The other day a Facebook memory popped up to remind me that my actual memory just isn’t what it used to be. There I am in the boots i’ve owned since 1982, perched on a freeway wall with my camera focused on something in the distance. But what?
Unable to let go of this – and another thing that I’ll get to some other day when I’m in a better mood – I perused my old writings for some clue and soon found it. The year I turned 50, I had an epiphany or two: a)I would never make enough money to go to a job I hate every day and b) money really isn’t everything although I have often acted as though it is. Much to the chagrin of Suze Orman whose appearances on Oprah seared in my brain forever that because I don’t organize my money neatly in my wallet, and because I honestly couldn’t tell you how much of it is in my checking account at any given time, I’m much less likely to attract any. Money. Other things, but not money. If I must choose between making a payment for something essential like the electric bill or springing for a hard-bound signed copy of Seamus Heaney’s Nobel speech, “Crediting Poetry,” well, the man from Bellaghy is winning, which leads me back to a monsoon-y August afternoon in 2013, just two weeks before Heaney died.
Time and space collapsed when I spotted the handsome little volume perched on a shelf in an air-conditioned out-of-print fine books store next to a used car dealership on Camelback Road, a universe away from Anahorish, “where springs washed into the shiny grass.” No, I didn’t buy the signed first US edition that afternoon, but I felt so guilty for having abandoned it there, that I knew it would only be a matter of time before I would return, with an explanation to the avuncular Phoenician bookseller, of the finer points of buying ‘on tick.’
Previously, the best money I ever spent was in 1982. Flush with my university grant money, I bought three things that would change my life – a Eurail pass, a 35mm camera, and the finest Hi-Fi stereo system money could buy. I moved out of the Halls of Residence at college, and into a red-brick terraced house on Ridgeway Street in Belfast, where I lived with four male engineering students who tolerated my girliness and threw great parties without ever damaging any of my vinyl.
At the lower end of our street was The Lyric Theater and at the top, The Belfast Wine Company, a convenient and well-stocked off-license.
Ridgeway Street, Belfast, N. Ireland
In the middle, these houses teemed with university students. All imaginative misfits, most of us going to our classes only when there was nothing else to do.
What sparkles in my memory of that time is one glorious evening on Ridgeway Street, when we spilled out of those houses and onto the road, pelting each other with water balloons. Meanwhile – seriously – the frontman of Thin Lizzy, a very cool Phil Lynott, leaned against the door jamb of a house full of art students from Derry. I have no idea what he was doing there, but he was enjoying himself. Maybe he got lost on the way to wherever he was supposed to be staying after the Lizzy gig at The Kings Hall. I can still see him, plain as day, smoking and laughing at us as we soaked each other, on the kind of shimmering spring night that transforms Northern Ireland into a veritable tourist destination – the kind of place it is today.
Decades later and all the vinyl records bought with my lunch money and my university grant, are stowed away in the roof-space of my parent’s house in Castledawson. About 50 of them made it to Mexico with me – nobody leaves Bob Dylan’s “Bringing it all Back Home” back home. Faded and stashed between the pages of an old diary, the Eurail pass took me to places that have stayed in my heart to this day – Paris, Florence, Rome, Capri, the Greek islands. The Olympus camera? It was stolen from my first apartment in Phoenix.
There’s no reason other than life™ for why it took thirty years and a breast cancer diagnosis before I would buy another 35mm camera. Maybe it took that long for me to get ready to finally take stock and see things through different lenses.
In the Fall of 2012, my lovely friend Rhonda and I enrolled in a college photography class that required us to pay attention to shapes and patterns and all the lines and curves we might otherwise miss going about our daily business. For a semester, the photography teacher sent us on scavenger hunts every Sunday to spots like the “Water Mark,” where five 14-foot aluminum horses guard a road in Scottsdale. Some folks believe it should be designated a wonder of the world, but my teacher just wanted me to notice it, to pay attention to those splendid horses that evoke the Wild West but also prevent flooding during our Monsoon season. At such times, water gushes from the horse’s mouths, and it is an awesome sight. And that, my friends, is what was in the lens of my camera as I stood on the other side of the freeway.
Now I know those wild horses belong in the Arizona desert where the rains are rare, but I prefer to think of them along the Annadale Embankment, watching over us at the end of a wild Belfast night.
