Skid Row Make a Name - 'New Faces, Old Places'

Skid Row - Brush Shiels and Nollaig Bridgeman

Doctoral Research Live and on Song; Brush Shiels

Anyone interested in examining my doctoral research around Rory Gallagher, Phil Lynott and Van Morrison can do so by having a look here. It's now housed in the Mary Immaculate College digital repository, and is publicly viewable. Very proud about that, after all those academic machinations.

Key areas in that project: 1. Irish rock and Irish Studies; 2. The birth of the Irish rock industry; 3. Irish rock and hybridity; 4. Irish rock and Irish national culture; 5. Irish rock and African-American culture. I'm improving several sections at present, as Cork University Press are interested in publishing in book form.
I'm very happy to be involved with them, as their record in publishing around Irish popular music is very healthy, and Sean Campbell's book 'Irish Blood English Heart' that came out a couple of years back is really exemplary. That's the kind of scholarship I aspire to.

A second challenge is now establishing a timeline for entries and exits into and out of Skid Row. If I'm correct, it began in 1968 with Lynott, Cheevers, Bridgeman and Shiels, changed to Lynott, Cheevers, Brennan and Shiels, changed briefly to Lynott, Cheevers, Brennan, Moore and Shiels, then (I think) Lynott, Shiels, Moore, Brennan (recorded and released 'New Places/Old Faces', May 1969), then Shiels, Moore, Bridgeman [or maybe Brennan] (recorded 'Mervyn Aldridge/Saturday Morning Man', then went on to CBS, etc). I'm interested in Bridgeman's departure/return. Did Robbie Brennan leave before or after Phil was 'sacked'? And why did he leave? I'm fairly sure he's the Robbie Brennan that worked with Phil years later in Grand Slam...

John Alcock - Mystery Man

A key figure in the commercial breakthrough of Thin Lizzy, John Alcock has producer credits both for Jailbreak and Johnny the Fox. But who was he? Internet sources don't even agree on his nationality, let alone offer verifiable facts about him, how he got into the business, where he started, and how he came to work with Lizzy. There are few, if any, pictures out there; the JA Wikipedia page has been deleted. However, someone's told me that a Twitter page and a website exist...well now, lots of stuff on there about pit bull terriers, not to mention pasta sauce and its relationship to a great guitar sound. This is definitely my man.

Liner notes confirm that Alcock worked at the Ramport Studios is Battersea during the mid-1970s. Built in an old church under the patronage of The Who, Moon, Entwistle et al recorded Quadrophenia there (Battersea Power Station Community Group are the keepers of that particular flame). Phil's Book, the detailed, online guide to British recording studios, provides some great info on the facility and its contents - check it out here. A certain Georgiana Steele-Waller left a note on that page to say she co-produced Johnny The Fox with Alcock... Another lead?

Interesting to note that a number of other Irish bands went on to record at Ramport, following its renaming as Townhouse 3 (after Virgin bought it). Chris de Burgh reputedly did a couple of albums there, and apparently, Hothouse Flowers recorded there too. Bits of history slowly disappearing... A little more history here. Sifting through the online information about the Helios sound desk that was installed at Ramport brings up the name Colin Fairly, who, according to Tony Arnold, worked with Rory Gallagher at one time. Now that's interesting...

Nightlife and Little Darling...Nelson, Marvin, Lynott?!

I've discovered that Marvin Gaye did a cover of this Willie Nelson-penned track in 1966 - as did Doris Day in 1960 and B.B. King some years later - so that begs the question: who/what was Phil Lynott thinking about by referencing this song? Marvin Gaye, perhaps? Those strings on the arrangement sound a bit like a Gaye track...or maybe Phil was thinking about B.B. King, the quintessential blues guitarist, and his version. What's also fascinating is that the same 1966 Gaye album has a second track relevant to Lynott's oeuvre: Little Darling (I Need You) shares a title with the 1974 single 'Little Darling' by Thin Lizzy. I find that interesting, because I know Lynott was an R&B fan (and exponent). Behind the swaggering vocals and (proto-punk?) screaming guitars of his LD single, I hear that there's traces of Motown in the Lynott song, with those descending horns in the background...! And then the Doobie Brothers did a cover of it later as well....in such ways are musical connections made. So what was Phil up to? Worth a closer look.

