RORY GALLAGHER CORNER

What do you think of that
I’m sleeping down at the laundromat

“Laundromat”

He’s been forgotten, but maybe if kids listen to “Laundromat” they’ll be inspired to pick up a Stratocaster and make a glorious noise.

I was late to the Rory Gallagher party, or maybe I was early. I saw his group Taste open for Blind Faith in the summer of ’69, but I had no idea who Rory was. And then I was turned on to him by my friend John Hughes in college, back in the day when an act could break out regionally, they never played this cut in New York, but it was on the airwaves in K.C.

I wasn’t gonna go to the corner, the pictures didn’t seem that impressive, but then I started getting e-mail about going and I just sauntered down there. On one hand it’s easy to ignore, just a sign high on a wall, but underneath that is a bronze Stratocaster, actual size, and that struck my heart, even though no one else was looking up. Because that’s the essence, the axe. What you could do with one, even the punk bands used one, but in the hands of true players you’d hear this mellifluous sound, sometimes edgy, always different, a far cry from the repetitious 808 heard on endless tracks back in ’82, and now today.

My favorite Rory Gallagher cut is “Walkin’ Wounded,” because of the groove, because of the majesty, try not nodding your head to this, it’s like he’s breaking ice with his guitar and the drums pound and Rory emotes like he cares, cool is not what he’s going for, then again, that’s what he ends up with.

The blues. We’ve all got ’em. They blew up because people could identify. Never underestimate the power of connection, it’s what holds the world together.

“Walkin’ Wounded”

TEMPLE BAR

It’s a neighborhood, it’s an actual bar, and it’s where Rory’s corner is.

Now if I were still in college, if I still drank, I’d spend my evenings there. Reminds me of the Alibi back in Middlebury, all wood, rough edges, not sharp. Where it’s about your personality as opposed to your look. And the guitarist was playing Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town” and it was like the internet era never existed. It was just a guy with a Martin, strumming and singing, how did it become about beats? But that’s only on streaming services, seems like songs sustain, not that they get any press, but they are the oral tradition that will survive, they penetrate your heart, that’s humanity, when you get rid of the tricks and just start playing and singing.

“Dirty Old Town”

THE BOOK OF KELLS

Kind of a disappointment actually. There are endless exhibits of build-up that supersede the ultimate book itself. Then again, it is old, and it is colorful and it’s amazing how they made it, but…

The library on the floor above is positively JAW-DROPPING!

They stocked every book published in England and Ireland. It’s overwhelming, you get the feeling that all the knowledge is RIGHT HERE!

That’s how you learn most, the written word. It supersedes the spoken word, which is kind of funny if you think about it. But book lovers would just like to sit there and marinate in the vibe of the Trinity Library. And it’s not only the feel, but the look… The vaulted ceiling, the ladders…

We ain’t got nothing like this in the New Land.

KILMAINHAM GAOL

It’s the hottest ticket in Dublin. It’s the PRISON!

And you wouldn’t want to be there. One tiny room, with only a blanket to keep you warm, the candle needing to last two weeks. And it’s amazing the people they executed, and the people who were locked up and let out and are now seen as heroes. It was illegal to beg during the potato famine, and if you got locked up you were better fed than you were on the street, so cells built for one were inhabited by nearly ten!

But mostly it’s about revolution. The Irish wanted self-rule. They eventually got it, after a long hard fight. We are no longer warding off the English in America, but somehow the majority is no longer ruling. Is it in our destiny to fight?

Taylor Takes A Side

You play offense, not defense.

Ever since Kavanaugh was confirmed the spin is Republicans have benefited, the Democrats have been pointing fingers, will it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Republicans are spinmasters, they understand the game, the Democrats are wimps who believe in their hearts they’re on the right side and should win and when they don’t they whine. GROW A PAIR!

Oh, can I say that?

Now that’s one place the Democrats have lost the plot, with the political correctness, the trigger warnings, the decision to offend no one. Get over it, go on the playground, your mommy and daddy cannot defend you there, you’ve got to fight for your right to party, and the Democrats keep laying down arms until…

Taylor Swift takes a side.

Now you can be cynical and ask where she was during the last election cycle. But never criticize someone for becoming woke too late. At least Taylor Swift woke up. Now if she’d only write a song!

History told her not too. My inbox is filling up with messages about the Dixie Chicks. Are you too afraid to take a side? Don’t be. You too can make a difference. Hell, why is it in Tennessee you can’t register to vote election day to begin with! You’ve got to push back and…

Ignore the news.

