I’m a bit ambivalent about St. Patrick’s Day. What is it about March 17th that renders so many people Irish or some version of it that I do not recall from living the first twenty-seven years of my life in Northern Ireland? Everywhere I turn tomorrow, there will be Americans proclaiming their Irishness , some in T-shirts emblazoned with a command for everyone to kiss them or a warning that they are falling-down drunk. Because they are Irish. Even politicians we never knew were Irish will become bona fide Irish – usually they are American. Imagine for a second just how many frazzled interns there must be in these United States, tasked by politicians keen on “the Irish vote,” with finding some verifiable, however microscopic, proof of their Irish heritage.
It’s well for them, but me, well, I continue to struggle with this very question. Am I Irish? Northern Irish? British? Ulster Irish? Well, it depends . . . and I know I’m entering dangerous territory here. My brother, more eloquent than I, and still living and writing in Ireland, broke it down for me one day, commenting on the “fractured and dissensual nature of [my] cultural background, where declarations of nationhood are open to contention (Northern Ireland versus the North of Ireland; Derry versus Londonderry) and can be dangerous, and potentially fatal.” Maybe this is why I fell in love with the idea of America, an idea that is unraveling at break-neck speed in the 2016 race for President.
I consider myself Irish – or as my favorite professor used to say, I “aspire to a united Ireland” – but my “documentation” suggests a split identity. I was born in Northern Ireland and own a British passport (to be on the safe side) as well as an Irish passport; my American permanent residency card clearly states Ireland as my country of birth; my birth certificate states my birthplace as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I am one of her Royal Majesty’s subjects, except when I’m not, like the time a waiter at Heathrow Airport refused to accept my money because, although Stirling, it was printed on a Bank of Ulster note. My money had identified me as something other than acceptable.
A more subtle subtext persists in America. In Arizona even, a flashpoint for immigration issues, it seems everyone is at least fractionally Irish on March 17th. With the green beer flowing and all those ringlets bouncing heavily on the heads of Irish dancers, and Americans pinching me if I’m not wearing green, I sometimes ask myself if perhaps I was always absent on St. Patrick’s Day. How could I have grown up down the road from Mount Slemish, where the young Patrick tended his sheep, and missed all these shenanigans?
Contemplating all of this, I am compelled to point out, for the record, that along with a bunch of girls from school, I went to Irish Dancing every week at the Protestant Hall on Railway Street in Antrim. And also for the record, not one of us had either the ringlets or the very straight backs and long legs of Michael Flatley‘s Riverdancers. Still, I loved it, and while I have long since forgotten the name of my lovely Irish Dancing teacher, I remember that she was kind and made me feel like I was a dancer. Today, I couldn’t do a slip-jig to save my life, but I can show you the red box that held my first Timex box – inside, in tissue paper, are all my medals. And, I suppose because I loved the craft that went into it, and I wanted to hold on to it, when I came to America, I even brought with me – in my backpack – the lovely dancing costume that last fit me when I was 12. It hangs in the back of a closet, reminiscent of Miss Havisham’s wedding dress. I don’t think I could part with it.
Then there’s the corned beef and cabbage. Honest to God, I have never had corned beef and cabbage. We always had the best of sirloin from Stewart’s Butchers – a place with saffron colored sawdust on the floor in which I traced figures of eight with the toes of my brogues. An imaginative child, I pretended I was cutting through ice on the blades of Harriet’s skates as she spun around a frozen pond in Tom’s Midnight Garden. But, oh, those young butchers looked a menacing, in their navy and white striped aprons all smeared with blood and bits of raw beef. They were not much older than me, but they intimidated me, sharpening their knives while I stood on the other side of the counter ordering a pound of minced beef.
As for cabbage, I still associate it with the overcooked vegetables, lumpy custard, and tapioca served for lunch at Antrim Primary School. Mind you, as my mother will no doubt remind me, when fried up with a bit of good bacon from Golden’s – the wee shop – cabbage is hard to beat (although not as good as turnip). But it had nothing to do with St. Patrick. Corned beef and cabbage would have been no more than a coincidence on St. Patrick’s Day four decades ago.
Then there are the shamrocks and the snakes. I don’t remember Pat the barman in Belfast’s Crown Bar ever taking the time to trace a shamrock on the head of a pint of Guinness for my friend Ruth or me, and as much time as we spent in there – and as much as we flirted with him – it was the least he could have done. Nor do I remember shamrocks or Celtic knots tattooed on young shoulders; rather, they were carved into headstones in old graveyards or embellished around stained glass windows at church. I never paid much attention to that bit of the story when St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland, although it has come back to me when I have sidestepped the odd snake slithering across my path on a hike through the Phoenix mountains. Real talk – they have been much less poisonous than the human variety.
