The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  Looking back, I think we knew they wouldn’t last. But nothing was ever said about that. It’s amazing what you can hide by standing out in the open, especially if you’re holding a guitar. It was obvious that for Trez and Seán things were not stacking up. Perhaps they were afraid to come out with it, as was I. But life on the road alters your factory settings. It’s a matter of getting through.

  In court proceedings that would happen much later, Fran denied on oath what I am about to say. I don’t want to call him a liar. But I know what I saw. I went into the kitchen one dawn to find him sitting at the table. He was in silent mood. On that table was a pistol. I know what I saw. So does Fran.

  He knows that I sat with him, that we didn’t say much, that after a time I picked up that weapon and walked to the 6th Precinct Station House on West 10th, where I lied that I’d found it on the sidewalk. It was loaded, they confirmed. I shouldn’t have touched it. A Glock semi-automatic. Illegal in New York. Eleven K cash, black market. ‘Here to tell you, you prevented a couple murders by handing this in,’ the NYPD detective told me. ‘Tell your grandkids. Good job. I suggest you make tracks, pal. Before questions occur to me. Hit the bricks.’

  Soon afterwards, Fran flew Concorde to London without telling us he was going. He’d been booked to appear on a talk show over there. In fact the producers had wanted the four of us to come on, to perform a couple of acoustic numbers in the course of the programme, but Fran never told us we’d all been invited. I didn’t find out for years.

  You may remember what happened: the fuss, the headlines. He got into a squabble with an audience member, threatened ‘to take it outside’ and the police were later called to the studio.

  The ruction caused comment, for obvious reasons. But for us, there were private unrests. Fran performed a new song, which none of us had heard, called ‘Stop Holding Me Back’, a thought-provoking title. He followed it with a number I knew he’d been working on for a while, a devastating thing called ‘Running in the Fields’. His plan had been to record it with a full concert orchestra and Vietnamese folk musicians. But that night he did it alone, a single acoustic guitar, played bottleneck style, heavy echo. It was simple, two chords, wrenchingly direct. No make-up. No mask. No Ships.

  Save your sordid sorrow

  And the pity it conceals.

  You’ll eat three times tomorrow

  While she’s running in the fields.

  Flags upon the altar

  Where the murderer kneels.

  I see my mother weeping

  As she’s running in the fields.

  Cleveland, Aspen, Vancouver, LA. The venues grew larger. Philly, New Orleans, up to Detroit, from there over to Houston where we opened for Joe Strummer, Trez and Fran joining him on stage for the most magnificent encore I ever heard, ‘The Guns of Brixton’ played acoustic. The people we gigged with were our heroes, our Titans. Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare in Santa Monica, California. Nick Cave at Jones Beach. Brian Wilson in Raleigh. For Christ’s sake, Tom Waits in Charlotte, North Carolina, with Trez playing cello on ‘Downtown Train’, seven thousand cigarette lighters ablaze. Sinéad O’Connor in Toronto. B.B. King in Baton Rouge. On 5th July 1986, we opened for the New York Philharmonic at a Central Park concert for the re-dedication of the Statue of Liberty. The Post put the audience at 800,000.

  Japanese and European mini-tours, headlining at that year’s Glastonbury Festival. On the night of my 23rd birthday, k.d. lang held my hand and sang a song for me, Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying Over You’, in a sake bar in Tsukuba, Japan. Elvis Costello bought me a margarita while we discussed Ray Charles, his use of the E-minor 7th on ‘What I’d Say’. I saw the name of the group scrawled on walls, jeans and schoolbags. Paul Weller named us in an interview as his favourite young band. Neil Young said on television that we were ‘a pile of lame hairdo’s’ with ‘a guitarist who couldn’t play shit’. The fact that he was even aware of my existence was like winning a Pulitzer Prize.

  In October our single ‘Devil it Down’ went top ten in seven countries. We were booked to play Croke Park, the biggest stadium in Ireland, where Jimmy once took me and Shay as kids to watch the hurling. I was able to buy Jimmy and Alice’s house for them, and a cottage in Scarborough, a seaside resort they loved. Then came the moment, in December of that year, when the last teenage dream burst true. In the town of St Clair Shores, Michigan, a little north of Detroit, Seán and I knocked on a door.

  We waited in the snow. The door was painted black. It was opened by Patti Smith.

  I cannot describe her. I’ll try. But I can’t. She looked gorgeous, a little weary, as though she’d only recently woken up, beautiful as an autumnal Sunday in an American city, when the dust and the traffic noise have receded for an instant, gentle as the gaze of a very old friend who knows all your secrets but forgives you. She blinked at us, grinned, stepped into the porch, said nothing at all but held out her arms, which seemed long in the frayed, grey cardigan she was wearing. A hundred years passed and I took a step towards her. A cop-car whoop-whooped on the street behind us and a cat blinked up from the gutter.

  I was not, had never been, a boy who wept easily. But I was shaking, close to tears, at that moment. I have no explanation for the pictures that were forming in my head: my sister in a Dublin park, my parents and Shay. The image of my teenage bedroom, picture of Philip Lynott on the wall, ripped from the Daily Express. A pile of scratchy 45s in the wardrobe near the window. Led Zeppelin IV on a turntable. I was thinking of hissy cassettes recorded off the radio, the moonlight italicising the dusty venetian blinds, a copy of the NME I’d kept for seven years for its photo of Patti Smith on the cover. Time had faded its crow-black to grey. But I hadn’t thrown it out. I couldn’t. Somewhere in my dad’s attic it was waiting for me to come home. Maybe it’s still there now.

