.’ ‘Hell,’ Bob snorted, ‘a cupboard? WE SET FIRE TO OURS!’

  Bob continued educating me, turning me onto the gospel singing group The Clark Sisters, and showing me old-time films of country artists. On the Hank Williams piano I learned to play ‘Lost Highway’ and ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’. We went to see The Charlie Daniels Band at an open-air venue in North California. Charlie introduced one of his songs by saying, ‘I hope them evil Russians see the error of their ways,’ and then, before singing ‘Amazing Grace’ at the end of the show – as most God-fearing country singers seemed to do – he added, ‘I’d like to thank God who made the Universe.’ I turned to Bob and said, ‘Someone’s gotta tell Charlie that God made the Russians too.’ Bob liked that, and laughed loud and long in his Texan guffaw.

  I slipped down to San Francisco for a couple of days to visit some musician friends, and when I came back to Mill Valley Bob cracked out the ‘buds’ once more. As soon as we were high, all the old Children’s Foundation and ‘Bob Marley was a visionary’ stories, which I now realised had been absent for the previous week, started again and it struck me that Bob’s dreams were intricately interwoven with how he felt when he smoked pot. Suddenly I saw him as a once-great man, perhaps still a great man, but one out of time, his dreams rendered hazy and out of reach by decades of reefer smoking. I still wanted to work with him but I decided to cover my ass too; I would bring the band to California to record with Bob in his own world, giving it the maximum chance of succeeding, but I’d also pursue recording without him in Dublin, where I’d produce the music myself.

  I found it hard to explain this to Bob. He was fond of saying to me, ‘You just call me from anywhere in the world and I’ll be there, and I’ll have that sound WIDE OPEN.’ I began to feel, ridiculously, that if I did recordings without Bob present I’d be betraying him. For my own peace of mind I had to tell him how I wanted things to be. We drove out to a beach on the far side of Mount Tamalpais, the green Olympian hill that dreams over Mill Valley, and as we walked along the sand with the sound of the Pacific surf in our ears, I outlined my plan. Bob, canny southerner that he was, understood the dynamics of the situation immediately and told me whenever I was ready to come to California and do some recording, to let him know. I flew back to Dublin with an easier mind.

  The moment I got back I brought the country songs I’d learned in Mill Valley into the Waterboys repertoire and booked studio time in Windmill Lane. Our relationship with the still-traumatised Pearse was shaky so a procession of prospective new sound engineers passed through the studio portals, each for a day or two of recording. Most, having done their homework and listened to This Is The Sea before arriving, expected a serious, furrowed-brow session of making big-scale layered rock music. Instead they encountered a gang of ragamuffins who wanted to play live in the studio and sound like Hank Williams and his Drifting Cowboys circa 1951.

  Most of these knob-twiddlers, trained in the era of overdubs and click tracks, looked at us as though we’d just teleported from the moon. I was hoping for one guy, just one, who had an intuitive rapport with me and a feel for the music we were playing, but none did. Though we made some some good recordings, almost as an aside, I found no engineer/collaborator. Sitting on top of a whole lot of nothing I began to wonder if working with Bob Johnston was what really needed to happen here. I contacted him to say we were ready to come to California.

  Bob booked us six days in Fantasy, an old-fashioned studio across San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, and in late November Steve, Anto and I flew into California. Bob picked us up and, as before, we drove through the woods, past the eucalyptus trees crackling in the rain, up Homestead Boulevard to Bob’s house where the American flag was still draped enigmatically over the balcony. I watched my companions experiencing Bob’s Californian dreamscape for the first time, just as wide-eyed and thrilled as I’d been ten months and two visits earlier. I’d figured if we were doing the recordings Bob’s way we should ask him to supply bassist and drummer, so during the days leading up to the session he drove us back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge to a rehearsal room in San Francisco, where he’d organised a selection of top West Coast players to come and try out with us.

  Some of them we’d heard of, like Prairie Prince, the drummer with The Tubes, and Willie Hall, who’d played with Booker T & The MGs. And under normal circumstances we’d have gelled with these guys and made sweet music but something seemed to be wrong in the machinery of the band – or with me. Perhaps I was jaded with the catch-lightning-in-a-bottle recording methods. Maybe what I really needed was to deploy some eighties-style planning and get more formal about how we worked, or at least find a balance between deliberation and spontaneity. For though I didn’t yet know it the absence of structure was begi
nning to burn me out, and working with Bob Johnston wasn’t the solution. We rehearsed for hour after hour, blasting through our massive floating repertoire of songs and jams, but didn’t chime with any of the players. In the end, pressured by Bob to make a decision, we picked Prairie Prince and Ross Valory, bassist with eighties pomp-rock band Journey.

  But before we hit the studio I needed to move out of Bob’s house. I couldn’t face the intensity of recording with Bob all day – a wild enough experience in itself – then going home with him at night. A doom was gathering over this project and the strain was beginning to show between the two principal actors. I told Bob I needed to stay in a hotel. He wasn’t happy about it but the southern gentleman in him wouldn’t let him refuse, so he reluctantly drove me to a couple of desultory highway-side motels in the middle of nowhere. I can still picture him stepping out of the car glum-faced, showing me these places with a doleful demeanour as if no one could possibly want to stay in them and the most natural thing in the world to do was return to Johnston towers in good ole Homestead Boulevard. But I didn’t wanna. And so I did what any sensible bohemian rocker in search of a bed would do: consulted the Californian version of the Yellow Pages. I found a little place in Berkeley itself called the French Hotel, a couple of streets from the studio. I booked myself in, got a piano delivered to my room, and that was that. And with Steve and Anto still billeted at Bob’s we entered Fantasy Studios on the second of December and starting running down the clock on the incineration of all our dreams.

  Fantasy was a good studio, stuck plumb in the middle of an industrial part of town, still decorated in its original seventies tat, blue carpet on the walls and wood everywhere; a warm and lived-in creative environment. Bob installed his own engineer, a quiet bespectacled genius called Tom Flye, then unleashed his most fearsome voice to terrorise the assistant, a long-haired young cove named Ralph, who sat quivering in a corner of the control room the entire week, taking note in a log book of everything that happened. Under coloured spotlights out in the studio were my electric piano, a drum kit in an alcove, and a Hammond organ, all close together for musical camaraderie. To the left and right of the piano were microphones for Anto’s sax and Steve’s fiddle. As soon as we were soundchecked I hit the ground running, vamping the piano and leading the band into a composed-on-the-spot song. As improvised songs often will, and ideally should do, this one caught the mood in the air – the awkward dynamic between Bob and myself – and turned into a rollicking kiss-off called ‘Ain’t Leavin, I’m Gone’. Sample lyrics: ‘You’re always right, baby when I’m wrong’ and ‘Your beauty is legend, your face is like the dawn,’ each repeated then capped by the resolution of ‘Well, I ain’t leavin’, I’m gone!’, which didn’t do much for the already strained studio vibes.