Thin Lizzy: Hollywood (Down On Your Luck)
Everyone knows the song “The Boys Are Back In Town” even if they don’t know it is by Thin Lizzy. Beyond that, most outside of the UK know very little about the band, and my guess is that even the number in the UK who know about them is becoming less each year. I know about them now, after decades of ignorance, because Faux Jr. is a fan. On a recent road trip, we listened to a few of their albums and I am now hooked. I grew up in the ’70s listening to Kiss and Bad Company, and I listened to a lot of hard rock in my teen years, so I am no stranger to the fact that the ’70s and early ’80s were a period sometimes ruled by hard rock. Even bands who produced Top 40 hits, such as Foreigner, Styx, and Loverboy, were really just hard rock bands with the ability to occasionally write catchy hooks. As I’ve gotten older, my attention to hard rock has changed focused to those bands who are able to write great riffs. While Kiss will always hold a place in my heart, their riffs were fairly basic. Nowadays, I tend to focus on the riffs of AC/DC when I want to rock out. I’ll sometimes get the Led out, but that is probably for nostalgic reasons. This is all to say that I now understand the place that Thin Lizzy holds in the canon of hard rock, riff-based music. Their founder, lead vocalist, and principal songwriter Phil Lynott was a bassist but he was clearly a riff master. You can randomly play almost any song in their discography and it will have a riff worth a listen. And, it isn’t just the riffs that make Thin Lizzy’s music stand out. Lynott was black, and they sound like they are American, but they are an Irish hard rock band. This difference in their musical background compared to others was presented in several distinct ways. The most obvious are those tunes with an Irish folk music influence, although there aren’t that many of those. In addition, Lynott’s vocal style and melodic delivery are unlike any of his contemporaries. His turns of phrase and spacing become more and more intriguing as you listen to the albums, and if you find it interesting you can’t help but get hooked. Lynott died tragically at the age of 36 from complications due to drug and alcohol addiction, but he left behind a string of hard rock albums that sound more like lost artifacts of rock and roll with each passing year. “Hollywood (Down On Your Luck)” is track five on the group’s 1981 album Renegade. As such, it is definitely not one of their most well-known tracks. I selected it out of dozens of similar Thin Lizzy songs that have a great riff, a catchy chorus, and present the band’s sound in all of its glory. If you want to listen to more of the band, start with the 1976 album Jailbreak to hear them in their prime. If you like that then check out Black Rose, a forgotten classic from 1979.
To learn more about Thin Lizzy, check out their website, read this great review of their classic double live album on The Quietus, or take a deep dive into the Thin Lizzy section of Rate Your Music.
To listen to all of the songs of the day, check out the Radio Faux Show Song of the Day playlist.
The Radio Faux Show 