Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  We met Clive Davis of Arista Records in a private airport lounge when he was flying one way across the Atlantic and we were going the other. I admired Clive, an old-school music man who’d signed Patti Smith at the dawn of her career and knew how to treat artists; part impresario, part talent-spotter, part CEO and part street-fighter. Though he was courteous, almost avuncular, there was a bare-knuckle boxer in every cell of Clive’s body. You wouldn’t want to be his enemy. Irene, sitting in on the meeting, didn’t get this. Bamboozled by the genial exterior, she came away cooing, ‘What a lovely old man!’

  A few days later Dick and I dined in Los Angeles with a legendary promo-man-turned-company-executive called Charlie Minor. As we approached the restaurant I saw Charlie, who I’d never met before, standing in the window mugging and gesticulating urgently to me with his arm in the air, doing a ‘Get in here, Buddy’ act like I was a member of his gang. He continued this pally performance through lunch, talking as if we were paisanos from a mafia movie and furiously mollycoddling me with his arm around my shoulder so I’d be charmed and sign to his label. That arm worked hard. A few years later Dick asked me, ‘Did you hear what happened to Charlie Minor?’ I hadn’t, but I guessed right – he’d been shot dead.

  The procession of meetings was a good opportunity to observe Dick in action, but though he talked a good game, some things made me wonder if I’d picked a stinker. When we received record deal offers with sums ending in a certain amount of 0s, Dick would become fantastically animated. There was something out of control, almost vulgar, about the display, as if the prospect of earning big bucks was jerking Dick’s puppet strings, and this suggested where his fundamental interests lay. More worryingly he was oddly passive in the meetings, caught, I realised, between sticking up for me and ensuring he never offended anyone who might be useful to him further down the road. He always let me ask the tough questions, and if the executives we met stepped over the boundaries of good manners, like when Krasnow lectured me, Dick remained sheepishly silent and let them go right along. Irene might not have had Clive Davis’s number, but she had Dick’s. ‘He’s got no balls,’ was her pithy prognosis. But it was too late now. I’d signed to Dick for three years and making the best of the relationship was more attractive than a legal bust-up in the middle of choosing a record company, and a return to having no manager at all. I accepted Dick’s frailties, focussed on his attributes and got on with the beauty parade.

  Our next appointment was lunch with David Geffen in his Malibu beach house. A casually dressed butler greeted us at the door and showed us into an elegant lounge where Edward Hopper paintings hung on the walls and vintage Sinatra (Capitol years of course) wafted airily from a stereo in the next room. Through the huge windows lay the living vista of the Pacific Ocean, its blue-grey surface torn by the dark sleek shapes of dolphins. Geffen received us like a Zen emperor, sitting on a sofa wearing jeans and shirt in that loose style favoured by ultra-rich people who know their wealth and status are so magnetic they don’t even need to dress sharply. He shook my hand, smiled and said, ‘I tried to buy Enigma.’ This arcane utterance had me confused for a few seconds, before I realised he’d got Ensign’s name wrong and was letting me know he’d tried to sign, or buy, me in the past. We sat down to lunch at a round table, waited on by the butler. Geffen pulled up his chair and sat an inch from the side of my face, scrutinising me. But it felt funny rather than intrusive, and when I turned to meet his eyes Geffen was grinning.

  I liked him. I liked the atmosphere of his record company too, with its storefront offices on Sunset Strip and the friendly staff members who didn’t gush or bullshit me. But I didn’t take to the first Geffen A&R man I was introduced to and when I told David this, he suggested I meet with some others and see who I liked. There were two to pick from and they unwittingly played a sting on me that couldn’t have worked better if they’d planned it. First John Kalodner, a cheerless chap dressed as John Lennon circa 1969, long hair, granny glasses, white suit and all, sat magisterially at his desk and told me in a weird high-pitched voice how rubbish he thought Room To Roam was – ‘you should charge people half-price if you’re gonna make an album like that’ – and made it clear that if we signed to him his junior assistant, a docile, cross-eyed fellow, would A&R The Waterboys. ‘And I won’t be available,’ he added snarkily, in case Lackaday and I were in any doubt. Half an hour later in another office in the same building, Kalodner’s rival, a rotund, soft-voiced mover and shaker called Tom Zutaut, told me I was ‘one of the great emotional rock singers and performers of all time’. Relieved, I almost fell into Tom’s arms.

