In a world that revolves around the confounding belief that modern humans can only process information being presented in 30-second clips, deciding to create a rock opera — on any topic — in 2025, let alone a concept record about ’60s counter-culture figure Dennis Hopper, is both cantankerous and bold. But it’s also completely unsurprising coming from Mike Scott, the leader of the musical ensemble known as The Waterboys. “Life, Death and Dennis Hopper,” released back in April, is wide-ranging and ambitious, but not impenetrable.
Dennis Hopper had an astonishingly large, multifaceted life, and so the portrayal of his story, in the hands of Mike Scott, is going to be equally complex.
“Dennis Hopper” is a record of 25 interconnected songs, stories and instrumentals that explain who Dennis Hopper was, and why he’s worthy of this project.
If you’re a Gen Xer who immersed yourself in punk rock or listened to college radio, The Waterboys will be a familiar name, if they don’t make your heart sing with fond nostalgia. That’s kind of unfair, because Scott has kept this particular cause going throughout the ensuing decades under the late Mark E. Smith’s much-quoted philosophy of, “If it’s me and yer granny on bongos, it’s The Fall,” since the band’s first self-titled release in 1983; in other words, even if Scott might be the only original member left, he’s still calling it The Waterboys no matter who else might or might not be around.
At the band’s recent series of stateside gigs, Scott explains to the audience that Dennis Hopper was present at the dawn of so many critical moments — “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Monterey Pop,” Warhol’s Factory, “Easy Rider” and “Apocalypse Now” (to name a handful) — and it’s this cosmic ubiquity, along with Hopper’s creative output in multiple art forms and just plain coolness that inspired Scott to recreate, chronicle, and tell Hopper’s story, with a careful eye towards context and history.
The record features a carefully curated list of guest artists, providing backing vocals, or cameos, and this is when you remember that this is a concept piece. Scott’s often been accused in the past of doing “too much,” excessive adornment, but in this context, all of it works. Dennis Hopper had an astonishingly large, multifaceted life, and so the portrayal of his story, in the hands of Mike Scott, is going to be equally complex.
So the album opens with the familiar, always timeless voice of Steve Earle, telling the story of Hopper’s childhood, wistfully looking at the trains heading west and dreaming of the future. Even if you know that Bruce Springsteen has a cameo, by the time he shows up towards the end of “Ten Years Gone” sounding suitably ragged and rough around the edges, he’s just another element of the story, and it feels like you wandered into some random dive bar only to find the Boss holding court in the corner, telling stories.
Fiona Apple appears mid-record to sing an entire song — “Letter from an Unknown Girlfriend” — and her unsurprisingly incredible performance switches the mood and brings down the testosterone. The Go-Go’s Kathy Valentine shows up as a random hippie girl looking for Dennis Hopper’s house at the start of “Freakout at the Mud Palace.” A chance meeting in an airport is how Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith ended up singing high and heartbreaking counter-harmonies on “I Don’t Know How I Made It,” a song Scott describes in the record’s liner notes as “Somehow Dennis doesn’t die.”
The strength of the record is that, with very few exceptions, you can listen to it as a solid collection of songs without having to be closely engaged with the text (or knowing anything at all about Dennis Hopper), while also being a singular body of work that you can engage with in its entirety, end to end. And there’s enough tracks — like the burbling rocker “Live in The Moment, Baby,” the Western ghost town ode “Blues for Terry Southern,” the aforementioned “Ten Years Gone,” a classic rocker that also manages to stylistically stretch across multiple eras, or the Who-like “Transcendental Peruvian Blues” — that you could throw on your phone to show up on shuffle and they’d be welcome visitors.
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But the subject is Dennis Hopper, so it’s gotta get at least a little weird. “Frank (Let’s F**k),” a song about Hopper’s role as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” is basically Scott yelling “LET’S F**K” for two minutes straight. There’s a song about golf that melodically wouldn’t be out of place on Lou Reed’s “Transformer.” And each of Hopper’s five wives has her own instrumental piece, which is oddly touching and unexpected, and serves the purpose of offering an emotional transition from era to era. They help make the story flow.
