Adventures of a Waterboy (3 page)

We had a jostling friendship with a cabaret guitarist called Brian Noble who we used to accuse of selling out because he played the squeaky-clean Eagles-type rock popular at weddings and dances. Perhaps to teach us a lesson he got us a booking at a venue in a small town called Maybole, and ever eager for a gig we took the bait. We arrived early on a Saturday evening to find the place, the Three Steps Club, not much more than a shebeen clinging to a cliff overlooking a piece of waste ground at the arse-end of town. It turned out to be an Orange Lodge, whatever that was, and it looked grim and functional, some kind of private working men’s club. ‘Set up in the corner, boys,’ said a man, pointing to a low triangular platform. Several club members were milling around and they looked hard, with dour, frozen features as if their faces had been chiselled from the cliff outside. We began to realise our cabaret guitarist friend had booked us here to take a rise out of us, but there was no way out.

Three hours later, as the last chord of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ echoed uneasily through the smoke-filled air, I was instructed by the wheezy young local to play the national anthem. I was shaping up to say ‘no way’ when another native stepped up and addressed not me, but Ronnie, who hadn’t sung a note all night, with the words, ‘You’re a good singer, son, sing the national anthem while Walter here accompanies you on the moothie.’ And there on cue was Walter, a wee man I hadn’t noticed before, pulling a little silver harmonica out of his jacket pocket.

Some beneficent angel must have been watching over us and prevented the Orange Lodgers from trying to make me sing the national anthem. Or perhaps the ‘angel’ was the native himself, recognising that a confrontation was brewing and tactfully moving to head it off. Whatever, Ronnie, wiser and less the firebrand than myself, duly sang ‘God Save The Queen’ (
mumbled
would be more accurate) while Walter backed him doggedly on the moothie and everyone in the place stood up. Except for our roadie Rab and me. The two of us remained seated throughout due to ideological objections, somehow managing to do so without a fight breaking out: another miracle. On the drive home I asked the others what an Orange Lodge was. Our Catholic bass player Jim told me.

Chapter 3: Where’s That Scottish Boy?

At ten o’clock on a Sunday morning I sit alone in an elegant hotel dining room in west London. Antique mirrors in gilt frames hang on white walls, sunlight floods through a bay window and mellow soul music drifts lazily from the bar. I’m nineteen years old and four hours ago I stepped off the overnight train from Scotland. My breakfast, long finished, has been cleared away and I’m reading a book,
The Last Battle
by C.S. Lewis. I’ve read it several times before, but I have it with me because it’s good to have an old friend around on an adventure into the unknown.

Suddenly a small, fragile voice calls my name. Twice. A white-cold wave of anticipation rushes through me. I rise from my seat and walk towards the voice, through an arched doorway, to the foot of the stairs. I look up and there, sitting on the top couple of steps in a white nightdress, is my New York rock’n’roll heroine Patti Smith. Her face is thin, her black hair a magnificent crow’s nest, her arms spindly, all elbows and long fingers. I’ve admired her, listened to her recordings, read her words and thought about her for two years; have come to London solely because of her, tracking her to this hotel, but I’ve never met or seen her in the flesh before. So the vision before me, this sudden private glimpse behind the gloss of fame, is super-real, blowing the gates of my young perception wide open, confounding all expectations.

Questions clamour in my mind: Have I disturbed her? Is it always so easy to meet her or am I special and favoured above all fans? Why this degree of magic? How will I get my friends to believe me? Will I be worthy of this? And rumbling under them all: What does she think of me and who will I find myself to be in this new situation?

I climb the steps and take her outstretched hand. It’s warm. She speaks to me in a kind of child-like half-asleep way, affectionate, with an older sister’s concern, and I feel inadequate, curling at the edges, transparent. She’s become a real living person, no longer my idea of Patti Smith-ness, and, paradoxically, under the penetration of her eyes, I’ve become a diminished shrunken idea of myself, an imposter, no longer real.

She says, ‘I’m not getting up for ya ’cos I’ve gotta sleep, but I’ve booked you a room.’ I thank her and she uncurls herself, stands to her full height, towering above me like a giantess on her higher step of the stairs, then disappears through a door to the hotel lobby.

I return to the basement lounge and pick up my half-read book. The sun is flooding through the window just as before, and the soul music plays softly. The world is still turning. I catch sight of my face in one of the mirrors. I’m becoming real again. I’m breathing.

I first read about Patti Smith and her band in the British music press in early 1976. Word had it they played ‘intellectual garage rock’, a phrase suggesting a mix of instinct, intelligence and primal energy, exactly what I wanted to hear in those becalmed days before punk re-lit the touch-paper and made rock’n’roll revolutionary again. I had a pen pal in Wales who imported bootleg records from America and when his latest list included a Patti album called
Teenage Perversity & Ships In The Night
, I ordered it, sight unseen and sound unheard.

