Jake Brennan (30:31)
Sid Vicious, bass player for the Sex Pistols, stumbled out of Phil Lynette's bathroom with his girlfriend Nancy Fancy Sponge in hanging off his track marked arm behind them. They left their own blood splattered on the bathroom wall. The junk was coursing through their veins now, slowly animating them like stop motion skeletons down the hall to the living room, where they collapsed on a couch next to Phil, who was watching an old Elvis Presley movie on a giant tv. Hey Sid, phil said himself, high on one substance or another at the moment. When are you gonna let me show you a few things on the base, mate? Sid scrunched his face in disgust. I'm not interested in that crap. I'm in the fucking Sex Pistols. It was the summer of 1978, so actually Sid's math, or more likely, his mind, was off. The Pistols had broken up earlier that year after releasing one studio record, which sent shockwaves through the rock and roll world. Things were changing and changing fast, all because of bands like the Sex Pistols taking the piss out of the status quo. Phil Lynett and Thin Lizzy were not exactly status quo when it came to rock and roll, but they were close enough. Phil knew that adaptation was essential for survival. If you can't beat em, join em and all that. Which is how Phil found himself moonlighting in the Greedy Basterds, a supergroup of sorts. That feature featured Sid Vicious, Steve Jones and Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols, plus Brian and Scott from Thin Lizzy, Bob Geldof from Dublin's own Boomtown Rats, and more. They played sets at places like the Electric Ballroom in Camden, and a version of the group even appeared as the Greedies on Top of the Pops. And it wasn't just the punks in England who were taking the film over in America and New York City. Johnny Thunders was sitting in his room at the Chelsea, balancing some heroin on his guitar pick to kill time, waiting for his fix and waiting on a friend. That friend being Phil Leinen, who wound up playing bass on a bunch of the tracks on Johnny's classic 1978 solo record, so alone. The thing is, 1978 was supposed to be huge for Thin Lizzy, punks or no punks. This is the year that they released their double live album, Live and and Dangerous, a record which not only featured Phil's very un punk buddy Huey Lewis on harmonica, but is widely considered one of the greatest live albums of all time. It was a huge hit for the band, also number two on the UK chart. This is the kind of record you pull out when the aliens land and they want to know what a killer rock show sounded like in the 1970s. Frampton comes alive Live and Dangerous has got the goods. As amazing as it is. However, Live and Dangerous by Thin Lizzy has a dirty little secret. And I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but your favorite live album probably shares the same secret. And it's this. Live and Dangerous is not live. At least not entirely. Here's what I mean. Thin Lizzy's producer, Tony Visconti, was tasked with assembling a cohesive listening experience from a ton of concert tapes taken from shows the band played throughout Europe. In North America, a lot of live albums are made this way. You cherry pick the best versions of the songs you want to include from an entire tour. But Tony Visconti had a problem. The tapes were all different speeds, different formats, and in various shades of quality. He couldn't edit together a consistent, balanced sound based solely on what he had in his hands. So the solution was to have Thin Lizzy come into the studio and re record some of their parts. But once they started the overdubbing process, they thought, well, instead of just re recording the bass part or that vocal part, why not re record the whole thing? By producer Tony Visconti's estimation, about 50% of live and Dangerous is not live and is therefore not dangerous. But instead it's a studio recreation. Some of the audience noise isn't even from Thin Lizzy shows, but instead from the tapes for David Bowie's so called Live Live album stage, which Tony Visconti was also working on at the time. The true backstory of Live and Dangerous was just as much of a secret as was Phil Lynett's life. These days. No one on the outside knew it and many on the inside didn't either. But in addition to cocaine and marijuana, Phil was continuing to do more heroin or whatever he could get on tour. In New York, he checked in on Sid and Nancy at the Chelsea Hotel while his limo driver drove up to Harlem to score some dal dip, which he melted down and shot up. Two weeks later, Nancy bled out from a stab wound to her abdomen and the cops fingered Sid for the job. But just a few months later, he was dead too. And the reason Phil's own transgressions were never salacious front page news like his friends. And when they were like the bust at the Guinness mansion, the reason he was so adamant to shut them down was because of the strict code he lived by. He was always professional, he never lost his cool, and he was always in control. And now he was a family man with a wife and two daughters. If someone wanted to get at the real truth, the whole truth, they'd have to come and get him. November 1980. The doorbell rang at one of Phil Lynette's houses. Not the one in his beloved Ireland, but the one at 184 Kew Road in Tookenham, England, where he lived with his young family. He answered it and was greeted by employees from the gas company there to carry out a routine inspection. Phil was confused. No one had told him anything about an inspection, but it was possible he'd missed the letter in the mail. These days, Phil had a lot more than usual on his mind. Two small girls and a wife to provide for his band, and