Wasn’t St. Patrick very clever to have found in nature a perfect symbol for Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to help him spread The Word? This was how I learned about the Holy Trinity in Sunday School, and, I always think about it when I recall those delicate shamrocks wilting in the buttonholes of suits worn by Catholic neighbors who went to mass on St. Patrick’s Day. Back then, it seemed that most Protestants either “took no notice” of the holiday or characterized it as something reserved for those “on the other side.” Ironic, given the young saint’s passion for spreading Christianity.
But by the time I was living and studying in Belfast, St. Patrick’s Day had evolved into a good excuse for an extended pub crawl with a motley crew of art students, engineers, and teacher. My last St. Patrick’s Day back home was in 1987. It was a Tuesday night, and it was cold, and we were on the hunt for craic, so we piled in a taxi and headed for The Wayside Halt, a nondescript country pub on the edge of the dual carriageway between Antrim and Ballymena, the kind of place that wouldn’t merit a second look.
Walking into The Wayside Halt I sobered, the events of May 24, 1974 rushing at me like scenes from a black and white documentary. My father had told me about it. That May evening, one of his friends had suggested stopping at the pub for a quick pint on the way home. (Back home, the “quick pint” is something of a paradox, and because da was in a rush to complete his bread deliveries before dark that Friday night, he declined). Before he reached Randalstown, the harrowing word had arrived that within the previous hour, Loyalist paramilitaries had barged into the Wayside Halt, and shot at point-blank range, the Catholic publican, Shaun Byrne, and his brother, Brendan. Other pub owners in the Ballymena area had been attacked as well, their places of business vandalized because they had decided to remain open during the United Workers Council Strike of 1974.
Shaun and Brendan Byrne were murdered, while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. In thepicture sent to me by one of the Byrne family, the only child not home that evening is the little girl standing at her father’s right shoulder.
Somehow – I know not how – Mrs. Byrne kept going, and on that St. Patrick’s Day in 1987, she outdid herself, with a giant pot of Irish stew, the likes of which I defy you to find in America. Bland to the American taste-buds, I’m sure, but when combined with an aromatic turf fire, a hot Powers whiskey, and someone like Big Mickey playing The Lonesome Boatmanon a tin whistle in the back bar, it was big and bold in flavor. It was unforgettable. On such a night, we basked in our Irish identity.
We knew who we were.
Every St. Patrick’s Day since, I am drawn back to The Wayside Halt. For the craic. For a pint with an old boyfriend. For Mrs. Byrne. And to bear witness.
It is January 5, 1976 at the end of a work day, and sixteen men are in a red minibus on their way home from the Glenane textile factory Four of them get out at Whitecross. and the van continues on to Bessbrook. The craic turns to football and whether Manchester United or Liverpool will make it to the top of the First Division, but it is tempered by what happened the day before when six local Catholics were murdered, ripping apart the Reavey and O’Dowd famlies. Naturally, the men aren’t surprised when they spot the red lamp swinging up ahead near the Kingsmills crossroads. Increased security would be expected following yesterday’s murders – and this is South Armagh – “bandit country.”
What words work for what happens next? The men are ordered out of the van by gunmen in combat jackets who have been waiting for them in the hedges. This is not a British Army checkpoint. The workers are told to line up and put their hands on the roof of the van. They are asked to state their religion – Protestant or Catholic. There is only one Catholic among them, Richard Hughes, and when he is asked to identify himself, his Protestant workmates are terrified. In their dread, in their desire to protect him, they cover his hands with theirs.
It is this moment that is forever lodged in the corner of my heart that never left Northern Ireland. It is this moment – this split second of humanity – that Seamus Heaney recollects in his 1995 Nobel lecture
One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA
All in vain. In less than a minute, ten of the men are gunned down and left to die on the side of a road slippery with rain and blood. Tit-for-tat.
Forty years later, the sole survivor, Alan Black, seeks no revenge. A survivor – and a witness – he is often stuck in those moments when, shot 18 times, he was left for dead. Every January, he finds himself going “into countdown mode — I look at the calendar and at the clock and think to myself ‘the boys have only five days or five hours or five minutes to live’, right up to the time of the ambush.” He seeks acknowledgement and justice for the boys and their families. He seeks answers that may never come.
