I have been in love with Tom Petty for over 35 years. I can’t help it. I’m convinced that had Tomcat met me when I was younger and could hold a tune, he would have snagged me to be one of his “heartbreakers.” Yes, I know Stevie Nicks is the Honorary female Heartbreaker, but she had proximity on her side. The truth is that Tom Petty (as well as the miles of highway that stretch from coast to coast) is largely responsible for my emigrating from Ireland to America in the first place. Well, that along with finding work and leaving The Troubles and the rain behind.
In 1985, I was part of what they call the “brain drain” that took about 20,000 of us away from Northern Ireland. By all accounts that number hasn’t changed much – I was a bit sad to read in The Belfast Telegraph just this past week that in August 2014 that 67% of people do not see a future in Northern Ireland. Why?
Myself, I remember just knowing that an education meant immigration, that I would leave for America and probably never return. Older and wiser, I understand better now what it says about a little country when all its talent is expended on faraway places like America or Australia, bringing to mind what Eamon De Valera said to the Dail in 1934:
No longer shall our children, like our cattle, be brought up for export.
Sobering, especially in light of all that has happened on the emerald isle in the past seventy years – and when you’re one of those children in the thick of it, young and well-educated, unemployed and broke, fed up with politics and parades, flags and fighting, grey skies and rain, America is awfully appealing – the idea of it, anyway – which leads me back to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Come on now, is there anything more American than driving down a highway with the top down and the radio up and Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin‘” blaring from the radio? Just ask Tom Cruise how his Jerry MaGuire is feeling as he sings along. (Naturally, he had me at “free”. . .)
My husband never quite got over being flat-out flummoxed by my relationship with “the road.” I had no sense of direction and frequently took the long and wrong way home, not really noticing because I was always singing along with the radio. Silently noting my stellar capacity for getting lost – and notwithstanding the fact that I was then still a novice driving on the American side of the road – my man intervened as best he could, with the gift of a silver pocket compass. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that I was never one for “orienteering” or map-reading or paying attention to directions. I was more of a free-spirited “let’s-just-see-where-the-road-takes-us” kind of gal. Mind you, with that attitude, I got lost all the time, and eventually, devil-may-care on the open road gave way to blind panic. I would fret over whether to turn left or right, then commit to turning right only to look back over my shoulder and realize I should have turned left. Then I would call home to report that I was lost. Again. You can imagine the inconvenience BC – Before Cellphones – calling collect from pay phones outside convenience stores.
Invariably, he’d ask me if the sun was behind me or in front of me, somehow believing that if he helped me establish North, I would know where I was. That never worked. So for our first Christmas together, he gave me the lovely silver compass which – until I gave it to Sophie for her first birthday without him last year – had remained untouched in the blue velvet-lined box it came in. I always thought it was too much like a piece of jewelry to be practical and, anyway, I didn’t really need it to help me find my way home. I relied on him to do that for almost twenty-five years and on Tom Petty to keep me company.
It’s not that Tom Petty is in the same category as Camilla Parker Bowles (remember how Princess Diana told Martin Bashir that there were three people in her marriage to Princess Charles?), but he has definitely been along for the ride. Ken liked Tom as well and took me to every concert he ever gave in Phoenix. He always made sure we had plenty of Tom on the playlist for our road-trips to California, and earlier this Spring, I’m sure he was looking down at me and laughing when the Hypnotic Eye tour dates were announced with not a single show planned for Phoenix, because he would know that I would convince my best friend to drive to San Diego to see the opening gig – something I would not have been able to convince him to do.
A mere five hours away, a road trip to San Diego would require no planning. As long as we had tickets, what else was there to worry about? Buying tickets was a snap for me as a member of the Highway Companions Club. Judge away. Let it be noted that I was also a card-carrying member of the David Cassidy/Partridge Fan Club once upon a time. Head held high . . .
Yes. We only needed tickets, gasoline, a place to stay, at least three outfits, and an assurance to each other that we would be back to Phoenix the morning after to see our girls off to school – my daughter’s first as a high school Senior, and Amanda’s little girl’s very first as a pre-schooler.