Don’t you get it, THE MEDIA IS LOVING THIS! THEY’VE SUDDENLY GOT A HORSE RACE! They love telling stories about the Republican resurgence.

As for the pollsters… Are they reaching millennials on landlines? If you trust the polls today, you probably trust the news, and never in our history has the fourth estate been more wrong.

This is the sixties all over again, in other words, WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

And what we learn is the inequitable side stuck in the past always loses in the end. That’s right, we’ve got abortion, we’ve got gay marriage, the Republicans are on the wrong side of history, don’t default to them, SPEAK UP!

Hell, the Republicans have their ducks in a row, their talking points set up. Protests are funded by Soros. Innocent until proven guilty. Ignore your past statements as you double down on your new. And what do the Democrats do? BLAME AVENATTI!

As if the confirmation of Kavanaugh was the World Series, but it’s just a playoff game, the real contest takes place in November. As for Kavanaugh…there’s always another season.

I’m not saying I’m optimistic. But I am saying I’m willing to take a side and stick with it, and point fingers at their team, not ours.

Wake up! Supporting women is a GOOD THING! A WINNING STRATEGY! Everybody has a mother, you don’t want to stop pushing on this. Furthermore, this is what Republicans do best, agitate and define the debate. It’s about time the Democrats defined the debate. Sure, I’m temporarily demoralized, we lost the game, but we did a hell of a job. We revealed the temperament of Kavanaugh, we exposed the duplicity of Susan Collins, who always says she feels one way but goes the other. This is to our BENEFIT!

All those professors coming down on Kavanaugh, the ex-justice, wow, I’d say we’re on a WINNING STREAK!

But the Republicans keep telling us we’re not and we’re buying it, blaming ourselves, and they’re laughing as we cripple our message.

Let your freak flag fly. Now is the time to be yourself, to stand up for something. They keep telling us we’re breaking America, when THEY DID! They marched on Charlottesville or endorsed it. They are the ones who didn’t put all of Kavanaugh’s past in evidence. But like good prosecutors, they keep blaming it on us. WE’RE BLAMELESS! We just want fairness for ALL! Is that a bad thing? OF COURSE NOT!

P.S. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift reaches many more voters than Fox. That’s the power of our side. When they say entertainers aren’t entitled to a voice tell them politics is show business for ugly people and that it’s all the same game.

Now that bummed me out. I figured I’d go see Phil Lynott’s statue. Hokey, I know, but what the hell, I’m here, and it’s not that far from the hotel. Not that I was so sure it was gonna be there, research told me it had been defaced, moved for construction, fans were frustrated they could not see it. I could not find it. I’m good with maps, but it eluded me. So, I turned on the directions and…

There it was. And it looked exactly like him. And I was the only one looking at him.

He was on a side street, behind those poles they use so cars won’t bump into things. You felt as if you came back tomorrow he could be gone, that his placement was temporary. But it was so eerie, because as I said above, it looked exactly like him, and we no longer expect this, in an era where there are constant brouhahas over art veering from reality, where commissioned portraits and sculptures are excoriated. It was like he was there but he wasn’t. The ringlets in his hair, his moustache, his lanky frame, his tie and jacket flowing in the wind. But he’s gone, dead and gone, for a long time. He lived until 36, he’s been gone since ’86, and I realized that as the assembled multitude walked by many had no idea who Phil Lynott was, they weren’t even born before he died.

And this was so different from the U2 exhibit at the Little Museum of Dublin. At this point, everybody hates Bono, except for a few dyed-in-the-wool Gen-X’ers. He’s so busy being larger than life that his identity has superseded the music, and that’s anathema. Everything is subservient to the tracks, your identity should be baked into the cuts, then again, U2 hasn’t created anything worth listening to in years. They’ve lost the thread, they made it to the pinnacle and took chances, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, and now they’re known best for invading your iPhone, if you think about them at all. And now they’re chasing hits, when it’s impossible for them to have one. Somehow they have to get back to basics, make music for themselves, and then possibly we can identify with it.

But once upon a time they were nobodies. That’s what you forget, how hard it is to make it. We live in an instant culture. It appears acts pop up on our radar screen and then disappear. And this does happen in the hip-hop world, usually aided by a more successful act, but it used to be you struggled, you were absolutely nowhere before you were somewhere, all you had was the dream, which you kept in your eye as you tried to dodge the minefields on the way to making a living, never mind becoming a household name.

That’s what interested me, the genesis. A lot was in that movie “It Might Get Loud,” but in this exhibit you could see the struggle. Changing names, being way down on the bill, playing to just a handful of people until…

That’s the funny thing about success, it’s not gradual. It trends upward, but then it goes thermonuclear, your dreams are fulfilled and you can barely cope with it.

