Henk reappears on this song
of the sea, this time as The Cursed Mate, facing off with much tormented
shrieking against Bobby O'Donovan's Ahab-like Captain. Henk didn't
actually get the Cursed Mate's final despairing scream exactly how he
wanted it right away. By the time he did, there was neither a dry eye
nor an unpierced eardrum in the
house.
Skeleton Crew was written as a gift for my now-deceased friend Larry
Holler, whose yacht the Little Wing I once piloted to Key Largo with
him. The song obliquely recalls Larry's spectacular showdown with a
drug-fuelled maniac fiddler one night in the middle of Biscayne Bay to
which I had been witness, and it was written entirely as a squib to be
copied in copperplate gothic and left to moulder in the galley of The
Little Wing. However, it's much more requested than anything I've ever
written to be taken seriously, and so here it is, in cinemascope and
glorious technicolor, The Captain played with slit-eyed menace by Bobby
O'Donovan, and with some literally thunderous drumming by Diane Ward,
who, asked to approximate "a storm at sea" produced the immense and
radically panned floor toms which punctuate the Captain's reply and
which conclude the piece. I was delighted that Mark Hornsby was able to
find me a mellotron choir. The Soldiers' Chorus of Henk, Bobby and Mark
had proven so effective on Brother Judas that they were here briefly
reanimated as The Dead Men's Chorus, to chilling effect. Mark Kane, with
whom I play live regularly, contributes significantly to this song with
fiddle and bouzouki (pictured here played by Mark in session), an
instrument which flavours a number of the tracks on the album.