Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  Chapter 14: Lockdown In The Big Apple

  I stand on a cliff above the Hudson River, legs slightly apart, holding a gold Telecaster chest-high, awaiting orders. Several goats are nuzzling my legs and making plaintive little bleating sounds. They smell funky. A spring breeze ruffles my shirt and dashes strands of hair across my face. A boat chugs by on the river below, a round-Manhattan day-tripper, the amplified tour guide’s voice echoing tinnily across the landscape. A hubbub of conversation emanates from behind me. Some of the voices are casual and conversational, but two or three are super-intense, not at all happy, fixated on some urgent process close to action point.

  Suddenly what I’ve been waiting for – dreading, even – comes from behind and to my left. ‘NOW! DO IT NOW!’ Jeff screams. His voice is manic, like an unhinged sergeant major or a startled lunatic. A man, from the sound of it, at the end of his tether. In response I slowly raise the gold guitar above my head, hoping to my timing is right, and angling the guitar, as best I can without looking, so its surface will catch the sun’s rays and create an aureole of light.

  Suddenly Jeff barks: ‘THE GOATS! PUSH THE GOATS CLOSER TO HIS LEGS!’ I hear scrambling sounds mingled with bleating. Then a short blissful calm before he redirects his attentions at me with the inevitable frantic repeat of, ‘NOW! DO IT NOW!’ Doesn’t he know I can hear him? I raise the guitar again, hold it in place above my head, and see another boat passing on the river below. I’d like to be on that boat, I muse, arms aching, Please let there be only a few more seconds of this. And if only he’d stop screaming at me.

  I drop my arms and dare to sneak a glance behind. There’s Jeff crouching in a ditch, baseball-capped and sweat-soaked, like a homicidal mole dramatically focussed on a tiny metal box in front of him, his video monitor. He raises his arm to alert the crew. Showtime again. I face forward, brace for the onslaught and remind myself it’s all in the name of rock’n’roll.

  Not finding Waterboys was becoming a hallmark of my sojourn in America, and as time came to make a record and the first highs of being in New York wore off I began to notice a new feeling: I was musically lonesome. I loved the city and its twenty-four hour parade of human life, but I missed the old world and above all the company of musicians who inhabited the same imaginal space as me. The players I met in New York had no idea what I’d experienced in Ireland and I didn’t know how to convey it to them. And as a conspirator Dick Lackaday was no substitute for Dunford or Wickham. Anto, on sabbatical fronting his own band round the London clubs, knew and understood, but he wasn’t here. And in his absence a shocking thing had happened: running my new songs on the tape loop of my mind I didn’t hear the Human Saxophone at all. There was no place in the music for my oldest colleague.

  Anto had played many roles in the band – soloist, sideman, foil, partner, wildcard – and our telepathic radar was so sharp I knew what he was going to play before he played it. But that was the problem: Anto and I had exhausted every combination I could imagine and however much his presence would have eased what was beginning to feel like exile, the music said no. After wrestling with this conclusion for several months I returned to Dublin at Christmas 1991 and told him it was over. He didn’t believe me, just kept looking at me as if I’d grown an extra head. But once he realised I meant it, he was shocked. And when he didn’t turn up to a meeting that evening I figured he needed time to adjust. It would be years before we spoke or played together again.

  I flew back to New York and dived straight into making the new Waterboys album, already titled Dream Harder. I’d been postponing the sessions while I looked for musicians, but with Zutaut and Dick Lackaday breathing down my neck, and dates booked round the availability of co-producer Bill Price, I couldn’t put it off any longer. In the nick of time I found a girl drummer, Carla Azar, and a New York bassist called Charley Drayton, and we gathered for rehearsals with Bill.

