Stay Loose

The Present Tense

Twenty seven years after the release of Looking For You, I am planning to release a collection of ten new songs on a CD entitled The Present Tense. The recordings should be available in early August in both CD and download form. I’ve resurrected independent record label Fayerweather Records for the purpose of releasing The Present Tense.

Most of the recording was done the week of February 6 through 10 at the Los Angeles studio of Joe DiBlasi. My musical brother-in-arms Jim King contributed great bass and keyboard tracks; my great friend David Sheils lent background vocals. Fellow Pep Boys Doug Morgan and Jim Cunningham sang background vocals once I returned to Columbus. Producer and musician extraordinaire Joe DiBlasi played the rest of the music, including smoking guitar parts on some songs and beautiful orchestral arrangements on others.

Seven of the ten songs are originals. I co-wrote three of the songs with friends Matt Munhall and Jeff Dressler. I wrote one of the songs as far back as 1986 and the most recent one in January 2012. Two of the three non-originals are published by Writer Zone Music, the Nashville publishing company I helped to start in 2003. And it’s not out of the question that Elvis may make an appearance…on this CD!

Please stay tuned for updates on the project. I look forward to sharing this music with you!

Pete, We Hardly Knew Ye

Pete Fornatale died today in New York City. He was a radio personality on the New York
City music scene from the time he was in college until his last Mixed Bag radio
show on WFUV FM on April 14th. You can read about Pete and his accomplishments at http://www.wfuv.org/blog/pete-fornatale-1945-2012.

Pete had a profound influence on my life as a musician. He got a copy of my first record, Home to the Heart, from his friend Dick Cerri in Washington, DC and started to play a few of the songs on his weekly Mixed Bag show when it was on WNEW-FM, the biggest rock station in NYC back in 1983.
That led me to bookings in folk clubs in Greenwich Village. On one of my trips to NYC, Pete asked me to come by the studio and do a live interview with him. I played three songs and he asked me great,
insightful questions. After the interview, we had lunch together at the AutoMatt Restaurant around the corner from the WNEW studio. He was warm and down to earth and I felt like the luckiest guy on earth that day.

When I put out my second record and moved from Los Angeles to Connecticut for graduate school, Pete asked if I would volunteer to help out with his Hungerthon telecast on New Year’s Night 1986. Would I ever! He broadcast live from the lobby of the United Nations building for 24 hours straight to raise money for World Hunger Year, a non-profit organization founded by Harry Chapin and carried
on by Pete and Bill Ayres after Chapin’s untimely death.

There I was in the lobby of the UN Building at 1:30 a.m. with no crowd to listen and respond to – just the millions of people I imagined who were listening to their radios around the NYC metro area. I got to the UN Building about 30 minutes early and was delighted to learn that I would be going on just after one of my heroes, Jesse Colin Young (“Get Together”). I was just as delighted to see one of my other heroes, Marshall Crenshaw (“Cynical Girl”) walk into the lobby while I was singing to take the spot after mine. For a kid from Lima, Ohio, I was in pretty tall cotton between these two giants.

That was the way Pete planned it, I’m sure. Though he was on a first-name basis with the very biggest of singers and songwriters, he was always promoting up-and-comers like me. Whether he was interviewing Paul Simon or a nervous first-timer like me, he never talked up or down to the performer. He was always on the level with his guests and with his audiences. Sure, he was a fan of the music, but he did not pander to his heroes or try to trick them into saying something they’d later regret. He was that great friend who was knowledgeable about music. Everyone who listened to
his shows must have felt a little bit closer to the lightning in a bottle that causes all of the music to be created and heard.

Pete had written a couple of great books about his experiences, including one about his insights from backstage at the Woodstock Festival. The last time I talked with Pete on the phone, sometime in 2011, he told me he’d send me an autographed copy of the book. So he did. I can’t bear the thought of looking for it tonight for fear that I loaned it to someone forgotten and will never see it
again.