So four unknowns from Dublin end up touring the world and impacting it. Going from local to global. This is the way it used to be. You formed a band. Unlike U2, it usually broke up. You found other players, you kept bouncing from here to there until you believed this one could truly go. But it never went without a manager, never ever. In this case Paul McGuinness. Since he’s been gone, the band’s not the same, they’ve been doing things they shouldn’t. Kinda like the “Joshua Tree” tour, which turned them into has-beens overnight, once you start playing albums from start to finish your days on the hit parade are over, those shows are a dash for cash, nostalgia, which is fine, unless you want to be au courant, and you know Bono wants to be.

And Bono is alternately out of the loop and a seer. Remove yourself from the street and you’ve got no idea what’s really happening. Fly at 35,000 feet in a private jet and you gain wisdom the punter can never get, like:

“In America you look up at the mansion on the hill and say, ‘One day that could be me.’ In Ireland they look up at the mansion on the hill and go ‘One day I’m gonna’ get that bastard.'”

There’s so much to unpack there that I won’t. But if you’ve been to both places it resonates.

And I’m here to interview Bob Geldof:

The Bob Lefsetz Podcast with Bob Geldof – Liberty Hall

That’s how far rock and roll will take you, from the Hollywood Bowl to the Liverpool docks to Liberty Hall. That’s what you’ll get by following the music. It’s all I did.

P.S. Looking at all the artifacts in the Little Museum I was stunned to realize that we only remember politicians and artists, and mostly the latter, and most of those we remember struggled and never got rich. And were pilloried by the populace on their journey. Meanwhile, all the businessmen are plowed under. Funny how everybody in America used to want to be an artist, now they all want to be businessmen, or famous, and there are a lot easier ways to become famous than being a musician.

P.P.S. Honestly, I thought “The Boys Were Back In Town” was a Bruce Springsteen rip-off. That Lynott had distilled the popular music of the States and fed it back to them, kinda like Tom Scholz with Boston. Then again, if you were alive back in ’76, the track was pounded into your brain with incessant radio play in an era where hits were known by everybody with ears, we burned out on stuff that now resonates, like “The Boys Are Back In Town.” But cruising the promo bin later that year I found “Johnny The Fox,” the follow-up to “Jailbreak,” and I took a chance. And this was when music was scarce, if you bought it, you played it, and you ended up knowing it. And one cut off of “Johnny The Fox” penetrated my brain, I thought of it when I saw Phil’s statue today.

There’s a girl I’ll remember
Oh, for such a long, long time
This girl I’ll remember
She was an old flame of mine

Rock, especially since punk, is known for being boisterous and in-your-face, as if without a whiskey in your hand it’s meaningless, but that’s not true, it’s the melancholy tunes that touch us most, the songs absent from the hit parade. The kind Taylor Swift sang before she became a whining winner. Everybody’s a winner in music today, they fear if they show vulnerability they’ll be voted off the island. But true artists are living in their own private Idaho anyway, so what different does it make?

Once this flame it did brightly blaze
Among the ashes there still remains
A glowing spark in my heart
For that old flame of mine

For Phil Lynott

For rock and roll.

“Old Flame”

Ry Cooder “Better Not Shake It No Mo'”

This is so right, yet so wrong.

Right in concept, wrong in execution, marketing that is.

You can’t get your message heard. All the traditional intermediaries are long in the tooth and near worthless. Talk to the acts that get their records reviewed in the newspaper, it has no effect. Radio is in the rearview mirror. What’s a poor boy to do?

Just what he wants to.

But you’ve got to give it a good shot. There should be a lyric video. Or at least some teenager should have put the lyrics on one half of the screen. It’s hard to understand exactly what Ry is singing. But the enthusiasm! The experience of seeing a legend at work!

And Ry has no YouTube channel, which flummoxes me, he’s a guy who could use one, demonstrating technique, doing covers, isn’t that what he’s famous for? But he’s another aged boomer out of touch with today’s technology, but not its mores.

Great art comes from inspiration. And talk to a great artist and they’ll tell you it’s elusive. But they know it when they feel it/get it, and they run straight to the studio, or get a pad and pencil or an iPhone and lay it on down, you’ve got to capture it right away or it drifts away. And you’ve got to be wary of mucking it up, trying to get it right. Sometimes the initial raw take is best. Kinda like James McMurtry’s “We Can’t Make It Here.” The original, now unavailable iteration, is solo acoustic, with an undeniable groove that has you contemplating the lyrics. The finished take has a different groove and it does not resonate and the effectiveness is diminished. Same deal here, if Ry went into the studio and polished “Better Not Shake It No Mo’,” he’d probably ruin it. But you can see Ry bouncing around his house, thinking about the news, how can one not, and then he gets a flash of inspiration and decides to write a song and lay it on down.

