Stories of disastrous, but ultimately successful, auditions abound in rock lore. Adrian Belew's difficult audition for Frank Zappa is a particularly good one, and another happens to be that of Scott Gorham's tryout for Thin Lizzy.
Now, it wasn't a disaster due to Gorham being unprepared; it was because the guitarist's bootleg Les Paul almost seemed to have a vendetta against him.
Having sold his Stratocaster to Supertramp’s Roger Hodgson, Gorham was left with, as he described in a recent interview with That One Guitar, only a “horrible black, Japanese Les Paul-ish” guitar with which to audition for Thin Lizzy.
The glory of The Boys Are Back in Town couldn't have been further away at that moment...
“[The guitar] really, on the day, started to fall apart, right in front of everybody's eyes, which was very embarrassing,” Gorham told That One Guitar.
In particular, the screws on the guitar's pickguard came out, leaving that part “dangling down.”
“Both Phil [Lynott, Thin Lizzy's bassist and frontman] and I, we were both on our knees trying to find this damn screw,” Gorham recounted, “And I said, ‘Ah, forget it,’ and I just ripped the scratchplate off.”
It may not come as a great surprise, then, that Gorham never wanted to be put in that situation again. Even once he had the means to acquire the best of the best genuine Les Pauls, Gorham would do the same thing with each subsequent example that he played.
“Afterwards, I looked at that guitar, and I went, ‘You know, that looks so much better without the scratchplate,’” Gorham said. “So, every Les Paul I had after that, if it had a scratchplate, that was the first thing that went. I took that scratch straight off because I love that shape of the Les Paul. And I just thought the scratchplate ruined it.”
In an interview with Guitarist earlier this year, Gorham went into further detail about the fateful audition.
“I had no idea who Thin Lizzy was,” Gorham recalled. “I’d never seen a picture of these guys, never heard any of their music. But I was told they’d had a hit with Whiskey In The Jar and asked if I wanted to put my name forward. ‘Hell, yeah. I got 30 more days left on my visa then I gotta go home.’
“The audition was at a dinner club. Phil stuck out that bear paw of his and shook my hand. We walk in and Phil says, ‘Hey guys, this is Scott.’ Robbo [Thin Lizzy guitarist Brian Robertson] just looked up and went, ‘Yeah, okay.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, let me warm my hands on that welcome.’
“But the reason they did that was because they’d already auditioned 25 guitar players. And here comes number 26, and guess what – he’s a fucking Yank.”