I can’t help but think that Pete had a lot more to say on the air and on the pages of books that will never be written. Fortunately we can listen to his Mixed Bag shows in the WFUV archives. And we can
all honor the people who have redirected our lives by doing the best we can with the gifts we’ve been given.

The Swiss Way

Here is a recipe for a great way of life: Low taxes.  Lower government regulation.  Abundant public transportation.  A strong currency. Low unemployment.  City along a temperate lake.  Mountains for hiking and skiing one hour away. Financial center of the world.  No buildings over six stories high.  The best shopping in the world for shoppers without a budget who seek the highest quality goods.

This is Zurich.

It is also true that prices of everything are astronomical.  (A Big Mac is $15 and a hamburger in a fancy restaurant can be $72.)  People seem to smoke in public a lot (or maybe that’s just a consequence of using public transportation, because people who smoke need a hit just before they get on the tram and just after they get off.)  It’s hard to get someone on the street to return a look in the eye, much less to smile at you.  Everything is very precise, so when something does not go according to form, the wheels can come off of the tricycle of the locals pretty quickly.  (Because I left my luggage cart in the wrong place, I incurred public scorn from the small man in the big uniform who checked my passport at the airport.) Because everything is precise, you’d better be on time….or else.  One suspects that the precision of the place just might have a little impact on the creativity and individuality of its citizens.

A friend and I spent three days in Zurich recently.  Our goal was to learn how the financial services industry works there.  We got to meet a number of highly professional bankers, attorneys, accountants, venture capitalists, family office managers and financial advisors.  My favorite visit was with two of the partners of Emerald Technology Ventures.  The business community there works like a Swiss watch, if you’ll pardon the use of an obvious pun.

We were sad but not surprised to learn that for most of the people we met, the United States is an afterthought for business.  The emerging markets of Asia and Africa are where capital is flowing right now.  In spite of the political uncertainties in those markets, especially compared to the relative stability of the American political and social scenes, capital is flowing to markets where it can get higher returns.  That’s probably because those markets are starting from a lower point and so the percent growth rates can be much higher than in the developed economies.

On our last night in town, we finally saw a different side of Zurich.  After attending the opera we headed for the piano bar at the Hotel Widder.  After waiting a few minutes for a table, one opened up in the corner.  I plopped down on the red leatherette and proceeded to upset the table cards on the table of the two women sitting next to us.  They got a large charge out of this and that’s all it took to start a conversation.  (Maybe the fact that they were on their second or third drink helped a bit?)

We discovered that both of them are self-employed.  Maria is a photographer who helps advertising agents show their clients’ products and people from the best angle possible.  Eva is a tailor.  They are both doing what they want to do and have moved to Zurich from the small towns in Switzerland where they grew up.

They explained the kinds of things that we would have learned if we’d met them during Language Study Abroad in our sophomore years of college.  What kind of music did they like?  Why in the world do men and women kiss each other three times on the cheek when coming and going?  How could they possibly find a place where they could afford to live?  Do the natives really eat the melted cheese dish called raclette or is it just designed to slow down the tourists who eat it?  How often do people get to ski in those ever-present Swiss Alps?

After three days of laughing only between ourselves, Fred and I finally got to laugh with the natives.  And even the short but unpleasant encounter at the airport passport check couldn’t ruin that laughter.

Reunions

I never miss a reunion.  It could be college, high school, graduate school, my mother’s cousins and their children or my mother-in-law’s siblings and offspring.  There’s something irresistible about having all of these people together in one place at the same time with the sole intent of reconnecting with each other.

The most recent reunion I attended was for all of the living alumni of the men’s a cappella singing group from my college years.  We get together every three years in Hanover, New Hampshire just as the long winter is starting to turn to spring.  In northern New England, this equates to the weekend containing the first Saturday in May.  One of the wide-eyed freshman in the current group is recruited to run the reunion under the tutelage of a wizened senior, who himself was the freshman in charge three years ago.