Footnote: The Heaney Lecture is now where it belongs – on a shelf in my house between Door into the Dark and Stepping Stones . As for Phil? His band would disintegrate a few months after that night on Ridgeway Street, and just three years later, Phil Lynott would slip away from us. He would have been 74 years old this year. How we loved him! As Joseph O’Connor explains, Phil was “the first Irish person ever to bound onto a stadium stage in leather trousers and bawl to the gods: “Are you OUT there?” He was our first rock star, gone too soon, and on a rainy night in Phoenix, some three decades later, I can still hear his coyote call . . .
But there is the replenishing joy of the songs themselves, that carnival of outlaws, renegades and chancers, tumbling through the sunbursts of his rhymes. From the lonesome cowboy’s prairie to the louche streets of Soho, from the mythic Celtic battlefields over to Dino’s bar and grill, his restless creativity roamed. You could stock a damn good jukebox with only his work, so vivid the eye for detail and so capacious its reach . . . The songs will abide. That’s the only consolation. But it’s a real one. Even in the darkest night, you can always hear the king’s call.
Far from Ridgeway Street and the wild horses in Scottsdale.
Once upon a time, before news traveled at break-neck speed to our smart phones and our Cable TV networks, we waited for it. We had no choice, and when “the news” came on at teatime, it was a serious affair that demanded our attention. It was rarely, if ever, about a new animal born at the zoo or a celebrity’s wardrobe malfunction. When UTV broadcaster, Brian Baird, entered our living rooms, in black and white, and with poker-faced authority as he told us something new, we took it as gospel.
As my brother says, “You could read nothing in that face. It was all in the voice. The face, if it told you anything, told you this: listen to what I’ve found out since I was talking to you last. This is very important, and will take only three minutes.” There was no shuffling of papers, no footerin’ with a pen – there was just the news.
When our Seamus Heaney died, I remember wondering, amid the flurry of texts and Tweets, how the late Brian Baird would have broken the news. Would he have maintained his composure or would he have lost what veteran American anchorman, Walter Kronkite, described as the “running battle” between his emotions and his news sense when he announced on-air, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I suspect the latter.
I first met him on a September morning in the early 1980s. I was a student at Queen’s University of Belfast’s Stranmillis College, and I was late for my first Modern Irish Fiction Since Joyce seminar. When I opened the door, it was to the sound of a familiar voice coming from the front of a classroom. There he was, sitting behind a desk that was too small for him, reciting Yeats, with the same gentle gravitas with which he read the news. Away from the TV that took up one corner of our living room on the Dublin Road, Mr. Baird was larger than life. As such, over the course of that year, he changed my life – the way only the best teachers an.
In Mr. Baird’s seminar, I discovered the novels of Edna O’Brien, the short stories of Frank O’Connor and Liam O’Flaherty, and Brian Friel’s plays. Even as I write, I can hear his recitation of Patrick Kavanagh’s “On Raglan Road,” which made me weep a little. Indeed, I still prefer to remember Mr. Baird waxing poetic over reporting news that was mostly bad in those days.
He introduced me to Seamus Heaney. As “professionally unfussed” as the characters that moved in those poems, Mr. Baird led us into and aem. He led his students in and out of those poems, wondering always and wandering through rural places and practices I knew well, but had until then taken for granted. I felt a new pride, almost boastful that I belonged to Heaney’s places – Castledawson, The Hillhead, The Lough shore, Broagh. I was, well, a Derry Girl.
I found a new respect for the craft of country men who peopled Heaney’s poems – The Thatcher, Barney Devlin, the blacksmith at The Forge, The Diviner –– men like my father, who I once observed “witch” water, the pull of it so strong where he stood, that the stick in the shape of a wishbone, bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting through a green hazel its secret stations.”
To be fair, this newfound appreciation for the ways of life in the townlands of rural Derry did little to make me more punctual to class or timely with submission of homework. Mr. Baird always referred to me as “the late Miss Watterson,” announcing my arrival in a way that only encouraged my tardiness. I enjoyed the attention, and I saved every hand-written essay, because I loved his red-ink comments. I used to image him sharing his assessments of my work on the six o’clock news: “A very sound survey, which I was pleased, at last, to receive. I had had oral evidence of its existence.” Or, “This was received very late, so I can’t guarantee this mark.” I got the mark anyway.
He started out as a young English teacher in 1956, in Kuala Kangsa, a small town in Malaysia. He had accepted a post recently vacated by a John Wilson, who later, under the pen name of Anthony Burgess, wrote the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. After a successful five years, Mr. Baird moved to the island of Penang, where his son, Patric, was born. And in 1963, the year I was born, the Bairds returned to Northern Ireland, bringing with them a cargo of words and phrases, recipes and photographs, from exotic Eastern places that could not have been further away from Belfast.