Ron Nevison...and Thin Lizzy's Nightlife

I'm currently researching Ron Nevison's role in the Nightlife sessions. As this well-known producer has a LinkedIn page, I've sent him a message to see if I can garner some info on his role in determining the album's direction. Nothing back yet....;) I'm interested in his work, because musically and technically, it represented a major transition for Thin Lizzy. As well as being the opening statement of the four-piece group, it was very different, in many ways, from the first three albums. Instantly noticeable is the smoothing out of the music, into a more streamlined, commercial sound...obviously Mercury had certain ideas about how to shape the band and make it marketable - with an eye on the US, no doubt. Not sure what I think about this transition right now, as I'm a big fan of the three-piece years and the group's progressive direction within them. Worth looking into how the change of record company affected things. It'd be nice to compare budgets. A key point of comparison is  'Slow Blues' on Vagabonds and 'Nightlife' on the later album. Both are blues numbers, but there's a raw, edgy power to the former song which the latter lacks. That's not to say that there aren't some legendary touches. What's with the Willie Nelson quote though? Appealing to the country community?? One thing that's striking is that the Irish-focused narratives remained - 'Philomena', 'Banshee', 'Frankie Carroll'. The latter song is like a resurrection of the family saga Diddy Levine...Not sure that the whole thing hangs together as an album, the way that 'Jailbreak' or 'Black Rose' does - in those terms, it seems quite fractured, more like a disparate collection of singles. Interesting religious theme in 'She Knows' - more on that later. Stupendous album cover - imagine that brooding, muscled black panther in your record store, LP size...

 I need to confirm this was the band's first recording with a US (co-) producer at the helm...going to look into that now. Definitely there's an important shift in sound - for one thing, it's the first time the 'twin guitars' were recorded on an LP. I'd also like to learn more about the group's division of labour vis a vis songwriting.
So...

  I'm wondering who picked Ron, then up and coming in the industry, to engineer and produce this album. There are some truly great performances here - 'Philomena',' Banshee', 'Sha La La'....and who's the keyboard/organ player on 'Dear Heart'? Brian Downey's drumming is really fantastic throughout. There's also 'Still In Love With You' - a standout track, though 'Showdown' is, for me, the top composition here...I wonder what management's role was in all this, and whether Ted Carroll was still the manager at that time...? I'll go ask Terry O'Neill and see if he knows....

Pulling Strings? Some recent research into the evolution of the guitar....

The Guitar in Rock Music

The development of rock music depended on the evolution and dissemination of one instrument: the guitar. Within rock culture, the acoustic and electric versions of this instrument perform myriad functions:  a compositional and performative tool; a symbol of an artisan aesthetic; a marker of social identity; and even a signifier of political unconventionality. These uses and meanings, and the popularity of the instrument itself in America, Britain and their cultural satellites - came about for musical, semantic, cultural and practical reasons.[i]

The six-string version of the guitar emerged in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century. It flourished during the following hundred years, as key Italian, Spanish and other musicians, composers and teachers expanded the guitar’s  repertoire and initiated improvements in technical method (Wade, n.d.: 68-71). The seismic transformations of the Napoleonic wars, combined with the professional movement of important composers and instrumentalists, precipitated the transfer of the guitar from Southern Europe to the major musical centres of Vienna, Paris and London; it was also transported to Africa and the Americas (Chapman, 2000: 14-31; Collins, 2004).

The advent of recording technology, innovations in transport and travel and the mass production of instruments enhanced the guitar’s popularity in the early twentieth century. Building on these advances, the Spanish guitarist Segovia and his protégé John Williams developed polyphonic performance techniques in the classical tradition; this was a key aspect in the widening repertoire of classical guitar music in Europe and the Americas. Acknowledging Segovia’s ongoing influence on his own musical vision, Rory Gallagher stated:

I’m almost, if you will, into the classical approach to the guitar like Segovia had of getting everything you can out of the guitar by the use of all the fingers and all the means you can get.