This a cappella group was the center of my universe during those four years of college.  I had times that were good, bad, scary, exhilarating, intoxicating and everything in between.

During my four years of college, I shared time in this singing group with thirty five other men.  Some of them only shared the group with me for one quarter.  One of them joined the group when I did, in the fall of our freshman year, and we went across the finish line together four years later when we graduated.

At our recent reunion, twenty of those thirty five people returned to Hanover for the weekend.  As a cohort, we constituted over a third of the total attendees.  What caused my contemporaries to show so strongly, I wondered?

A few of them told me that the singing group was their true fraternity in college.  They skip the reunions of their college class but not the reunions of this singing group.  Others live close enough to be able to attend for a day or two and see a select group of old friends.

At the end of the dinner on our last night together, we all stood in a large circle on the porch of the college skiway and sang the group’s signature song with our arms around each other.  The song is Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” and it is arranged in a way that is moving and resonant.  Ever since it was added to the group’s repertoire in 1968, it is the song that the group has used to welcome its new recruits during a 3 a.m. visit to the new recruit’s dorm room.  (“There’s a place for you, somewhere a place for you.”)

As we prepared to sing this song on the last night, I blurted out “hey, you young guys: take a good look at us.  This is what you will look like in thirty five years!”  That’s when it hit me: I have more yesterdays than tomorrows, as Bill Clinton famously said on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday.

So, why keep coming back to an event that shows you in stark terms just how you are aging?  Do you do it to slow down the hands of time?  You do feel younger when you go back and recreate your past, or at least try to recreate it.  But maybe you’d be better off to avoid the reunion and ignore the signs of aging.

I go back time after time because memories of shared experiences are one of the most precious things in life.  With luck, we will know the people with whom we shared the stage in college for sixty or seventy years.  That is longer than most of us will know our parents, spouses or children.  Only our siblings will know us longer than these friends.  That’s why we call it a brotherhood.

Goodbye, Friend

For those of you who followed my blog entries from Ireland, here is news:

NEMATI Dr. M. Masoud Nemati, M.D., age 59, of Fleming Island, FL, passed away on Sunday, February 7, 2010 at his home, surrounded by his loving family. Dr. Nemati was born March 25, 1950 in Kermanshah, Iran, the beloved son of Malihe and Abdolazim Nemati. At a very young age, Dr. Nemati aspired to become a medical professional. He became a talented surgeon who dedicated himself to the health and well being of others before himself. Dr. Nemati completed his surgical training at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, and was Chief Resident at Bridgeport Hospital, Bridgeport, CT. During his residency, he did multiple rotations at Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, NY and also at Yale Newhaven Hospital, Newhaven, CT. Along with his many medical achievements, Dr. Nemati was a General Surgeon and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, Past President of the Clay County Medical Society, and Past Chief of Staff at the Orange Park Medical Center. In addition to his brilliant medical career, Dr. Nemati was a loving husband, father, brother, uncle, and friend who made a lasting impression and positive impact on those he loved and the community he served. He was an avid golfer, runner, world traveler, and skier, and was a proud Jacksonville Jaguar Season Ticket holder since their inaugural 1995 season. Dr. Nemati is the loving husband of Sakinah; father to Dustin and Alexis; step-father to Michael Bencher; brother to Suhela Khoshrazn and Setareh Vafabakhsh; son-in-law to Fredrick and Joann SansCrainte; brother-in-law to Behrooz Khoshrazn and Seyed Vafabakhsh, Gregory SansCrainte, Joseph SansCrainte, Matthew SansCrainte, James SansCrainte, and Jeffery SansCrainte; and uncle to Ghazal Vafabakhsh, Gazol Khoshrazn, Arastoo Khoshrazn, and Sheila Nemati. He was predeceased by his brother Saiid Nemati. Funeral services and memorial celebration of his life will be held at 10:00 AM on Saturday, February 13, 2010 in the chapel of Jacksonville Memory Gardens Funeral Home, 111 Blanding Blvd., Orange Park. Dr. Nemati will be laid to rest in the Garden of the Resurrection at Jacksonville Memory Gardens. Family members, friends, and associates will gather on Friday evening from 5-8 PM at the funeral home. In lieu of flowers, the family has kindly requested memorial donations be sent to the American Cancer Society in memory of Dr. M. Masoud Nemati, M.D. Throughout his illness, Dr. Nemati remained selfless, gracious, and kind. His impact on our lives will be long felt, and he will remain forever in our hearts. Please Sign the Guestbook @ Jacksonville.com