I remember spotting him one night in the foyer of The Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street, just a few doors down from where I lived when I was a student. He was enjoying a cigar and a laugh with local celebrities, his thick gold bracelet chinking against a brandy glass as he raised it in my direction. I wish I had been bold enough to say hello, confident enough to ask if he thought the play was going to be all it was cracked up to be. I know now he would have welcomed me into the conversation, but I was hesitant, awkwardly aware of my “station” as the first person in my family to attend university or to go to a play at The Lyric Theater. I may as well have been in Penang. Mr. Baird would have understood that, too. Seamus Heaney did as well, explaining in Stepping Stones to Dennis O’Driscoll:
Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days,I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.
A university education in Belfast was a universe away from the Broagh, necessitating a kind of verbal dance with his mother, when he returned from it to the family home, full of new knowledge, new words, and new sensitivities. I can almost picture him – in that tight space between elevated and plain Derry speech, watching every word, weighing its impact before he utters it. My mother and I have danced that very dance, her telling me to this day, ” you know all them things.”
From Clearances IV
Fear of affectation made her affect
Inadequacy whenever it came to
Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek.
She’d manage something hampered and askew
Every time, as if she might betray
The hampered and inadequate by too
Well-adjusted a vocabulary.
With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You
Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue
In front of her, a genuinely well-
Adjusted adequate betrayal
Of what I knew better. I’d naw and aye
And decently relapse into the wrong
Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.
In 1991, Mr. Baird would receive a letter from me. By then, I was living in Phoenix and teaching part-time. In anticipation of teaching an Irish literature class, I wondered if he would maybe share with me the syllabus from the Irish Fiction course that changed me all those years before. He obliged. His elegant hand-written letter remains folded between the pages of a Queen’s University Library book The Collected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh that stands in my bookcase today.
I wish there had been more letters. He died in 1998, by which time I was in the throes of learning how to be a new mother – my daughter’s first teacher. I regret not making time to thank him for the gift of Heaney’s poetry – there has not been one day of my adult life that I have not been grateful for it.
Following his death, then manager of Ulster Television( UTV), Desmond Smyth, described him just as many of us remember him:
To a TV generation Brain Baird was the voice and the face of UTV news. He was a totally professional broadcaster and a charming work colleague with not an ounce of ego about him.
Like Seamus Heaney’s men – not an ounce of ego.
In a world much smaller by 2013, I received out of the blue one morning an email from his son, Patric. In his travels, he had found something I had written about the impact of his father on yet another former student. It turns out I am part of a large and global fan-club. On a trip to Malay to celebrate his 50th birthday, Patric told me he met some of his dad’s former pupils, now men in their seventies, recalling with gratitude and fondness the teacher who had helped shape their appreciation of literature and the English language.
It was a long struggle with a rare form of leukemia that killed my favorite teacher. Patric wrote that his father remained positive throughout the illness. Of course he did.
He died before seeing his son become a journalist and before knowing the full extent of his influence as a teacher and a lover of Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Even though I know he is the man who kept on reading the news in spite of a fly landing on his lip, I also believe that his inscrutable poker face would break into a smile at the thought of his son and a former student, each of us in our fifties and like Seamus Heaney, “crediting marvels.”
After my husband died and the weekend before my first Christmas as a widow, I walked out one morning to find a large envelope bearing a Belfast postmark in my Phoenix mailbox. Inside was a typed letter from Patric and a slim paperback volume – a book I knew well. For some time, he had been meaning to send me one of his father’s books of Heaney’s poetry, and while searching for my address online, he learned of my husband’s death. In his letter, he disclosed some details of his father’s death, a few days before Christmas in 1998, and wrote of the airplane trip to Belfast to be with his family. Whether from London to Belfast or Dublin to Phoenix, such a flight is too long isn’t it? Fraught with a desperate desire to just be where you belong.
So it was that Mr. Baird’s personal copy of “Death of a Naturalist” became part of my book collection.
It is certainly the most dog-eared of the collection and probably the one he read the most. I’m sure he could think of no better person to whom he would like it passed on.
When Terri Hooley decided – again – to close down the Good Vibrations record shop in the summer of 2015, I wrote this for him. Again.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but that changed one November night on the plane from Chicago to Dublin. 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, I’m supposing, 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 Great Victoria Street, 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 would always know what I would 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 Europa, 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 cried 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 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, forty five 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. They sang 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” or Little Feat’s “Waiting for Columbus,” 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 right 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 also 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 red 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 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 have 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 Ray Millar,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 – Lowell George, Linda Rondstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. Meanwhile, my parents were listening to Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Hank Lochlin – and although I resisted the steady diet of country and western, it someshow moved in and took up permanent residence in my heart as well. 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. 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 had 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. In fact, it moved to a prominent place in my living room in Phoenix.
