OK, it's March 17th. St Patrick's Day. Or Evacuation Day. Or Whacking Day if you watch The Simpsons. It's green beer, parades, mass quantities of consumables, celebrating Irish heritage, hoping that girl you fancy sees you through beer goggles and slips up for a change. I get it. I'm 7/8 Irish and 1/8 French Canadian. It's kind of an odd combination I suppose, but it is what it is. I came to Boston in 1978 because I was, gulp, listening to Emerson, Lake & Palmer while thumbing through the college catalogue my high school guidance counselor had given me and my friends. I saw, in order; Boston, Emerson College, and the ability to Major in Mass Communications. They had two radio stations! As a long time disciple of FM-Radio by the age of 18 I was very interested in becoming a DJ. Naturally that dream was crushed with all the others, but I'm not at all sure I made the connection at the time that Boston had one of the nation's premiere Irish populations. Today I think nothing of hearing a gorgeous Irish accent at one of the scores of Irish bars I have frequented over the years, but they are not the kind of places you frequent on days like today mind you. To paraphrase Yankee great Yogi Berra "Nobody goes there anymore, that place is too crowded." I may want to celebrate being Irish today, but not at an Irish bar. It's a complete circus at these places on St Patrick's Day. Want to wait in line at The Black Rose in Faneuil Hall? Be my guest. Even if you paid the once a year cover to get in, you'd get no service and you'd literally have no place to stand. No tabs either unless you surrender your credit card. I don't have a problem doing that when I know I can get it back inside of half an hour. Maybe I should stay home today (not). It's like New Year's Eve and Marathon Day all rolled into one out there! And to think I came to talk about some music...Irish rock artists have moved into the fore over the years. Way back in the 60's you would think of Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher. Two absolute icons of Irish rock history. Their respective bands Them and Taste are still critically acclaimed to this very day and that was before they launched monster solo careers. In the 70's we tackled Thin Lizzy, The Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers and The Boomtown Rats. But one band nobody ever talks about any more from that era was a band called Horslips. Nobody can take away the Irish heritage of some of these bands, but Horslips was probably the first band to blend traditional Celtic music and out and out rock. The made great use of the flute a la rock legends Jethro Tull, but their music was in the context of what we would think of as basic Irish melodies. It's hard to tell if Horslips were ahead of their time or behind it.
One of the great things about going to college is that you get exposed to everyone else's tastes in music. I have a friend named Jefferson, who is 100% responsible for my exposure to Horslips whether he knows it or not. He grew up outside of Philadelphia, PA while I was a Jersey boy. That meant we had access to the same radio stations back in the day. WMMR and WYSP of the Philadelphia area and WNEW & WPLJ in the New York area. My little FM converter in my blood orange 1971 Ford Pinto gas tank explosion if you got hit from behind death mobile could barely draw the Philly stations. I had to drive northwest to get in even odd gas station lines in the late seventies and I'd sit there listening to the Philly stations and wait my turn. Jefferson came north with Philly staples like Genesis & King Crimson (progressive rock was huge in that area, but even as I listened to the late Alison Steele - the "Nightbird" at 10 PM every week night on WNEW in the 70's - barge onto the air to the sound of King Crimson's In The Court of The Crimson King I didn't understand how much I would come to love this genre). To make a long story longer Jefferson had a copy of a 1977 record called Aliens by Horslips. It had a cut on it called Second Avenue which I instantly took a shine too. The funny thing is after Horslips cobbled together a couple of greatest hits records Second Avenue wasn't among the tracks. The beauty of digital recreations of records is you can just slam your own personal bonus cut on any "comprehensive" greatest hits package and right a wrong out of the box. Slap the artwork on the file and add the sequential number and all is right with the world.
Irish music has of course gone wild since the 70's. A little known band called U2 surfaced nationally around 1980 and the rest is glorious history. I just LOVE the track "Magnificent" from No Line On The Horizon. The Edge is my one of my all time favorite guitarists. There is nobody like him and when he's got it going on it's magic. It's so simple and yet incredibly complicated. I can't even put it into words. After U2 in no particular order, chronologically or otherwise, came Clannad (a group many folks give credit for being the first to blend traditional Irish music and rock), The Pogues, Gary Moore of Thin Lizzy fame, Sinead O'Connor, My Bloody Valentine, The Cranberries, Damien Rice, The Thrills and Snow Patrol among others. All have made a name for themselves and Irish rock music. OK, I've definitely blathered on long enough, but I wanted to leave you with yet another obscure chestnut of my own personal rock trail. Horslips may not be a household name to many, but their Amazon page will tell you that they had enough of a fan base to release several albums and have a nice career. I really like Second Avenue and I hope you folks do too. Happy Whacking Day!
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