Published in Florida Times-Union on February 11, 2010

 

Beached

I don't what what it was that made the owner of the boat decide he had to try to rescue it from the beach instead of letting the tide carry it out to sea again.  Earlier in the day, we had seen the boat, which was not more than 15 feet long and no prize, sitting up on the beach near the house where we were staying on Drake's Island in southern Maine.  Now it was 10 p.m., and the boat owner's pickup truck was stuck in the sand at the beach with the waves sloshing in and out around it.  Not only that, but the boat owner's buddy's truck was out in the water, too, along with a rudimentary boat trailer.  It did not look good for the two trucks or the trailer, though the boat looked just fine.

There was a light shining from the firetruck about 200 yards away from the scene of the mistake.  It made the area look like a scene from the movie "ET".  To top it all off, there was a full moon shining down on the ocean and a sky full of starts to light the way.  A crowd of at least fifty vacationers had gathered around the vehicles.  If you closed your eyes, you could imagine that they were keeping watch on a beached whale that was gasping for life.  This was the kind of entertainment that money could not buy.

The trucks were going through their death rattles.  First the headlights and safety blinkers started coming on and off intermittently.  Then the horns started to blow.  It didn't take long for the sea water to undo what Detroit had done.

The word on the beach was that the boat owner had called the police earlier in the afternoon when the boat had gotten stranded.  He told the police he would try to free the boat later that night when the tide came in, and they suggested that he call back so that the fire department could help.  Either he didn't hear that part of the message, or he forgot it after an afternoon of drinking beer on the beach with the Labor Day weekend crowd that was up from Boston or down from Quebec, because instead of the fire department, he'd enlisted a friend with a boat trailer to help instead.

The fire department was here now, and they decided they'd wait until high tide the next morning to rescue the four stranded vessels.  I went to bed willing to bet $100 that the trucks would be swept out to sea.  But I was wrong.

The morning came bright and clear, and there were the trucks, the boat and the trailer, stuck in the sand with no sea water to restrict the rescue.  Another crowd was gathered around.  This one featured parents with coffee mugs and their young children, instead of the older crowd with wine glasses from the evening before.  It looked like the pivotal scene from the book Mike McGillicutty and the Steam Shovel where the townspeople of Popperville stood around to see if Mike could dig the basement for the new town hall in just one day (or he would not get paid.)

The bobcat came, and in fifteen minutes, it was all over.  The truck owner was last seen removing the license plates from his truck.  It was not clear if he did it out of sheer embarrassment or if he was planning to use the plates again.  If it was the latter, that was the only thing he was going to be able to use.

One of the hardest things for a human to do, especially the male species, is to take an offer of help when it is given.  We made this mess, we'll get ourselves out of it by ourselves, thank you very much.  If that boat was worth $3,000, the two trucks had to be worth two to three times that much.  There but for the grace of God go I.

I expect that the good folks from Carfax will be using this as the premise for a commercial soon.  If you are watching, Mr. Carfax, here is the photo you need.  Call me.

The Organizer

Every group needs one.  The person who takes charge, sets the rules, keeps people in line.  Some people resent The Organizer; most people silently thank TO for being charge so they don’t have to.

TO rarely gets credit for what he or she has done.  TO usually only gets the blame when something isn’t exactly right.  TO has to work while others are playing.