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. For the good times.
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.
We may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world
– James Baldwin
This is for George Floyd.
I came to Arizona in the late 1980s. Something of a cliché, part of the “brain drain,” I was a well-educated immigrant who had over-stayed her welcome in America and subsequently found a job in a bar. With my Northern Ireland accent and the right amount of naiveté about Arizona, I was the main source of amusement for the regulars who stopped by for a beer after their shift at a nearby manufacturing plant. Young and fearless, I charmed them with what they considered an Irish brogue, and the more alcohol I served, the more they wanted to tell me all about their Irish roots.
Most mornings, the bar was quiet, with only a few weary workers coming in after clocking out of the graveyard shift. One of them was Cliff. He was tall and handsome with a million dollar smile, and he was black. Like the other regulars, he teased me – relentlessly – about my accent, asking the same questions everyone else asked, if it was really that green over there, if I ate Lucky charms for breakfast or used Irish Spring soap. And, mostly, he would ask what a nice girl like me was doing in a dump like this.
One morning, Cliff arrived as the lead bartender was delivering a hasty tutorial on how to make cocktails. A self-proclaimed “broad,” she had decided it was about damn time I graduated from serving unfamiliar beer in colored cans to mixed drinks. A quick study, by 10 o’clock that morning, I had set up a row of dubious cocktails for anyone willing to try them. By the time Cliff showed up, I was deep in a learning curve, getting to know the popular highball cocktails that every bartender should know as well as the lowball variety favored by some of the locals, like the creamy Mudslides boot-scootin-boogie-Bob ordered for everyone in the bar on a Friday night. There were never enough shot-glasses.
Rather than over-pouring his usual shot of Jim Beam, I cajoled Cliff into giving one of my creations a go. “Ah, g’wan. Ya will, ya will. You’ll have a Tequila Sunrise to please me. And, what about a Salty Dog or a Long Island Iced Tea to sort you out for the rest of the day?” I don’t remember what he chose, but it amused him that I had written down all the recipes so I could learn them “by heart,” like a catechism. Sucking from a straw one those questionable concoctions, pretending to like it, he helped me pass the time, talking about how hot it was already and what I had planned for the weekend.
The jukebox he had nicknamed “Country Thunder” was silent that morning, the only sounds a dropped fork on the kitchen tiles, a Goddammit when the owner realized he was missing some ingredient vital to the daily lunch special or that the cook had spiked her coffee with J & B scotch. Again. Out of earshot in the back office, my bartending teacher was counting money, and at the far end of the bar two men staring ahead, smoking over a pitcher of Budweiser.
Chopping limes and twisting slivers of lemons for later, I kept Cliff entertained, until during a lull in our conversation, I heard one of those men call out to the owner who was still out of sight, “Hey Bud, since when do you allow the help to talk to niggers?”
Again.
“Hey – I said since when do you allow the help to talk to niggers?”
And I froze.
Instant, sickening, and recognizable, flight or fight fear, not unlike the kind I once felt as a young girl, when one evening after school, I turned a page in the Belfast Telegraph to find a black and white photograph of a young woman, a Catholic, who had been stripped and tied to a lamp-post, hot tar and feathers poured on her roughly shorn head – her punishment for falling in love with a British soldier.
Frozen behind a bar in Phoenix, Arizona, I was back in 1970s Northern Ireland.
In ”Punishment,” harrowing and haunting to read, the late Seamus Heaney evokes a young woman who has been shorn, stripped, and killed in a primitive, barbaric act he juxtaposes with the ‘tarring and feathering’ punishments in the Northern Ireland of his day. Speaking directly to the dead woman, he tells her:
My poor scapegoat, I almost love you, but would have cast, I know the stones of silence.
While I took a powerful lesson from Heaney’s poem and have applied it to all manner of situations in my life, I did not apply it that morning in the bar. Young and foolish and frightened – and privileged – I cast the stones of silence.
To anyone reading this today, it will be difficult to accept that I had not expected to find racism in 1980s America. This is the truth. Unravelling the memories, I return to my adolescence, to Sunday evenings in our Dublin Road living room, when my family – along with everyone else we knew – gathered around a tiny television to watch ‘Roots.’ We were horrified when Kunta Kinte was sold into slavery in America and whipped within an inch of his life for trying to escape. Aghast, we watched, night after night, but we also held onto the notion that just as the entire country seemed to be galvanized by the story unfolding on Roots, surely an entire country would subsequently adopt a kinder, gentler attitude. Surely?
