Poet On The Loose

Spurred by the pop success of Dylan and the folk-poetry of Donovan and Marc Bolan, as well as the Beat poets of San Francisco, a kind of alt. poetry scene developed on both sides of the Atlantic in the late ’60s, that appealed to the pop audience as well as to hippies and those who saw poetry as a key part of an alternative lifestyle.

Before his adventures with Horslips, Eamon Carr, with Peter Fallon, had founded Tara Telephone and made it a dynamic component of the Dublin cultural scene. They published the works of Bolan, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney and others in their magazine Capella and in broadsheets, and ran workshops and recitals in places like Trinity College. They combined the most vibrant aspects of what was happening in the USA, including Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, with the English movement that had spawned Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Adrian Mitchell, Pete Brown, Brian Patten and a myriad other fine poets.
Into that heady cultural mix came Philip Lynott. Carr well remembers the momentous circumstances.
“Before I met Philip,” Eamon recalls, “I’d discovered that the man who’d created the famous Che Guevara poster was Irish, Jim Fitzpatrick – who was later to design covers for Thin Lizzy albums. So I contacted Jim and told him about this idea I had for putting poetry on walls as a way of getting poetry to the people. He designed spectacular posters based on the poems we gave him and printed them in Dayglo. One he did, a work called Summer Of Love, turned up in an exhibition at the Tate Modern not long ago.”
Carr was aware that alongside an Irish music scene then dominated by showbands and ballad groups, was a nascent rock scene that nodded respectfully at its poetry counterparts.
“Actually,” says Carr, “one of the local rock scenesters who gave us a tacit approval was Phil Lynott. He seemed to have an instinctive understanding of poetry, although I’ve no idea if that impulse came from within or from books or school, or just absorbing what was going on in what was a very creative scene in Dublin at the time. He invited us to a studio to hear some demos. Gary Moore was there with his guitar, and Philip was all on for putting some fresh ideas around. He was open-minded enough to accept us, people like me wandering around with a pair of bongos, into his rock ‘n’ roll world.”
That innate curiosity led Philip to ask Carr what went on at the Tara Telephone happenings. Carr explained that they were essentially informal, and that people did a piece when they got the nod.
“One night we were down in Trinity College and somebody told me there was a guy at the door to see me. It was Philip, and the first thing I spotted was that while the audience already inside were dressed in scruffy oul jeans and dodgy pullovers and torn check shirts, he looked fantastic, all blinged-up like Sly Stone! Eric Bell was with him and he asked if it would be okay if he sang. I said of course, but I didn’t want him to be pressurised. I told him to come in and hang around and do something if he felt comfortable. He was absolutely chuffed when he did perform and got a very good reception, and the next day he was telling everybody about this poetry reading he was part of at Trinity last night, man!”
On another occasion, Lynott bumped into Carr after a reading and invited him to join him for a jam in the Go-Go Club with Ditch Cassidy and The News, another fixture on Dublin’s hippy scene. “There’s no doubt,” says Carr, “that he was up for all kinds of experimentation and cross-cultural goings-on. This, of course, was at a time when John Peel in England was using poetry as part of his radio shows and we soon realised that Phil Lynott’s writing was much more than just pop or rock ’n’ roll lyrics. He was obviously tapping into the same vibe as the rest of us. There’s a great sense of rhythm in his lyrics.
“They have a genuine pop-poetic impulse and use clever pop-poetic techniques. Many of them stand up on the page without the music. In nearly all of his song lyrics, there’s a line that jumps out at you. Like in ‘Running Back’, there’s that line “When they say it’s over, it’s not all over/ There’s still the pain”. Lou Reed or Leonard Cohen would be hard-pressed to come up with a line like that. Philip took on big themes; you could write a thesis breaking down his work into its poetic components.”
As Carr points out, Lynott was by now working in a genre that not only included the likes of Dylan and John Lennon, but one in which the lyrical writings of artists like Chuck Berry and Smokey Robinson could be regarded as poetry when divorced from the music.
“Philip wasn’t following any pop tradition in writing, but was more interested in looking at the potential to take lyric writing beyond what was the rock ’n’ roll norm for the time,” Eamon suggests. “I can’t say if he was directly influenced by the Beat poets or Ginsberg, but it would have been hard for him to avoid those influences, either directly or indirectly, and he was well aware of the diverse elements of the folk and rock scenes in Dublin. From the start it was obvious that he was engaging with something that went beyond the average pop lyric. When I first came across his song ‘Dublin’, it was a revelation, that somebody in the rock field would write a song about the city! This hadn’t been done since James Joyce!”
Debates still rage as to whether Bob Dylan is a poet or not; the same discussion is now taking place around Lynott’s songs and poems. What’s Carr’s take on the claims for Phil as poet?
“Philip had the ability not just to communicate through his lyrics but to involve you and get you to respond emotionally to the experience. He had a great eye for detail and a great ear for the street, not to mention a deeply inquiring mind, pulling in influences from hither and yon. If you apply Matthew Arnold’s maxim that genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul, you have to acknowledge that Philip Lynott was a poet.”

The Origami Crow by Eamon Carr is available through bookshops from The Seven Towers Agency and at www.columba.ie.