I'm with the Band

The Cat in the Hat.

I first heard Paul Creane and the boys singing while I was consuming Erdinger in the beer garden of the Sky and the Ground.

They had obviously been out there all day, as the session had grown to include at least 38 musicians and the crowd displayed that happy confused bewildered look that crowds - 

 who have gone out for a lunchtime drink and then found themselves drunkenly shouting and repeating themselves, wrapped in orange blankets at midnight  -

 sometimes wear.

I was trying not to knock over the sky high glass the Erdinger was served in, a task that would become infinitely more precarious in direct response to the actual amount of Erdingers consumed.

In a quest to reconnect with humanity after an enforced period of solitary confinement, I had begun to breeze around the sunny streets of town on Sunday afternoons, with a woman who was so co-ordinated that her eyeshadow matched her beads, bag, bracelets and boots.

She was on the hunt for a man.

 I was running away from one.

Again.

I resembled more of an explosion in a paint shop and had surveyed my Marilyn Monroe bleached blonde bouffant at lunchtime, and prevailed upon the co-ordinated one to fix it for me - with a bottle of some highly toxic, acidic concoction bought in Superdrug for €4 - and had emerged from the destroyed shower stall - dripping on the wooden floors looking like a fat Morticia.

The Sunday before, I had been carousing with Mocha and the Moloneys at a post mortem of a Christening that had turned into a cataclysmic session and I had spent those lost hours in another beer garden (Magees) wandering from crowd to crowd, ranting and laughing until the wine and the heat and the excitement culminated in not one, but a series of spectacular falls.

 “She fell more times than our Lord” mentioned one wag as he dropped his large bottle into a plant pot. I was catching my breath and surveying my heels, slumped in a white plastic deck chair watching a naked man having a poo.

“Why is there not dimpled glass in the jacks?” I asked no-one in particular, as I stared at the man sitting on the toilet in the B&B,  directly accessible from the roof garden,  before plummeting headfirst down the metal  stairs like a carelessly flung Raggedy Ann doll.

Why is a man stripped to the waist sitting sideways on a toilet in full plain view of the entire garden I wondered as I massaged my knees.

“Look over there, he’s having a poo” I begged random passers -by as I staunched the worst of the  bleeding with a piece of toilet roll.

On the Sunday I saw Paul and the ever expanding Band, I had spent an inordinate amount of time swinging my newly blackened locks with their fresh aroma of bleach into surprised strangers faces and trying not to get the eye on me and the bums rush out the door for spilling Erdinger.   

 

So, it was with some sense of trepidation that I was even out in a beer garden trying to behave like a rational human instead of a bunch of nervous tension and high octane energy wrapped up in the body of a small middle aged woman. 

The boys had their heads thrown back singing “Rescue Blues” and I felt like I had come home.

I wanted to sit in with them, and sing along.

 I wanted the camaraderie of the group, to be wrapped in an orange blanket, swaying with them, to be lost in the music and the moment.  

I wanted to go back to someone’s house with them, and stand in the kitchen and wonder where the jacks was and if there would be paper  and  smoke  till 4 am.

Did they not know that –

 I had been at sessions and parties, singing pubs and rock festivals, lock -ins and rallies, barn dances and shebbeens all my life

 that I had sung “Beautiful Affair” with Stocktons Wing in a cliff top pub in Clare while the impossible Harvest Moon lit the wild waves of the Atlantic foaming beneath,

 that I had made Roger Whittaker sing The Last Goodbye to me on a ship after I retrieved his guitar from the car decks, navigating through the chains and the barking dogs,

that I had climbed the lighting rig to see Paddy Casey play Sweet Suburban Sky and was helped down by Paul McGuiness,

that I had heckled Tommy Emmanuel in Colfers of Bannow –

(About a thousand of us went out from town in 5 or 6 buses - after the tall balding softly spoken Emmanuel opened his show with a solo that lasted 15 minutes and left the crowd stunned into silence following a display of virtuoso guitar playing that was frankly and patently impossible, if not illegal, he enquired into the hushed crowd –

Does anyone here play the Guitar?

Not any MORE   I shouted back. )

 

Did they not know that I loved Acoustics and Guitars so much that all I played at home was Dylan, Drake, Buckley, Martin, and that I was helplessly hopelessly addicted to the picking and the strumming,

-          that I was always the girlfriend of the Guitarist and schlepped both him and his Guitar home and was careful of both of their necks and knew how to let them breathe, to come in from the cold air, and relax into the room before tuning them up ?

-          That I wore a T-shirt that said “I’m with the Band” and not in a coolly ironic way

-           Did they not know that I knew all the songs and could stop a room at 4 am when I sang an unaccompanied piece in London, or Germany or Spain?

-          Did they not know who I thought I was?

Obviously, they did not.

Although I tried to burrow in and sit on the margins, 

finding stools at the edges and trying to engage random musicians in banter and entirely useless bits of musical trivia, they took one glance at the woman with the dyed black hair and the precarious glass of beer and in one fluid movement drew in their breaths and the stools and carried on with the music.

Tonight, at the launch of their much awaited second album I get to stand on a stage before they play and announce that I AM with the band.

Amen

Michelle Dooley Mahon Feb. 28th 2014 in Wexford Arts Centre @ The launch of Paul Crean & The Changing Bands Album "The Clock"