Beautiful Losers

. . . I will give honour to all the sincere musicians who ever were or ever will be. The music they played was . . . fresh and courageous; daring, sincere, unfettered. It was unmanufactured avant-garde, and still is, because there was no place for it in the world; so the world neglected something of value and did not understand.
Sun Ra

He was a friend of mine
Bob Dylan

Not all the great ones get their dues. For every boy/girl wonder plucked or propelled from the vast obscure, thousands more get left in the mire. Reward and genius are odd and only occasional dancing partners success has more to do with timing, luck, serendipity . . . any combination of flukes. Everybody knows someone who coulda been a contender the urge to mythologise one s buddies is not a new one, and for every Kerouac there s a dozen Cassidys.
Liam Crowley was a friend of mine who wrote the most amazing songs, and could sing the hell out of them. This guy was the genuine article, a dyed-in-the-blood rock star. He had the walk, the talk, the face and the hard neck. Liam entered a bar and people stared, either wanting to throw the gob on him or kick his head in. In short, he had it. But it wasn t enough.
Such tragedies are commonplace.
Dublin is full of wanna-be s and has-beens with raw talent and charisma to burn. For the want of luck and a good business head, they fail, and not even spectacularly. Rather, they meander through a half-life of deals that never come to anything and ideals that are never tested. The smarter ones call it quits and channel their energies into something else. The rest reach their mid-30 s, still blindly hoping that next demo will do it for them, living on falsities and fantasies until they end up divorced, unemployed and middle-aged, with only the clammy blanket of anonymity for comfort.
Usually, this is no great cause for weeping or gnashing of teeth. Success often terrifies such characters even more than the alternative. Many Dublin musicians, like the writers of previous generations, are still half-in-love with the myth of the beautiful loser; they re most comfortable hangdog, leaving their dreams to coagulate with the slops on the counter at closing time. Often the world, their world, Dublin, doesn t miss them. The bitch of it is, so many of the mediocre ones get all the deals, get the work done, get to the church on time.
So, history will probably indict Liam Crowley as a never-was. His body of work never amounted to anything but a portfolio of shambolic gigs and several demo tapes left gathering dust in the garret. And while it s no great catastrophe that he remains uncelebrated, the airwaves are all the poorer without his voice. Occasionally, at the strangest stray moments, one of his songs, a fragment of a melody, a killer line, will come into my mind, and I ll stall for a minute, and shake my head at how it never happened.
* * * * *
A March night in Rathmines, two months after I ve moved up from Wexford. The plan is to get into a dirty little rock n roll band and have some fun, but even that humble ambition is proving hard to fulfil. I don t know what I m looking for something not a million miles away from the Velvets or The Stooges or Tom Waits or all three but the few auditions I ve attended are sorry affairs, full of dullards with ponytails, beerguts and too many Dire Straits records. But this guy, this one guy keeps calling the number I ve left, that of my parents house in Wexford, and after playing phone tag for a week or so, we finally arrange a meet.
The bloke s name is Igor. I don t know it at the time, but I ve probably unwittingly bumbled across one of the maddest and baddest guitarslingers in the country. Igor is apt to attack his instrument with anything from a make-up brush to a garden implement, or hook a wah-wah pedal up to anything that doesn t move. Plus, he s in league with this singer guy, Crowley.
When I clap eyes on the two at our pre-arranged meeting point outside the Swan Centre in Rathmines, I breathe a sigh of relief. If either one of em had their jeans tucked inside their boots, or the top button of their shirts done up, I was outta there. But no, they look cool enough. We go back to Igor s flat, where the three of us talk for a couple of hours, and I listen to their demos while they smoke all my tobacco. Igor is short, dark, bow-legged and fired up with manic nervous energy. He has the biggest record collection I ve ever seen; George Clinton, Township fiddle music, surf records, Howlin Wolf, Dread Zeppelin. He keeps playing stuff at me, then taking the record off after 30 seconds, losing patience in the rush to hear something else. Liam, on the other hand, is tall, handsome, raffish, and witty. He smokes constantly, laughs a lot, seems to find plain things absurd and absurdity second nature.
I like them both a lot. And the songs are good some of them suggest Iggy or The Stones, but there s some funky shit too, stuff Prince wouldn t be ashamed to put his ever-changing name to. Igor makes me a tape and we set up a rehearsal for St. Patrick s Day 1991, in a city centre practice room.
Later, I take the tape home and listen to it over and over again, growing ever more intrigued. These crummy little 4-track demos are obviously scraps and sketches and rough drafts, but they have magic. There s a muffled, scuzzy dance tune called Hotel Bar . Then there s the laid-back, cocky 3am , in which Liam s voice is like Sly Stone with a hangover. There s a long neo-psychedelic ramble entitled Sleazy Love , with a simple two-note echoing motif running through it that s pure genius, and Liam crooning in a wrecked falsetto.
Not every song is as good. The squeaky late-80 s stuff that fills most of side two is obvious juvenalia. But at the end of the C90, there s a remarkable ballad, Andalusian Dream , that could be covered by a swashbuckling Charles Aznavour. Later, Liam tells me he has the stage-set for the song all worked out, stripey mariner s shirt, creaking galleons, the lot. The whole thing has a noble savage feel that reminds me of Bowie doing Brecht s Baal. Good omens.