These men are known to me only through the tiniest details from a Belfast Telegraph article written a decade ago “Joseph Lemmon, whose wife was standing over their tea as he died; Reginald Chapman, a Sunday school teacher who played football for Newry Town; his younger brother Walter Chapman; Kenneth Worton, whose youngest daughter had not even started school; James McWhirter, who belonged to the local Orange lodge; Robert Chambers, still a teenager and living with his parents; James McConville, who was planning to train as a missionary; John Bryans, a widower who left two children orphaned; and Robert Freeburn, who was also a father of two. The van driver, Robert Walker, came from near Glenanne.”
The answers may never come, nor justice. As Susan McCay reminds us “The absence of reconciliation has never been more starkly apparent, and as usual, those most hurt in the past are hurt again.” But what also remains for us and what belongs to us, is humanity and courage on the side of a country road in South Armagh forty years ago. We would do well to hold on to it.
The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.
“They stopped France when its guard was down,” announces the BBC reporter from a TV in the corner of my house so far away from Paris. Of course they did.
I should know by now that a popular concert venue in Paris on a Friday night is not an unexpected place, that there are some for whom Paris is “a legitimate target.” I should know by now not to be shocked that a gunman would fire indiscriminately into one restaurant at the intersection of Rue de Charonne and Rue Faidherbe. And then another. Learning that two explosions were heard outside the Stade de France during the friendly football match between France and Germany, I am reminded of 1994, the year Ireland qualified for the World Cup. The country was ecstatic, its factories, offices, shops, even banks, all closing early so everyone could make it home, or to the pub, in plenty of time for kick-off at the Ireland v Italy match being televised live from Giants Stadium in New Jersey. We had thought of going out to the pub to watch the first-round match, but my father convinced us to stay at home, have a few jars, and watch the match from the comfort of the living room. So we gathered around the TV and held our breath as Ireland went up 1-0 against Italy at Giants Stadium. Like Boston Red Sox fans prior to the 2004 World Series, we were afraid to look.
The second half of the match was well underway when two men in boiler suits, their faces hidden behind balaclavas, stormed into a tiny packed pub, The Heights Bar, in the village of Loughinisland, County Down. With an AK47 and a Czech made rifle, they shot madly and indiscriminately at the sixteen men who had gathered around the bar to watch Ireland take on Italy. They killed six of them, and according to witnesses, the two gunmen laughed as they made their getaway. The first killed, Barney Green, was in his eighties, someone’s grandfather, and as I recall from the stories that later poured from that heartbroken village, he had put on his best suit to mark Ireland’s making it to the World Cup. In the same moments, the jubilant Irish football team was making its way out a Giants Stadium awash in green, held aloft by the chants of 60,000 supporters, anticipating champagne and a night of revelry, only to be silenced and sickened by news of what had happened in a country pub back home.
Anything can happen.
In Paris last night, I imagine some in the crowd guessed or hoped or dismissed those blasts outside the Stade de France as something else, the way we convince ourselves that it is a car backfiring on the freeway not a gunshot, that it is merely a clap of Monsoon thunder not a bomb detonated on a railway line. But then comes the scream of sirens, the plumes of grey smoke, the unmistakable stench, the blood thick on the aisles at The Bataclan and the realization of being under attack, once again in the lingering aftermath of two planes that crashed with such force into the heart of a city, on a clear Autumn morning that had been full of possibilities, the Manhattan skyline sparkling in the sunshine.
Until that grotesque morning in September 11th 2001, I know I had taken for granted the sense of security I felt as a woman who had traded Northern Ireland for America. Foolishly, I had too quickly dropped my guard. I had grown complacent and smug, confident that – unlike her mother – my American daughter would never have to look twice at an unattended shopping bag that had been simply forgotten by someone in a hurry, or that she would never find herself standing stock still with her arms over her head to be searched before proceeding through airport security, or wonder while poring over international headlines, how a complete stranger could hate her because of her nationality; or, that she would find out from her grandmother on a Facebook message that 129 people were confirmed dead following a shooting at a rock concert in the center of Paris.
As bits of sentences sped across time and distance with harrowing news of suicide bombings and indiscriminate shootings, I kept going with my Friday evening plan to attend The Psychedelic Furs concert in Scottsdale, nostalgic for the verve of the 1980s.
I kept going, all the while knowing that such horror was unfolding on the other side of the Atlantic? Has my heart grown numb? And what fear lurked in the minds of The Psychedelic Furs as they took the stage in Scottsdale, Arizona, aware that just hours earlier, the Eagles of Death Metal were performing in Paris, forgetting, the way we do, that anything can happen, that gunmen can storm in and slaughter scores of fans with automatic weapons.