TO gets rewards in different ways.  If TO is also The Boss at work, he or she presumably gets paid more for being in charge.  In a family, TO gets to set the rules more often than not.  In a voluntary group setting, the rewards for TO are all psychic.

Our TO for the Klatt Brothers and Friends trip to Ireland was Peter Pavarini.  By day, he is senior partner and health care attorney at a Columbus law firm.  By night, he plays music with the Klatt Brothers (now in their fourteenth year) and volunteers at a health clinic he and his wife helped to start in Delaware County, where they live.

Peter and Colleen first went on an Enchanted Way tour with Tom Piggot in the fall of 2007.  They really enjoyed the vibe and the focus on music.  On that tour, the music was provided by Wisconsin singer/songwriter JohnSmith.  When Peter asked Tom if he could book a tour with his friends in the Klatt Brothers providing the music, Tom agreed.

Peter did a fantastic job of organizing the trip.  He called a meeting over a year ago to get a commitment from two of the other founding members of the Klatt Brothers band and from me to go on this adventure.  He communicated relentlessly with Tom Pigott and the twenty four people who eventually agreed to accompany Peter and his wife Colleen.  He collected money from us and wired it to Tom right on schedule.  He set up conference calls so that everyone could get to know each other and could get questions answered

For this, Peter got the reward of seeing his friends and family discover the joys of musical Ireland, as he and Colleen had done two years earlier.

Thank you, Peter.  You can be TO any time in my book.

Don’t forget to thank TO in your life.

Best Friends

I used to think that you could only have one best friend.  Somehow the term implies exclusivity.  Only one person can be the best baseball player or the best student.  When such things can be quantified and laid out on paper, it’s easy to say who is best. 

If you have more than one best friend at a time, it might be akin to going out with two people at once, or something even more uncomfortable.

I just finished a ten-day trip to Ireland with twenty three other people.  As I’ve been recounting the trip and all its richness, it struck me.  Four of the people on this trip are people I consider my best friend.  How can this be?

My wife Betsy is my best friend.  She is everything I ever hoped for in a spouse and life partner.  She is funny, smart, loyal, a better athlete than me, a great parent to our children, outgoing, fun to be around.  And is she ever cute!  I once heard someone say that you should marry carefully, because your spouse becomes your room mate for life.  Marrying Betsy was the single best decision I ever made.

Doug Morgan is my best friend.  He and I have a lot in common, as we went to public high schools in Ohio, went to Ivy League colleges, worked in the two biggest cities in this country, and then chose to return home to Ohio to raise our families.  We play music together in a band called “Doug Morgan and the Pep Boys (Manny, Moe and Jim.)”  We play golf together.  We are on at least five different boards together.  I often say that my social life revolves around two people: my wife, and Doug Morgan.  Doug and I have talked about moving together in retirement to live near each other, not in Florida or Arizona, but in a small college town someplace in Ohio.  Doug brings out the best in people.

Tom Ruegger is my best friend.  We have known each other since 1972, our freshman year together at Dartmouth College.   We’ve seen each other through the best and worst of times.  I was best man in his wedding in 1979.  He and I shared two apartments in Los Angeles during our scuffling days after college, and he was my biggest fan when I was trying to make it in the music business.  He has inspired me with his creativity and amazed me with his capacity for insight, humor and hard work.

Dan Wright is my best friend.  If I had not visited Dan at Dartmouth College one night in the fall of 1971, I might have gone instead to Williams College, where I had been all but promised early admission by the director there.  Instead, I followed Dan to Dartmouth in the fall of 1972.  He was my first “roadie” when I played the college student union circuit, and we had that memorable first trip to Ireland in the summer of 1987.  When I asked Betsy to marry me, I did not have to think twice about who I’d ask to be my best man.  It was Dan, hands down.  When I went off to have my hips replaced in 2001, I told Dan things I could not tell Betsy in case I did not come back.  That’s a best friend.

