Stay Loose

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.

Heroes

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.  Some of them are people we know personally; others are people we cherish from afar, maybe even from another time.  My parents are two of my heroes for everything they have done for my sister and me and for their community.  James Taylor is a hero for creating a style that is instantly recognizable and for making you feel you're listening to him in his living room when in fact you are one of thousands of people in the room with him as he plays and sings in concert.

I have a new hero as of Friday.  His name is Masoud Nemati, and I was lucky to play a round of golf with him at Ballybunion Golf Club in Ireland.  It is said that you can learn a lot about a person by playing golf with him.  If you are really lucky and you're paying attention, you can learn something about yourself as well.

I wasn't planning to play Ballybunion on this trip, because they do not allow riding carts, and since I had both of my hips replaced in 2001, I have only played golf with a riding cart.  Hip replacement surgery is a wonderful thing because after you've recovered from the rather traumatic surgery, you have mobility you've either never had or have not had in many years.  Walking five or six miles across 18 holes of golf is a bit outside of what you expect to be able to do, even though no doctor had ever told me that I should not walk that far.  In fact, I walk one and a half miles three or four mornings a week to stay in shape and clear my mind.

When one of our tour members canceled out of the round at Ballybunion, I knew in my heart that I wanted to give it a go, even though I'd have to walk the course.  I'd played in in 1987 with best friend Dan Wright and wanted to try it again.  I decided that I'd simply walk as far as I could and then head back to the clubhouse, whether I'd finished 18 holes or not.

Ballybunion is a wild, ancient golf course built into a series of dunes beside the Atlantic Ocean in County Kerry.  Five or six of the holes run directly alongside the ocean.  (In a cruel twist of fate, the ocean is always on your right as you step up to the tee on these holes.  So if you hit the ball to the right more often than not, which is the case with me and many other golfing friends, a sliced ball is going to wind up on the beach down below or even in the water.)  Many of the fairways take you through valleys formed by the ancient hills above, so if you do not hit your first or second shot straight, you have to climb up the hill to look for your ball in the gorse.  And if you are so lucky as to find it, you have to stand at a strange angle to hit it back down onto some short grass and try to get home with a reasonable score.  In other words, it's not really a place for a below-average golfer with two artificial hips.

I had gotten to know Masoud a little bit before we began our round that day.  I knew he'd grown up in Iran and had left in the 1970's because his family was aligned with the Shah before the revolution.  I also knew that he was fighting cancer and had completed his most recent round of chemotherapy less than two weeks before beginning the trip to Ireland.  I could tell from the fact that he came on the trip that he was going to live his life to the fullest and not sit around feeling sorry for himself.  So I didn't think twice about the fact that he was going to play Ballybunion with his friends Michael, Marc and Sam.

Masoud and I were in a threesome with Doug Morgan (www.twowheeling.com).  Doug is another one of my heroes, because you always know what Doug stands for.  He is the kind of friend you'd want to have along in any situation.  Read his blog and you will see what I mean.  Suffice it to say that Doug spent a lot of time going up and down the hills looking for my lost balls and reminding me as I was addressing the ball on the tee to keep my swing smooth.  Doug is in better shape than anyone I know because he rides his bike to and from work almost every day.  So he was prepared for the task of helping me, and he was more than willing to help.

I could tell that Masoud was starting to struggle about the fifteenth hole.  He'd told me a little more about his cancer treatment during our round, and about some of the surgery he'd had to prevent the cancer from spreading.  I had started to struggle someplace around the twelfth hole and thought about being sensible and giving up.  But Masoud inspired me by his words and by his actions.  If a man facing down death could finish this challenging march through the hills and dunes, I was going to walk with him.  Several times offered to pull his cart up a hill, and each time he refused.  He showed me how to live this experience to its fullest.

When the round was over, I stood on the hill leading up to the 18th green, took off my Yale Golf Course hat, placed it over my heart and thanked God for giving me this day.  I vowed to start walking my own golf course back home in Ohio and not let my life be limited by some imaginary constraints or excuses.  That's what happens when you get inspired by a hero.

Blarney

I love Ireland.  Seems that almost everyone you meet here has a sense of humor.  You just have to look a little deeper for it in some people than in others.

Yesterday we we being driven out to visit a scenic beach in County Cork.  Some guy in a rented Ford tried to pass us on a narrow beachside road.  When he pulled back in behind us without passing us, he slammed into the back of the 27-passenger van that our driver Paddy Downes is using to drive our group around Ireland.  The sound it made when it hit the van and then bounced against the stone wall was better than a cup of coffee for waking us up after a short night.  Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but the rented Ford is probably headed for the clunker pile of Ireland today.

We decided to get out and walk the remaining mile or so to the beach.  A line of traffic was stopped on the other side of the road.  When one of the drivers leaned out of her window to ask what happened, we told her "there was a car smash but nobody was hurt and the Garda are on their way." She smiled a wry smile and said "they should be here by tomorrow, then."

