EVERYBODY LOVES DENNIS HOPPER
A CONVERSATION WITH MIKE SCOTT OF THE WATERBOYS
The Waterboys have been charming audiences for decades with timeless classics like “Fisherman’s Blues”, “The Whole Of The Moon”, “This Is The Sea”, and “We Will Not Be Lovers”. Their upcoming album, Life, Death And Dennis Hopper is one of the most creative albums of their discography.
Why exactly did The Waterboys make an album about Dennis Hopper? “It’s a combination of his character, his restlessness, the changes he went through, and the different worlds he inhabited,” exclaims Mike Scott, the lead singer and songwriter of The Waterboys. “He was an actor, of course, but he was also a photographer, very involved with the Pop Art movement in Los Angeles, and a friend of James Dean. So, he was present in all these moments in cultural history, and I found his story and the scenes in which he acted in his life were fascinating.”
Doing a concept album like Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, made certain things easier. “When I did the running order for the record, there was no choice involved because it had to be chronological,” states Scott. “I didn’t have to think, ‘What am I gonna write a song about now?’ because it was all Dennis… He had such a colourful life that certain episodes stood out very strongly, like, ‘There’s got to be a song about this. There’s got to be a song about that.’ A friend of mine also suggested doing an instrumental for each of his five wives, and I loved that idea.”
The Waterboys did a concept album before. In An Appointment With Mr Yeats, they took several of William Butler Yeats’ poems and set them to music. “It was a discipline in it was working with a personality; Yeats’ personality, and there were certain rules I had to follow,” reflects Scott. “I could change his words a little bit. I could swap verses around if that made the song hang together better. But I would never change his meaning – what Yeats intended with the poem, at least as far as I could tell, was sacred… With Dennis, the rule is to never fictionalize his life. I only did it once, and that was “Freaks On Wheels”, which is done with humour, but in all of the places where it counted, I never changed any detail of his life story. I always honoured the fact. It’s not like a biopic where I might change some facts to make it more dramatic.”
Along with being a record about Hopper, the album is about life in general. One example is “I Don’t Know How I Made It”. “It could apply to so many people’s own journey or own life drama, so I deliberately didn’t disturb that,” says Scott. “A song like that doesn’t mention Dennis. It’s completely influenced by his life because that quote: ‘I don’t know how I made it,’ is actually something he said in an interview. He was talking about his years of addiction – he meant, ‘I don’t know how I’m still alive.’ I found that very moving, so I wrote the song. But I realized if I don’t put Dennis’ name in the song and I don’t tie it to a specific set of events in his life then it has extra resonance; the application to it that anybody’s story can fly.”
The Waterboys did a band version of “Letter From An Unknown Girlfriend”, but it did not sound right to them. “I felt we needed a female voice, not only in this song, but we needed a female voice on the record,” says Scott. “Fiona [Apple] did a very powerful cover version of our song “The Whole Of The Moon”. She sang it so great with such an emotional edge. I knew she would do “Letter From An Unknown Girlfriend” brilliantly, and of course she did.”
PURCHASE LIFE, DEATH AND DENNIS HOPPER
Similar things led to Bruce Springsteen being featured on “Ten Years Gone”. “The funny thing is the first choice was myself because I’d already recorded that voiceover,” reflects Scott. “I played it to a friend of mine, a man in the music business in the UK, called David Bates. He said, ‘I love the album, and you’re singing great, but I think you’re doing too many different voices.’ At first, I disagreed with him. Then I realized, ‘No, he’s right. There’s too much me. There’s got to be more different voices.’ I went through the extra pieces that I’d done, like that little voiceover at the end of “Ten Years Gone”, and that seemed to me an obvious one to get someone else to do. At first, I thought maybe I’d get an actor who could deliver it in a dramatic way. But then I remembered my old Bruce Springsteen bootlegs from the ‘70s when he used to do songs like “The E Street Shuffle” or “Pretty Flamingo” with long stories that he would tell over the band. Bruce would tell these wonderful stories, and I loved the dramatic way he would do that. So, I decided to ask Bruce, and my manager knew his manager, and the word came back that he’d do it.”
“Frank (Let’s Fuck)” is inspired by Hopper’s character Frank Booth from David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. “It’s the one and only song on the album where I play the character that Dennis played in a movie,” comments Scott. “Every third word that Frank said was ‘Fuck.’ So, I thought, ‘What would Frank be like if he was in a record? He’d just be going fuck you, fuck you, all the time.’ So, I put myself into that character that Dennis had played. So, it’s me doing Dennis doing Frank.”
“Everybody Loves Dennis Hopper” represents Hopper’s popularity later in his life. “After he’d been through all his personal travails and addictions and everything, he’d gotten himself straight, and for the last 20 years of his life, he was like a twinkling Hollywood elder, turning up on five movies a year, on every talk show, on every magazine cover, and always telling his story with humour,” exclaims Scott. “I tried to present in lyric all the different things that made up his public profile at the time… The best way to do that was spoken word; it’s almost rap – it didn’t suit a conventional rhyming song lyric.”
“Andy (A Guy Like You)” is about Hopper’s friendship with Andy Warhol. “What people don’t know is that when Warhol was unknown, he drove across America with some of his colleagues, and he had his first ever proper exhibition in a Los Angeles art gallery that Dennis helped organize,” states Scott. “There’s also a story where Dennis bought the first ever Campbell’s Soup Cans painting. I’m not sure if that’s true. I hope it is… When Simon [Dine] sent me this instrumental, it worked with the lyric, and I realized quickly it sounds like a Burt Bacharach-type track from 1963, exactly when this exhibition happened.”
Life, Death And Dennis Hopper has many fascinating interludes. “I wanted to look at the story from an outside perspective,” states Scott. “So, “Memories Of Monterey” is sort of this old English hippie who’s looking back nostalgically at the Monterey Pop Festival that Dennis was at. “Freaks On Wheels” is a spoof movie trailer for a B-movie. Dennis had actually made a biker B-movie called The Glory Stompers, but I had changed the name of it and changed some of the actors just for fun. Then there’s also “Transcendental Peruvian Blues”, where I’m a British newscaster reporting from Peru. I just wanted to bring in these different angles because I feel everything that happens to us in the world can be seen from multiple perspectives – I really like looking at a story or an event from different angles to provide that breadth of perspective. I had the opportunity to do it with this album because I had so much space, 60 minutes, and an unlimited number of ideas, so why not look at it from different perspectives and make it more interesting.”
Life, Death And Dennis Hopper drops on April 4th. “It’s a gathering of a lot of things I had observed and felt over the years about popular culture,” notes Scott. “To me, it’s not only about Dennis. It’s not even only about Dennis, and life and death; it’s also about popular culture and counterculture and a lot of my feelings about what’s happened since Rebel Without A Cause, which I sort of see as the ‘big bang’ in popular culture in 1955. Everything that has happened since then, a lot of it, is contained in this record or at least touched on.”
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Photo Credit: Paul Mac Manus
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