There are several other friends I’d put in this best friend category, and I’ll save that for another post, as they were not on this recent Ireland trip.  In some ways, this trip resembled the college experience, with the pleasant addition of wives and credit cards.

 All of my life I’ve felt that I’ve done things well and could have done them better.  In this category I include school, writing and performing songs, working in the banking industry, even being a husband, son, brother and father.  The one thing I could not have done better is to be surrounded by best friends.

The Last Night

We finally came to the end of the tour.  Twelve couples had lived and played together for nine nights.  We’d gotten to know our three Irish tour hosts pretty well.  We’d shared jokes and could pretty much say anything we wanted without fear of criticism or retribution.  It was good.

On our last night, we gathered in the hotel bar after a big meal at Vaughan’s Pub in Lisconnar, County Clare.  Our gig at McHugh’s Pub next door had been cancelled because one of the McHugh’s regulars had passed away several nights ago, and the owners thought it wouldn’t be right to have live music there on the day of the wake.  So we decided to entertain our friends and the hotel patrons in the bar.

The evening started with an extended version of the old American folk song “Goodnight Irene.”  We’d been asked by tour guide Tom Piggot to each write a verse or two of our own for the song to commemorate some experience we’d had on the tour.  It is a tradition that Tom has brought forward from each of the tours he’d hosted.

As the verses started to roll out, I could see why this was a great tradition.  Each person’s verse brought forth another shared experience.  Some were timid, some were ribald.  The prize for best verse went to my friend Tom Ruegger, who found a new rhyme for the word “Guinness” and also managed to work an alternated meaning of the word Bulmer’s, the name of a powerful Irish cider, into the mix.

Tom Ruegger then brought out cartoon drawings he’d been making all day.  Each one captured a really funny scene from our trip.  Tom doesn’t just draw cartoons for fun, like I sing and play the guitar for fun.  No, Tom has made his name in the LA animation world by producing shows such as Scooby Doo, Animaniacs and Tiny Toon Adventures.  He worked directly for Steven Spielberg on the latter.  To get a quick taste of Tom’s work, google Wacko’s World and get ready for two minutes of absolute pleasure.

We’d had a great night the previous evening.  Doug and Beth Morgan celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary with us at the Wild Honey Inn in Lisdoonvarna.  We had wonderful food and drink, and we were entertained by three sisters who played traditional Irish music for us during and after dinner.  We added a few songs of our own, including an unrehearsed version of “I Will” by the Beatles and a version of James Taylor’s “Something In the Way She Moves” which Doug dedicated and sang to Beth.

Tom Piggot asked us to come up with a name for our tour, another tradition that has served his clients well.  We first thought we’d call it the Happy Cow Tour.  Michael Gilligan from Jacksonville continually remarked on how he’d like to come back in his next life as an Irish cow because they seemed more content than American cows and had better scenery to enjoy.  After our dinner at the Wild Honey Inn, Dan Wright decided that we should call it the “It’s Only Money Tour.”

Dan and I had visited Ireland in the summer of 1987.  We played twenty two rounds of golf in twenty one days.  At least that’s the way I remember it.  We’d promised each other at the end of that trip to return to Ireland someday with “our women”, as we’d said back in those less politically-correct days.  Dan was best man when Betsy and I married, and he has settled into a wonderful life with Therese Spellacy, who enjoyed visiting her ancestral home with us for the first time.

 

On the last night, Dan and I closed down the hotel bar with a pint of Guinness and a promise to come back again someday.  Oh, and we also promised to write down as much of this trip as we could remember and send each other a copy in the next four weeks.  It was a great way to end the last night.

The Tralee Gig

I had a feeling this place was going to be trouble.  It was too antiseptic, not like the other Irish pubs where we’d visited and performed on this tour.  And we were going to be competing with the big screen TV, which was showing local hero Padraig Harrington as he tried to beat Tiger Woods to the finish line on the last day of the PGA Tournament.