We made great time, rolling in to San Diego around 5PM on a Saturday afternoon. Being sensible, we checked out the concert venue so we wouldn’t get lost on our way the next evening, and then began calling a few hotels. How hard could it be to find a room on a Saturday night in San Diego? After being laughed at by The Sheraton, The Holiday Inn, Best Western, The Hilton, and a Motel 6, we decided to call hotels.com, and after being transferred to a call center, presumably in a place far away from America, a nice lady on the other end of the line informed us that she had just the room we needed, not too far away from us, albeit in another country.
Resigned to a night in Tijuana, Mexico, we forgot about the fact that nobody had left the light on for us and decided to concentrate instead on finding something to eat. Bona fide foodies, we were on a mission to find the little restaurant that had defeated Bobby Flay in the “Taco Throwdown.” Forget hotels.com – it is much more fun to play with the TVFoodMaps app. And soon, we were safely ensconced at a table by the window of Mama Testa Taqueria. Funny how a good margarita, guacamole, and all manner of salsa will make you forget about forgetting to book a hotel room.
After demolishing all that was laid before us, we tried one more time to find a room in America. Siri dutifully informed us that there was an “inn” nearby. Because it ended with “-shire,”Amanda thought it sounded rather respectable like a B & B in The Cotswolds. I thought it sounded, well, not like that at all. The man who answered when I called said he had “all kinds of room,” no need for a reservation, to just ‘come on down.” And even though my gut screamed, “No! No! No!” I knew Amanda had been enchanted by the idea of a B&B that ended with “-shire,” so we made our way there. Shortly after exiting the freeway, we found it – across the street from a Bail Bondsman, and nestled between a pawn shop and a “gentleman’s establishment.” Under its eaves, I noticed a transaction taking place between a man and a woman. Maybe he just needed change for the soda machine . . .
“Oh, let’s not.” I said. “How about we head north? Sort of like going to Mexico except in the opposite direction and still in America?”
Crawling across the bottom of the TV screen are the words “Robin Williams Dead at 63,” and as celebrity doctors weigh in on reports that the actor died at his home in Northern California today, apparently due to suicide by asphyxiation, I am drawn back to my first encounter with Robin Williams on the TV in our living room in Antrim. As they speculate about his battle with severe depression, I am a teenager in Northern Ireland once more, and he is an alien from outer space on the Mork and Mindy show.
Brilliantly, he was Mork from Ork. Pam Dawber, as Mindy, was the perfect foil. Easy to like, she shared my taste in music with the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album hanging on her apartment wall. Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too. But there was no one like Mork in Belfast. He was unlike anyone we had ever seen in rainy, slow 1970s Northern Ireland. With his rainbow suspenders and the catchphrase that caught on with all of us, “Nanu Nanu,” Mork was enchanting, a lovable clown with an inexhaustible range of funny voices and a child-like exuberance for all he was learning about being human.
Somehow, he was accessible to everyone. And even though he was out of this world, Mork learned about being in it, about being human, about falling in love, eventually reporting back to his invisible mentor, Orson:
Love doesn’t make sense. That’s why Earthlings think it’s so wonderful.
We loved Mork, and we loved Robin Williams being Mork. Like Mork, the actor was constantly evolving and surprising all of us, perhaps even himself, as he improvised through his various roles. So quick and agile in body and mind, he disappeared into roles such as that of the teacher we would all want for our own children in Dead Poet’s Society; the broke dad masquerading as a no-nonsense housekeeper and nanny for his own children in Mrs Doubtfire; Adrian Cronauer, the DJ who spoke truth to power in Good Morning, Vietnam; the heartbreakingly vulnerable homeless, Parry, in The Fisher King;and, the widowed psychologist, Sean McGuire, in Good Will Hunting, who would go to the ends of the earth for the love of his life. This last was my husband’s favorite Robin Williams role – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences liked it too, and awarded Williams with an Oscar.