On the day of the rehearsal I show up early. Igor s there, amp and FX pedals already set up. I assemble the rented kit and we begin jamming on a kind of hip-hop/Stones sleazy groove. You can usually tell in the first minute whether it s going to work or not. It works. I m having so much fun that an hour passes before I realise how late Liam is. When he finally arrives, sporting a new haircut and a hangover, we begin working on some songs.
The pair s modus operandi flummoxes me. Instead of picking a song and blocking out the arrangement methodically from intro to outro, they endlessly jam their way around a tune, rarely discussing bar-counts, beavering in never-ending cycles, an ourobouros of noise. Each version of any given tune varies in length and feel. At the end of the day I don t know the songs any better than when we started.
Still, the scope of their repertoire is becoming apparent. Most of the Dublin acts around are writing tight, commercial, four-square guitar workouts, generic xeroxes of English bands, all in 4/4 time. This stuff is different. It s loose, lengthy, balladic and often epic. What snatches of the lyrics I can grasp are poetic, but not obtuse. More than anything else, these songs are ambitious.
But it s Liam s grasp of atmosphere that strikes me hardest. He seems to be after something very specific, not just in terms of beats per-second, but the precise feeling demanded by each song, the menace of Controversy or the stately strangeness of Captain And Artisans . He approaches the writing of the music in the way most people hear it: as a series of shapes, colours, symbols, scents, senses, thinking more like a painter than a songwriter.
Sometimes this drives Igor, a twitchy and instinctive player, even madder than he already is. Igor plays like a cross between Link Wray and Lee Renaldo; he likes to spray all over the canvas, a tomcat spunking up the neighbourhood, or Jackson Pollock on a blender bender. And he doesn t always respond well to being told where or what to play, thus generating a necessary but nevertheless sparky creative tension. And though Liam dogmatically follows his own mandate as to what the songs are and aren t about, some of his directions are quite abstract. Sometimes this is infuriating: being told that a song isn t spirally enough can often get on your tits at half-twelve on a Sunday morning in a sweaty rehearsal room. But at least it s the right kind of lunacy.

Over the next few weeks the three of us developed a healthy rapport. We d meet several times a week at Igor s house and work out stuff acoustically over endless cups of tea, roll-ups and bull sessions. Later, we d transfer the set-up to a rented rehearsal room to test it in a full band format, while trying to audition bass players at the same time. That was a major problem: we never could find the right guy to hold down the bottom end. They were always either plectrum-toting trogs who couldn t sustain a groove to save their lives, or slap-bass fwappedy-doink wankers in purple turtlenecks.
And still, the methodology vexed me. The songs were outstanding, but after a month or so there were still only two or three actually finished. Plus, Liam s alter ego, his wicked twin, began to appear with disturbing regularity. He was an out-and-out hedonist, a drunk with a mission, forever after that acid-like state of wide-eyed childish bliss, the sense of wonder at every living and inanimate thing, of being perpetually astounded by the world. Sometimes I think he had to restrain himself from crawling across summer lawns whispering Wow! over and over again. Not that this periodic disorientation of the senses interfered with his creative faculties if anything it probably improved them, but it did tend to make him forget practical stuff. Like showing up for rehearsals.
I suppose the cracks first began appearing at the Scrumpy Jack sessions. So-called because of the cheap cider we were imbibing on that fateful day, these were nothing more or less than an attempt to record some songs on the 4-track at Igor s place on one of his days off from work (Igor was the polar opposite of Liam in that respect; workaholic, punctual, reliable). The recordings themselves were good we rigged up the bones of a makeshift drumkit using snare, hi-hats and a briefcase and kick-pedal for a bass-drum (not bad at all), and got a couple of tunes down before the drink overpowered us. Then Liam s girlfriend came around, a sulky specimen. A fight ensued, our singer disappeared, and the whole thing fell apart.
The next few months were a blur of similarly drink-sick vignettes. Like a tipsy night in Kehoe s pub off Grafton Street, where Liam and I spent hours discussing a song he was writing called Blind Nightingale , something he felt sure would be his masterpiece. Hazy, scuttered days in Temple Bar, sitting on the pavement bumming beers as the hot afternoon turned into mad and miraculous evenings and downright dangerous nights. Once, when Liam and I were cigaretteless and destitute on South Anne Street, we spotted Robert Plant moseying across the cobblestones. When I mentioned that I d bought a lot of Led Zeppelin records in my youth, Liam convinced me to hit on the singer for a pack of cigarettes. Jawlocking for a smoke and shameless, I did. Plant obliged, amused at the barefaced cheek. If you re reading this, Bob, thanks.
I remember another lost night outside The Waterfront, a bunch of us out of our brains in the back of someone s car as Liam strummed the Stones Dear Doctor on his acoustic, and we all honky-tonked along, braying like assholes. Later, Liam crashed out in my bedsit. We were starving, so Mimi from across the hall offered to make us cheese sandwiches. Halfway through eating them, we noticed that they were blue with mould.
In the hands of the right film-maker, this period might ve made a good first reel in the biopic of some burgeoning rock god: Jim on Venice Beach, or Brel s squalid first months in Paris, perhaps. All the tried and tested scenarios were there; days spent dodging landladies, chopping up furniture for firewood, scraping together shillings for cheap wine and cider. Except we went from rags to more rags there was never any big pay-off. Besides, it was only slumming of the most ersatz nature Liam s attitude to money could be most charitably described as cavalier, but he had his family to hit on any time he was broke, and I was too cagey to end up on the street wearing a cardboard box. So while we were often hungry, or at least uncomfortably peckish, we never knew starvation in the true sense of the word.

