‘Jailbreak’ Turns 50: Is it the greatest American rock album?
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
Look, I know that headline up there has you scratching your head: Thin Lizzy, all five members, are from Ireland. So the query should be answered as “no,” and you can close this email/blog post/TikTok/AI dispatch. But in the words of Lee Corso, not so fast my friend, follow me here:
Thin Lizzy’s iconic LP, Jailbreak, turns 50 this year. The group’s sixth album, it was the one that took them from “hard rock Irish curio with a bass player who writes and sings all the songs” to “the band that made “The Boys are Back in Town.” The group had released five LPs in the early ‘70s on Vertigo Records, all of them performing fair to middling on the British market—then dominated by Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, before punk blew that country wide open—and were given the “one last chance” directive from Vertigo. Make a huge album or be dropped; have a hit in America or head back to Ireland and start playing pubs again.
Thin Lizzy, backs against the wall, went into the studio in late 1975, and looked to America for inspiration: lead singer and chief songwriter Phil Lynott captured the America of the mind in the resulting nine songs, with songs of freedom, cowboys, running away in a way that is uniquely American (we were founded, after all, but a group of Englishman running away from England), and loves lost across the open vistas of the American Southwest. In a push to become something bigger than the meat and potatoes hard rock band they had been before, Thin Lizzy somehow captured what it was like to survive in America in what was then its 200th year, despite having little to no experience with what America was actually like.
And I contend that this is why it’s the best American rock album: you can’t capture what it’s like here from the inside. Our best representations come from the ideal America, the America imagined by people who haven’t been here but see in America some future promise, some alternate way of being, some romantic locale where your boys are always coming back, and so is your girl, and so are the guys in lockup, and so is the cowboy. In a fit of artistic inspiration, Phil Lynott summed up 200 years of the emotional American experience, and sold it back to us, from Dublin.
Is there an album opening better than the riff-as-door-kick of “Jailbreak”? A song about riding out into the wild of the night with your friends, riding across the proverbial Delaware with the wind at your back with “boys who mean business,” might as well be the American revolution as a tight four minutes. “Running Back” captures the windswept fields of the Middle West, where no matter how for you get away to the coasts, you feel tethered to that anchor point. “Fight or Fall” and “Warriors” capture the everyday fight against the dying of the light, keeping your head above water at all costs. “Cowboy Song”—before it was rewritten by hair metal icons Bon Jovi as “Wanted Dead or Alive”—was the defining song capturing the feeling of riding the highways. For the musicians in the songs, that means busses, and fans, and publicists. But if you’re driving your secondhand Saturn SL1 from 2003 down highways, it hits the same way.
And of course, there’s “The Boys are Back in Town,” the greatest rock song from a decade full of them. 50 years old, it still captures the feeling of being 12, 22, 32, 42, or 72, and being around the people who know you best, who know all the best stories, who fill your proverbial cup. It’s an anthem for every major U.S. holiday; particularly the 4th of July, when everyone is in town for cookouts, and your own American years drop like so many grains of sand in the hourglass. It was by a considerable margin Thin Lizzy’s biggest song—it hit number 12 on the Billboard charts, in an era dominated by early disco—and they never really had the chance to top it. Phil Lynott would be dead in under 10 years of alcoholism and drug addiction-induced septicemia, proving the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that there are no second acts in American life, Lynott’s forever tied to the biggest song on his band’s biggest album.
All of this to say: This weekend, America turns 250 years old. If you want to celebrate that event properly, take the 36-minute ride on Jailbreak. It asks not for patriotism, or reverence, or a statue erected in its honor. It is, instead, an album about how things are, in our hearts.