At the end of the movie, when Will Hunting leaves that note on his best friend’s front door, Ken always said he could have written the same for me, as a farewell to the life he left on January 13, 1990, to begin a new one with me, his girl.
“I’m crazy about you,” he told me that Saturday afternoon in a dive bar doorway. “I’ve been waiting for you my whole life, and I was beginning to think you weren’t going to show up.”
Within just weeks, we had embarked on a new life together. Unexpected and off-script, yet meant to be.
Like Sean McGuire, my Ken had no regrets about all he had left behind. He understood exactly why Sean would give up his tickets to see the Boston Red Sox play in Game 6 of the World Series. Sean had to go “see about a girl.” And even though he was a made-up character in a movie, there was something about the way Robin Williams delivered these lines that made me believe he was still the same guy who shone through in Mork, the guy who knew what it meant to love:
That’s why I’m not talkin’ right now about some girl I saw at a bar twenty years ago and how I always regretted not going over and talking to her. I don’t regret the 18 years I was married to Nancy. I don’t regret the six years I had to give up counseling when she got sick. And I don’t regret the last years when she got really sick. And I sure as hell don’t regret missin’ the damn game. That’s regret.
Learning tonight that he suffered from depression saddens me. Yes, Robin Williams is is a stranger to me. A celebrity. Of course I don’t know him, but I know about depression and despair, addiction and self-medicating, denial and co-dependence and all the other words from the Big Book. I would come to find out that the man who had waited for me for so long also struggled with all of these. Until the end, it turns out. For most of those years, I had no idea, because he hid it so well. Masterfully and with shame. No one would ever have known, on the outside looking in, because he was attentive to those around him. He was funny – so funny – and warm. He listened more than he talked so that he knew so much more about others than they did about him. He kept those demons at bay until it exhausted him. I know that now. Side-stepping the disease, each of us engaged in self-preservation or a kind of selfishness, we were no match for it. And now that he is gone I find myself remembering all that was good – all the laughter and love wrapped up in random road-trips and surprise bouquets and trips to Dairy Queen every Friday with our daughter. So much good, that I have to believe Gabriel García Márquez was right:
..the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past
Ah, endurance. Often we endure quietly and alone and wonder what we could have done differently or better – when it is too late. We don’t like to talk about depression very much. It’s not quite “as acceptable” as some physical illnesses, is it? It isn’t pink with ribbons and races. It is dark, and it lurks beneath the surface, nipping at the heels every day. Unlike other diseases, it is non-communicable and highly treatable, but there are only certain diseases, disorders, addictions, and ailments that can be the subject of “polite” conversation.
Depression can be unrelenting. It can be lonely, and loneliness – as Mork reported back to Orson – all those years ago, is a disease:
. . . loneliness is a disease of the spirit. People who have it think that no one cares about them.
Unlike the “common cold,” its symptoms unapologetically made public with persistent sniffles, sneezes, loudly blown noses, and a tell-tale trail of balled-up Kleenex in its wake, the “common” depression – and it is more common than we think – is more of a secret never to be told. So those afflicted often find ways to conceal it. Perhaps it is somehow, heartbreakingly, easier to camouflage depression with the routines and rituals by which other people define us. Perhaps. So, for a while, we had Robin Williams. He made us laugh and cry and feel better about our lot in life. I will remember him the way his wife has requested, grateful for the “countless moments of joy and laughter” that will sparkle forever.
On my way home from work, I stopped by Half-Price Books, remembering that I still needed to buy George Orwell’s 1984 (the obligatory summer reading for a high school Senior). My lucky day, I found a well-worn paperback copy, published in 1961- the only one in the store – and I paid a dollar for it. Just a dollar to enter a world of newspeak and double-think, of propaganda and psychological manipulation, of “Big Brother’s Watching You.” Sometimes I think George Orwell wrote to remind us of our worst selves. Handing over my dollar, I spied a record section and asked the young man sorting through donated books to hang on for a minute while I checked out the albums. I wanted to point out that I was “an early adopter” of vinyl with an impressive collection back home in Ireland, but I imagine he dismissed me as somebody who could be his mother with no taste in music. Still, I maybe impressed him with my purchase.
