Adventures of a Waterboy (22 page)

‘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 the 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.

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: fashionably 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.