Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Fleetwood Mac’s Hidden Gem: The Rise & Fall of Danny Kirwan [Highlight From Episode 334]

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Fleetwood Mac’s Hidden Gem: The Rise & Fall of Danny Kirwan [Highlight From Episode 334] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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  Speaker 1: Here's a highlight from a recent episode of Booked on Rock.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Ray robertson his brand new book titled dust More Lives
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: of the Poets with Guitars. Danny Kerwin is maybe the
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  Speaker 1: most interesting musician to make this book. He has kind
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  Speaker 1: of lost that.
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  Speaker 2: That's so cool to hear you say that, because he's
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  Speaker 2: very unknown.
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  Speaker 1: This is a guy you can make a movie out of.
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  Speaker 1: It's a tragic story, but it's a fascinating story, and
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  Speaker 1: it's one of those man if he just maybe got
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  Speaker 1: some help and things could have turned out differently.
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  Speaker 2: Different times, you know.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, he was with Fleetwood Mac from sixty eight
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  Speaker 1: to seventy two. Bear Trees from seventy two is one
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  Speaker 1: of my favorite mactoons.
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  Speaker 2: Oh really, yeah, Oh that's so cool.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right. Quote for a former member of a
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  Speaker 1: world famous rock and roll band. Danny Kerwin is remarkably
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  Speaker 1: little known, both in terms of the biographical details of
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  Speaker 1: his life and the wonderful music he created. He is
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  Speaker 1: not a legend. He is a mystery. The mystery part
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  Speaker 1: of his life is regarding his post Fleetwood maciears right,
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  Speaker 1: that's that's when things get.
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  Speaker 3: And I actually say the same thing that what you
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  Speaker 3: just said. I said, you know, he does deserves a
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  Speaker 3: biographer or a documentary. I've tried to interest a couple
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  Speaker 3: of people and they they're like, oh, but I say, look, man,
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  Speaker 3: he was in Fleetwood Mac.
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  Speaker 2: It wouldn't be you know, he's not like he's unknown.
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  Speaker 2: He's unknown.
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  Speaker 3: But it's that that period of Fleetwood Mac that know.
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  Speaker 3: And you talk about the Peter Green years and then
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  Speaker 3: the the Lindsey Buckingham Stevie Nicks years, there's this period
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  Speaker 3: in between and for me, some of the music that
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  Speaker 3: Danny made and the fact that he joined the band
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  Speaker 3: when he was eighteen years and three months old, not
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  Speaker 3: even a legal drinking age, and four months later they
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  Speaker 3: have a top you know, a number one song with Albatross,
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  Speaker 3: with his song on the flip side. I mean, it's
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  Speaker 3: just too much, too quick. He's living with his mother
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  Speaker 3: in a basement apartment in Brixton. The next thing is
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  Speaker 3: he's traveling the world with this rock band and he
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  Speaker 3: turned he never really was a big drinker. He turns
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  Speaker 3: to drinking as it waited for stress. And then Green
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  Speaker 3: leaves the band and he's pushed out front, you know,
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  Speaker 3: and if you see the pictures of him. I try
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  Speaker 3: to describe him as best I can. He looks, you know,
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  Speaker 3: he's got like the jug ears, the bowl haircut, the
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  Speaker 3: big blue eyes. He doesn't look like a grizzled blue
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  Speaker 3: rock guy, you know, and they're like stick And if
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  Speaker 3: you listen to the bootlegs which I have of him
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  Speaker 3: playing live, you know, he's the stage announcements. He sounds
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  Speaker 3: like he's apologized this nick songs are quiet number We're
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  Speaker 3: gonna do now, you know, it's like he's not that guy.
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  Speaker 3: He also wasn't a jammer, you know. He liked to
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  Speaker 3: write create little, perfect little songs. So again anesthetical to
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  Speaker 3: the time. But when he gets kicked out of the
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  Speaker 3: band in seventy two at twenty.
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  Speaker 2: Two years old, it's kind of over. You know.
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  Speaker 3: He spends three years hanging around, and then he gets
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  Speaker 3: a record contract in seventy five. The first one has
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  Speaker 3: some really nice stuff on if you'd strip away all
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  Speaker 3: the strings.
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  Speaker 2: And horns and all the bullshit.