It has been over 30 years since I held a record by The Clash in my hands – a 7” single in its original paper sleeve, “Remote Control” in stereo and on the B side, “London’s Burning” in mono. Given my recent musings on Terri Hooley and the Good Vibrations Record Shop and Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In, it wouldn’t have been right to leave The Clash in a second hand bookshop in Phoenix, Arizona.
I know I would be far better off adopting more of a minimalist lifestyle, confronting the clutter and discarding all the unnecessary bits and pieces, but I must regress. I’ve decided to renew my relationship with vinyl. I’m annoyed that I ever ended it. I’m annoyed that I ran with the crowd and turned my back on LPs opting instead for shiny compact discs in plastic cases that were hard to open. Privately and begrudgingly, I started over, and after twenty odd years, I had an impressive CD collection. Then along came some genius who figured out a crafty way to store my thousands of songs on a computer, an iPod, and ultimately, my phone. No more labor over a mix-tape – effortlessly and endlessly, in countless configurations, sorted by artist, album, genre, date last played, my music is delivered whenever and wherever I need it. It exists, apparently, on a virtual cloud, the location of which remains a mystery to me. Meanwhile, all the cool kids are collecting new vinyl, gushing over the digitally remastered Led Zeppelin 1 and acting like they invented it. Well, they didn’t. I’m reclaiming it. And, I’m going to start at the end of July, with the release of the tribute to JJ Cale album.
The laid-back songs of JJ Cale, the original cool breeze, the “boogie minimalist,” have been part of my personal soundtrack since the early 1980s when I bought the “Naturally” and “Grasshopper,” album, and when I went to The Errigle Inn in Belfast every Saturday night to see S’kboo who, when they played “Cocaine,” would always announce it as a JJ Cale song, knowing presumably, that most of the world thought it was an Eric Clapton song. By the time I came to Phoenix and its hotter than hell afternoons, JJ Cale was the natural choice for backyard ambience, for a beer in the hammock under the shade of a mesquite tree. That’s where I was last summer, listening to Travel-Log, when I heard that JJ Cale had died. I felt personally bereaved the way some of us do when we learn of the death of someone we don’t know, someone who has never met us but who has been next to us in our bedrooms and backyards, telling stories and singing us to sleep whenever we’ve needed them. Naturally.
Around the first anniversary of Cale’s death at the end of July 2014, Eric Clapton will release a new album “The Breeze, An Appreciation of JJ Cale.” Featuring Tom Petty, Mark Knopfler, John Mayer, Willie Nelson, Derek Trucks of The Allman Brothers Band, and Clapton himself, the album is an over-due tribute to the man without whom Eric Clapton may not have had such success.
In a statement about the new record, named for Cale’s 1972 single, “Call Me the Breeze,” Clapton stresses that he is just the messenger, wanting to bring more attention to JJ Cale the man who made him and so many other people famous when they covered his songs. “In this case . . . I’m just saying thank you,” he tells Rolling Stone.
Thank you – a powerful pair of words, typically unsaid when we need to hear them most.
There’s a lovely minute or two in the Irish film, “Waking Ned Devine,” that never fails to remind me of this. The hapless Lottery official has arrived unannounced at Ned Devine’s funeral, just as Jackie O’Shea is about to give the eulogy. Always quick on his feet – and realizing his scheme to cash in on Ned’s winning lottery ticket is about to come crashing down – Jackie pauses, looks over at his best friend, Michael O’Sullivan, who is posing as Ned, and as an easy smile spreads across his face, delivers this:
As we look back on the life of . . . Michael O’Sullivan was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Michael and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but on the plane from Chicago to Dublin two Novembers ago, perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused with Woodbine cigarettes:
“Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .”
Terri Hooley.
