You don't even need to listen to Ian McLagan’s new album, Never Say Never, to feel a few tears coming on. Just reading the lyrics is enough. Actually, just looking at his face on the cover could do it, if you know the reason why he can’t quite bring himself to smile, why you can’t see any sparkle in his eyes. “As always, for Kim,” it says on the back cover, under a picture of a beautiful young woman. He lost her two years ago, after 28 years of marriage. He didn’t get to say goodbye.
The edge is gone from his grief now, the acute bouts of tears and struggle just to make it through another day without her. In person, he does smile, and laughs frequently — often after cracking a joke in his impish, almost mischievous, nudge-nudge, wink-wink way. But the ache is still strong; you can feel it when he talks about her and what he did to cope after her death in a car crash. You can sense it in the Manor house they shared since moving to Austin 14 years ago after being introduced to the city by keyboardist McLagan’s dear old friend, former Small Faces/Faces bandmate Ronnie Lane. Her hats hang on wall hooks, as if any minute, she still might walk into the room and plop one on her head. She peers out from photographs, mostly as one half of a couple that clearly adored each other. Nooks and crannies are filled with things they cherished together: dog figurines, books, antique lamps … slowly, McLagan is starting to sort through some of it: old videos and DVDs are about as far as he’s gotten.
When you do hear those songs — those nakedly revealing words of longing and despair, those memories he wishes he could share again — the emotional impact of his loss hits even harder. It’s heartrending, and yet so sweet, you want to hug him just for being able to express his feelings so eloquently. And maybe you do wipe away a tear of your own.
But maudlin it’s not. Because Ian “Mac” McLagan just isn’t that kind of guy. Sensitive, yes. Candid, yes. But he’s not trying to elicit sympathy. He’s just trying to cope in the only way he knows how: by making music.
“You know, it’s not like I sat down and decided to make an album about Kim, it really wasn’t,” he says, occasionally sipping from a glass of Guinness and giving one of his two friendly dogs a pat. “But after she died, I didn’t write anything straightaway. I was kind of watching myself, wondering whether I would write, if I could write, or what form that would take.”
The day after she died, he began playing one song over and over. It’s called “Where Angels Hide.” He’d written it a few years previously when his friend Ben Mandelson, his bandmate in Billy Bragg’s Blokes, lost his wife. McLagan found it soothed him a bit to play it.
“I never told him, ’cause I could never play it for him. It was too touching — too tender,” McLagan says. “And so years went by and I would go back to it every now and again, and I’d write another bridge. There’s no bridge in it. I’d put a bridge in, and then I wrote another bridge … and then I realized it was a little too jazzy.
“As soon as I started playing it — I mean, playing it for me — I threw the bridge out and the song was finished. It always had been finished.”
There are words I don’t have, I can’t find them/There’s nothing I can say/To help you or get you through the day. The words that might heal you escape me/Nothing that I write/can help you or get you through the night.
You’re not alone, she’ll always be there/Right by your side singing lullabies. And when you dream she’ll always be/where angels hide in paradise.
There are words I should say and want to/But I don’t know where to start. A whisper might shatter your heart. The words unspoken might say more than any I can find/To help you find some peace of mind.
“It helped me,” he says. “It really did help me.”
Mandelson finally heard the song as the album was being mixed in England by McLagan’s old friend, Glyn Johns. By then, the lap steel player had remarried. The fact that Mandelson fell in love again, McLagan says, “gives me hope.” But he doesn’t seem ready to move on just yet.
Never Say Never's title tune has to do with the first time McLagan saw Kim, “clear as day,” after she died. She appeared to him just a few weeks after her death, while he was staying at the beach house they’d rented on the coast for their annual vacation. He couldn’t get his money back on the deal, so he went anyway, loaded down with cases of Guinness, some tequila, a copy of Bob Dylan’s Modern Times (“the healing album”), thank-you notes and stamps, so he could write responses to all the sympathy cards that had poured in. One hot day, the dogs started barking, and there she was.
He says he’s learned that’s a common experience for mourners. He’s also spotted her in Austin’s Lucky Lounge, where he and his faithful Bump Band (guitarist/vocalist Scrappy Jud Newcomb, bassist/vocalist Mark Andes and drummer Don Harvey), have a regular Thursday happy-hour gig when they’re not on the road.
“When the Crying is Over,” the album’s closer, most directly addresses McLagan’s own grief and expresses his hope that he and Kim will be together again in heaven. But another song, “Killing Me with Love,” actually was written before his wife’s death; it was one of several he’d shelved so he could work on Spiritual Boy, his tribute to Lane, the Small Faces/Faces singer/bassist who died in 1997 from complications of multiple sclerosis.
