As much as classic-rock radio purports to be the last bastion of Real Music, the format is, of course, just as formulaic, repetitive, and popularity-driven as any Top 40 station. Classic-rock radio doesn’t honor veteran bands’ legacies; it contracts and distorts them, reducing diverse multi-decade careers to one or two focus tracks. And because of this, a lot of people have been raised to believe that Thin Lizzy were a hard-rock band, thanks to the only two songs of theirs you’ve been liable to hear on a North American terrestrial rock station over the past 30 years. But as the missing link between Van Morrison and Van Halen, the Irish outfit were really a sensitive soul band who rocked hard as a defense mechanism, shielding the late Phil Lynott’s sad-eyed, streetwise narratives in a molten, harmonic twin-guitar attack that anticipated heavy metal without ever fully hardening into it. And while Lizzy’s sharp-angled logo fit in right next to the KISS and AC/DC patches on your older brother’s denim jacket, Lynott was the rare arena-rocker who wasn’t shrieking to hit the cheap seats—he was singing about the sort of poor bastards stuck in them.
That underdog mentality has made Thin Lizzy perhaps the only band of chest-baring, leather-panted '70s rockers to be unironically embraced in the more humble environs of indie rock, having been namedropped in song by Belle and Sebastian and the Hold Steady, covered by the Mountain Goats, and lovingly imitated by Ted Leo. And the band’s eclectic palette of formative influences, not to mention their unique socio-political dynamic (with a half-black frontman, and members from both sides of Ireland’s Catholic/Protestant divide) go a long way in explaining why their early Decca Records catalogue is currently being reissued on vinyl by the astute historical preservationists at Light In the Attic, as opposed to some major-label bargain-bin CD run.
Like Thin Lizzy's 1971 debut (reissued by LITA in 2012), Shades of a Blue Orphange (1972) and Vagabonds of the Western World (1973) have been ignored by classic-rock radio playlists, and their existence is rarely acknowledged even by the band’s infinite stream of compilations and live albums. The Thin Lizzy represented here—the early trio formation of Lynott, drummer Brian Downey, and ex-Them guitarist Eric Bell—found themselves in the same position as many other blues-schooled rock bands at the dawn of the post-hippie '70s: aesthetically confused and willing to try anything in hope something would stick (all while surreptitiously recording entire albums of Deep Purple covers to pay the bills). And while neither of these albums is wholly rewarding enough to qualify as an overlooked classic, they’re still illuminating documents of a hard-luck band finding its voice for the first time, if only in fits and starts.
As Shades of a Blue Orphanage makes abundantly clear from the get-go, Thin Lizzy weren’t lacking ambition at this stage, but rather direction: Album opener "The Rise and Dear Demise of the Funky Nomadic Tribes" is every bit as ridiculous and unwieldy as its title suggests, cycling through tough funk grooves, proto-metal riffage, and progged-out breakdowns en route to a drum solo that fades out unceremoniously at the seven-minute mark. But the track is also something of a red herring, an early, clumsy stab at heaviosity from a band that, at this point, had a much better grasp of intimacy. Even though Thin Lizzy’s sound had yet to settle into place—variously taking the form of ersatz Elvis exercises ("I Don’t Want to Forget How to Drive"), pavement-splitting rockers ("Call the Police"), Astral Weeks-esque folk reveries ("Chatting Today") and ethereal piano lullabies ("Sarah")—Lynott’s lyrical voice was already providing a sturdy anchor to rally it around. On richly detailed character studies like "Buffalo Gal" and the hymn-like title track, the then-23-year-old Lynott was already singing with the rueful wisdom of a man several decades his senior, laying the foundation for the rugged-romantic archetype that would define his legend.
While Shades of a Blue Orphanage did little to reverse the band’s flagging fortunes, its follow-up single—a glammed-up cover of the traditional Irish standard "Whiskey in the Jar"—gave Thin Lizzy its first UK hit single in 1972. But that success would not boost the commercial prospects of the band’s next full-length, Vagabonds of the Western World. Fearing that "Whiskey" was a novelty hit that didn’t truly reflect the band’s sound, Thin Lizzy refused to include the song on the record. Which is kind of funny in retrospect, since the great breakthrough Thin Lizzy made on "Whiskey"—in the form of Bell’s thick, mercurial guitar hook—provided them with a new sonic blueprint.
Thin Lizzy had yet to divest itself of all its hare-brained ideas—the spoken-word, psych-funk workout "The Hero and the Madmen" may fancy itself a western-themed storybook epic, but it sure as hell ain’t no "Cowboy Song". They were, however, starting to kick out the jams with greater confidence and consistency. When Lynott shouts "I’m a rocker!", it’s no mere crotch-grabbing macho posturing; it’s the sound of a spiritually adrift musician ecstatically discovering his true calling. (Accordingly, the song in question, "Rocker", was the one tune from this era to keep its place on the band’s set lists long enough to warrant inclusion on the band’s definitive 1978 concert document, Live and Dangerous.) And though Bell would depart soon after the album’s release, his sweet, swirling leads on the swinging opener "Mama Nature Said", the gorgeous soul serenade "Little Girl in Bloom", and the storming title track laid down the gasoline trail that Lizzy’s future dream-team tandem of Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham would set ablaze. Respectively, the best songs on Shades of a Blue Orphanage and Vagabonds of the Western World displayed the early, indecisive Thin Lizzy's facility with wobbly barstool ballads and swaggering, hot-wired rockers. Their greatest victories would come once they started hitting both targets at the same time.