It’s hard to take a concept album on the road. Before you point to all of the bands that have performed full album shows, the fact that they happened doesn’t make them necessarily good concerts. That’s because the criteria for successfully sequencing a record album are not at all the same for live performance. But if anyone knows this, it’s Mike Scott, and at a live show in Columbus, Ohio, a few dates into the U.S. leg of the tour supporting “Dennis Hopper,” he demonstrated his understanding by announcing that they were going to be performing songs from the record, but not the entire record, just enough to give you the feeling of the story.
They opened with “Live In the Moment,” which jumped the audience right into the beginning of Hopper’s story, on the set for “Rebel Without A Cause.” There were eight selections from the record, performed at the same level of energy and excellence as the older material that opened and then closed the show. “Blues for Terry Southern” got to stretch out and take up space; “Letter from an Unknown Girlfriend” was performed by Scott himself on acoustic guitar; and “Hopper’s On Top (Genius),” the story of the aftermath of “Easy Rider,” ended up being an unexpectedly delightful sing-along, an entire room shouting “GENIUS!”
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It’s not the same band that you saw in college; it’s not the same vibe, but the songs remain endlessly indelible, eternal. The current Waterboys are a crack team of musical mercenaries up there to play the sheer hell out of each and every song, no matter what era it first originated in. It’s keyboard-heavy, with Brother Paul on Hammond B3 and the occasional keytar, offered with aplomb, and across the stage, Famous James fills in the rest of the keyboard needs. Then there’s a rhythm section you’d want on your side in a bar fight, not showy but rock solid — although bassist Aongus Ralston can shift quickly into bullet-proof yet elastic swing and drummer Eamon Ferris is one of those drummers who sings along to every song even though he doesn’t have a microphone.
In a post on Bluesky, Scott commented, “When I go see bands, I wanna be blown away by great new songs and to hear my old favourites made new. And that’s what I aspire to give you with my band.” He also mentioned that his philosophy when playing a festival was to go out there and steal the fans of other bands who might be stuck there in the audience waiting for their faves to come on later. This version of The Waterboys live should worry anyone who has to come on after them.
This isn’t the first time musicians from the British Isles have had to educate Americans on their own culture.
They’re not up there playing regurgitated versions of “Medicine Bow,” “Don’t Bang The Drum” or “Fisherman’s Blues.” They’re delivering ecstatic, enormous reinterpretations that retain the elements of the originals that hooked us all in the first place. There’s some nostalgia involved, sure, tied up with memories of dancing with your goth girlfriends at New Wave Dance Night, but all three of those songs on a random Friday in Ohio were total steamrollers. People danced and sang and shouted and cheered, and it wasn’t about the past; it was about what was happening in front of them right at that moment. “Whole of the Moon,” holding pride of place in the encore, felt like it had only recently been released, affirming, vital and very much needed right now.
This isn’t the first time musicians from the British Isles have had to educate Americans on their own culture. It’s a tradition that began back when Mick Jagger met Keith Richards on the platform at the Dartford train station, where Jagger was standing there holding blues LPs he’d just gotten via mail order from the States. The Rolling Stones would synthesize what they’d heard, make it their own, and play it back to us. The Beatles did the same with the likes of Motown and Arthur Alexander. U2 got raked over the coals when their late ’80s wandering across the American West inspired “The Joshua Tree.” Sometimes you don’t know what you have until someone who doesn’t take it for granted shows you why they think it’s awesome.
The Waterboys will be back on the other side of the pond by the time you read this, but the life of this project will continue with “Rips From The Cutting Room Floor,” described as “16 tracks recorded during the making of ‘Life, Death And Dennis Hopper’ but which for various reasons didn’t fit the running order. They range from complete unreleased songs to a couple of spoof advertisements featuring Dennis.” Like the first volume, it will be out on Sun Records in December, continuing to keep this bit of history alive.
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from music columnist Caryn Rose