“Some people thought that was kind of a comic song and it’s actually, to me, a love song,” he says. It would be easy to misconstrue, though, considering it’s got some lines that don’t sound so tender, and a Vaudevillian lean that, it turns out, is also a nod to Lane. “When Glyn Johns was mixing the stuff in London, he turned around and I looked at him and I said, ‘Influenced by someone we both know,’” McLagan recalls. “He said, ‘Obviously.’”
It was Lane who lured McLagan and the former Kim Kerrigan Moon (she was previously married to Who drummer Keith Moon) to Austin from L.A., where they’d migrated from England. Spiritual Boy contains covers of some of Lane’s greatest compositions or co-writes, like “Itchycoo Park” and “Glad and Sorry,” plus a song McLagan wrote for him, “Hello Old Friend.” It was released in time for what would have been Lane’s 60th birthday on April 1, 2006 — four months before Kim died.
During a tour of his supremely cluttered, yet somehow inviting garage-turned-studio, dubbed the Dog House (near a room he calls the Laughing Dog bar, over which hangs his painting of three other beloved companions), he says, “It’s the only place in the house that Ronnie Lane’s been in. They couldn’t take him up the stairs because he would go all stiff.” During Lane’s 1994 visit, Mac played him “Hello Old Friend.”
“When we were cutting Spiritual Boy,” he says, “it was even more spiritual because it was a room he’d been in.”
Over an old upright piano, there’s a photo of Lane and McLagan from the Small Faces days. They’re in Dublin, visiting Mac’s grandmother on a spur-of-the-moment excursion. Mementos and memories fill the room, and there’s a story to go with every one. The one thing that looks out of place amid the jam of Hammonds, Wurlitzers, Leslie speaker cabinets, desks, books and assorted stacks of stuff is a T-shirt dangling from a hanger as if it were drip-drying laundry. It’s the one with the crown on it that Kim’s wearing in the album photo, taken not long after they started dating. It’s one of his; he’s wearing it on the cover. The inner sleeve contains a self-portrait he did in 1966. He’s wearing the shirt there, too.
McLagan calls Spiritual Boy “a labor of love,” and Never Say Never “even more so.” Several songs were ditched because they no longer seemed good enough or didn’t fit. But he’s got other projects in mind for a couple of them; he also wants to do an instrumental album at some point, though he hasn’t really written instrumentals and he thinks it will appeal only to his British market. He also fears excess scrutiny, though perhaps he’s worrying needlessly. His songs and his fingers are stronger than his voice anyway, and at his age — 63 — what the heck?
“I always compare myself to Booker T. — and I stop right there,” he says, never considering the possibility that Booker T. is comparing himself to a short British guy with spiky white hair. In the world of rock ’n’ roll organ players, it’s hard to name a talent more accomplished than either one of them. Booker T. might have the MG’s and “Green Onions,” but McLagan’s notches include the Stones, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt … not to mention some iconic Small Faces/Faces songs.
Part of his charm is that he has that vulnerability. He’s also got none of that “don’t you know who I think I am?” attitude of importance that some who’ve experienced fame carry with them long after their 15 minutes have expired. (Which is not to say that McLagan’s riding on past glory. He’s still very much in demand as a session musician, and very much revered by his international fan base.) Of course, Austin hasn’t yet become the kind of town where people get very far with that kind of arrogance. He talks about how welcoming, nurturing, Austin has been.
“Thank god I was here when Kim died, I’ll tell you,” McLagan says. “She loved it here. She blossomed. And I’ve blossomed since I’ve been here. You know, if we’d been still in L.A., I’d have bought a gun. It would have been too depressing. No, Austin’s been very, very good to me and her. … I actually mentioned this at Lucky Lounge on Thursday — I tend to waffle in-between songs. I said, ‘You know, every week someone will come to me after the show and say, we’re so happy to have you here.’ And I say, ‘You don’t know the half. I’m happier than you know to be here.’ It’s absolutely true. It’s brilliant here.”
Then he steps out into the waning sun and heads off toward his favorite restaurant, Little Thailand — which gets a free plug every week during his show. It’s a kitschy little joint in Garfield, basically in the middle of nowhere, but it’s got fabulous food. He’s a regular, and they love him as much as he loves the place. Even there, he winds up in conversation with people who gingerly approach, wanting just to interact with one of Austin’s biggest living musical legends. Even after all these years, he’s still flattered when it happens.
Before he goes, he stops in the kitchen to say hi and greet the waitress’ new baby. His small talk is always punctuated with laughter; this is a guy, after all, who has a page of jokes on his Web site, who still loves nothing more than raising a glass and having a laugh.
He knows that one day, the sparkle might return to his eyes. Heck, one day, he might even fall in love again. You can never say never. But for now, life goes on, one day at a time.
