Adventures of a Waterboy (11 page)

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 beginning 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.

After that we jammed for several hours and tried unsuccessfully to get magic to flow. Clearly I needed some fresh inspiration and on the morning of day two I found it. Before the session I took a stroll through the Berkeley streets and noticed a dog-eared book in a junk shop window. It was titled
Folk Song Jamboree
and according to the cover contained ‘songs from many lands’. I bought it and started flicking through it as I walked to the studio. On page fifty-seven was a song called ‘When Will We Be Married’, apparently from South Africa. I couldn’t read the music but I liked the words. I took the title and a couple of lines, added some more of my own and by the time I got to Fantasy I’d fashioned it into a lyric. As chance would have it, Steve was in best Fellow-who-Fiddles mode that morning, cheerfully skirling out rustic jigs and reels as we warmed up. I tried singing my new concoction over one of these and to my delight it fitted. Prairie Prince joined in with some Scottish-style military drumming, and suddenly we’d made something special.

But it was an oasis in a musical desert. The rest of day two, and all of days three and four, were spent in vain pursuit of alchemy. I tried some new songs but they were unfinished, and the extra lyrics they needed didn’t flow into my imagination on the spot like they usually did. I tried plucking favourite oldies out of the air like Bob Dylan’s country waltz, ‘Wallflower’, and the old Irish ballad, ‘When I First Said I Loved Only You Maggie’, but nothing caught fire. We replaced Prairie and Ross with another couple of guys but were still becalmed.

Meanwhile the studio had calcified into two sharply delineated territories: the control room was Bob’s domain and I hardly ever went in there (and took a deep breath for courage before I did), while the live room was the band’s domain, which Bob rarely entered. The two camps existed almost independent of each other, a wall of glass and a thousand miles separating us. We played with no direction from Bob and he worked on the sound and recorded the music with no involvement from us. On the rare occasions Bob approached me in the studio I could feel a raw aggressive energy radiating from him, which I interpreted as frustration directed at me. And I began to object to it. Though nothing was said, I started to feel he was blaming me for the sessions not taking off. It was no one’s fault. The situation was beyond our control because our different worlds were too far apart. A band from the eighties couldn’t merge with a producer from the sixties anymore than oil would mix with water. The Waterboys needed the kind of pro-active production guidance – input on arrangements, song selection and performance – that Bob didn’t or couldn’t give, while he needed from us the discipline and maturity a band achieves only after years of playing live together in studios. Our shared musical endeavour had been doomed before we’d recorded a note, and the dream of making something great together was a delicious unattainable mirage.

To confound things further, none of us was thinking or feeling clearly, for Bob had brought the dreaded ‘buds’ with him and the reefers were passing round till the air turned purple. What’s more, the tapes were rolling non-stop, capturing every blip and doodle we made, the worthy and the worthless, with no quality control whatsoever. By the end of day four we’d gone through a cool
fifty
fourteen-inch master reels and counting, with nary a releasable musical moment to show for it. That night Bob suggested we try yet another rhythm section. He recommended a young bassist called John Patitucci, who we liked the sound of, and the veteran drummer Jim Keltner. I knew Keltner’s name from many of my most beloved records including John Lennon’s
Imagine
and George Harrison’s
Concert For Bangladesh
, but I fancied working with someone our own age and said so. Bob looked at me like I’d grown horns and put the argument to bed, saying simply: ‘Jim Keltner is a motherfucker drummer.’

And he was. Next morning, day five, we reconvened with our new guests. Patitucci was nineteen, fresh as a lamb, golly-gosh happy, and played like a funky angel. Keltner was cool, dressed in dark blue jeans and denim shirt, black waistcoat, frontiersman’s beard and impenetrable shades, which he never took off. He had that slow-talking, word-weighing American style familiar from Clint Eastwood movies and I loved him instantly, recognising my resistance from the night before as the absurdity it was. And when Jim started playing, a different wavelength of musical reality opened up. His grooves, his drum fills, his timing, his sound and his radar – the ability to intuitively discern the direction of the music as we played – were from another universe. Patitucci, addressing him as ‘Uncle Jim’, slotted in sweetly on bass. Suddenly we were on the move.

