Jailbreak

The Zoo Crew has got the turntable locked on Thin Lizzy and the title cut from Jailbreak, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any length of time you already know this one does not ask permission. Phil Lynott wrote it, the classic four played it, and John Alcock produced it down at Ramport Studios in London for the album that finally shoved the band through the door they had been kicking at since Dublin. Scott Gorham has told the story more than once. Phil walked in with the bones of the thing, mostly a bass figure he would hum as da da dada, dada dada, plus a melody over the verse, and then he kind of ran out of map. That was the deal in that lineup. Lynott brought the riff and the story, and the two guitar slingers had to finish the house. Brian Robertson remembers working it up at soundchecks the way they often did, the song wearing some other name before it settled into Jailbreak. Gorham and Robertson pushed the chorus up to the B, back through the E, and then built that middle section so it keeps climbing, A to E and on up, until the harmony note has nowhere left to go. Robertson's wah-wah sits in there like a siren that never quite shuts off. It is the sound of a gate coming down and a gang deciding the gate is optional.

The lyric is pure Lynott tough-guy theatre, the same leather-and-chains cast that shows up in The Boys Are Back in Town and The Rocker. Me and the boys do not like it, so we are getting up and going down. Hound dogs on the trail, alarms and sirens, busting out dead or alive. He liked his characters on the edge of town, scheming, half outlaw and half poet. The wider album was supposed to be something stranger than a straight rock record. Gorham has said Jailbreak was meant to open a science-fiction concept piece about alien beings and overlords, and if you read the original liner notes you can still catch Phil starting that story, a warrior locked into a video scanner, Dimension 5 in the hands of the Overmaster. The rest of the songs refused to stay inside the plot. The boys did not care, Gorham said, plain as that. What survived on the sleeve is Jim Fitzpatrick's cover, the band breaking out under the eye of that alien overlord, which is why the painting still looks like a comic book that learned how to play loud. An alternate take, with a short spoken introduction and extra guitar, turned up on the bonus disc of the 2011 deluxe remaster, a reminder that the track was still being worried over long after the single had done its work.

The single followed The Boys Are Back in Town out of the same record, with Running Back on the flip, and it peaked at number 31 in Britain after an August 1976 release, scraping the Australian charts as well. Years later VH1 parked it at number 73 on a list of the greatest hard rock songs, which is the sort of plaque a song neither needs nor refuses. Gorham has also recalled hearing Tony Iommi, of all people, call the riff a favourite, the kind of nod that travels farther in a guitar shop than any chart position. The album itself was the one that kept the band on the label. Gorham has been clear about that. Jailbreak was their third shot with the company, and if it had stiffed he figured they would have been shown the door. The Boys Are Back in Town, a song the band had nearly left off the record when it was still called GI Joe, did the heavy commercial lifting after a couple of Louisville disc jockeys heard what the band had not. Jailbreak was the warning shot that opened the live sets, because everybody in the room already knew the riff before the first downbeat.

To get to that riff you have to go back to Crumlin and a kid who was not supposed to be the singer. Philip Parris Lynott was born in West Bromwich, England, on 20 August 1949, son of Philomena Lynott, a Dubliner training as a nurse, and Cecil Parris. He was raised in Dublin by his grandparents, went through the Christian Brothers' school on Armagh Road, and had a short, miserable spell as an apprentice fitter at a foundry before his mother backed him in walking away from it. Music had already got hold of him. Elvis and Hendrix were the pictures on the wall. With his old school pal Brian Downey he sang in a local outfit called the Black Eagles, mixing rock and roll with whatever else a Dublin ballroom would stand. After that band folded he landed in Skid Row, the Dublin group led by Brush Shiels, not the American band of the same name. He was tall, thin, Afro already doing half the advertising, and he looked like a frontman. The rest of the band was less sure about the voice. While he was hoarse with tonsillitis they let him go. Shiels, figuring the kid still had something, taught him the bass and pushed him toward writing his own songs. Convinced he had no future as a singer, Lynott built a new group called Orphanage with Downey on the drums.

The turn came in a dressing room. Eric Bell, a Belfast guitarist who had passed through Them, came down to the Countdown Club on Mary Street with Eric Wrixon while Orphanage were on. Downey has laughed about it since. He voted against bringing Bell in, and Phil informed him that Bell was joining whether the drummer liked it or not. They split Orphanage and started Thin Lizzy around the turn of 1970, Lynott on bass and vocals and already the main writer. The name is a Dublin joke on Tin Lizzie, the old comic-strip Ford. Say thin in a Dublin accent and you are most of the way to Lizzy. Bell liked to claim he was tripping when the pun landed. A one-off single, The Farmer, barely crawled out of the pressing plant. A new manager got them onto Decca, they moved to London, and the first album arrived in 1971, still carrying Phil's love of the old country on songs about Dublin and his mother's place, the Clifton Grange Hotel. The breakthrough that made the name known was the 1973 rock rewrite of Whiskey in the Jar. Bell left not long after. Lynott, tired of guitarists walking out, hired two at once, the Glasgow kid Brian Robertson and the Californian Scott Gorham, and told a former manager that the next time one of them quit there would already be another standing there. Fighting in 1975 set the twin-guitar style. Jailbreak in 1976 made it famous.

That is the long road into the four minutes on the deck right now. A foundry kid who got fired from his own band, learned the bass out of spite and necessity, wrote about outlaws because he had been standing just outside the circle his whole life, and then handed a half-finished riff to two guitar players who knew how to make it climb. The Zoo Crew will let it run. If the Zoo Freaks want the rest of the story, the sleeve notes, the later lineups, and the records that followed the breakout, it is all sitting at THE ZOO, same as the rest of the freeform pile. The band's own door is the Thin Lizzy official website, where the rock and roll history still walks through Jailbreak as the record that changed the stakes. The official pages keep the photos and the old war stories moving: Thin Lizzy on Facebook, Thin Lizzy on Instagram, and Thin Lizzy on X. Spin it loud. The boys meant business.