  Bill Price was a veteran English recording engineer who’d been around for years. I’d bought singles he’d made in the sixties, like Marmalade’s Reflections ‘Of My Life’, a hazy pop hit that sounded to my ten-year-old ears like tears alchemised into music, and he’d mixed all the best punk classics, crunching blasts of energy such as the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen and The Clash’s London Calling. Thirty years of rock had been processed through the discerning filter of Bill’s ears, and by late 1991 he was enjoying a run of autumnal success having mixed Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II for Tom Zutaut. Whatever I thought about G N’ R’s neanderthal efforts, the albums sat like a pair of fat crows on top of the American album charts crapping on all competitors, fabulously mixed in Bill’s ballsy yet luminous trademark sound. And when Zutaut introduced us in a swanky hotel overlooking Central Park I liked Bill straight away. The mark of the wizard was in his face and he had piercing dark eyes, wore pressed jeans and a hooped rugby shirt (I forgave him these) and walked with a soft padding lope as if perpetually tiptoeing round dangerous or volatile people, which for much of his career in music he probably had been. He was no fool either. When Charley Drayton started arriving late for rehearsals and neglecting to learn the songs, Bill fired him without a qualm.

  Charley made one brilliant musical suggestion before he was axed: a key change in the intro of ‘Glastonbury Song’. And the dude who replaced him was no less creative. Scott Thunes was Frank Zappa’s bassist, a bug-eyed, pony-tailed West Coast genius, suggested by Bill, who invented killer hooks, learned songs in a nanosecond and did the New York Times crossword between takes. Drummer Carla was a sassy tomboy from Alabama via L.A. who spent most of her time on the phone dissing her previous employers, Wendy & Lisa. When Bill coaxed her from the hospitality lounge to sit behind her low-slung kit she played lopsided, jittery grooves punctuated by fabulous drum fills that sounded like sudden bursts of machine gun fire. The music the three of us made together was a kind of faux rock’n’roll, not exactly powerful (Carla wasn’t that kind of drummer) and nothing like what I’d had in mind when I wrote the songs. But it had a quirkiness I liked and, with the clock ticking, for the first time in my life I sacrificed the sound in my head.

  The work progressed swiftly enough, but there was a difficulty with one musician. Scott and Carla had a bickering, juvenile attitude to each other and spent all day squabbling comically like brother and sister. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, they gelled musically. The band member I had a problem with was myself. I couldn’t find my demon inside, the iron musical will that had propelled me through the eighties. Maybe the act of giving up my musical vision in the haste to start recording had self-sabotaged me, or my confidence was shot because I was following-up an unsuccessful album. Or maybe the act of co-producing, deferring to other people’s opinions instead of taking sole responsibility for the record, blunted my edges. Whatever, I wasn’t on fire. I wasn’t even smouldering. Nor could the presence of this era’s Black Book, laid open like a talisman on the mixing desk with all its hieroglyphic notes and instructions, rouse my musical demon. It was proof that money isn’t everything. I had a $2.8 million record deal and studio time in the poshest recording parlours of Manhattan, but no mojo.

  And though I dug Bill and savoured his wizardry, our imaginations didn’t crackle on the same wavelength. A groove that sounded stiff to me sounded fine to Bill. Or he’d say I could sing a song better when I felt I’d already nailed it. We worked to accommodate each other but a shared understanding didn’t develop. Zutaut and Dick Lackaday were happy with the work, so I relied on their opinions and by May the album was complete, but when I played it at home the music sounded too generic, with not enough Waterboys spirit. Stung, I shook some semblance of my old willpower into action and spent half the summer hunkered down in Electric Lady, Jimi Hendrix’s funky old studio in Greenwich Village, overdubbing new parts, re-doing vocals and bringing the record closer in line with my own taste.

  In the autumn of ’92 the amended work was mixed by a young L.A. producer called Brendan O’Brien. I liked the results: fashi
onably dry, with no reverb, and a tight modern edge. But Zutaut didn’t dig it and insisted Bill Price remix the tapes again in his more traditional rock sound. I wasn’t sure enough of my opinion to fight the corner and Tom got his way, finishing the album himself with Bill in early 1993. When Dream Harder came out that May it debuted high in the British charts, getting sufficiently good reviews to restore some of The Waterboys’ critical status. But I knew the record had captured me at half power and was leagues short of the restatement of purpose I’d hoped for. I would put this right by doing a killer concert tour.