Except for one thing. My songs were still uncooked and I was exhausted after four days of diminishing returns, frazzled by the vibes with Bob and spaced out by the prodigious reefer intake. And a strange thing: I felt so in awe of Keltner’s greatness that though I could still play my ass off I could hardly sing. I felt unworthy. But the show had to go on, and so we tried two half-written new numbers, ‘Blues For Your Baby’ and ‘Lonesome Old Wind’. These were good ones and we played them for hours, turning them inside, upside, backwards, forwards, extending them into twenty, thirty-minute improvisations, exploring every nuance and possibility in the music. Keltner powered us like a musical buffalo god, his shoulders heaving in the drum booth, sticks blurred, drum-skins and cymbals reflected in his shades, maracas and shakers bound to his arms and legs with gaffer tape, creating a choogling sonic aura around his beat.

When Keltner played a crack opened and the soul of America shone through. All the wild untamed land that once was the American continent was invoked in his crashing, rumbling, unstoppable groove: prairies, cattle drives, mile-wide rivers, the spirits of great Indians, buttes and canyons, rattlesnakes, badlands and the heavy boom of distant thunder. His drumming expressed a sense of space, sacredness and power as great as the great land itself. Patitucci’s warm, human bass playing, full of the nuances of jazz and pop, ensouled this sonic landscape with the beating heart’s pulse of steamboats and gamblers, street processions and Mardi Gras, the chorus lines of Broadway musicals, flappers, gospel-hollerers and churches in the wildwood. And though at the end of the fifth day we had captured nothing that came close to a record radio-friendly rock single, nothing that harmonised with the sounds or styles of the time, and nothing sufficiently structured to put on a record, nevertheless The Fellow Who Fiddles, the Human Saxophone and I had had the most profound musical experience of our lives.

On the final day, like a defeated army charging into a valley for one last vainglorious hurrah, we played almost non-stop for nine hours. I pulled out every new composition I had floating around my head and a slew of classic country and gospel songs. We fused with Keltner and Patitucci and expanded the music to awesome proportions, reconfiguring songs on Olympian scales. We played a forty minute blow-out of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, a half-hour improv on the spiritual ‘Soon As I Get Home’, and mighty moss-gathering tumbleweed journeys through Hank Williams’s ‘Honky Tonkin’’, The Carter Family’s ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’ and Blind Roger Hay’s ‘I’m On My Way To Heaven’. We reinvented classic American roots music that day and recast it as a single sacred flowing river of power.

After one extended workout I asked Keltner, ‘what’s the longest you’ve ever played non-stop?’ ‘Uh, well, Michael,’ came the answer, ‘I think it might be the one we just played.’ And when the last chord of the last song died away there came the sweetest of all moments when Jim stepped out from behind his drums and walked quietly to the piano. ‘You guys,’ he said slowly, with unimpeachable coolness, ‘are serious groovers.’ Yet still,
nothing we could put on a record
. I knew it, Bob knew it, Steve and Anto knew it. No one asked them, but I’m sure Keltner and Patitucci knew it. We’d gone on a mighty journey but brought back nothing we could show to the world.

For our last night in California I moved back into my old room at Bob’s, our relationship restored to cordiality now the pressure of recording was off, and in the morning he drove us to San Francisco airport. We all knew the experience was over, that there would be no more, but neither Bob nor we had the heart to say it. I promised him I’d listen through to the music when I got home, with a view to selecting stuff for our album, but it was a hollow promise. I would listen, yes, but as soon as I could, I’d move on and finish the record in Dublin without Bob. At the airport Bob helped us lift our bags from the car. We piled them onto a couple of trolleys, each of us gave him a hug, then we headed down the concrete tunnel into the airport. We turned halfway and waved back to him and Bob called out, ‘Thank you for your music!’, his Texan voice echoing after us down the tunnel and down the years.