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  Speaker 3: The next two are abomination, and he basically ends up
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  Speaker 3: in a homeless shelter by the time he's thirty, and
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  Speaker 3: he's not sleeping outside. Sad Yeah, yeah, yeah, either's so
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  Speaker 3: there's some quotes in there that from Mick. Fleetwood wrote
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  Speaker 3: two autobiographies, so he talks about the last time that
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  Speaker 3: he saw him. Because when they're touring Touss, you know,
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  Speaker 3: Rumor sells twenty million copies and Toughs only sells eight million.
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  Speaker 3: But they're in England, and Fleetwood seems like a really
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  Speaker 3: nice guy. He'd looks to look after people. So somehow
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  Speaker 3: or another he used his money and power to sort
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  Speaker 3: of get Danny's information and call him up and invite
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  Speaker 3: him over to the hotel because that's Fleetwood Max playing
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  Speaker 3: Wimberly that night and he said, you know, Danny said
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  Speaker 3: he had slept on a bench late before and that
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  Speaker 3: he had worms. Fleetwood went to hug him. He's like,
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  Speaker 3: don't touch me. Do you want to come to gig? No,
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  Speaker 3: never sees him again. He lived in pubs in his
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  Speaker 3: room and didn't play any more music. And I just
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  Speaker 3: find sudden the and that's for the title of the book.
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  Speaker 3: I'm so pleased that you're a fan. Because obviously Dust
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  Speaker 3: is a song off the last album, the last Danny
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  Speaker 3: Kerwin song that he made with Mac the second last
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  Speaker 3: song on the album, and it's taken from a Rupert
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  Speaker 3: Brooke poem. He's a World War two, World War One poet,
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  Speaker 3: British poet, and he sort of chisels off the first
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  Speaker 3: two lines and it's one of the most haunting, hauntingly
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  Speaker 3: beautiful invocations of the ephemerality of life and fate and
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  Speaker 3: and and he.
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  Speaker 2: Was just so again, just so young.
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  Speaker 3: You know, we're not talking about painters or writers sometimes
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  Speaker 3: get better as they get older. This stuff is often
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  Speaker 3: like lyric poets, it's it's when you're young, with all
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  Speaker 3: that energy and passion and openness that closes up. You know,
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  Speaker 3: the Dylan's of the world who keep making interesting music,
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  Speaker 3: or the Neil Young's, or the Joni Mitchells like I
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  Speaker 3: listened to. Like I think Neil is rated at the
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  Speaker 3: top until Russ never sleeps. And that's that's a long time,
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  Speaker 3: a long time to be making, you know, popular music
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  Speaker 3: and still connecting that way. Where Danny, I think, is
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  Speaker 3: that that kind of flame out that's more typical of
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  Speaker 3: that brilliant flash in the sky that disappears.
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  Speaker 2: I just feel it's.
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  Speaker 3: Important that people need to know about Danny's music, and
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  Speaker 3: I think that they'll get they they'll they'll have a
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  Speaker 3: better life.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it reminds me of said Barrett, what
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  Speaker 1: happened on the night that they did fire Danny Kerwin,
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  Speaker 1: and that was in August of seventy two. There's we
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  Speaker 1: finally got to because he just he bailed before a show.
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  Speaker 2: He bailed before a show.
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  Speaker 3: Apparently he not only was he drinking a lot, he
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  Speaker 3: didn't like his nerves are really bad, so he didn't eat,
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  Speaker 3: so that compounds the drinking. He's really really really really
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  Speaker 3: really thin, really nervous, not sleeping, not eating, drinking and
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  Speaker 3: apparently by the end it wasn't one incident. Fleetwood was
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  Speaker 3: the only one who sort of was the intermediary. Everyone
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  Speaker 3: else was. He said, asking Jenny for a cigarette at
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  Speaker 3: that point was like asking for a fight.
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  Speaker 2: He would isolate himself self isolate, and.
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  Speaker 3: Apparently Bob Welsh, he was in the band by then,
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  Speaker 3: he had problems with Bob Welsh. And the night before
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  Speaker 3: the gig, they were not the night of the gig,
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  Speaker 3: they were backstage getting ready to go on and he
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  Speaker 3: smashed up his famous less Paul and smashed his head
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  Speaker 3: against the wall.