With perfect timing it arrived in the mail the week I left school for the last time, at that golden shimmering moment when the world was wide open and everything was possible. It was a twelve-inch record in a plain white cover, shrink-wrapped, with reddish-brown photocopied insert bearing a picture of a crow-like, spark-eyed woman, and a set of unlikely song titles. These were unusual, charismatic, infinitely
other
: ‘The Smooth Stone Beyond’, ‘Radio Ethiopia’, ‘Strained On Strange’, ‘Redondo Beach’. What weird new culture was I about to enter?

It turned out to be a live recording, tinny and thin but full of energy. First I loved Patti’s scrawny voice, a threadbare raven full of defiance and spunk. Then her words were like the clamourings of an urchin visionary who, against all odds, has found the key to the universe. And thirdly her band; raw and fast, with rough guitars and hammering piano bouncing off tumultuous, explosive drums. There was no virtuoso show-off playing and the music was coloured with improvisation and a spirited sense of rebellion. It was the first punk record I ever heard, and the best.

A few days later I bought her official album
Horses
, which was brimful of the same scratchy, ecstatic energy. I started collecting everything of Patti’s I could find and soon my attention alighted on her poetry books; slim, arty volumes available by mail order from esoteric-sounding bookshops in London and New York. That Patti was a proper published poet gave her an intellectual cachet that set her apart from other singers; imagining her poems, before I saw them, to be bulletins from a transcendent consciousness, I figured she must have access to worlds and phenomena normal people couldn’t see. This impression was dented when I read the poems. They were by turns crude, druggy, obscure or dream-like, occasionally shot through with brilliance, and always deliciously pretentious. But pretentious or not, I took it all as holy writ because I was smitten. And anyway I was pretentious myself. Being a fan of the exotic Patti Smith Group – an initiate of their Mysteries, no less – put me several leagues closer to cool than any of my friends, and at seventeen that was just about the most important thing for a young man to attend to.

For the next two years I devoured Patti’s work, played her songs with my band and raved about her in my home-made fan magazine,
Jungleland
, a photocopied medley of articles by me and mates illuminated by stolen photos chopped out of the music papers. As editor I adopted the ridiculous pen name of Velvet Lanier, after The Velvet Underground and Patti’s boyfriend, Blue Öyster Cult keyboard player Allen Lanier.

In March 1978 Patti released her third album,
Easter
. It included the song she became best known for, ‘Because The Night’, but it was the title track that did weird things to my soul; a surreal lyric poem with a palpably sacred atmosphere, set to a processional rhythm with tolling, hazy bells and a vocal performance pitched between a child’s wonder and a high priestess’s invocation. At the song’s gorgeous denouement the inspired addition of distant bagpipes pierced my heart like a rose thorn.

To coincide with
Easter
’s release Patti was due to play two concerts at the Rainbow Theatre in London, part of a European tour. I was in Scotland with no tickets, but I’d read that Patti always stayed at the Portobello Hotel when she was in London. I knew this joint, a discreet bohemian bolthole favoured by artists and musicians in a terrace of stucco-fronted houses close to the Portobello Road; I’d visited it once, trying to meet and interview ex-Velvet Underground member John Cale. So I took a chance. I phoned the hotel on the afternoon of Patti’s first show and in my most confident voice asked to speak to her. To my amazement they put me through to her room without question. The phone rang twice, then a female American voice came on the line.

‘Hello, this is Patti?’ She said this with a kind of rising question mark at the end, subtly requesting the caller to identify himself.

‘Hi, my name’s Mike Scott. I sent some fanzines, called
Jungleland
, to your fan club address. Did you get them OK?’

‘ Yeah …’ This was clearly untrue as I could tell she had no idea what I was talking about, but it was said, kindly, to spare my tender fan’s feelings. ‘Where are you calling from?’

‘Scotland.’

‘Scotland? How far is that?’

‘400 miles.’ A decent distance in Britain, but nothing to an American.

‘Wow ... what a long way! You gotta come to the show so you can tell the kids all about it up there.’

‘You mean come to London?’

‘Yeah, come to London and write about the show.’

This encouragement, casually given, acted on me like a wonder drug. My heroine had summoned me and I was going! And though Patti perhaps didn’t quite count on me turning up at her hotel and laying myself on her mercy, I got the overnight train that night and presented myself at the Portobello Hotel at nine the next morning.