We’d eaten dinner in a private room upstairs, and Betsy ran back up from the first floor with news that a real live Elvis imitator was sitting at the bar downstairs.  When I ran down to get a glimpse, he was gone, and I joked with Betsy that he was just a figment of her imagination.

Now here we were, playing in the front of the pub with the fluorescent lights overhead casting a sickly glow on us and lending a less-than-romantic setting to our friends and the few locals who’d wandered in.  Although the latter may have seen our posters plastered all over the billboard outside the club, it became pretty clear that they were hoping for another dose of the Irish music rather than a gullet full of Americana music from The Klatt Brothers and Friends.

Still, the show must go on, even if you are paying to play rather than being paid to play.  But I could not take my eyes off the guy sitting right in front of us.  The Elvis imitator had returned, and he was watching our every move.  He looked like Barney Rubble with an Elvis haircut.  His wife was sitting next to him, looking like……well, she looked like Betty Rubble, I guess.  He had on a Hawaiian shirt that had an airbrush painting of Elvis on the back.  The guy himself had sideburns that looked like they’d been glued on with Elmer’s.  And Betty kept trying to catch my eye, which made Barney more and more resentful and frustrated as the evening went on.  At least that’s the monologue that was going on in my head.

But the Elvis guy was the least of our worries.  Now, your honor, comes The Guy in the Green Shirt.  He was a solid 225 pounds, had at least one of his front teeth missing, and he’d come to the club for two things.  Neither of those things was to listen to music.  One was to get as drunk as possible, and the second was to start a fight with someone.  I’d seen this guy before in my nine years of playing music for a living.

First he asked me a question in a language that I could not understand.  It was not English; it may have been Irish or Esperanto.  Then he walked up to Colleen Wulf Pavarini in the middle of her tour de force duo with her husband Peter, “We’ve Got An Old Love.”  He stated that he wanted to kiss Colleen, and then he did.  Peter could only stand by and try not to antagonize TGITGS any further by confronting him.  Understand that Peter grew up in New York and could have ripped this guy apart verbally….if only the guy was not speaking the language that only hard drunks can speak.

That was it for me.  I took off my guitar and told each of the bartenders that this guy was trouble and that until they got him out of their pub, we were not going to play any more music.  They tried their best to shuffle him out, but they were not up to the task in either courage or bulk.  So TGITGS remained.

Now, your honor, comes our splendid tour guide Tom Piggot.  Tom was bigger than TGITGS, at least as tough, and Tom was sober.  As I later learned, Tom ran a pub for years before he started Enchanted Way Tours (www.enchantedwaytours.ie).  During the first two years his pub was open, Tom had thrown at least 210 people out of it, and those were only the ones he counted on the log his insurance company required him to keep.  So Tom was out last line of defense against TGITGS, our Maginot line.  Except, we didn’t really know about that part of Tom’s background.

Eventually, Tom and the two skinny bartenders made a final push.  TGITGS resisted, and for a second I wished for a straitjacket to thrown over his head.  Then he relented and let himself be led out the door for good.

We had a much better night musically than our first night in Clonakilty, because we used no amplification this night and could actually hear each other play.  We turned in a spirited, if wary, set.  (What if TGITGS returned with a gang of drunks and smashed up the place?  Would my son Alec ever forgive me if I ruined his Fender bass guitar by defending the honor of our women?)

Finally, mercifully, it was time to end the evening.  We finished with “Elvis Imitators”, the great song by Steve Goodman and Michael Smith that I’ve adopted as my traditional closing song.  The Elvis guy was still sitting up front, and I could tell that I’d finally won him over.  He came up to me as we were packing up and said “Man, I’ve just got to get the words of that song from you!”  I said “Just answer me one question.  Are those sideburns real?”  He took my hand and guided it to one of the sideburns, then prompted me to grab them and try to shake them loose.  Nothing doing; they were the real thing.

Music is its own reward.