  Zutaut was riding high on the success of having signed Guns N’ Roses and clearly thought of himself as the guy with the Midas touch. Though Guns N’ Roses were everything I thought rock should have evolved beyond by about 1970, I respected Zutaut’s nuanced opinion of my new song demos (his favourites were ‘The New Life’ and ‘The Return Of Pan’) and I fancied a bit of the Midas touch myself. I signed to Geffen.

  With an L.A. record company and a New York manager I was ready for the move to America. I gave Anto six months’ paid leave, made a farewell trip to the West of Ireland, and in August of 1991 Irene and I moved into a brownstone apartment on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village.

  I hit the ground running, embracing the city like a lover, going to concerts every night and bringing myself back up to speed with rock’n’roll. I prowled the great Avenues and felt New York’s crackling energy seep into me, recharging my sense of wonder. The city was like a huge roaring engine and in those first months it swept me up in its momentum and put wings on my heels. Then, as now, Manhattan was the world centre of live music; you could catch Ray Charles in a jazz club, see Prince at Radio City or score front-row seats for a Ravi Shankar concert. There were new bands to check out, bluesmen in from Chicago, jazzbos and folkies in the clubs, old-style gospel groups come over the bridges from Brooklyn and the Bronx holding jubilees in downtown church halls, and even American Indian music if you knew where to look – and I did. Soon my head was buzzing with new information and inspiration. I even plucked random shows from the listings in the Village Voice and bought tickets on the basis of a band name or concert theme.

  This musical roulette led to wonderful discoveries like The Anonymous Four, an a cappella group singing medieval rounds and chants in the perfect environment of a masonic chapel somewhere uptown one winter afternoon; four crystalline female voices as pure as the glacial New York day outside. Or it threw up weird eccentricities like The Stellar Singers, an ensemble performing something called ‘Anthem For The Earth’ at the prestigious Lincoln Center. I went to the concert accompanied by my trusty roadie Ken, a lanky Dubliner and the last survivor of The Waterboys’ Irish road crew, who’d moved to New York with me. We found our seats, the lights went down and five men and five women came on stage and stood in a semi-circle. Then a little guy walked on with a bald head, white mutton-chop sideburns and a shiny dress jacket. He acknowledged the audience with a pained expression as if either embarrassed or suffering from a great burden, then turned to face the singers. He clasped his hands in front of his solar plexus – a curious gesture, which the singers all copied – and after a long, significant moment of silence began to conduct them with great intensity, as if drawing the music from their very souls.

  I glanced at my concert programme to read that this chap was called Gareth B. Woods and that he ‘spontaneously composed’ the music and had ‘received’ the composition we were now hearing while driving through the Mojave Desert. I began to develop distinct feelings of scepticism. The singing was semi-operatic with high soprano flourishes and low basso drones, but though gymnastically impressive it wasn’t actually very good. The high ‘tra-la-las’ were slightly curdled and the low manly voices unintentionally comedic. It was as if some critical self-awareness on the part of conductor and performers had been suspended and replaced by devotion to the significance and indeed wondrousness of what they were doing. I sat listeni
ng, my curiosity fully engaged, and began to realise I was witnessing a marvellous example of the Emperor’s New Clothes, made all the more remarkable by the rapt commitment of the Singers, now in transports of artistic ecstasy and held in thrall by the arm-waving of the dubious maestro, Mr Woods, who they clearly idolised.

  I was so engrossed by this tableau that I’d forgotten roadie Ken sitting next to me. I turned to look at him and he glanced shyly back at me with a deeply conflicted expression that said all at once Aw boss, you don’t really like this, do you? and But what if there’s something artistically serious going on here that I don’t understand? and Will I offend him if I say I think it’s awful? and Please can we go soon? The poor man’s face was a picture. Suddenly I needed to laugh. Very loudly. But before a sound could come out I wedged my knuckles in my mouth and dissolved into an explosion of silent mirth, joined seconds later by a relieved and liberated Ken, which of course made it funnier still. Somehow we kept our laughter under control until the merciful release of the intermission whereupon we ran out of the hall and howled like daft wolves in the New York night.

