Thin Lizzy was a live band. Despite an impressive catalogue, the band never seemed to capture the energy and danger of its live shows in the studio. However, Lizzy's 1978 "Live And Dangerous" album comes close. It is arguably one of the best live rock albums ever recorded.

VH-1 Classics has just released "Still Dangerous: Live at the Tower Theatre Philadelphia 1977." The concert was recorded at the beginning of the band's ill-fated American tour, where bassist/singer Phil Lynott's health cut the trek short. "Still Dangerous" shows a hungry and wild band road testing and tightening tunes that would wind up on the classic album. It's an awesome glimpse into the history of an extremely influential group.

Thin Lizzy was a rock 'n' roll anomaly; the band was from Ireland, the singer was black. Yet the band's trademark twin-guitar-solo attack raised the bar for rock guitar, and echoes of its influence can still be heard today. Guitarist Scott Gorham, the lone Yank in the outfit, keeps Thin Lizzy going. Gorham was instrumental in uncovering these tapes. He now hangs his hat in England, where he still lives and breathes Thin Lizzy, and spoke to City over the phone recently. An edited transcript follows.

CITY: As an American, how did you wind up joining Thin Lizzy?

Scott Gorham: I was already over here [in Europe]. My joke is, "I only came over for the weekend." In fact I was on a six-month visa and I had already been here for almost five months. So I had 30 more days to go. Mentally I was already geared up and packed up to go back home to L.A. But a pretty cool thing happened. I was in a little pub rock band called Fastbuck. We used to get a lot of musicians to get up and jam with us. And one of the guys that used to get up with us all the time was this Irish guy. This one particular evening he came up to me and said, "I don't know if you're interested, but I know of an Irish rock band that's looking for another guitar player. Do you want me to put your name up?" As soon as he said "Irish" and "rock" I was immediately intrigued.

This struck you as odd?

I didn't know there was any such thing as an Irish rock band. I asked him what the name of the group was and he goes, "Well, it's this group called Thin Lizzy." And I thought, Wow, what a fuckin' dumb name that is. Anybody with a name like that is never going to get big.

So when did you first hear the band play?

They were playing in this African supper club, if you can imagine that. They had all these black waiters with really colorful-looking shirts on working in the place. So the first guy to walk up to me is Phil. And I look at him and I'm thinking he's one of the waiters. "Yeah, hey buddy, can you get me a coffee and where's the band?" And he goes, "Oh, I'm Phil." I have to admit I was kind of shocked; Irish rock band, black guy, and he's got an Irish accent. Man, this is getting all fucked up. It was really turning my head around. But I got up on stage, they taught me a few of the songs. I think they were pretty impressed with how quickly I caught on to everything. I gelled pretty easily with the other guitar player, Brian Robertson. Unbeknownst to me they were recording this whole thing and the three of them later that night listened to it and Phil himself called me up that evening and asked me to join the band.

So you got the gig

Yeah. Go figure, 30 more days to go. So I ended up spending the rest of my life here.

How did you guys come up with the idea for your signature twin-guitar leads?

The solo thing was really kind of a no-brainer because we were both lead guitarists. At that point it was just figuring out who had the best feel for which song or which part of the song. The harmony thing was more of an un-premeditated accident. We were in doing one of the really early albums. And Brian Robertson...there was this certain guitar line he was just laying down and the engineer mistakenly left the delay on his guitar, so as he was playing the line, the line was repeating and he was harmonizing with himself. And we were like, "Oh shit, play that back." So we re-did it. They turned off the delay and I laid down the harmony line for it. We just kept going back and fourth like that thinking, This isn't a sound, but it's just a pretty cool thing to have in your arsenal.

Phil was also integral in that sound, keeping the mid-range and bottom solid while the guitars were up in higher registers. He played like a guitar player.

Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up, because really it was only years later that I realized what an essential part Phil's bass playing played in this whole thing. After Phil, I started playing with a lot of different bass players and I realized just how fucking solid this guy was. And the kind of notes Phil would pick out were really cool also. Phil would always make fun of his bass playing.

Do you think Thin Lizzy the live band overshadowed Thin Lizzy the studio band?

There's no doubt in my mind it was that way.

Why?

I'm not really sure. For some reason, we just couldn't get it in the studio. I don't know why that was. Whatever songs we would do, we would immediately take them out on the road andBANG! They would just kind of blossom where we couldn't get them to blossom in the studio. Now, I don't know if that was an engineer or a producer thing or whatever. But that always seemed to be the case; we couldn't get it down on record, but god damn it, it always happened on stage every time for us. To be honest, maybe a lot of the problem was we did so many of these albums in quick succession that we never really gave ourselves enough downtime to really dig deep into each of these songs. I think that was a big mistake on Thin Lizzy's part.

How'd you stumble upon the tapes that lead to "Still Dangerous?"

I knew we had all these tapes in a lock-up, and knew at some point they were going to be in danger of disintegrating and oxidizing. I had no idea how many live shows we had recoded. There was box after box after box. But it was one box that stuck out. All it had written on it was "Philadelphia 2." Now, I remember doing the [radio show] "King Biscuit Hour" - it's been bootlegged, it's bad production, it's really just a desk monitor mix, everyone's heard it. But the managers who were managing us at the time reminded me this was a two-night show. This was right after we'd done the "Bad Reputation" album and we'd been offered an arena tour with two or three different headline acts. In our minds this tour was going to break us in America. We were going to show everybody we weren't just "The Boys Are Back In Town."

So this was a warm up for the tour?

This was the two-week cushion we gave ourselves to prepare. The second night was really a Thin Lizzy crowd.

And this was before "Live And Dangerous?"

Same year.

If Phil hadn't died...

If Phil wouldn't have died we'd still be on the road to this day. I have no doubt about that at all. Three weeks before he died, I was over at his house, at that point the band had been broken up for a couple of years. He was still having a very, very hard time with the drugs - I fortunately had been able to get off the drugs at this point. He brought out an acoustic guitar and started playing these chord patterns. "This is a new song I've been working on...and gee, you and I we really gotta get back together again..." And I was all for that. I was like "abso-fuckin-lutly." Three weeks later Phil was dead.

Will this new record be something just for the old fans, or are you hoping to bring a new generation to the legacy of this band?

I'm hoping this is an album for everybody. This album shows everybody just what the hell this thing called Thin Lizzy was all about.