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It all started by accident. In 2014, Mike Scott, founder and lead singer of The Waterboys, was walking past the Royal Academy in London and a poster caught his eye. It was a black-and-white image of a familiar-looking guy from the 1960s, with long hair, a beard and an intense look in his eyes. Above the photo were the words Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album.
“I couldn’t understand exactly what that word ‘album’ meant,” says Scott, speaking from his home in Dublin. “I thought it could have meant that Dennis Hopper had a record. So I went in. And there were all these fantastic black-and-white photographs he had taken in the 1960s. Hundreds of them. It blew my mind.
“To me, Hopper was the guy from Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet. I knew him as an actor and I knew he was emblematic of the late-’60s and early-’70s counterculture. But I had no idea he took photographs.”
He did. In fact, it’s estimated Hopper took 10,000 photographs between 1961 and 1967. He photographed fellow actors such as Paul Newman and Jane Fonda, artists including Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg, and a range of musicians from Brian Jones to James Brown.
He also shot civil rights marches, music festivals, road trips, highways, diners, advertising billboards and the people he saw along the way, including hippies, bikers and those who inhabited the counterculture.
Scott is uncomfortable with the word “obsession” but it’s difficult to think of a better word to describe what happened next. He started devouring every biography, magazine article and interview he could about Hopper.
Inspired, he wrote a song about the actor in 2020. Then he wrote a couple more, thinking he might release an EP. But Hopper’s life contained so much that the songs kept coming. Before he knew it he’d amassed more than enough for a 25-track double-album, called Life, Death And Dennis Hopper, released last year.
“The amazing thing to me is how many cultural moments he was present for, and how he reflected the times,” says Scott. “He was there right back at the big bang of youth culture with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. He had a friendship with Andy Warhol at the beginning of pop art. He made Easy Rider. His credentials are peerless. I think we can see an entire generation through him.”
For an album with such scope, Scott decided to enlist other voices. That’s Bruce Springsteen doing husky spoken-word on Ten Years Gone. The opening track, Kansas, is sung by Steve Earle, “because I needed someone who could conjure the sound and feeling of the prairies, and what better man to do that than Steve Earle?”
There are four instrumentals on the record, one for each of Hopper’s wives. But Scott also wrote a song called Letter from an Unknown Girlfriend from the point of view of a woman who had been physically abused by Hopper.
He sent it to Fiona Apple to consider, as she had covered The Waterboys’ The Whole of the Moon and Scott felt she had brought an emotional edge to the song that no one had ever achieved before.
“I sent her the lyrics and the band’s instrumental,” he says. “And later I was in the van with the band on the way from an airport to a hotel while we were on tour and I got an email from Fiona. It had an MP3 with her playing piano and singing the song to give us an idea of how she planned to sing it.
“We listened to it on my phone and we were all completely speechless. We were floored. I wrote back to her and said, ‘We want to stick with this and put it on the record as it is. It’s perfect.’”
Scott felt a sort of kinship with Hopper when he read about what the actor-director went through in making 1971’s The Last Movie, which was a critical and financial failure. He saw parallels with his own experience making Fisherman’s Blues, the 1988 album that popularised Celtic folk after the so-called “Big Music” he had pioneered with A Pagan Place and This Is the Sea.
“After the success of Easy Rider he was given a lot of money and freedom and time to do whatever he wanted,” says Scott. “And I was in a similar position after This Is the Sea. But both of us lost perspective. He went to Peru and filmed so much footage that he found it incredibly difficult to edit. And it ended up being a very non-linear, confusing film.
“With Fisherman’s Blues, I was writing songs daily and we produced so much music that it was like I was in this forest and I couldn’t find my way through it. I remember how isolated and lost I felt. And I wondered if Dennis felt like that, too.”
The Waterboys play Perth’s Astor Theatre on May 11 and 12, Sydney’s State Theatre on May 14 and 15 and Melbourne’s Palais Theatre on May 16 and The Tivoli Brisbane on May 18.
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