37 years ago this week Mom’s friend Sammy wrapped his car around a tree on Anderson Anthony. He was in a rush to pick up his girlfriend, and now there’s a locker room building named after him. I used to walk by the commemorative plaque every Friday on my way to the grandstands, where I’d stomp and boo and holler unseemly things at football players who didn’t deserve it. The best place to be was always there, at the center of the world where floodbeams and light pollution met, on Indian summer nights Wes and I spent hiding our bloodshot eyes after doing three dabs apiece across town. Men still talk about Joe Charboneau there.
It all stays with me like a postcard now: couples in fuzzy pajamas and Ugg boots locking braces beneath the bleacher metal; walking taco stench dirtying the air; cowbell rhythms and grass-stained laughter; restless tennis shoes knocking over bottles half-full of tobacco spit; an American flag run up the pole upside down. Half-baked homecoming proposals on dollar store posterboard. Chili cookoff medals pinned to jackets like military lapels. Concussions inside a hundred raised-ranch houses. Five church bells talking over each other at six o’clock sharp. It was always a rebuilding year, even when the team was winning.
When Travis and them beat the brakes off Beallsville, 44-6, they had to carry the rest of us out of there. Wes and I twirled around until we ran out of the parking lot and couldn’t hear the “Let’s Go Wildcats” chants anymore. We jumped in my burgundy Pontiac and peeled off toward a knot of backroads and graveyards. We were both 17 then, and full as a tick on adrenaline. We spent some fumes stealing CDs from Walmart and driving through the next town on a quarter-tank, following roads built in-between coils of poverty. My car was pointed east, because that’s the only direction Wes and I ever went. We sat in our shirtsleeves in the perfume of a thunderstorm and talked shit about a town we couldn’t even pick out on a map. Together we memorized every road in our town by turn and spent too many hours figuring out which song sounded best on each one.
Manning the aux cord was as noble then as being knighted by sword. Wes played a lot of clunkers in those days (I’m still burnt out on Sublime’s self-titled album) and he probably thought the same about most of my choices (I certainly wore REO Speedwagon’s “Take It On the Run” thin). But in exchange for letting me drive I let him deejay, and in the aftermath of the Beallsville bloodletting, he played something new. “This one,” he said. Suddenly, a rush of twin guitar riffs and Gaelic soul spawned into the front seat. That one.
Thin Lizzy started in 1969 when Phil Lynott, Brian Downey, Eric Bell, and Eric Wrixon got together in Dublin. By the time Jailbreak came out in 1976, Wrixon and Bell were long gone, replaced first by Gary Moore and then, more famously, by guitarists Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson. Lynott brought the duo into the band for insurance purposes. “The next time one of those cunts walks out there will be another one there,” he said. Thin Lizzy’s cover of the Dubliners’ “Whiskey in the Jar” went to #1 in Ireland in 1972, and “The Boys Are Back in Town” and “Waiting for an Alibi” were international hits four and seven years after. Without Thin Lizzy there is no Judas Priest or Iron Maiden or Guns N’ Roses. Nick Lowe ripped them off on “So It Goes,” and Henry Rollins called the band “streetwise as any punk could hope to be.” Sade, the Cardigans, Smashing Pumpkins, and Huey Lewis & The News have covered their songs. Hell, Huey Lewis played harmonica on the Live and Dangerous take of “Baby Drives Me Crazy.”
The first four Thin Lizzy albums don’t interest me much, which makes the accomplishment of “Whiskey in the Jar” even greater. Their 1975 tape Fighting is, by my approximation, one of the most fun“pre-masterpiece” projects ever. The Irishmen (and Californian and Scot) spun the blues into folk music, and then they spun folk music into hard rock, and then they spun hard rock into pop. “Wild One” is simply tremendous; you can hear the scuzzy head rattles of “Jailbreak” in “Suicide”; their cover of Bob Seger’s “Rosalie” feels especially epic sitting next to the jazz-flecked “For Those Who Live to Love.” And then “Freedom Song,” Lynott and Gorham’s heroic Black Power protest anthem, gave Thin Lizzy that bloody, sexy, defiant edge that colored Jailbreak.
I’ve heard hundreds, if not thousands, of rock and roll albums, and I think Jailbreak is the greatest rock and roll album of all time (though Electric Ladyland, Highway to Hell, and Street Survivors get close). The songs form a tone hall of fame. Gorham and Robertson tattooed every chorus with harmonized keystroke riffs and streaky barre chords that sat on the 3rd above melodies. There was minimal effect and even less reverb and delay. Jazzy but rarely heavy. To my ears, they never played aggressive, nor did they ever seem showy. Most necessarily, their guitars lent a perfect contrast to Lynott’s husky, superstar vocals. If he was Ireland’s most beloved rock star, that is because his poetry sounded like a million bucks in his bandmates’ company.
And Lynott was a rock star, not a rock technician: always on beat but as cool as the day was long. He dressed in all black with a black bass guitar draped over his crotch. He drank lots of grapefruit juice. Very heavy metal. Lynott wanted to be half-Van Morrison, half-Hendrix, but landed closer to Randy Bachman and Billy Gibbons, while Gorham and Robertson were a chrome-plated adaptation of Dickey Betts and Duane Allman. Lynott carried with him a Sly Stone attitude and “Foxy Lady” femininity. Pretentious as he could be in his lyricism, he wrote about women but never named his songs after them. The Lizzies vamped about brawls, bars, come-ons, and Celtic folktales. Lynott liked rebellion as much as heritage. He was the son of an Irish mother and Afro-Guyanese father but embraced his Gaelic blood the most, which awakened at Jailbreak’s end with roundelayed visions of a 12th-century Anglo-Norman invasion and “marchin’ men” overthrowing the overlords in “Emerald.”
