Adventures of a Waterboy by Mike Scott

keyboards taking up approximately half the stage front, relegating poor Marco Sin to a shadowy rear corner. When I suggested we move his gear a few degrees westwards Karl erupted, accusing me bitterly of thinking I was Bruce Fucking Springsteen and that the musicians were my personal E Street Band. I may not have wanted to be Bruce, but this was my group and the vehicle for my songs, and if Karl, the veteran of one and a half albums, couldn’t deal with it, that was for him to work out. But I didn’t want one musician’s personal drama causing the stage to mutate into a fiefdom, and the keyboards were moved. I resisted the temptation to emulate Z’s right hook and Karl contained his impatience until after the show in Detroit, three weeks later, when he announced his departure to the rest of the band in a motel bedroom.
    Karl and I had been friends, often hanging out smoking reefers, listening to music and talking till dawn. He’d brought a lot to Waterboys recordings, especially This Is The Sea , but dealing with him in the daily life of the band had become a burden. Every time we came off the road I swore to myself I’d never tour with him again, but because he was such a good player – and because in a corner of my heart I loved the guy – I didn’t follow the promise through. Now Karl had made the decision for me and his news came as a mighty relief. That night I went for a long walk with Steve Wickham through the moonlit Detroit suburbs, past flat-roofed houses and the churches that stand like sentries on every corner of that city, enthusing about what we’d do with The Waterboys from here on in. For the way was clear for Steve, myself, and Anto to emerge as the three-man soul of the band.
    Karl stayed on till our final American concert in New York a week later, but as we burned the miles the vibes in the band were weird. Everything was splintered. Some people on their way in, others on the way out. Karl wasn’t the only one splitting: Chris Whitten would be leaving after New York too. When we returned to London we’d have to audition and rehearse new players all over again for the next leg of the tour starting ten days later. Between Chicago and Detroit we fired our tour manager, a hapless ex-pat Englishman called Biff, Kurfirst’s man, whose levels of ineptitude were matched only by his good nature. Biff was demoted to humble roadie, a position in which he seemed far happier, and our usual roadie, a taciturn Brixtonian called Jim Chapman, was elevated to tour manager. Kurfirst didn’t like it but, trying to keep my ramshackle tour rolling somewhere in the freezing Midwest of America, I was past caring whether my manager blew his top in the comfort of his Broadway office.
    In mid November we flew from the Midwestern snows into the mellow balm of California and in L.A. we stayed in a motel where oily-furred rats scurried round the bottom of a dried-up swimming pool. At night we played two sets at the famous Roxy club, a funky, dark neon-crusted shebeen of a shithole on Sunset Strip. The guest list was a roll call of L.A. scene-makers and punk rock aristocracy; someone told us Bob Dylan was coming and there was a seriously buzzing atmosphere in the joint. Our trumpet player, Roddy Lorimer, a wire-haired Glaswegian with the purest, most soaring sound in rock, had joined the tour and somehow all seven of us fitted on the egg-box-sized stage. Dylan didn’t show but his rumoured presence added an extra edge to the performance. We would encounter him for real, soon enough.
    After the show in Berkeley the band went sailing on San Francisco Bay with the crew of a Greenpeace boat, but I flew on ahead to New York, scene of our final American concert, to stay with Kate Lovecraft, a moth to the flame. Our love affair had been flickering on and off. We’d split up transatlantically a couple of times during The Waterboys’ British dates, then got back together in New York at the start of the American stint. We were