When the Waterboys founder Mike Scott was a teenager living in Edinburgh, he published a fanzine called Jungleland. The sixth issue, which came out at the end of 1977, had Richard Hell on the cover and teased articles about the Sex Pistols and Graham Parker. That Scott named his zine after the final song on Bruce Springsteen’s album Born to Run suggested that the angry energy of punk—a force that exerts an outsized pull on the young—was tempered by a yearning spirituality. For Scott, music offered a portal into a new way of seeing the world, one charged with romance, something you could get swept up in, where life seems so full of excitement and possibility it’s like a swelling container just about to burst.
Another coverline for “Jungleland” No. 6 is Patti Smith. When the Patti Smith Group came to London while touring Easter in 1978, Scott, on a hunch, called the hotel where he thought the singer might be staying and asked to speak with her, and the front desk patched him through. He asked if she’d received a package of zines he’d sent (she hadn’t), and after a brief chat she invited him down to London to cover the show. He took the train down, met his hero, hung out with her band, befriended her guitarist, Lenny Kaye, and stayed in a room in the fancy hotel she had arranged. Five years later, when Scott placed an advertisement in the NME classifieds seeking bandmates, he described what he was looking for:
THE WATERBOYS REQUIRE LEAD/RHYTHM GUITAR PLAYER. 18-24. Ability, own style, and appreciation of Patti Smith essential.
A few additional data points to help us understand Scott: When on holiday with his mother to London at age 16, he popped into a studio advertised in Melody Maker and recorded a version of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” playing most of the instruments himself. He wanted to see how records were made. Scott’s first band was called White Heat, named after Lou Reed’s song, and the name of the Waterboys was taken from a line in Reed’s “The Kids,” from Berlin. Other fixations during his youth were David Bowie and Van Morrison.
So that’s Dylan, Patti, Bruce, Van, Lou, Bowie, and punk rock—inspirations that all seemed in conversation with one another. Springsteen was once the New Dylan, and Patti was taking rock’n’roll poetics into strange places; Bruce and Patti had met each other in song on “Because the Night”; Springsteen’s second LP was deeply indebted to Van Morrison, and Patti had of course had transformed “Gloria,” the signature tune of Van’s early days, on her album Horses; Bowie had covered Reed and Springsteen both, and was, like the latter, punk rock royalty; Springsteen had shown up on Reed’s “Street Hassle.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