In my life, there’s before Jailbreak and after Jailbreak. “The Boys Are Back in Town” stuck with me after high school, in playlist shuffles and viral VICE articles, but listening to the album all the way through was something I always said I’d get around to but never did. Five years later I found the whole thing at the Ox Roast, in a tent full of bargain bin vinyl records with sticker prices higher than a tank of gas. The seller’s highway robbery was paradise compared to the multilevel marketers and junkers flipping bric-a-brac out of stalls flanked by horseshit patties, sno-cone stands, and iron popcorn kettles. Mom and I used to go to the Ox Roast every Fourth of July weekend and walk around until the spending money ran out. Then we’d people-watch: Amish peddling pastries and knockoff Crocs, antiquers haggling over milk bottles, the peanut man plying the hundreds waiting for a beef sandwich with free samples.
Each time, I’d go in looking for something different. One year it was Star Wars Burger King drinking glasses. Before that it was baseball cards, Apollo 11 newspaper clippings, and GameBoy cartridges. Last summer, I haggled for an old metal Coke cooler while every other stall sold fake Labubus. I gave away most of my albums during COVID because they wouldn’t fit in my studio apartment, but I began rebuilding the collection after quarantine. And four years ago, next to a $25 copy of Frampton Comes Alive!, I found Jailbreak with part of the shrink still on it. But I lost the negotiation because I kept coughing on hay and dust that’d lingered into the tent, so I paid for Jailbreak in small bills and read the tracklist while standing in line for a lemon shake. There I was, in hillbilly and hippie heaven, saddled with memories of classic rock guitar licks, Dino’s Bar & Grill, buildings named after dead boys, Johnny’s place, wildcats, Wes and I smoking anything we could get our hands on. That twin-wail gas was potent.
But Jailbreak is not just motorcycle riffs, pub provocations, and rubber hooks. It’s rockstardom untampered by celebrity, a band in full command of their own godly plurality. Thin Lizzy opened for Journey later in 1976 and blew the arena rockers off the stage. The album’s third-most popular track, the foreplay bop “Cowboy Song,” would be a career-making song for any other band from the era. But Thin Lizzy’s idiom was the antithesis of ELO and Jethro Tull’s. 10/4 time and “letting it float,” Lynott reckoned, hurt rock and roll music. Most of the songs on Jailbreak aren’t serious, nor do they ever submit to fame’s ugliness. It’s about fantasy, pleasure, and throttled lead lines. “The Boys Are Back in Town” and “Jailbreak” and “Cowboy Song” and “Emerald” vibrate in you long after they’re over.
Still, Thin Lizzy always puzzled me. How could one band sound so sophisticated yet so demented? Maybe it was the starry, syrupy sweetness humming in the saxophone and guitar duet on “Running Back”; maybe it was the splashy, mile-a-minute choogle of “Angel From the Coast.” Their swagger let me be whatever I wanted: a boy, a Romeo, on the run, a messenger, a cowboy, a brother. Thin Lizzy had encrusted myths drawn all over them. They could boogie as well as they could bask, tagging intensity, saw-toothed licks, and Phil Spector pop singalongs together.
But myths can only get you so far. Ten years after Jailbreak and three years after Thin Lizzy called it quits, Lynott’s body, spoiled by heroin, finally gave out. Bedridden in Salisbury with septicaemia, doctors put him on a ventilator until, days later, pneumonia and heart failure finished him off. In his absence, Jailbreak has become seminal. The physicality of these nine tracks is bar fodder for some and religion to many, including me. “The Boys Are Back in Town” has lived a million lives on TouchTunes alone, because it’s the greatest psalm in rock and roll. Eve grew from Adam’s rib in the Garden, and from Lynott’s red-hot vernacular and Gorham and Robertson’s metallic echoes grew wild-eye boys and equally crazy cats.
I’d known “The Boys Are Back in Town” before that Beallsville game 11 years ago. Most of my friends did, if not by name then by its town-crier attitude. Dad’s blue Dodge pickup radio was always tuned to 93.3 The Wolf, Youngstown’s classic rock station that used to ping off the satellites above our house. We had a patio in the backyard—nothing spectacular, just a square of brick with a sorta nice firepit plopped in the center of it. Dad bought tiki torches from the Lowes by the mall and put them around the deck chairs like a fence or a skyline, depending on if you were sitting or standing. He hung a cheap boombox off a deck post and its noises cluttered us.
When mosquitos bit up my legs I took shelter in the house fast. Fireworks blasting above the neighbors’ treeline lit the canopy from our place down to Dulka’s. David and Dalton’s laughs from the other side of the crick turned the lightning bugs on. The race track a few miles down the road roared with gusts of scrap tin. Lynott’s voice would appear and, from the other side of a screen door, I’d listen to him fill up our little banner of heaven. So maybe it was muscle memory, or maybe we were born with it in us all along, but Wes and I sang mannnn, we just fell about the place as soon as we were meant to. It all came to life and our voices, split by headlights but still holding, could be heard for miles and miles, even when lightning snapped at the ground like a lasso. “That’s God taking a picture of us,” I thought.
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
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