CIGAR BOX BANJO
Copyright © 2010 by the Estate of Paul Quarrington
Foreword © 2010 by Roddy Doyle
Afterword © 2010 by Martin Worthy
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Greystone Books
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-438-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-55365-629-6 (ebook)
Editing by Barbara Pulling
Copy editing by Peter Norman
Jacket design by Heather Pringle
Text design by Jessica Sullivan
“Hello Jim” © Paul Quarrington/Cordova Bay Music Publishing;
“Are You Ready” © If Dreams Had Wings Music/Cordova Bay Music Publishing
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Text printed on 100% post-consumer, acid-free paper
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
SOURCES
AS I START to write this I’m listening to an album called You & Me, by a band called the Walkmen. Ten minutes ago, I bought an album called Songs of Shame, by a band called Woods. I did this so I’d have something new on my iPod as I walk to collect my daughter from her choir practice later today. Last night I volunteered to wash the dishes because a) the dishwasher is broken, and b) I could listen to four or five tracks from another recent purchase, the Velvet Underground’s Loaded. Actually, it’s Fully Loaded, which is Loaded with extras, including a demo version of “Satellite of Love,” a song that became famous later in Lou Reed’s career. The final version, the version I first listened to in 1973, is on Reed’s album Transformer. I still remember loving the lines:
I’ve been told that you’ve been bold
With Harry, Mark, and John.
I remember hoping that my parents would—and wouldn’t— charge in from the room next door and demand that I stop playing the record. The record didn’t belong to me. I had it for the night and I was recording it by holding my tape recorder up to one of the stereo speakers. The whole record was a taunt, to me, to my parents, to the world. But they didn’t charge in; they remained untaunted. Nevertheless, I’ve always loved those lines.
The demo on Fully Loaded was recorded in 1970 and the lyrics are slightly, but significantly, different.
I’ve been told that you’ve been bold
With Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.
The “Wynken, Blynken” version was recorded two years before “Harry, Mark, and John” but my reaction, when I heard “Wynken” and “Blynken” last night, was almost violent. What did Reed think he was doing? I know: he’d actually changed the lyrics and saved the day. And I know: it’s only a couple of lines from a song. But, for a few seconds, the time it took to wash one bowl and overcome the urge to smash it, I couldn’t see that. To claim that music is more important than oxygen would be trite and sentimental. But it would also be true.
I love music. I seem to remember a disco song with those words—I love music, any kind of music. I just looked it up; it was the O’Jays. I wouldn’t be as generous as the O’Jays, because I think most music is shite. But I have to admit, if I’d been in the O’Jays—and I wish I had been—I’d have been quite content to sing along. I love music, even shite music. Which is just as well, because I live on an island called Ireland where much of the music is shite. I grew up listening to “Danny Boy”; I grew up hating Danny Boy, and all his siblings and his granny. The pipes, the pipes are caw-haw-haw-hawling. Anything with pipes or fiddles or even—forgive me, Paul—banjos, I detested. Songs of loss, of love or land; songs of flight and emigration, of going across the sea; songs of defiance and rebellion—I vomited on all of them. My own act of rebellion, in a wet land full of rebel songs, was to hate all Irish rebel songs, in fact, all Irish songs, everything that sounded vaguely Irish, including the language and all who spoke it, or even thought in it.
Then I heard Jackie Wilson singing “Danny Boy.” It wasn’t that his rendition was extraordinary, although it is. The song just stopped being Irish. It was being sung—it was being demolished—by Jackie Wilson, a black American who, as far as I knew, had no connection with Ireland, and I could actually listen to the song. It was a liberating, interesting moment. Liberating, because, freed of its time and geography, it became a song that I could like. Interesting, because it made me think about songs in general and what made them good, or bad. “I Say a Little Prayer” is my favourite song, but only if it’s sung by Aretha Franklin. “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” is a dreadful song, but I wish Otis Redding had recorded it. I’d never liked “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” another of the songs I was unable to avoid when I was a child, until I heard and saw it used at the end of a documentary film called Rocky Road to Dublin. The film was made in Dublin, in 1967. The camera is on the back of a lorry as it passes a school, very like the school I went to, just as the school is emptying. The boys, very like the boys I knew and the boy I’d been, spot the camera and run after it. That’s what you see as the Dubliners start to play and Luke Kelly starts to sing, the boys charging after the lorry. It’s an exhilarating end to what is a brilliant,