I Miss David Bowie

 I miss David Bowie.

 “Sure, what would the likes of you be doin’ hobnobbin’ with a superstar?” You might counter.

Well, back in the late 1970’s he bought Pierce Turner and myself a large brandy each.

Turner & Kirwan of Wexford were debuting some tracks from a Science Fiction album, no less, in an uptown club called Hurrah when some yahoo roared out, “Play Suffragette City” – a Bowie song we were known to perform.

To which Turner snarkily replied, “We’ll play it when David buys us a double brandy.”

Lo and behold, at the end of the set we were presented with two large Rémy Martins in fancy tumblers, with a message from “Mr. Bowie” that while he loved our extra-terrestrial explorations, he would have been honored to hear our version of his ditty.

New York was a very different place back then. David probably hopped into a checker cab and dropped by Hurrah on a whim. He had no security detail with him and left as discreetly as he arrived.

Nowadays, Kim Kardashian wouldn’t check into the Ladies without a couple of beefy bodyguards in tow.

Celebrities were as common as cockroaches in the New York City of old. My brother, Jemmy, while plying his trade as a waterproofer on the face of the Carlyle Hotel once had Mick Jagger roar down, “Jesus on high, can’t a man get a decent night’s sleep in this kip?”

That was nothing compared to the profanity-laced tongue-lashing he received from Lauren Bacall when shoring up the Dakota.

One of his crew was so taken aback he was moved to whisper, “I wonder what Bogie ever saw in her?”

Lest you think this column is devoted to name dropping, I will refrain from mentioning my favorite Hendix story that concerned a window frame slicing a centimeter from one of Jimi’s divine fingers.

Andy Warhol called it correctly - everyone is a celebrity these days, however, instead of his projected 15 minutes of fame, better use your 15 seconds wisely.

I can barely walk down my block anymore for fear of losing an eye - there are so many wannabe Kardashians brandishing selfie-sticks while inanely mugging for their iPhones.

Will someone tell me what the Kardashians are famous for anyway? I’ve been out of the celebrity loop since the Murdochs quit flogging The Post in the subways. And don’t tell me to read it online – I’m already wasting so much time in the digital netherworld I can barely spare an hour for the pub.

Speaking of which – what’s the greatest cultural loss in New York City since the pandemic was visited upon us?

Dive bars! Remember that hole in the wall you used to frequent whenever your spouse or significant other questioned your authority or sanity? Yep, the venerable dive bar is gone with the wind - and the astronomical rents.

Next thing you know that bastion of nightlife Paddy Reilly’s will be shuttered, and Steve Duggan will be heading home to manage the Cavan Senior Football Team.

But then New York was always a changeable place. People laughed at Archbishop Dagger Hughes for building St. Patrick’s Cathedral up in the rural glades of Fifth and Fifty-First.

Who’d travel all the way up there to do the Stations of the Cross? For that matter, does anybody even remember, let alone attend, the Nine First Fridays anymore - although it wouldn’t surprise me if you could observe them through the Internet.

The city changes and we change with it. Am I mistaken or was New York at its peak in the years before 9/11? In some ways the city never seemed to recover, but I suppose that depends on your perspective.

I knock on wood as I say it, but just suppose we have weathered the curse of Covid. What kind of city will we be inheriting this time? One utterly divided by wealth – no doubt, but when was it ever any different?

And then you look at the bright side of things – most of us are still standing; although in one arena all is changed, utterly changed – the Mets now rule New York as we hurtle towards October.

And yet, I still miss the good old days when celebrities ranged freely around Manhattan and David Bowie bought me a double brandy.

Is America Broken?

 Is America broken? It’s a question that is posed with increasing frequency.

I used to dismiss it out of hand. This country has come through so much – escape from British colonialism, a civil war to prevent the Southern slave-owning states from seceding, a Civil Rights campaign allied with national protests against a disastrous war of choice in Vietnam.