The French guy who was driving the car had his own sense of humor.  He tried to tell the people gathered around his smoking hulk of a rental car that our bus had been stopped on the road when he hit us.  What did he think the 27 of us on the bus would say to the Garda about that?  Maybe he would claim we were all suffering from a shared hallucination.  Now, that's blarney!

Tom Pigott, our tour director, told us the first day that "most of what I tell you the next ten days will be true." Today he told us that St. Brendan the Navigator discovered America in a leather boat several hundred years before Christopher Columbus did.  He also believes that the Irish Famine of the 1850s could have been a form of genocide.  Who am I to say he is wrong or right?

The Klatt Brothers had a fun and sweaty night performing at Shanley's Piano Bar in Clonakilty, County Cork.  Our travelling party of 27 people practically filled up the place.  Phil Shanley, the owner of the venerable institution, had been talking up the evening with the locals.  So the house was packed.  Even though we could not hear ourselves very well, the crowd were primed to enjoy themselves, and so they did.  Three of the most sustained rounds of applause we got were on songs on which we were joined on stage by guests.  Tom Pigott got up and sang acappella and brought the house down.  Brendan our van driver (yes, we have a van to go along with our bus!) got up and sang a blues song with us, complete with a series of scorching harmonica solos.  Finally, Matt the erstwhile soundman got up and played his fiddle to great effect on a song we'd never heard but managed to back him on with a sentence of instructions.  It was an evening to remember.  My black gig shirt was still wet when I woke up the next morning.

Our tour organizer Peter Pavarini made a great observation about the Irish sense of humor.  He pointed out that it is delivered in a wry way that is rarely cynical.  They choose to overcome tough times by trying to find humor in just about every situation.  The laughs come easily in this country, and that's no blarney!

Tomorrow.......Ballybunion.  There are no riding carts (or buggies, as they're called here), so I'll walk until I can walk no more.  I may have discovered the best way to lower my golf score.

Guinness & Murphy's

We discovered an essential truth last night at Shanley's Music Bar in Clonakilty, County Cork.  "When in Cork, drink Murphy's."  It turns out that the natives of County Cork think of Cork as the hub of the universe, and the products of the County are second to none.  Not to mention the people, the places, the songs, the stories, .......

Tonight the Klatt Brothers and I will be performing at Shanley's, starting at around 10 p.m.  It's a place that is imbued with music and tradition.  Phil Shanley holds sway behind the bar.  You can tell she misses her late husband Mossy, who played piano there seven nights a week and hosted sing alongs and backed up various traveling musicians.  Their son is the lead guitar player for Irish folk star Mary Black, and several of her platinum record awards hang on the walls near the small stage.  Our traveling companions and assorted tour guides and drivers number 23 people, and we should just about fill the place.  It will be a night to remember.

Last night we were treated to a seven-song set by Irish singer and songwriter John Spillane.  He is inspired by the towns of County Cork and has written a number of songs about the places of the County.  His philosophy, if I recall it correctly, is that people are the same everywhere.  Check him out at www.johnspillane.com

We're off to the stone circles for some songs and sites of the Irish Sea.  I'll be thinking about my home in Ohio, which I consider to be the hub of the true universe!

Circling Shannon

I am spending the next ten days in Ireland.  Betsy and I have joined eleven other couples on a journey round the southwest of the Republic on a Mercedes bus.  We will visit the pubs at night and hear the best of Irish music.  By day we will play golf and see the sights.  Four of us who are musicians are going to perform in three or four of the pubs we visit.  This was all arranged by our friend Peter Pavarini, who took this tour with his wife Colleen two years ago.  Out tour guide is Tom Pigott and he has signed up for a whale of a group!  Each couple on the tour knows at least one other couple, but none of us knows everyone on the tour (yet.)  So I expect some good fun and great stories to come out of this trip.  Stay tuned and I will try to post once a day or so.

"Circling Shannon" is an Irish expression for having had too much to drink.  It comes from a state visit that Boris Yeltsin made to Ireland some years ago.  Apparently he had his pilot circle Shannon airport six or seven times so he could sober up enough to be presentable when he stepped off the plane.  Whether it's true or not, it's become part of the lexicon over here.

Tonight we played our first few songs on Irish soil.  We sat in the lobby of our hotel in Bunratty and rehearsed a bit.  Peter and Colleen brought down the house with "Old Love" and then I closed with "Elvis Imitators."  I plan to re-learn "The Ballad of Penny Evans" by Steve Goodman so I can sing acappella if the moment is right.  We already have two anti-war songs in our repertoire of 32 songs, and so one more makes three.  It seems right in this country that fought for its freedom and won back in the 1920's.

There is a friendly rivalry here between the Irish and the Scots that I liken to the Ohio State/University of Michigan rivalry.  Of course there has been and continues to be a lot more at stake here than who won a football game.  Maybe the main difference between the Irish and Scottish is that the Scottish have yet to win their freedom from England.  It has not been for lack of trying.  If it happens for the Scots, it will happen in a peaceful way, even though earlier Scots laid the path with their blood.

But I digress.  Ireland is a beautiful, friendly place with a real sense of itself.  Come explore with me!