(Rory Gallagher, quoted in Rosen, 1974: n.p.)

While guitar music developed initially in the classical tradition, it quickly became the instrument of choice for players in diverse cultures. The fact that it could be tuned and played in myriad ways enabled the evolution of different styles and modes of performance. A BBC documentary entitled The Story of the Guitar (2008) historicizes its growing popularity outside of the classical domain. Focusing on Anglo-American developments, it demonstrates that as early as the 1920s, the American artist Maybelle Carter had performed country songs on a Gibson L-5 acoustic guitar; blues musicians, including Robert Johnson, used Gibson L-1 archtop guitars in the same decade (Chapman, 2000: 49). A nationwide American obsession with Hawaiian ukulele music during the same period further boosted the popularity of plucked-string instruments, while the ‘Singing Cowboy’ figure, typified in films by Gene Autry and Leonard Franklin Slye (Roy Rogers), led to the appearance of guitars in popular visual media (Muise, 2002; Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, 2011).

For guitar makers, the instrument’s popularity lay in the fact that its constituent materials and parts could be quickly and cheaply obtained, making mass-production and distribution practical and profitable. For the consumer, a guitar was financially accessible, simple to maintain and easily transportable. As a result, the instrument was rapidly absorbed into various musical cultures. Crucially, many migrant African-Americans adopted acoustic (and later electric) models to express themselves and their cultural, social and biographical situtions in music. The introduction of the guitar to black Atlantic consciousness enabled the flowering of a conceptually vibrant and technically diverse continuum of blues traditions in the 1920s-1950s (Jones, 1963; Palmer, 1987; Shadwick, 2000).[ii] The guitar was the key instrument in country blues; Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy and myriad Mississippi and other musicians utilised it to accompany their songs. Thus, fingerstyle, strummed and slide guitar traditions in a variety of tunings emerged (Shadwick, 2000).[iii] The instrument was central to the later emergence of Electric Blues, as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells and Aaron ‘T-Bone’ Walker began to perform electricified arrangments of Blues compositions to appreciative audiences in Chicago and throughout the northern US.

The guitar was also incorporated into jazz, as that music spread north from the port city of New Orleans to New York, Chicago and Kansas City during the 1930s. Charlie Christian, performing with Benny Goodman’s sextet, and Eddie Durham, guitarist with Cab Calloway and Lester Young, pioneered the use of the electric guitar as rhythm and lead instrument in the jazz ensemble; advances in amplification meant that it came to occupy a principal position in the the immensely popular big bands and swing bands of the 1940s. Concomitantly, Django Rheinhardt’s virtuosic artistry, which mixed gyspy and jazz music, further increased the instrument’s popularity among jazz audiences and musicians, both in the Americas and Europe.

Concurrently, the guitar was being absorbed into performance practices associated with Anglo-American music; it was the instrument of choice for many folk, country and protest singers. In particular, those musicians chronicling the migrations to California ahead of droughts in the ‘Dust Bowl’ and Great Plains regions during the years of the Depression were drawn to the instrument; its portability was central to its being used to express the misfortunes faced by many migrants. The instrument would play an important role in the flowering of music culture among the labour movements organized around union halls; it was equally prized at the folk club gatherings (hootenannies) organised in major American cities during the 1930s, 40s and 50s.[iv] Huddie Ledbetter, Woody Guthrie, Bess Hawes and Bob Shane were among those who popularised the guitar as a rhythmic and harmonic accompaniment to folk and protest songs (The New York Times, 2009; Britannica, 2011; Kingston Trio, 2011).

The presence of the guitar in both black and white American cultures was crucial to the rock music’s eventual entrance into mainstream popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s. The Story of the Guitar documentary notes that the international chart success of Bill Haley’s R&B-influenced ‘Rock Around the Clock’ (a US and UK No.1 single in 1954) inspired many teenagers to purchase guitars; in TSG’s first segment, U2 guitarist The Edge likens ownership of a guitar to possession of “a motorbike or a gun” for teenagers in the 1950s and 60s (BBC, 2009). The comparative simplicity of the instrument for performing popular music – skiffle, R&B, basic blues and folk styles, for example – and the instrument’s considerable potential for the execution of avdanced techniques, made the guitar attractive to both novice and specialist players. In Britain, Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day guitar tutor, first published in 1957, presented guitar-playing techniques in a simplified, accessible manner.