And the best part of this video is not the song, but Ry himself. Why in hell, during the hottest L.A. fall in memory, is he wearing a toque? And the white socks with the slippers… PRICELESS! Like a granddad puttering around the house. But the playing…

This Ry can do naturally, he needs no study, no tutoring, this is his wheelhouse as the kids say today. And he’s totally detached from modern reality, it’s a blast from the past, the way he shakes his head, illustrating how motivated and into it he is, this is the opposite of what we constantly confront, Ry seems GENUINE!

As for the song… It’s oblique and it’s humorous. The way art is supposed to be. The talking heads, the newspaper writers, they lay it all down explicitly, the artist has a skewed view, which resonates with the most people. Ry focuses on a relatively peripheral element of the Kavanaugh case, Ramirez’s contention that Brett swung his penis in front of her and…

But shaking it does not have to be literal. As Tom Wolfe so eloquently wrote, you can be a big swinging dick, and certainly Kavanaugh thinks he’s one, and “dick” has two meanings and…

There’s a break where Ry picks.

And then he shakes his banjo and at the very end you hear a little girl squeal, the granddaughter, the next generation, the one that’s gonna pay the price.

This is in the tradition that Ry grew up with, folk music, hootenanny, he started playing before the Beatles. And that sound percolated and grew to the point where the songs became staples at summer camps and became anthems for the peace movement.

You’ve got to start somewhere.

And it’s always best to go back to the garden.

Ry didn’t assemble twenty writers, didn’t add a manufactured beat, hell, his foot was enough, he did it the old-fashioned way, with humanity, and it resonated.

But nothing is gonna happen. Especially not in a world where the “Times” delineates Trump’s tax evasion and it’s already forgotten. But it’s a start.

And very modern, in that you don’t think about money, you don’t try to plan the game, you just focus on the art and see what happens.

But come on Ry, help us out. With the aforementioned lyrics. Using the internet to spread the word. I’m not saying you have to employ a PR person to carpet bomb the world to little effect. I’m just saying that you’ve got to reach the people who care, however small that group might be. Via the social feeds of like-minded musicians. You start with your friends and you spread the word there.

So this is really curious. At first I was intellectually stimulated but not emotionally. The track, unlike McMurtry’s, is not a hit, it’s not something that yearns to be played over and over again, ad infinitum. But trying to decipher the lyrics, I got hooked, and it really didn’t matter if anybody else did, I was locked on, and that’s what listening is all about.

And I loved the humor. Everybody’s taking themselves so seriously. In the last era of social protest they did not, Frank Zappa built a whole career on poking fun at his own generation. People get the joke, assuming you make one.

So let this stimulate you. The system has been broken down to nothing. Unless you’re a rapper, you’re positively cottage industry. Instead of being frustrated that you can’t dominate the world and make bank, fulfill yourself.

And you just might fulfill the rest of us.

P.S. I asked the manager, Robert Cappadona, for the words, since I couldn’t figure them all out, this is how he responded:

As a manager, I’ve spent a good deal of time transcribing lyrics.

This is the my best version, knowing Ry’s writing (not the gospel).

…Where I’m unsure I will put the word(s) I believe it to be in ( ), and the words I don’t know empty in ( ).

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Well better not shake it no mo’ no mo’
You better not shake it no mo’
Mitch McConnell told me son
You better not shake it no mo’

And you better not jump the girls no more
You better not jump no mo’
If you wanna be a Supreme Judge
You better not shake it no mo’

Well a pretty little gal come walking by
And had to shake it (that thang)
She went and told the FBI
But it ain’t no fault of mine

‘Cause I used to be a college boy
And just one thing I found
When they got their lipstick and their (boobs)
They really wanna shake it all down
Yes they do

Shake it on down
Shake it on down
Shake it on down

If the girls play hard to get
I will just play harder yet
and ( ) going to shake it all down

Play it for me

( ) a letter this morning ( ) I highly reckon it read
The words and salutations from the President
Saying those bitches at the White House
Just as fine as anything be
So come on over to my House
And shake it one time for me

Shake it on down
Shake it on down
We’ll use discretion
But it (will decline)
Tell ‘em court’s in session
Let’s shake it one more time

Shake it on down
Shake it on down
I’ll rock the majority opinion
And soon we’ll shake it all down

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