  Meanwhile on Hudson Street I turned one of the rooms into a music den, with all my usual instruments and a selection of oddities I found at my new favourite shop. Music Inn was a tiny store on West Fourth Street, run by two grumpy sixties survivors who charged a one-dollar entrance fee and tried to scare away non-serious customers at the door. Like a musical ark it stocked every acoustic instrument in the world, from Afghan zithers to Zambian finger pianos, which hung from the ceiling, lined every millimetre of the walls, overspilled from ancient shelving and occupied almost every particle of floor space, save for two narrow channels via which the customer could just about negotiate his way from one end of the shop to the other, a feat impossible without banging one’s head at least six times. From my various expeditions to this archaic grotto I emerged the possessor of Indian harmoniums, Navajo rattles, Chinese cymbals and rattling clusters of Bolivian goats’ hooves, all of which found their way onto the next Waterboys album.

  I returned to another rarefied establishment, the witchcraft shop I’d visited in 1985, to buy a new Black Book to put my songs in. During my travels in the West of Ireland I’d written on anything I could scratch a pen on, a method which had suited that free-flowing adventure. Now I wanted to feel again the sense of my writing flowing in one focussed stream of energy, and gathering it in a Black Book was the way to foster this.

  And there was another revival: auditions. Envisioning a new Waterboys that would tour and play for the next ten years, I rented a Midtown rehearsal room and welcomed a stream of bass, drum and keyboard hopefuls and even, for the first time, a couple of lead guitarists. As always the process doubled as a way to try out songs, and I used new numbers like ‘Preparing To Fly’ and ‘The Return Of Jimi Hendrix’ as musical workouts. But while some good jams were had, none of the musicians felt like Waterboys to me, and after a couple of months I decided to look beyond New York.

  Dick Lackaday had a friend in Chicago called Jim Powers who offered to show me round the city’s blues clubs so I could check out the players, and in late October I flew out to meet him. Jim was a handsome young white guy with a big heart and an ultra-positive business-like manner as if he’d just attended a motivation seminar. We spent a weekend taking in the clubs together and though I didn’t find any new band members the experience was fantastic. At Kingston Mines we watched the harmonica devil Sugar Blue make his entrance from the back of the hall, blowing blues hunched over his harp like a shadowy spirit of the night as he bobbed and ducked through the crowd to the stage. Across the road in B.L.U.E.S we soaked up the workingman’s grooves of Magic Slim, a great avuncular bruiser of a man rendered a foot taller by the massive Stetson that balanced like a lampshade on his rock-like head. And in a stone-floored cave the size of a tuck shop we breathed the energy of the voice-crackling banshee Junior Wells.

  Late on the Saturday night we were sitting in a club on the Southside called the Checkerboard Lounge, when I mentioned to Jim that I loved gospel music and had always wanted to see a real gospel church service with a choir. ‘I’ve always wanted to do that too!’ he replied. He called over the barmaid, a middle-aged black lady, and asked if she could suggest a church we might visit in the morning. ‘Y’all oughta come ’long to mine,’ she said and promptly wrote the address on a piece of paper: The Paradise Baptist Church, 1163 East Forty-Third Street.

  Next morning, smartly dressed, we set off in Jim’s car. Forty-Third Street was an endless straight road through the most forsaken urban landscape I’d ever seen. Louis Armstrong had lived there in the twenties when the place was hopping, but it wasn’t hopping now. We drove past block after block of burned-out lots, overgrown waste ground and functional grey buildings until at the very end of the road, where Forty-Third Street fizzled out at a railway line, there was a low, flat-roofed hall.

  Even as we got out of the car I heard the music; a women’s choir rising like balm over the doomed streets. We went through the entrance door into a dark hallway where a black lady in a Sunday hat greeted us as if she knew we were coming. Jim and I had decided we’d sit in the back row, so that if the service got too emotional for our white-boy sensibilities we could slip quietly away. But the lady in the hat ushered us into the church in full view of the congregation and showed us instead to two empty seats in the centre of the second row, next to which sat our barmaid from the night before, radiant in her best clothes. She glanced up at us discreetly and nodded. I looked around.