Yet so much divides us nowadays, you might say. Indeed it does, but that’s the nature of a democracy. Unlike Putin’s Russia, we debate our differences publicly, that’s a strength but also a burden.

In a healthy democracy there’s usually a center, often a majority to whom differing factions turn for validation of their arguments.

When that doesn’t work, elections are called, or regularly scheduled, where the people decide.

In a country of laws like the United States of America, a vast majority of people accepts that elections are sacred and that the winners will form the next government.

But what happens when the leader of the losing group refuses to accept the verdict and contests the result?

The courts decide, as ultimately happened in the Bush v. Gore election of 2000.

We currently find ourselves in a situation where the defeated president in 2020 not only refuses to accept the result, but he even attempted to influence election officials in his favor.

You would imagine that his wiser colleagues would intervene for fear their party would suffer even a greater rejection in the coming elections.

Yet, it would appear, that Mr. Trump has convinced the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan that he won the election of 2020 despite all evidence to the contrary.

Does the Republican Party actually believe this “great lie?” On the face of it, this hardly seems likely, yet there are people who are utterly convinced that voting machines were tampered with and other forms of election chicanery perpetrated, without even a whit of evidence.

What happens now? Well, voters have a chance to send a strong message to both the Republican Party and its leader in the November midterms, and again in the 2024 presidential election.

Democracy, however, is nothing if not gloriously messy, for we are currently afflicted by a rate of inflation unequaled since 1981, and, of late, it’s “the economy, stupid,” that has driven most people to the polls.

It will take time and much massaging for our US market economy to correct the surge in prices caused by a pandemic, rusty supply chains, and a war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine.

We should always bear in mind that part of the reason for the current soaring inflation rate is because workers are finally demanding and receiving higher wages.

However, as long as the Federal Reserve doesn’t cause a recession by randomly raising interest rates inflation will eventually return to a manageable level.

But if we succumb to economic alarmism we could throw the baby out with the bathwater, and that precious baby’s name is democracy.

We have a stark existential choice in the coming elections. Do we choose democracy or one man’s refusal to admit that he was beaten fairly and squarely in the 2020 presidential election?

Despite party labels, this is not a partisan issue; democracy, despite its flaws, is something to cherish, while Mr. Trump’s self-delusional dream of autocracy is not.

He’s already done grave damage to American democracy by causing many of his followers to doubt our election process.

We may differ on many issues, but in the end we can settle matters at the polls. Let’s vote rather than harangue each other on the platforms of an increasingly vicious and vacuous social media.

Had Mike Pence not done his job as Vice-President on January 6^thand certified the election of Joe Biden who knows what the end result would have been. But, at the least, it seems likely more lives would have been lost while President Trump sat on his hands and allowed a mob of his followers to run amok in the Capitol Building.

We do have a very safe election system and should treasure it rather than allow one man to disparage it, and then hide behind inane conspiracy theories.

Is America broken – far from it! But democracy is under attack and it’s our turn to defend it.

THE FORGOTTEN EMIGRANTS

 I was recently giving a talk to the Irish Business Organization and was asked by host Shelley Ann Quilty-Lake to describe my own emigration from Ireland to New York.

I began by describing life in the city in the 1970’s.

Though the era is usually painted as being dangerous and crime-ridden, it was also exciting and gloriously inexpensive.

Reggae pulsed through the city accompanied by the sweet pungency of marijuana, while Punk was reinvigorating staid rock music. A couple of gigs a week in The Bronx or Greenwich Village easily paid for my rent-stabilized apartment.

Then in the midst of my feel-good story a series of anguished faces flashed through my mind. All Irishmen, they ranged in age from early 20’s to late 70’s, faces I’d forgotten or stored in some cobwebbed mental attic.

They sat or stood at bars I’d played across the country from Bainbridge Avenue to Geary Street in San Francisco. 

 

Some wore leather jackets and torn blue jeans, but most were dressed in the Irish evening attire of sports coat and cavalry twill trousers; each had told me some variant of our common emigrant story.

