One of my favorite lyrics of the past 40 or 50 years, a lyric you’ve likely never heard, a lyric I’ve never quite understood myself despite the fact that it goes into deep rotation in my skull every few months or so, is: “I wish I was a brakeman on a hurtlin’ fevered train / crashing headlong into the heartland / like a cannon in the rain.” Mike Scott wrote that, and like a lot of what Mike Scott writes, what it means is way less important than how it makes you feel. He played a sold-out show Tuesday night at Thalia Hall with the Waterboys, his band of 40-odd years. They don’t tour much, and by “they,” I mean Scott, who pretty much is the Waterboys. This is his show. He’s one of those singular music weirdos who, however steeped in influences — there’s plenty of Dylan in that lyric — transcends his enthusiasms through sheer eccentricity. Mike Scott is the only Mike Scott out there.
There is no other.
But the world never makes enough room for its Mike Scotts.
Watching him Tuesday night, it wasn’t hard to picture an alternate timeline where he is selling out multiple nights at the United Center, 40 years into a famed career. The music is certainly anthemic enough. The man himself is six foot and change, but looks taller, and lanky, and very pale, like an Irish scarecrow. He grew up in Scotland, but he’s been inseparable from his adopted Ireland for decades. He will not be categorized. He took the stage in a long polka-dot shirt, embroidered bellbottoms and a floppy cowboy hat, looking like an undead Neil Young. If you know the Waterboys, it’s probably “The Whole of the Moon,” a perfect song, now 40-years old, covered by Prince and Jack Antonoff and admired by many more. That lyric I mentioned is in “Fisherman’s Blues,” the other Waterboys song you may know. It’s all fiddles, pub whoops — pure momentum.
It’s the kind of rave-up you finish a show with, and by the time the Waterboys were done, they’d wrung it thoroughly, drawing out Celtic shout-alongs, honky tonk and punk.
But Mike Scott being Mike Scott, it arrived early in a two-hour set. The man has plenty of sing-alongs, he seemed to imply. Plus, he needed room for his centerpiece, a chunk of the new Waterboys album, a concept album. And the concept is this: Dennis Hopper.
Random as that sounds, of course a Mike Scott would appreciate a Dennis Hopper.
One inimitable voice recognizes another. As Scott explained to the audience, Hopper played Zelig to many of the cultural upheavals of the 20th century, and since Scott appears constitutionally incapable of half-measures, the album, “Life, Death and Dennis Hopper,” is, indeed, 28 songs about Dennis Hopper and his times. It embraces Hopper’s chronology, yet throws out the pretensions of concept albums for a puncher biography.
While Hopper rides the ‘50s youth explosion — he costarred in “Rebel Without a Cause,” then later directed “Easy Rider” — Scott and company leaned into straight-driving guitar bombast. While Hopper the under-appreciated art photographer embraces the ‘60s and champions a little-known Andy Warhol, Scott downshifted into the floaty vagueness of a Buffalo Springfield-esque dreamscape. To reflect on Hopper’s Midwest childhood, Scott stepped aside entirely for a video of Steve Earle singing the album’s “Kansas.” For Hopper’s infamous descent into drugs and volatility, Scott went spoken word; as Hopper’s career crumbled, the music went sinister and dizzy for “Ten Years Gone,” with additional spoken word, this time via a backing track by Bruce Springsteen.
Like many concept albums, or even jukebox musicals, it’s a lot. Naturally, it ended with a ballad about that time Willie Nelson taught an aging, slower Hopper to embrace golf.
Mike Scott, as evident at Thalia Hall, has made inspiration itself his muse, without burying himself beneath empty hosannas. Inspiration is a catalyst not a time filler. He played a veiled ode to Patti Smith (“A Girl Called Johnny,” his first semi-hit, from 1983), and for “This is the Sea,” abandoned the record’s bracing defiant breathlessness about staring down change for a more melancholy stroll that nodded to Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby” while amending its lyrics for the abyss of resurgent fascism. Here is an artist who can open with an epic Willie Nelson protest tune (“Me and Paul”), and close with an exuberant “Purple Rain,” and never allow you to forget Mike Scott. He leaves you not knowing what to think about the Waterboys, except that we don’t do it enough.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