Technological developments in electric guitar circuitry, amplification and solid-body design by Les Paul, Leo Fender, their associates and competitors led to the popularisation and mass-production of the electric guitar, beginning in the 1930s. This extended the performative and sonic potential of the acoustic instrument significantly (Chapman, 2000). For example, through amplification, the electric guitar became louder and more controllable in terms of volume; this expanded the functional remit of the instrument within the ensemble, because melodic patterns (and solos) could now be performed while accompanied by rhythm sections that included drumkits, organs and amplified bass. Smaller and slimmer neck and body profiles made the electric instrument easier to play during lengthy performances (Wheeler, 2004; 55-69). Adjustable components such as bridges, string saddles and string trees contributed to greater accuracy of tuning. Different string gauges allowed for a greater variation in tone and technique, while accessories such as the whammy bar (vibrato arm) enabled a phenomenal range of pitch variations on certain models. Pick-up switch selection, tone controls and the use of solid bodies adapted the tonal profile of the instrument, allowing the player to achieve greater diversity between rhythmic and melodic playing. The evolution of auxiliary effects, including distortion, fuzz, wah, tremolo, echo, phasing, octave and delay, expanded the timbral potential of the instrument; the manipulation of sustain and feedback, through skillful use of amplifier and guitar, was another means by which the electric instrument extended the sonic possibilities of its acoustic antecedent.[v]

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[i] [i] Recent research states that the modern guitar has antecedents in the instrumental families of the Middle East (Egypt and Persia) and Mesopotamia (Chapman, 2000; Coelho, 2003; Wade, n.d.). One theory, developing from Hornbostel and Sachs’ classification of the guitar as a composite chordophone, suggests that these instruments arrived into early modern Europe with the Moorish invasions. They became culturally established during the Renaissance (Guy, 2001; Wade, n.d.); four and five-course (i.e. string) precursors were popular throughout Mediterranean Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapman and Wade both note that these instruments were particularly favoured by wealthy Europeans; this is evident from religious statuary, sacred and secular paintings and numerous surviving musical publications of the period.A four-course guitar was one with four sets of doubled strings, similar to a modern mandolin. This contrasts with the modern guitar, which has six single strings of diverse pitches (EADGBE in standard tuning); see ‘Early History’, the insightful overview, in Chapman, 2000.

[ii] The term ‘black Atlantic’ describes a range of cultures and cultural locations of African origin that transformed as they travelled, via the Atlantic, between Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and the United States; I expound on the ideaand its implications in detail in Chapter Five.

[iii] Blues describes a range of acoustic musical styles fusing elements of the earlier practices, including field shouts, work and folk songs, ragtime and gospel. It developed initially in the Southern United States (in particular in the north Mississippi Delta) and the American south east, before spreading to the industrialised north as a cultural consequence of the Great Migration. In itself, blues culture represents one of the major global musical innovations of the twentieth century; blues also provided one of the essential musical foundations of the emerging Anglo-American rock culture (Jones, 1963; Shadwick, 2000; Van der Bliek, 2007).

[iv] The Almanac Singers, Red Dust Players and Kingston Trio are notable examples here: see The New York Times Company (2011).

[v] Bob Dylan’s challenge to the expectations of folk music audiences, combined with musicians’ interest in instrumental, electrified music (Dick Dale, The Ventures, Lonnie Mack, Hank Marvin and The Shadows) also paved the way for the electrification of rock. Dylan confounded audiences at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by ‘going electric’, performing a 15-minute set backed by a blues band featuring electric guitars and an amplified rhythm section. See Inglis, 2006:16-28 and Heylin, 2000: 201-22. See also Martin Scorsese’s biographical picture, No Direction Home (2005).We can conclude, then, that the popularisation of the guitar was a key factor enabling the phenomenal prominence of rock music and culture during the 1960s and 1970s.