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  Speaker 2: Instead.
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  Speaker 3: I'm not going on stage, and you can do a
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  Speaker 3: lot of things to your bandmates. But you can't bail
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  Speaker 3: on them, you know, you can't not play. And so
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  Speaker 3: they limped out there and finished the gig. But they're
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  Speaker 3: missing their league guitar player. They're missing the guy who
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  Speaker 3: sings a lot of their songs and the skin of
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  Speaker 3: the saddest thing that I found was that when Fleetwood
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  Speaker 3: told him that that at the hotel, he said, and
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  Speaker 3: that Danny didn't really know that there was a problem.
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  Speaker 2: Oh really, I've been a hamp. I thought that's not
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  Speaker 2: gonna bode well for the rest of his life. Like,
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  Speaker 2: you don't think there's a problem, you.
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  Speaker 1: Know, No, that was just that was just another day
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  Speaker 1: for him.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, It's like, yeah, and you're twenty two years old.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, I mean me, at twenty one, I couldn't
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  Speaker 3: slap my ass with both hands. At twenty two, it's
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  Speaker 3: like you're you're already now a has been I.
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  Speaker 2: Mean, that must just do your nut in entirely.
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  Speaker 3: The first album second chapter has some things I write
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  Speaker 3: in the book about how someone released a compilation in
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  Speaker 3: two thousand that sort of strips away some of the
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  Speaker 3: extraneous instrumentation, that there's some beautiful songs in there, but
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  Speaker 3: you can already.
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  Speaker 2: See he's sort of regressing back to the kind of music.
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  Speaker 3: That interesting thame what Danny is and that generation of
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  Speaker 3: rockers is their record collection isn't just filled with rock music.
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  Speaker 2: He grew up on his mother's record collection, so a
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  Speaker 2: lot of.
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  Speaker 3: Jazz music, hall music, top top top ten, top thirty
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  Speaker 3: music in nineteen twenty all these sorts of antiquarian musical form.
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  Speaker 2: So it really enriches his style.
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  Speaker 3: You know, if you just listen to rock your music,
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  Speaker 3: your sound is going to be, you know, fairly limited
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  Speaker 3: that way. And what's interesting about him is that later
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  Speaker 3: on when he does those solo albums, they almost returned
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  Speaker 3: to this sort of Anavelian kind of It sounds like
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  Speaker 3: he's trying to make music for a different era, almost
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  Speaker 3: like he's willing himself to go back to his youth
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  Speaker 3: or his mother's youth.
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  Speaker 2: It's it's very painful stuff.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've never I've never heard it. I've never heard
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  Speaker 1: the solo stuff, so I'm gonna give it a listen.
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  Speaker 2: There's four songs off the second second chapter, including the
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  Speaker 2: title track, but yeah, they need they threw everything. Danny
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  Speaker 2: wasn't a major player on this.
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  Speaker 3: His produce, his manager was there, and so you know,
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  Speaker 3: when in doubt, put violin, when in don't, put horns,
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  Speaker 3: put things.
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  Speaker 1: And and then the next two after that most mostly
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  Speaker 1: cover songs because he really wasn't writing all that much.
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  Speaker 3: Songs that he had written ten years before, new songs,
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  Speaker 3: songs by people in the band. His manager wrote a song.
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  Speaker 3: You know, someone probably said, hey, he was in Fleetwood Mac.
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  Speaker 3: He's good. He used to be good looking. Anyway, he's
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  Speaker 3: a good looking young man. Sure, we're not gonna throw
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  Speaker 3: a huge amount amount of money at him or anything.
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  Speaker 3: But the irony is that his first solo album after
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  Speaker 3: two years out of MAC is in seventy five, the
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  Speaker 3: year that the first MAC album comes out, you know,
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  Speaker 3: the first one with Stevie Nix and the one just
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  Speaker 3: before Rumors and it sells, you know, only three million
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  Speaker 3: or something, and then rumors.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the last the last couple are they're hard
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  Speaker 2: to listen to. He's he's clearly not the uh he's not.
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  Speaker 2: He's not powering this.
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  Speaker 3: Someone else is sort of you know, building a record
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  Speaker 3: around so they can get a check.