Many had arrived in the late 1950’s fleeing lack of work and opportunity. More came in the 1980’s when people were exiting Ireland at such a clip the joke was “last one out, turn out the lights!”

They had ended up in some American city or other because there was no life for them at home.

They had never married, and had settled for some form of employment that guaranteed them a room, and enough money to spend most nights at a local Irish watering hole.

When they’d finally scraped up the fare to go home to a funeral or wedding, they found that their notion of Ireland had changed, they didn’t even fit in socially anymore, dashing all hope of a permanent return.

I ran into many of their ilk while traveling around America in the back of a van. They liked Black 47 – not the harder edged rock or funk music, but the unvarnished anthems about emigration and politics.

Songs like Livin’ in America and James Connolly would lead to post-gig conversations at the bar, and eventually to heartfelt revelations about the country of their birth. Shots of Jamesons, and the knowledge that I’d be leaving town in the morning with their secrets, often led to late night eloquence.

These people weren’t whiners or looking for sympathy, it’s just that they’d come to the hard won realization that their die had been cast at an early age.

The Irish system of education that they’d experienced was brutal. Class sizes were often above 40 and corporal punishment was the rule.

I knew what they were talking about, for in my own Christian Brothers Primary School boys were beaten unmercifully, not so much by the brothers themselves but by the young state-employed, lay teachers.

Words like dyslexia or autism were barely known, let alone that students might suffer from such conditions.

It was one size fits all – if you didn’t know an answer you were first humiliated and then beaten with a stick or a stiff leather strap until your hands were numb or raw. No wonder so many children abandoned school at the legal age of 14.

The unholy alliance between church and state didn’t help. Emigration kept the country subservient and manageable. Let them go – less to feed and educate on the island of saints and scholars!

There was never a suggestion that remedial classes be given to young emigrants to help them fit into a foreign industrial society. Why bother – didn’t they have their rosary beads to guide them?

Ireland is a much different country now. Young people receive a humane education and many never think of emigrating; while Irish consulates are aware of their responsibility to senior emigrants and regularly provide grants to organizations like the Aisling Irish Community Center, The New York Irish Center, the Emerald Isle Immigration Center, and other caring groups across the country.

But still I can’t forget the faces of those late night confidants who should never have had to leave their homes and native country.  

Their humble stories are as important as the successful ones we celebrate. Their courage and their lonely fortitude still inspire me.  

The Poetry of Granite

I was digging in the garden recently; not an activity I’m particularly fond of, but there’s something about a June afternoon that entices you to slice a shovel through earth.

The sun was high, a fresh breeze sighing through the new leaves of the old maple, and a finch of some denomination was chirping when I struck something hard and unforgiving.

It was granite in perfectly shaped bricks that at one time must have constituted a wall, or perhaps a small kiln.

Small seedlings of quartz still sparkled from the red stone, though it had been buried beneath the soil for many years.

I rested on my shovel, and in an instant was transported back to a graveyard in Co. Wexford on another June day.

I had just turned 17 and was, as usual, working summers for my grandfather in his headstone business.

It was dusty work, cutting, chiseling, and slicing the stone while fashioning it into monuments and kerbing, with the roar of pneumatic drills pulsing through his premises near Wexford Quay.

It was always a relief to escape into the quiet countryside and erect a finished monument in a local graveyard.

It never felt morbid, for death was democratic, and there was a sense of achievement when we gazed on a new headstone gleaming in the soft evening light where there had been none that morning.

We worked in three types of stone, limestone, the commonest (and least expensive), rugged granite, and aristocratic white marble.

The latter was my grandfather’s favorite, so much so that in the 1950’s he had traveled a number of times to Carrara in far off Italy to visit the quarries owned by his friend and supplier, Signor Bordese.

This hospitable and erudite gentleman had escorted Thomas Hughes to Florence and Rome, so he might gaze upon the majestic churches and statues carved from his favorite stone.

My grandfather had left school at 13 to be apprenticed to his own headstone-making father, but he had the soul of an artist and would spend hours studying exotic statues, longing for the chance to carve his own images onto white marble.