That morning in a dive bar in Phoenix, Arizona, I couldn’t have been further away from Northern Ireland or from Gambia, West Africa in 1750, Kunta Kinte’s place of birth. I couldn’t have been further away from the right thing to do. I chose not to stand up. I said nothing to those two men. To Cliff, I said, “I’m sorry.” I am ashamed that I said it too quietly.
In response, Cliff stood up and looked at me. In his kind brown eyes, no anger just a resignation, a look that told me he was used to it. He picked up his hat, put it on his head, and walked out the door. He left a $20 tip.
I never saw him again.
I am so sorry. I am so sorry I said nothing. I am so sorry I did nothing.
Maya Angelou reminds us “when you know better, you do better.” Do we?
Nine days ago, we watched on TV a cell-phone video, recorded in broad daylight, as a police officer pinned George Floyd to the ground, and for minute after minute after minute after minute, after minute, after minute, after minute, after minute, after tragic minute, held his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck. We watched as onlookers pleaded for medical attention. We watched as the officer kept his knee pressed on the neck of a handcuffed man who presented no physical threat, having ignored the nine times George Floyd begged for mercy, for water, for his life:
“Please, please, please I can’t breathe. My neck hurts. Please, please. I can’t breathe.”
Helpless, we sat in our homes and watched as the scene played out the way we feared it would. Helpless, we watched until eventually George Floyd, unarmed and handcuffed and black, fell silent and motionless on the pavement, a police officer’s knee still pressed against his neck. We can no longer choose to be helpless.
We cannot – nor should we – look away from the harrowing sight of a defenseless black man pleading for mercy. We cannot – nor should we – look away from injustice. But looking at it is not enough. It never was.
George Floyd mattered. Somebody loved him. His life was important. It had value. He lost it yesterday in an encounter with law enforcement that once again raises pain and trauma for so many people. The issue of police-community relations has been a point of controversy and pain for the whole of American history. It involves centuries of trauma. In the past several years alone, almost every part of Minnesota has lived through a fatal encounter with law enforcement. George Floyd’s death raises that trauma yet again for so many people. It is legitimate for community members to be outraged by George Floyd’s death. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I strongly encourage everyone who wishes to exercise their First Amendment rights to protest to do so safely: use social distancing and wear a mask. It is an act of care for yourselves and your community to do so. ~
We were right here, watching and wishing – waiting – for justice, for peace. It comes dropping slow – too slow.
No justice, no peace.
Yesterday,George Floyd was laid to rest, a day after new charges were announced against the the officer who showed no mercy and against the others who were at the scene and chose to stand by while George Floyd died. In his eulogy, Rev. Al Sharpton said that when he visited the scene where Mr. Floyd was taken from us, it occurred to him that what happened there illustrates in one brutal metaphor, the African American experience:
“George Floyd’s story has been the story of black folks . . . because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck. What happened to Floyd happens every day in this country, in education, in health services and in every area of American life. It’s time to stand up in George’s name and say get your knee off our necks!””
It is time. And, white people like me can help. There are things we can do – little things – that will make a big difference for black communities, things we may have never done or said before, questions we have never thought to ask. We can act. As consumers, we can choose to shop from black-owned businesses. As voters, we can make choices about the who decides how our cities will be policed, and how our police will be funded, and we can force answers to question about why, during a pandemic that is disproportionately impact our communities of color, there is money for police officers to suit up in body armor, but not enough PPE for front-line doctors and nurses. As educators in loco parentis we can volunteer to sit on committees that examine curricula, and when we admit that it neither includes nor respects the diversity of our families, we can demand a change.
Let’s not squander another opportunity to do one of these things – today. We can move on up the road.
Of Alex Haley’s story, James Baldwin writes:
Roots is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one–the action of love, or the effect of the absence of love, in time. It suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can’t but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us. Well, we can perish in this vehicle, children, or we can move on up the road.
Decades later and all the vinyl records bought with my lunch money and my university grant, are stowed away in the roof-space of my parent’s house in Castledawson. About 50 of them made it to Mexico with me – nobody leaves Bob Dylan’s “Bringing it all Back Home” back home. Faded and stashed between the pages of an old diary, the Eurail pass took me to places that have stayed in my heart to this day – Paris, Florence, Rome, Capri, the Greek islands. The Olympus camera? It was stolen from my first apartment in Phoenix.