  I needed a properly powerful band, and Carla and Scott, for all their charms, weren’t the players I needed. So I held further auditions in New York, a grand parade of hot session drummers and beetle-browed keyboard players so hip that Dick Lackaday’s hands shook when he whispered their names. But no combination of these players made a band. The closest I got was a trio of guys I played with on a musician-seeking trip to Texas: Bukka, Joey and Brad. After a monumental jam in an Austin practice room I brought them to New York where we were joined by a brilliant lead guitarist called Chris Bruce. But the music still wasn’t right: our styles were too different and didn’t add up to a coherent musical identity. Nothing I put together had the flavour that said Waterboys. I was beginning to feel like I was banging on a closed door, and as the prospect of a tour evaporated it seemed clear I needed to try something different, like ditch the Waterboys name or leave America. But first I had to make videos to promote the album.

  I considered video a bastard mongrel medium that shouldn’t even exist, for it violated the prime directive of song writing: thou shalt cause images to arise in the listener’s imagination. There were as many interpretations of a song as there were minds and hearts that heard it, and video crapped all over this subtle miracle, branding the same set of images onto the brain of every punter. That the images in videos were often shallow and moronic fuelled my conviction, and as soon as I had sufficient authority over my own career I stopped doing them. By 1993 I hadn’t made a video for eight years.

  This had cost The Waterboys in sales, as record company staff always liked to remind me. I knew our late eighties singles like ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ would have been bigger hits if they’d been promoted with videos, and by the nineties I was questioning my attitude. Might it be worth sacrificing the listener’s imaginal relationship with the singles in order to make an album a hit and have its ten other tracks reach more people? But what if the spread of video was neutering the power of song, diminishing its capacity to move people? Perhaps the times had changed and swimming against the tide wasn’t doing me or anybody else any good. It was written into my Geffen contract that I didn’t have to make videos, but uncertain of my rightness I decided to join the parade and give it a try.

  First I needed help learning how to project to camera and not get put off by film crews so I went to an acting teacher, a theatre director called Stephen Jobes. Stephen was the first person I’d met in New York who’d have looked at home in Spiddal; he had Pan eyes and a bushy white beard, and when he looked at me I could feel him looking into my soul. At our first session he taught me to keep my focus and close out distractions by imagining the rest of the world held at bay behind an invisible boundary that I controlled. The second week he had two young actors crouch close to me and make faces while I sang ‘The Return Of Pan’ with my guitar and ignored them. The third week six actors ran in and out of rooms. The fourth week they started fighting. The fifth week a tall hostile man stood above me and insulted my song while a pretty woman sat at my knees and spoke words of seduction. Through it all I kept playing and singing, shutting them all out, an education which, quite apart from its application on video sets, taught me a lot about maintaining focus on stage.

  Meanwhile Geffen had video directors drawing up plots, called ‘treatments’, for the videos. To my dismay these were mostly filled with clichés and misinterpretations of the songs. Or they missed the point completely: one noted video auteur submitted a script for ‘The Return Of Pan’ that included an orgy on top of a Mexican pyramid, melting faces and an ‘atmosphere of black magic’. The lurid description climaxed, like Apocalypse Now, with the words, ‘The horror! The horror!’

  I turned them all down, which made me unpopular at Geffen, where artists were expected to be ‘reasonable’. And because no one shared my view that video was a debased medium, or agreed with me that the treatments were rubbish – and let’s be frank, all my handlers really wanted was a glossy three-minute ad to fit MTV’s programming style – the focus of the search became ‘finding someone that difficult Mike can work with.’ I knew this was how the Geffen video department felt because they started suggesting random maverick directors they thought I might take to.

  One of these was a cackling misanthrope called Jeff Stein to whom I was introduced in a Sixth Avenue coffee shop. Because Jeff was wearing a t-shirt with the same psychedelic design as a magnet on the fridge in my kitchen I decided to take a chance on him. I was determined to ensure the video conformed to my sense of the song and that it shouldn’t contain an irrelevant storyline, so I tried to control the choice of ideas. I showed Jeff a photo from the Dream Harder sleeve in which I sat on an amp playing a gold guitar and insisted we recreate it on film with me performing sitting down. Jeff, gleefully and with a touch of sadism, indulged this foolish request, which of course resulted in a passive performance. When I suggested we have some goats in the video Jeff obligingly shipped in a truckload of the little blighters from a farm. But while I’d imagined the goats looking wild and Pan-like, on film they were goofy, like wacky pets at a children’s zoo. The grand finale was a trip to the New Jersey Palisades, a line of gaunt cliffs across the river from Manhattan. There we filmed a clip of me standing knee-deep in goats, raising the gold guitar over my head to catch the sun’s rays as the camera tracked back to reveal the city skyline. Inevitably the goats broke free and ran amok over the cliffs. A luckless camera assistant broke his leg trying to catch them and had to be airlifted out by helicopter.