Lizzy constantly touring all over Europe, Australia and Japan, despite their latest album, Chinatown, getting some of the most lackluster reviews of their career. And last but not least was the constant turnover in the band. With Garry Moore replacing Scott Robertson on guitar and then Garry replaced in short order by Snowy White, Phil struggled to keep it all together. He chalked up this gas thing as something he'd overlooked and welcomed the men inside his home. They began to look around, but not where the furnace or the piping was. Phil watched as one of the men walked into the master bedroom. Which was odd. Suddenly Phil began to panic. Paranoia set in. The kind of paranoia that his old friend Eric Bell, Thinlizzy's original guitarist, once experienced just before he threw his guitar to the stage and walked away for good. But there was no walking away from this. For Phil. He had. He was surrounded. And not by gas men, but by Philip Lynette. Phil spun around to see the so called gas man who'd entered the master bedroom. Standing there he was holding two wrapped packages of cocaine in one hand. In the other he was holding a badge, not a gas man badge. These guys were the drug squad. Philip Lynette, the phony gas man said again, you're under arrest. In addition to the coke which had been stuffed into one of Phil's jackets, the narcs found grass in Phil's Mercedes in a cannabis plant growing inside his house. And that next Summer on his 32nd birthday, August 20, 1981, Phil Linet stood before the judge who sentenced him to a 200 pound fine. It was a lenient penalty, but only because Phil had convinced one of his roadies, a guy they called Big Charlie, to take the fall for the drugs and swear under oath that the jacket belonged to him and not to Phil. It was a page taken right out of Freddie Mercury's book. Keep your secrets, control your narrative. Or as Phil L Code instructed, always be professional, always be in control. Sean o' Connor couldn't believe his luck. His Dublin based band, the Look Alikes had managed to score an opening slot on Thin Lizzy's tour. And though you didn't have to look into a crystal ball to know that their best days were now behind them. For any Dubliner, or dub, as the local parlance goes, Thin Lizzie were it. The rest of the world can have St. Patrick. Give us St. Phil Lizzie were a source of tremendous national pride. Sean o' Connor in particular was stoked to be able to support such legends night after night. And he knew what came with the territory. The parties, the women, the revolving door that was Phil Lynette's private room. So many women coming and going that despite Phil's relationship status at the time earned him the nickname Phil. Line em up. And then there were the drugs. They were everywhere. Dealers, hangers on, guys looking for a one way ticket to the big show. With a little baggie. One night backstage, one of these dudes approached Sean, flashing his ready supply of cocaine. Well, Sean thought, when in Rome. But before he could indulge, out of the shadows sprung Phil Lining. He put his hands on the dealer's arms, pushing him away from Sean and violently slamming him up against a wall, head first. The dealer felt like his brain was oozing from his ears. With one hand, Phil held him in place, and with the other he stuck out his finger and pressed it against the dealer's chest. If you ever offer Sean coke again, I'll fucking have you killed. This was just one side of Phil Lynette. The side that fancied himself a character down at the pub with the Quality street gang. A badass, a jailbreaker, a no shit taker. One of the boys who is back in town and who's gonna fuck you up for turning this young grasshopper here onto dope. And then there was the other side, the gentler side, the more vulnerable Phil Lynette, the self described black Irish bastard from Dublin who successfully drove out his own insecurities in order to realize his dream of rock stardom. Just as his fellow saint, St Patrick, once drove the snakes out of Ireland, allegedly. But there was no one protecting Phil. Line it the way Phil Lynett was now protecting Sean o'. Connor. No one to step in when he showed up again at Johnny Thunders room at the Chelsea, this time with a bag of heroin in his hand. Or when he was stopped at the Dublin airport with more junk, grass and methadone in his possession. Not just because he ignored his own advice and the advice of doctors, but because he did so while delving further into his addictions in secret. Phil's longtime bandmate, guitarist Scott Gorham, also struggling with a heroin addiction, got himself under control, using neuroelectric therapy to kick his habit. Unlike Scott, however, Phil wasn't so lucky. On January 4, 1986, at just 36 years old, his heart, liver and kidneys gave out. It was just about seven years since Phil's old, old friend Sid Vicious died from a hot shot. And roughly five years after Phil's death, another one of his friends, Johnny Thunders, would also die from an overdose. Phil's buddy from the other side of the musical tracks, Huey Lewis, looked around at all the carnage. All this talent and promise wasted. A handful of his friends gone or on their way out. Huey, for one, wanted a new drug, one that wouldn't make him sick, one that made him feel the way he felt when he listened to the rich musical legacy of Thin Lizzy, which is to say something like Grace, I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace. All right, happy St. Patrick's Day everybody. This week's Question of the week is which Irish artist or band is your favorite and why is it thin lizzy? U2? The undertones? Cranberries? Who is it, which artists and why? 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