Some time after our dream-like encounter on the stairs, the hotel receptionist came to tell me my room was ready. It was on the top floor, a small Victorian chamber with deep red walls and wooden furniture that made me think of ship’s cabins. An old fashioned painting of the Crimean war was hung above a dark mahogany dressing table, and a small window, with wooden blinds that split the streaming sunlight into golden stripes, overlooked gardens bustling with spring blossoms and clusters of cloud-high trees. I lay down on the bed in this gracious space, the first top-class hotel room I’d ever been in, and slept. I was woken by the phone ringing. It was Patti’s guitar player, Lenny Kaye, who she’d delegated to look after me. I arranged to meet Lenny in his room and when I knocked on his door he was just out of the shower, drying his hair with a towel, a tall, thin, intellectual American. I liked him straight away. Lenny was a kind, soulful guy, easy to be with, and we spent an hour comparing notes on rock‘n’roll, British punk bands and Patti bootlegs, of which Lenny showed me several he’d purchased on tour.

In the early evening Lenny took me to the theatre in a black chauffeur-driven car, another first. We drove past Hyde Park, through the West End and Kings Cross and into the greasy spoon hinterlands of North London, finally pulling up at Rainbow’s stage door on a side street off the Seven Sisters Road. We walked down white corridors that smelt of disinfectant till we came to the dressing room, where the rest of the band, minus Patti but plus several people I didn’t recognise whom I presumed were stage crew or friends, were hanging out on plush leather armchairs, strumming guitars and talking.

In an antechamber was a lordly spread of salads and sandwiches. Not understanding, at my tender age, about hotel room service, all I’d had to eat that day were two biscuits I’d found in my room. I was so hungry I snuck in and helped myself to some morsels from the spread. The band’s drummer Jay Dee Daugherty – blond, charismatic, younger than Patti and Lenny – walked in after me. ‘Hi,’ he said in a friendly but firm American accent, ‘my name’s Jay. I don’t think we’ve met.’ Ten years later, to the day, I would work with this man on The Waterboys’
Fisherman’s Blues
album, and carry coal and turf to his rented cottage in the west of Ireland, myself the veteran and he the new boy. But for now he was a princeling in his own domain and I was a callow interloper, filching provisions.

I embarrassedly introduced myself, then from the dressing room I heard hands clapping for silence followed by Lenny’s voice requesting ‘everyone except members of the Patti Smith Group’ to leave. I made my escape, slipped down to the side of the stage and got myself into a good position to watch the show.

To see my favourite band for the first time from such a super-close vantage point was a privileged, heady experience. A few feet before my eyes the players and music came to life and I felt their energy like a man standing in front of a fire feels the heat of the flames. I saw the musicians’ interactions, noticed signals and glances pass between them, moments unseen by the audience, and I gained a sense of the balance of power and personality within the group; Patti, super-intense, on stage a wholly different creature from the frail, white-clad angel of the morning, now in black clothes and low-brimmed bowler hat, feral, prowling and unpredictable; Lenny, a leggy chicken-boned guitar-wielding giant; Ivan Kral, bassist-cum-lead-guitarist with Eastern European cheekbones, deploying a classy selection of traditional rock poses; Jay Dee, his hands wrapped for protection in trailing white bandages, playing like a soldier in a fire-fight, punishing his drums as if the music meant life or death; and the whole they added up to – a bristling totemic countercultural poetry-fuelled garage rock band.

And like all great bands should, the PSG looked and moved like a gang. They were Patti’s droogs, clad in sharp, colourful clothes and longer-than-punk hairdos that suggested their communal fashion clock had stopped the day in 1968 when the Rolling Stones made their promo film for ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, the
ne plus ultra
of pure rock’n’roll. As for the music, it was seethingly, beautifully, skull-rippingly loud, especially the riffs detonating from Ivan’s guitar amp just in front of me. The band performed most of my favourite numbers: ‘Set Me Free’ (explosive neo-biblical rant-rock), ‘Ain’t It Strange’ (eight minutes of wild, chicken-scratch reggae) and the mighty ‘Easter’ itself, almost as luminous and transcendent as the record I fell in love with.

There were other people close to me in the shadows, friends of the band or executives from the record company. They looked bored and didn’t clap after songs, creating an incongruous dead-zone around the inferno burning on stage. I’d never stood side-stage before and felt self-conscious about clapping; would it distract the band and be a terrible faux pas, or would they welcome a flicker of encouraging energy at the stage’s edge? How would I feel if it was me up there? I didn’t know, but sacrificed my cool and clapped anyway; I was witnessing my most loved band in performance and I hadn’t come 400 miles not to applaud. The band paid no attention.

When the show finished I had to survive on my wits. My chaperone Lenny was occupied with post-gig well-wishers, and I was only one of many hangers-on hanging around backstage. Alone and with no role to inhabit, place to be, or groove to follow, I rootlessly haunted the corridors around the dressing room. And when I saw Lenny leave I followed and attached myself to him, exiting by the same stage door we’d come in four hours earlier and getting into the same chauffeur-driven car.