ROCK 'N' ROLL NEVER FORGETS

With its working class roots and boozy background, rock ‘n’ roll often teeters on the edge of chaos and violence.  

Rock music, on the other hand - usually the popular music of the day - tends more towards the predictable and mainstream.

Having played both, I barely differentiated between them until I began to try and make some sense of a life spent in music.

Basically, rock ‘n’ roll is about sparking an interaction between band and audience that can take both beyond themselves. While rock music is putting on a show that you invite the audience to enjoy and participate in.

The differentiation can be applied to any kind of music. For instance, I might describe The Dubliners as a rock ‘n’ roll type of folk band and The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem as more from the rock end of that spectrum.

The early Dubliners were chaotic, strayed from a set list if there was one, drank copious amounts of alcohol, and interacted spontaneously with their audience.

Liam Clancy once told me that everything about his group was choreographed, down to the last yelp and joke. Each member had acting experience, they rehearsed their sets thoroughly, and would often perfect them in their dressing room.

They were instantly recognizable by their uniform of the Aran sweater, while The Dubliners looked as if they might have slept in whatever they were wearing, and probably did.

Both bands were brilliant on stage and you can trace the roots of most current Irish folk groups to one or the other.

Being strictly choreographed, the Clancy’s/Makem shows were well behaved; while there was plenty of alcoholic chaos and the occasional dustup at a Dubliners’ outing.

Both bands were political, but there was the little matter of the Irish Civil War between them. 

The Dubliners boasted a left-wing, urban antipathy to the Irish Free State government, while the Clancy’s/Makem tended towards a more general anti-British imperialist stance.

My own journey through Folk, Rock and the general kitchen sink of music, was definitely affected by the roiling elements of chaos, alcohol, and politics.

Wexford was a Labour town in the midst of a Fianna Fail/Fine Gael county. Though most people were Catholic and paid at least lip service to Rome, yet socialism had strong roots in the town.

 

Oddly enough, the songs of Stephen Foster were very popular in the working men’s pubs along the Main Street and the Quayside.

But if one were singing Old Folks At Home, “comrade” would be effortlessly substituted for such racial slurs as “Darky.”

At the age of 17, I was recruited to play bass in a band run by local maestro, Johnny Reck. Talk about chaos, we rarely rehearsed, and I had to learn bass while standing on one foot in the midst of near riots.

Why so?  Well Johnny promoted “young people dances” where testosterone and preening ruled without the restraints of official security, so when a cider brawl broke out – as it invariably did - bodies would come flying towards the stage, and one had to kick them away until the participants exhausted themselves. 

Johnny’s cardinal rule was that music must continue through all dancefloor battles and the stage be protected at all costs. This strategy ensured that violence would remain localized, courting and kissing could continue unabated, thus preventing “all hell from breaking loose.”

A true rock ‘n’ roll apprenticeship, yet it hardly prepared me for The Bronx. There in the boom-time 80’s and early 90’s chaos, alcohol, and politics ruled unrestrained, along with the seeming right of every punter to demand their choice of songs.

This presented no little problem, since Chris Byrne and I had decided that Black 47 would become an all-original-songs band as quickly as possible.

Not only did the patrons despise unfamiliar songs, some didn’t want to hear Reggae or Hip-Hop beats either. I guess those rhythms challenged some undefined color bar.

These patrons’ demands rarely occasioned intellectual debates, the besotted clientele would have already put in a full day’s work on a building site and could sling sacks of cement as casually as I could swing a guitar.

Yet I wouldn’t give back a minute of the experience. With new songs nightly ricocheting off the sheet-rocked walls of Bainbridge Avenue, you had to fight to survive, and your only weapons were a dogged determination and an unshakeable belief in the chaotic, boozy power of Celtic Rock ‘N’ Roll.