  Along every pew sat black people, dignified in their hats and smart coats. We were the only white faces. In the centre of the floor, facing the congregation, stood a youngish man wearing a suit, Bible in his hands and tears streaming down his cheeks as he cried, ‘Thank you Jesus for gittin’ my children safe to school every day. Thank you Jesus for gittin’ my kids through school safe every day. Thank you Jesus for bringin’ my kids back home to me safe every day.’ Members of the congregation encouraged him with interjections of, ‘That’s right’ or ‘Hallelujah’. On a raised podium behind the young man two rows of women in immaculate pale blue robes were laying down a sympathetic moaning chant. On the floor to the right was a teenager playing an organ, and on the far left were a young drummer and bass player waiting for their cue. Then a tall, distinguished man in robes swept in from a side room and took his place behind a lectern. He welcomed us all, ‘including guests’, and then simply threw back his head and sang:

  ‘Jeee-eee-suu-uh-ussss is myyy guiii-iii-iii-iiide!’

  What a voice! It soared through the air of the church, glad and rich, the long warm syllables rolling across the room like an unfurled banner. He sounded like Marvin Gaye’s brother or the honey-toned son of Sam Cooke and clearly, unquestionably, if he hadn’t chosen the ministry could have been a great soul singer. And then he began his sermon.

  I don’t remember a word the pastor said, but I’ll never forget what happened. He spoke in a humble yet powerful voice and warmed to his theme gradually, using repetition and rhythm to build emotional intensity the way black preachers do, and every time he said something that moved them, which was every few seconds, the members of the congregation responded with, ‘Ain’t that the truth!’ or ‘Ain’t God a good God!’ About ten minutes in, the three musicians began to punctuate the pastor’s words with short soulful riffs, and sudden drum flourishes or cymbal crashes like exclamation marks. Then the choir started interjecting Hallelujahs as the clamour of sung and spoken responses grew. For thirty minutes the pastor threw forth his voice and the church responded, and all the time the sermon gathered power and intensity until it filled the room with a sense of raw, unpredictable emotion, of something urgent about to happen: exactly the kind of ‘hot’ event Jim and I had been worried about.

  Suddenly the atmosphere changed and the pressure crackled like the moment before a storm breaks. I looked at the pastor and it was as if an invisible hand took him by the scruff of the neck and lifted him in t
he air. He started bouncing haphazardly up and down, alarmingly out of control, shouting ‘whooo … whooo … whooo’ in a wild ecstasy, arms waving and gown flapping like great black wings. Several men moved towards him and took his arms, holding him close enough that he wouldn’t fall but lightly enough to allow his rapture to continue. The congregation was electrified: people were on their feet in the pews, shouting, dancing, some ‘falling out’ like the pastor and being held by those next to them. For a long wild moment – a minute that felt like an hour – the preacher rocked, eyes rolling, in the grip of something bigger than himself, and it was as if an energy descended through him and bathed the church and everyone in it with power. I could feel it affecting me, making my chest hot, raising goose bumps on my neck and arms, drawing from me a response of profound but inarticulate emotion that made me want to cry, jump, hide and fall on my knees all at the same time.

  Then gently the power changed and the climax subsided like a musical note falling in pitch. The pastor gradually came back to himself, the men let him go, and the music dropped to a soulful slow groove like an afterglow, the women of the choir waving their arms and singing long, deep Hallelujahs like I’ve heard they used to sing on the banks of Southern rivers. His face glowing, the pastor smoothed the sleeves of his robe and said: ‘Praise the Lord! It doesn’t happen every week, but it happened today!’

  When Jim and I tumbled out into the Chicago daylight and got back in the car we were dazed and thrilled. Christianity wasn’t for me but Spirit was Spirit, by whatever name, and we’d just met It. I flew back to New York without any new Waterboys, but with a deeper sense of inner wellbeing than I’d felt in a long time.