Where do I begin, and what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? In 1977, he opened his own record shop, “Good Vibrations” on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. The next year, under his own record label of the same name, he released “Teenage Kicks” by a relatively unheard-of Derry band, “The Undertones.” I bought the single and played it relentlessly. It was 1978. It was Northern Ireland, where, when our kitchen windows rattled, we wondered if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and we wanted to be farther away still, to escape, to “teenage kicks all through the night.”
Now this may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie that was playing on my flight back home, except that Terri Hooley opened “Good Vibes” on the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after “the day the music died” in Ireland, and as I watched Richard Dormer’s brilliant portrayal of him in “Good Vibrations,” I was a teenager again, fingering through the sleeves of vinyl records in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop in Antrim, my hometown, knowing that Ronnie knew what I’d like, and if I asked, he’d play it on the record player for everyone in the shop to hear. And when he did, you would never have known that our little country was in the grip of The Troubles.
There were moments on that flight back home when I wanted to jump out of my aisle seat and cheer for Terri Hooley, for Punk Rock, for everyone who bought a record from a smoke-filled shop just down the street from the most bombed hotel in Europe , and for every musician who ever played in Northern Ireland. I think I maybe even understood – if only for a moment – what Joe Strummer of The Clash meant:
When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to live for one glorious burning moment.
But when the movie ended and my remembering began, I wept for all that Northern Ireland lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing would have been to stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends refuse to visit Belfast while vacationing in Ireland. They don’t think it’s safe. “But it’s a great city!” I tell them. “The best in the world! And the Antrim Coast is stunningly beautiful.” I urge them to take the train from Belfast to Dublin, to enjoy the full Irish breakfast on the journey. In my enthusiasm, I forget about all those times my brother had to get off the Belfast to Dublin train and take the bus because of the threat of a bomb on the line. So what must it have been like for Terri Hooley trying to convince bands to play in Northern Ireland in the 1970s?, when musicians were afraid to come because of something terrible that had happened in the summer of my twelfth year.
In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband, one of the most popular bands in the country, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us, I’m sure they didn’t think anything of it until they were ordered out of their vehicle and told to stand by the roadside while the soldiers checked the back of the van.
I don’t know if, while standing on the side of the road, The Miami Showband realized that this was not an army checkpoint and that they were instead the victims of a vicious ambush carried out by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).
While the band members waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of their van. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing both, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.
There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy in spite of his pleas. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the air. Des McAlea suffered only minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. He recalls the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, almost forty years later, I can recall the shock and revulsion – the fear – we felt as details of the massacre unfolded in our newspapers and on the radio later that morning. I remember my mother shaking her head in utter disbelief. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?
What happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else. Perhaps we had been in a kind of denial that musicians were somehow immune, perhaps because we saw in the Miami Showband what could be, its members and its audiences crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers said his band was “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” Terri Hooley may have been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were scared. There were some who thought that the musical life of Northern Ireland was over. Performers from the UK mainland were afraid to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, it became wildly expensive, the cost of insurance premiums soaring given the real threat of hi-jackings and bombings. Northern Ireland was a “no go” area.
Just three years after the slaughter of those young musicians on what became known as “the day the music died,” in Northern Ireland, I remember being shaken to my very core – again – by the inhumanity of people in my country. It was February 18, 1978, and what happened in the restaurant of the La Mon House Hotel in Gransha, outside Belfast, will forever stay with me.
La Mon House was packed that evening with over 400 people, some of whom were there for the annual Irish Collie Club dinner dance. By the end of the night, 12 of those people – including children – were dead, and numerous others seriously injured. The next day, the Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the attack and for their inadequate nine-minute warning. With cold-blooded premeditation, the IRA had used a meat-hook to attach the deadly bomb to one of the restaurant’s window sills, and the bomb was connected to four canisters of petrol, each filled with home made napalm, a mixture of sugar and petrol, intended to stick to whatever or whomever its flames touched. I remember watching the TV coverage and listening as a reporter described what happened after the blast – the enormous fireball, some 60 by 40 feet, unrelenting in its ferocity, roared through the Peacock restaurant, engulfing the people in its path in flames and burning many of them beyond recognition.