Anything can happen.
On September 11, 2001, it seemed that the world could barely breathe for fear of what might happen next. My little girl was just four years old, safe in her pre-school, learning how to be away from me. As the news tumbled out of New York city, I found myself unable to think or do, momentarily frozen by a revulsion familiar to children of The Troubles. Blindsided again.I suppose, with the Good Friday Agreement and talk of peace and renewal, I had grown complacent. How could I have so quickly forgotten that anything can happen?Anything. I should have known better.
Anything can happen.
The tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted
Those overlooked regarded.
~ Seamus Heaney
Did we used to be more resigned to that maxim? Maybe. Growing up where I did, when I did, I was often confounded by the bombs and bullets, the brutality and barbarism on both sides, but at the same time, somehow – and sadly – resigned to it. I held tight to the ordinary rituals, those I thought I could control. I tried not to be afraid that “it” might happen to me. I never fully gave into the fear as I went to school or the shop or to the pub on a Friday night or out to a concert. Had I succumbed to the fear, I might never have left the house.
With hundreds of people out and about in the city of lights, there is the potential for a tremendous loss of life, and a profound sense of sadness and weariness accompanies this awareness. It reconfirms my fear that it is impossible to defeat terrorism. At the same time, it is impossible to live in constant fear of it, otherwise you might never go outside, as my mother often told me when I was a young girl growing up in Northern Ireland.
So what can we do today and tomorrow and the next day as we wonder why and how or when it might happen again? We will find, long before the answers, the highest expressions of humanity and kindess within the hearts of ordinary people who will emerge as heroes. Mr. Rogers calls them “the helpers.”
While we struggle to find the words to explain the inexplicable – again – we can remind our children – and ourselves – of the helpers and their humanity that shines through the darkest days:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.
Terri Hooley has decided to close down the Good Vibrations record shop on June 13th. This one’s for him – again.
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 stopped what we were doing to wonder aloud if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and from where we wanted to escape, to a different neighborhood and for “teenage kicks all through the night.”
This may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie except Terri Hooley reopened “Good Vibes” on the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after what came to be known as “the day the music died” in Northern Ireland. Watching 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 would play it on the record player behind the counter for everyone in the shop to hear. As soon as the needle hit the groove, no one would have guessed 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 ever 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 understood again – and more clearly – what Joe Strummer of The Clash was talking about when he said:
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 my Northern Ireland had lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night. Every single night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends still 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 somehow 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. I wonder now 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 the terrible thing 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 were only mildly annoyed by it, until they were ordered to get out of their vehicle and 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). As they waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of the band’s 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 night air. Des McAlea suffered minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, almost forty years later, the shock and revulsion returns, 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?
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. But what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers defined his band as “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” I imagine Terri Hooley had been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were afraid. Some people thought Northern Ireland’s musical life was over. Performers from the UK mainland were too scared to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, performing in Northern Ireland 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 was shaken to my core – again – by the inhumanity of some 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 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.
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 Terri. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owning a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in standing on either side of the sectarian divide. For the young people who came to Good Vibes, he wanted another option, another kind of country where a kid would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. 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 – about “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a 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 one. 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.
In those days, we had three TV channels from which to choose, 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 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. 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 university 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 conducted his research the way we did pre-Internet and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable with 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 than with 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 syllable is 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” spin 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 an 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.) 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 writes in this “Ode”
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 in November 2013 was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by a very cool record shop I’d discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring back to my Phoenix home, my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland. My plan was to resurrect the turntable that was part of the stereo system my husband bought for me the year we met.
Back then, I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, and he surprised me with it. 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 it. 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.
Ken 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. How I would have liked just one more spin.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a 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.
A more subtle subtext persists in America. In Arizona even, a flashpoint for immigration issues, it seems everyone is at least fractionally Irish on March 17th. With the green beer flowing and all those ringlets bouncing heavily on the heads of Irish dancers, and Americans pinching me if I’m not wearing green, I sometimes ask myself if perhaps I was always absent on St. Patrick’s Day. How could I have grown up down the road from Mount Slemish, where the young Patrick tended his sheep, and missed all these shenanigans?
Shaun and Brendan Byrne were murdered, while the children were in the sitting room upstairs. In the picture sent to me by one of the Byrne family, the only child not home that evening is the little girl standing at her father’s right shoulder.