Liam s brother John was a sculptor of some renown, so himself, Igor and I ended up at the opening of more than one exhibition, skulled on free wine, trying to get sense of abstract shapes, car crashes and all manner of bewildering detritus. This arty background might in some way have accounted for the singer s approach to music: Bill Graham had a theory that Dublin missed out on the kind of rock-goes-to-art-college culture that spawned the likes of Roxy Music and Bowie and Pulp. Certainly, that lounge-lizard trip wasn t lost on Mr. Crowley; he d had his evil-evil period, cruising the city in black jeans, polo neck and leather jacket, pretending to be some fuck-up from The Factory.
And with drink on him, the guy was a 64-carat slut. In the time I knew him he bedded some of the most beautiful and most diseased women in Dublin. He was a true sexual democrat; he d fuck anything once his vision went blurry enough. Jesus, he was lucky not to contract anything more serious than a case of crabs. As I got to know him better, it was hard to restrain myself from issuing his new partners with the direst warnings. You couldn t bring him anywhere, he d hit on your sister, your mother, someone s wife, putting himself in mortal danger of getting hit on in a rather different manner by the husband.
But the real rot set in somewhere between the summer and autumn of 91. The endless rehearsals (an irritating sap on finances), the botched student-engineer cut-price recordings, the unfruitful search for a bass-player and the exhaustive musical wild goose chases all began to take their toll. Igor and I were getting disillusioned, losing confidence in the songs through hearing them through crappy little PA s we were desperate to play, to get some feedback from real human beings, and the odd wine-addled set at the opening of an art exhibition with a last-minute stand-in bass player seemed to aggravate rather than ease our antsiness.
It didn t help that Liam s personal life was taking a left turn into weirdsville. The guy had been obsessively reading Rabelais Gargantua & Pantagruel, taking the great texts a little too literally for comfort. He also developed a brief and baffling fascination with porn, and began hanging out with the most unsavoury sections of Dublin no-life. The worst of these was an amoral waster by the name of Frank, a snake-eyed drunk with greasy hair pulled back in a ponytail, and the smile of a paedophile.
Then there were the booze-fuelled card sessions in Liam s flat. I attended one of them typically they ended up in a drunken rows, curses and crying women. Gone was the sense of poverty-stricken innocence, the hunting for firewood in Rathmines skips, the black tea and burnt toast, the earnest talk about books (if you borrowed a book of say, Robert Lowell poems from the boy Crowley, you were apt to find scrawled notes for musical adaptations in the margins).
By winter, Igor and I had fallen in with Milo, who was into starting up a band as soon as possible, and had the connections and drive to get it moving fast. Igor moved out of his flat the centre for so many informal practices, and as the Antibodies took up more and more of our time, the bond between the three of us disintegrated. Liam and Igor finally had a bust-up at rehearsals one night as we were preparing for the recording of a big-money demo, and that was it. When the recording eventually happened, Liam spent ages getting another guitarist to play like Igor pure folly. I finally got the hump when I found out that he d begun working with other drummers, a pill made even bitterer by the fact that I wasn t happy with my playing on the session.
People still ask me about the four songs on that tape. Some reckon it s the best demo they ve ever heard. I haven t played it in years, but I occasionally allow myself the luxury of regret that it didn t make us all megastars. But as I say, I was lucky. I at least got to hear those tunes. Billions didn t.

You might think this little fable is building up to some terribly tragic denouement. Well, it is and it isn t. No, Liam didn t implode on himself and burn out before 30 like Gram or Kurt or Hank, leaving his estate to posthumously exploit his songwriting stash. The truth is more ordinarily awful: he got a series of jobs playing covers in the bars of Europe, got older, got drunk, missed the train. I haven t seen him in five or six years, but I hear he s alive and kicking, as sane or insane as he ever was. But damn it to hell, it coulda been great.
What a waste.
What the fuck.
What next? n