Alas, Wexford people were of a practical nature, and preferred their memorials to be inexpensive and to the point.

The traveling people were my grandfather’s allies in art, they alone, he confided, “appreciate the majesty of death and the hereafter” and encouraged him to transpose marble into images that captured their sorrow and loss.

For hours on end, in his dusty little office, they’d pore over pictures of ornate sculptures before deciding on a suitable memorial for a revered elder or a lost child.  

To top it all, they paid cash up front, unusual in those times, for it was considered poor form to ask a grieving family to pay anything but a token deposit until well after the headstone had been erected.

The world was simpler back then, there was a trust between people. Did that come from the fact that most Irish families got by on so little?

Did the Famine still impinge upon folk memories? On the rare occasion when a bill was written off as a bad debt, Thomas Hughes and my mother would share a doleful look, and one of them would quietly mutter, “what can you expect - the best left.”

Still, the business prospered, and every summer we erected headstones all over County Wexford, remembering to pay our respects to the parish priest and occasionally taking tea in the kitchen with his housekeeper, the most important person in the locality.

Everyone had his and her place in that world. Everyone knew everyone else and, to some degree or other, fit in.

My grandfather is long gone now and I’m not far from being the same age he was when I worked with him in those long ago summer months. How the years fly!

Then the wind suddenly gusted in the new leaves of the old maple, the finch ceased its song mid-verse, and I found myself back in my own garden in a different century.

I had three heavy bricks of granite to deal with, and I wondered what use that man of stone, Thomas Hughes, would have put them to.

Rory Gallagher - A Man of Contradictions

 Rory Gallagher was a man of contradictions. Born in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, he spoke with a soft Cork accent; the quietest man in the room, he was one of the great Blues belters. He lived for music, and in some ways he died for it.

It’s 50 years now since he released Live in Europe, arguably Rock’s greatest live album, and it’s 27 years to the month since he passed away.

Though a household name, most Irish people have never heard his music, for he was rarely played on popular radio lest he might singe the ears of god-fearing punters with his Blues based explorations. Yet he is one of the best known and revered Irish musicians and has sold over 30 million albums.

His peers were no less impressed by his raw talent, when asked what it was like to be the world’s greatest guitarist, Jimi Hendrix replied, “I wouldn’t know – ask Rory Gallagher.”

Meanwhile, Eric Clapton was so enamored of his playing he asked Rory’s band Taste to open for Cream at their legendary Royal Albert Hall final concert.

All heady stuff for a guy barely out of his teens who had grown up on the banks of the River Lee, far from the bluesy Mississippi Delta.

But then little Rory Gallagher, like wee Ivan Morrison, cut his musical teeth in a much-maligned Irish institution – the showband.

At the age of 15 Rory joined Cork’s Fontana Showband - the same age Van hooked up with The Monarchs from Belfast.

From personal experience I know that showband discipline tended to make or break musicians. Because of the presence of brass players you were expected to become adept in almost every key; and you played whatever was danceable in the Top Twenty, be it Pop, Rock, Ska, Country, Trad Jazz, you name it.

Rory came of age in The Fontana (later called The Impact), and learned about life while playing US army bases in Europe and the UK.

Two years later in Belfast he formed Taste, an explosive three-piece Blues Rock band managed by Eddie Kennedy who kept them on the road for four years in a battered Transit van, but blowing minds everywhere they went.

Their last major gig was at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival where before a massive crowd they gave Hendrix, The Who, and The Doors a run for their money, then promptly broke up.

The 22 year-old Corkman brought aboard Gerry McAvoy on bass, and Wilgar Campbell on drums, and with his brother Donal managing, Rory Gallagher set out to fulfill his dreams.

I went to see him whenever I could. Can you imagine what he meant to young Irish people still trapped in the dregs of Éamon de Valera’s dated dreams?

With the North of Ireland going up in the smoke, we had little to cheer for, but we had Rory, and he was the best Blues Rock guitarist/singer in the universe.