And almost forty years later and on the other side of the world, I am haunted by a widely disseminated image of the charred remains of someone who died in that horrific explosion.
How could anyone look at that image and look away, unchanged?
I looked at that image – time and again – and still I was not brave enough to stay and do the hard work. To abide.
A lot of my friends passed away. I thought I was going to be the only one left; it was a horrible time, but the idea of leaving Belfast made me feel like a traitor.
Punk Rock was perfect for him. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owing a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in taking either side of the sectarian divide; he wanted young people to have another option, another kind of country where a young person would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. And he was fearless in the pursuit of such a place.
Naturally, Terri Hooley loved “The Undertones.” So did I. They were from Derry, and they knew about “The Troubles,” living and breathing it every day of their lives. They chose not to sing about it. Why would they? If anyone needed an escape, they did. So instead, they sang about the everyday things that mattered to them – and to me – in 1978 – “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a much darker road.
Glam rock, punk rock, reggae, blues, pop, classical – my musical education encompassed all of these and more. There were piano lessons, violin lessons, orchestra, choir, but the music lessons that stayed with me I learned in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop, in vinyl.
I spent hours in the Pop-In, flipping through LP after LP, and walking up to the counter with three or four, knowing I would have to whittle my selection down to just one. After all, my school dinner money could only buy so much. I loved the ritual behind buying a new record. It began with carefully opening the album to see if the song lyrics were inside, or a booklet of photographs, or liner notes that would fold out into a full-size poster that would end up on my bedroom wall. I handled my records with care – as did Ronnie. And he would always add a clear plastic cover to protect the album art.
We had three TV channels from which to choose in the 1970s, no Internet, and no smart phone, so I spent a lot of time in my room, reading and listening to music. Still, I remember watching the Mork and Mindy show, and noticing that hanging on Mindy’s apartment wall was the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album.
Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too.
There was nothing better than opening an album to find the liner notes and a paper sleeve inside that folded out into a full-size poster, like that of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” That made it on to my wall as well.
And then there was the ritual of playing the record – and some records, like “Born to Run” or Steely Dan’s “Aja” should only be listened to on vinyl.
It requires some effort to listen to music on vinyl. First, you have to actually get up, look through your stack of LPs to find the one you want, remove it carefully from the paper cover, place it on the turntable, drop the stylus right in the groove, sit down again, listen. Then you have to get up again and turn over the LP to hear Side Two. It’s a major investment of time. There’s waiting involved. Shuffling music on an iTunes playlist requires no real commitment at all.
WIth vinyl, it was important to have the right hi-fi system. The first significant and most important purchase of my life was the system I bought in 1983 (feeling flush with my grant check). I remember enlisting the assistance of an engineering student who lived across the road from me, a few doors down from the Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street. He didn’t go out much, but he loved music. A purist who would never have watched Top of the Pops but would never have missed the Old Grey Whistle Test, he did his research (imagine, in the days before the Internet!) and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable that had a little strobe light, and some fairly impressive speakers.
What he knew then – and I knew it too – is what the 21st century late-adopters of vinyl are discovering – there is no better way to listen to music than on a record. I loved all the pops and crackles, the anticipation before dropping the needle right in the groove, and the audible drawing of breath, the hiss before the first line was sung. Yes. I was experienced.
When I came home to Antrim on the weekends, I’d make a point of visiting Ronnie Millar’s shop. By that time the Pop In had moved from its original location by Pogue’s Entry and into the shopping center. And by that time, Ronnie Millar knew what I liked (which meant he knew what else I would like). One of the things I remember about him is that he paid attention to his customers and quickly figured out the music they liked– even if he passed judgment on their taste,like the day he asked “Why do you want to buy that rubbish?” when Dennis Ceary from the Dublin Road picked up “Never Mind the Bollocks” by the Sex Pistols.