  When I saw the final edited film I realised the folly of controlling the content myself; though the video was well shot by Jeff it was stiff and kooky, a thousand miles from the intent of the song. Chastened by this experience I veered the other way for the second single, resolving to let whichever director got the job do whatever he wanted. Surely it couldn’t turn out any worse! So tapes of ‘Glastonbury Song’ were sent to a dozen top video-makers in America and Britain, and soon the treatments were jumping out of the fax machine.

  Most were the same old procession of clichés and I didn’t feel good about offering myself up as a sacrifice for any of them. In desperation the Geffen video staff sent me boxes of directors’ showreels to look through and I dutifully knuckled down to the mind-numbing homework of watching hundreds of rock videos. The horror! The horror! But among them was one I admired. Peter Gabriel’s ‘Digging In The Dirt’ was directed by a wildlife video-maker called John Downer, and Gabriel was brilliant and persuasive in it. His lyric, about scrutinising his pain to learn how to heal it, was well served by the visual imagery. So I told a relieved Dick Lackaday, who told a relieved Geffen Records, that I’d do a video with John Downer. The treatment when it arrived was, alas, yet another set of clichés – time-lapse photography of clouds speeding across the sky, freeze-frame drops of water exploding – mixed with Downer’s wildlife microfilming techniques and a smattering of misinterpretations of the ‘Glastonbury Song’ lyric. But I’d said I’d do it and, hoping that because the Gabriel video had been so good somehow this one would be too, I flew to Britain.

  The first scene was shot in a field in the West Country. As a smoke machine pumped out billows of mist I was filmed lying on a fallen megalith in the midst of a stone circle. I wasn’t just watching a clichéd rock video now; I was in it! And I wasn’t Peter Gabriel. Without a musical performance to focus on, my attempts to be natural on camera were awkward. Realising I was ill at ease, John decided to closely
direct my every movement.

  Over the years so many rock videos have been made starring musicians who aren’t actors that directors have developed ways of working around them with the minimum disruption to egos, filming schedules and budgets. An emphasis falls on scenery and context, rather than the individual’s performance, ‘acting’ shots are filmed in a minimum of takes, and a tacit understanding spreads among the crew that, like a ship obliged to carry a landlubber on a voyage, we have a dud amongst us. I was now experiencing this and felt tightly controlled, a prisoner in my own promo: a kind of animated, patronised prop. I was filmed climbing up and down Glastonbury Tor, running across fields, being hosed with water and lying in a pool of dry ice smoke, the film of which, John explained, would be turned upside down so it would look as if I was flying through the clouds. ‘It’ll be brilliant,’ he assured me.

  With the video filmed, but not yet seen, I returned to New York and on my first day back encountered an unexpected figure from the past. Karl Wallinger was in town with his group World Party, opening a show for one of Dick Lackaday’s other artists. I’d forgiven Karl for slagging me off in the press a few years earlier, and was interested to see him play live. It was an evening concert in Central Park. Irene and I were sitting in guest seats, awaiting the start of the show, when a woman stepped out from the wings onto the stage. She had red hair, wore a black dress and carried something metallic. And she was looking roughly in our direction. I watched her crouch on the lip of the stage and slowly, deliberately point what appeared to be a video camera right at me, as if she knew who I was and where I’d be. Suddenly I realised who it was. Kate Lovecraft was filming us!

  She continued for a few seconds then abruptly stood up and went backstage, and almost immediately Karl and his band came on and struck up their first number. They sounded good but I couldn’t focus on the show. I was totally unnerved by Kate’s little performance, and I felt violated too. I’d lived in New York for two years without running into Kate and I’d almost but not quite forgotten about her. She clearly hadn’t forgotten about me. What I’d just witnessed was almost an exact replay of when she came to the South of France, sat in a conspicuous position for the whole Waterboys show, then came backstage to bogusly tell me she was dying of tuberculosis.