Every year he came home and played a Christmas tour. Those gigs were beyond belief.

Rory shredded his sweat-stained guitar for hours on end, and it wasn’t just for himself; he was exhorting us to go beyond ourselves, to dream big, and make sure you at least came within an ass’s roar of those dreams.

After emigrating, I saw his every New York gig, from the Bottom Line to opening for Rod Stewart in arenas and demolishing him.

Rory gave every iota of himself onstage. Rodney just seemed to be having a bad night after the young Corkman had scorched his stage.

To get to the heart of Rory’s demise would take more than a column, suffice it to say, the road is a monster, sooner or later it forces you to confront your demons, and no one escapes without scars.

You’ll never get a chance to see Ireland’s greatest musician now, but you can still experience him.

The next time you’re feeling a little low play Rory’s Live in Europe album – it might be 50 years old but it will shake the cobwebs from your soul and bring a huge smile to your face, with only the hint of a tear when you conside what might have been. 

Let's Go Mets!!!

 How about those Mets!

I know I shouldn’t rave about the boys from Queens so early in the season for fear I’ll send them crashing down from their perch atop the NL East.

And I’m aware that New York is considered a Yankees town – but have you noticed that when the Mets are winning, our city comes alive.

I have a radical friend who claims it’s all part of the class system, that the Yanks are the corporate team, while the Mets are more working and lower middle-class.

He stresses that when the Bronx Bombers are losing by more than 2 runs in the middle of the 7^thinning many of their more well-heeled admirers not only stretch, they also exit the stadium; whereas, no self-respecting Mets fan would dream of boarding the 7 train without getting their full 9 innings money’s worth.

How did I become such a Mets loyalist?

Like many things it came to pass in a saloon - Tomorrow’s Lounge on 86^thStreet in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to be precise.

Our crew of immigrants, music heads, and general ne’er-do-wells hung out in this den of iniquity.

Bay Ridge was Mets country and whenever the team was playing, the muted television was turned to Channel 9. This was back in the early 1970’s when Cable - not to mention Roku or Apple TV - was still a techie pipedream.

‘Twas in the cool alcoholic shadows of Tomorrows I slowly parsed baseball’s arcane rules, and came to the conclusion that America’s pastime was simpler than cricket, but way more convoluted than rounders.

I barely remember our first pub outing to Shea Stadium, except that we were way up high (in more ways than one) in the nosebleeds, and a disgruntled neighbor remarked that he’d never seen so much beer consumed by so few.

Did the Mets win that game? I can’t even remember whom they were playing, so I guess winning – or remembering - is not of paramount importance to Mets partisans.

I do vividly remember the Mets glory years of the 1980’s when we ruled New York, led by such stalwarts as Keith Hernandez, Rusty Staub, Daryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden.

Part of this triumph was bittersweet, however, as my first cousin Charlie Kerfeld pitched relief for the Astros at the time and, blood being thicker than Budweiser, I was emotionally torn whenever the two teams clashed.

Imagine my elation when that remarkable Cavan impresario, Steve Duggan, succeeded in booking Black 47 for Irish Night at Shea, not once but four times. There we were out on second base playing in the same position as The Beatles themselves to a delirious multitude of the Mets faithful.

To this day I proudly cite that Black 47 played Shea Stadium more times than the lads from Liverpool.

I regret to say that neither of my two sons followed in my footsteps, but in fairness both were part of the Jeter Generation when even many in Amazin’ Bay Ridge turned their backs on Los Mets.

Such sporting loyalties spring from deep within the psyche. Thus, in my novel, Rockaway Blue, diehard Yankee loyalist Jimmy Murphy is still finding it hard to figure out why his son Brian became a Mets fan.

And yet, in an odd way, this puzzling “betrayal” gives him some small relief when dealing with the loss of Brian during 9/11.

I have to say my Yankee friends have been very understanding about my Mets obsession; nowadays, they merely sigh and shake their heads, though more in sorrow than anger.