It hadn’t taken him too long to figure out what I liked. I’d spent hours in there during which he would play something he knew I didn’t know (because, let’s face it, he knew the contents of my entire LP collection and probably everyone else’s in Antrim). And he knew I’d buy it – a perfect profit cycle. Every once in a while, I’d stump him by asking if he could get a record he hadn’t heard of – but not very often. Even though I could have probably found it, during the week, in ‘Caroline Records’ or Terri Hooley’s ‘Good Vibrations’ in Belfast, it wasn’t the same as going home to Antrim to ask Ronnie to get it for me. I don’t know when I found out that Ronnie’s brother was the drummer in The Miami Showband, but I have often wondered about the impact of that horrible night on a man who loved and sold music for a living.
All those years when I was collecting vinyl, it didn’t matter when I didn’t have a boyfriend or had nowhere to go on a Friday night. Even when I had convinced myself I would be “left on the shelf” it didn’t seem that bad given the company I was keeping – Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. The music made everything better, and one of my fondest memories is of sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night with our dog almost hypnotized watching Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection” go around and around on the turntable.
By the late 1980s, I began making cassettes – mix tapes – hundreds of them. Making a mix tape was a labor of love – there was none of this easy downloading, dragging and dropping of music into your iTunes library. No. A mixed tape required hours and hours of opening albums, choosing just the right song, making sure the needle was clean, then dropping it in the groove, and making sure to press record and pause at exactly the right time. And then you’d give it to some boy or girl, hoping the tunes said what you could not. (Or maybe that was just me.) And then you’d wait for feedback.Those were the days of delayed gratification, and I miss them.
If you don’t know Native American poet and author, Sherman Alexie, you really should. He knew a thing or two about the mix tape, as he wrote in “Ode to a Mix Tape”
Ode to a Mix Tape
These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes.
CD burners, iPods, and iTunes
Have taken the place
Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon
Enough, clever introverts will create
Quicker point-and-click ways to declare
One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor.
But I miss the labor
Of making old school mix tapes— the mid air
Acrobatics of recording one song
At a time. It sometimes took days
To play, choose, pause,
Ponder, record, replay, erase,
And replace. But there was no magic wand.
It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape
Was sculpture designed to seduce
And let the hounds loose.
A great mix tape was a three-chord parade
Led by the first song, something bold and brave,
A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,”
Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye.
The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,”
or something by Hank. But O, the last track
Was the vessel that contained
The most devotion and pain
And made promises that you couldn’t take back.
~ a labor of love.
My plan last November was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by the very cool record shop I’d discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland – back to Phoenix.
Before we were married, when I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, my husband bought me another hi-fi. It had the tape deck, CD player, and, the trusty turntable – although by that time, nobody was buying vinyl. Still, I must have believed it would make a comeback, because I held onto the turntable. It’s in a cupboard along with other things of sentimental value. He kept asking me why I just didn’t get rid of it, but he knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And I cannot. He would have loved to see me break out that turntable to play his favorite Lou Reed album. But life barged in, the way it always does, when I was busy making other plans for us, and he never got to see me resurrect the turntable. I would have liked just one more spin.
Maybe, like vinyl, the handwritten letter will make a comeback as well. I am sad that the letter-writing of my youth has fallen out of favor, snuffed out by phonecalls, text messages, Skype, and e-mails that are simply not the same. How I miss opening my mailbox to find the red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail, par avion. And how glad I am to have saved so many to read and reread, these objets d’art, immortal reminders of the people I treasure and who treasure me.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a certain spot of time in our lives. This isn’t just nostalgia for my youth, it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that good things were and still are worth waiting for. Like peace – in Northern Ireland.
Brilliantly, he was Mork from Ork. Pam Dawber, as Mindy, was the perfect foil. Easy to like, she shared my taste in music with the cover of Jackson Browne’s “
Handing over my dollar, I spied a record section and asked the young man sorting through donated books to hang on for a minute while I checked out the albums. I wanted to point out that I was “an early adopter” of vinyl with an impressive collection back home in Ireland, but I imagine he dismissed me as somebody who could be his mother with no taste in music. Still, I maybe impressed him with my purchase.
As we look back on the life of . . . Michael O’Sullivan was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Michael and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.