One, however, continues to be politely condescending. But he stepped way beyond the pale recently when he suggested that the pep in the step of New Yorkers of late is due to the ending of the pandemic, not “the Mets winning a few games against the dregs of the National League.”

Enough of such patronizing pessimism! I’m willing to state now that come hell or high water this October I will not be mouthing my usual, “Wait until next year” mantra.

I wish you all a very happy summer, and I’ll see you at the World Series in Citi Field when autumn leaves are falling.

Turner & Kirwan of Wexford at The Boardy Barn

 So, The Boardy Barn in Hampton Bays, Long Island is no more. I can hear silent tears dripping into pint mugs all over BBQ.

You don’t know what BBQ is – well, then you probably wouldn’t have felt very comfortable in the raucous atmosphere of the Barn.

It stands for Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Queens, and was a pejorative term used for those who invaded Hampton Bays from the boroughs on summer weekends.

Because we were well known in most of the Irish neighborhoods of New York, Turner & Kirwan of Wexford felt right at home in the Boardy Barn.

We played happy hours there every summer weekend in the late 1970’s, where up to a thousand roiling, sweaty people would dance and carouse after making their way up to Montauk Highway from the pristine beaches of Hampton Bays.

On a good day up to 100 kegs of beer would be drained, and that’s not even counting cans and shots.

It was like going into battle. The only way to survive was to get the crowd on your side, and then hold them there for the remainder of the four-hour gig.

We were not your usual Irish Folk duo. Pierce Turner played a moog synthesizer on top of an electric clavinet and battered a high-hat with his left foot.

I assaulted a kick drum and an electric-acoustic Ovation boosted by a battery of effects. Between us we sounded not unlike a psychedelic A train roaring through a local stop.

We learned early that every song had better segue directly into the next, for any silence could lose you the crowd’s fickle attention.

The bartenders approved of this strategy – continuous noise equaled continuous drinking, with no time wasted on niceties.

To that end, before every set they topped off a pint glass of Southern Comfort for each of us. We had discovered that this sweet but fiery liquid was Janis Joplin’s favorite poison, and what was good enough for the Texan Blues belter was just the ticket for two culchies from Wexford.

The crowd was usually happily wasted, but one afternoon a guy seeking to impress his date grabbed one of our pint glasses assuming it was full of beer and tossed it back.

His eyes bulged as he dropped to his knees, and his date screamed as her paramour’s forehead hit the concrete floor.

We were playing Lola by The Kinks at the time. With a capacity clientele screaming the chorus no one even blinked.

I don’t ever remember a fight in the Barn. The security guys preferred gentle persuasion to the sadistic maneuvers favored in other establishments.

But the truth is owners dictate the mood and carryon in every gin mill; and Mickey Shields and Tony Galgano were princes in their field. Even at its most rip-roaring, the Boardy Barn always seemed friendly and well managed.

Tony, in particular, encouraged Turner & Kirwan to go over the top. All these years later, I can still picture him smiling broadly as we got the whole joint snarling the chorus of Bob Dylan’s elemental kiss-off, Like a Rolling Stone.

When I complimented him later on his acceptance of high-spirited behavior, he merely smiled and explained that he and Mickey were in the business of selling booze not cotton candy.

I guess Mickey, a large sized character himself, knew the place wouldn’t be the same without Tony who passed away in November.

A hurricane had been forecast for our last Boardy Barn gig, yet all appeared calm enough as the evening wore on. Suddenly, a blast of wind hit the huge marquee tent and the support poles shuddered violently.

Security took over, and though well oiled, the crowd departed in a disciplined manner.

In the spills of driving rain Tony helped us carry our equipment to the van and told us to make for Manhattan, but if the storm worsened to check into the nearest motel and charge the room to him.

We made it home safely, Tony, and it’s my loss that I never saw you again to thank you for your consideration.

I’m sure many readers will raise a glass to you for giving us all so many priceless happy hours back in the Boardy Barn of our youth.