  She led us into the house, past a room of many guitars, up white wooden stairs, to a kitchen. There were paintings on the walls, stacks of art magazines on a bare floor. Near a fireplace hung a black-and-white photograph of Dylan circa ’66, looking cool in mirror-shades like a punk. I remember her telling us that there’d recently been a flood in the basement. She was concerned about her books, among which were a signed first edition of Auden and rare monographs on Virginia Woolf. It was shockingly cold that day, the way it gets in a Michigan winter, and I was wearing a parka, one of those enormous American efforts like a duvet with sleeves, and the realisation suddenly assailed me that I looked like a fool. You don’t meet Patti Smith in an anorak and spectacles. I don’t know what you meet her in. But not that.

  I was babbling, incoherent, a bit shaken up. She sat on a stool near the window. She loved Christmastime, she said, the best season in any city, but in New York they did it like no place else. Yes of course she missed Manhattan but was ‘a happy mom’ these days, and that brought a nightlife of its own. Give her regards to Broadway. Had I children? I should. They were a blessing. ‘A child is a song’.

  She asked about the group, about Fran in particular. Every photo of him she’d noticed in a magazine showed him smoking. I must tell him to quit. It was never too early. A singer couldn’t smoke. Nobody could. Were we writing new material? Where in Detroit had we gigged? Did we know such-and-such a club in Berlin, and the Flèche d’Or in Paris? We were to call up the booking managers and mention her name. Would we care for a herbal tea, or a glass of port, perhaps? There was a bottle she’d been saving for a special occasion. It had been given her as a wedding gift by a fan. She started telling the story but broke off after a moment. She would find it and we’d share a Christmas toast.

  The fool in the parka sat gibbering in the kitchen, while the heroine of his youth went rummaging in the cupboards and rinsed the small, blue glasses. The woman who wrote ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Birdland’ and ‘Free Money’. Seán helped her open the bottle.

  How was ‘beloved London’? What did we think of William Blake? Of Kerouac, Rimbaud, the Who, Bessie Smith, of the Bhagavad Gita, the Animals? Had we
visited Jackson Pollock’s house out on Long Island? My accent was cute. She loved European voices. Would I read to her a while in the studio? From a shelf over the washing machine she took a yellowed edition of The Wild Swans at Coole and as we descended the stairs she switched on a lamp. It was darkening outside. I could see the houses across the street, the dusk coaxing Christmas lights on in windows. We sat on a battered couch, Seán, I, and Patti Smith, and I read to her from Yeats while the night came down on St Clair Shores. Sometimes she took a tiny sip from her tumbler of port. At one point, she picked up an old Guild 12-string that had seen a few fights. And that’s all that happened. She played a chord or two while I read. Seán and I walked back to the Holiday Inn through snow, where a limousine collected us and brought us to the airport and we took the midnight flight to Newark.

  At home, I couldn’t sleep. I walked all night. West Broadway to the Battery. The empty streets of SoHo. Up the Bowery to St Mark’s. The East Village of New York. You wonder if I’ve lived, if I’ve any regrets? Have mercy. Don’t confront me.

  Sixteen

  SEÁN AND I bought Harleys. Trez bought a Saab. Fran, who by now could be close about money, bought art, though I never saw much of it and wondered where on earth he was putting it. I wandered out to Trez’s courtyard one morning, drunk as a boiled owl, to find Fran in fervent conversation with a young man introduced to me as ‘Dave’. Turned out to be David Wojnarowicz, the artist and filmmaker. He was thin, clearly ill, full of bright, brave talk but with a gloriole of hurt around him. A wry, funny storyteller, bless his troubled soul, he looked like a younger version of the farmer in American Gothic. He’d come around now and then, with his sketchbooks and tear-sheets, was fond of shooting the breeze with Fran. One of the happiest memories I have from that time is of a night when David happened to mention he’d never been on a motorcycle. I drove him all the way to El Barrio in Spanish Harlem, 116th Street and back, in the New York dawn, through the empty canyons of Broadway, as the lights forming the electric ticker-tape across the marquees of Times Square spelled out the national deficit. Of such impossible recollections is that city made. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, too young, aged only thirty-seven. Years later I gave my daughter his beautiful nude of Fran and a charcoal portrait of Trez.

  Invitations to openings and installations were delivered by the sack-load. Private viewings in Hell’s Kitchen. Grad-shows in former abbatoirs. Exhibitions of ‘radical work’ in the yawning warehouses and one-time sweatshops near Union Square or the Garment District. Fran and Trez often went. It wasn’t my scene. I flew Jimmy and Alice out to see us gig in San Francisco, a city they’d long wanted to visit. It was a fundraiser for the orphans of Chernobyl – the explosion had happened that April – and so Dad delighted in scolding me that the first-class tickets were a criminal waste of good money. He’d be happier in a truck-stop motel where a person might get a decent cup of tea than in the Four Seasons, where ‘people like us’ didn’t belong. He adored disapproving of the breakfast buffet, clicking his tongue in admonishment at the kumquats and the egg-white omelettes, before trousering extra croissants for his lunch, to Mum’s wailing mortification. This refusal to enjoy himself was his Irish mode of enjoying himself, and I was happy to have given him the chance. For many months afterwards, to the neighbours back on Rutherford Road, he would decry my profligacy and decadent wastefulness. It was his endearing form of boasting.

  ‘It’s after going to his head. Forty dollars for a breakfast! And a mint on the pillow and half the waiters daisies. For people like us! It’s shocking.’

  There were other varieties of happiness, too. A couple of months before the album came out, I’d met someone after an acoustic gig we were doing down in Brooklyn. She was a Canadian engineering student called Juliet, or Jools, and we started kicking around together. There was a seriousness about her I liked. She was well-read, into poetry. We’d go to the Public Library for readings or concerts, idle an hour around the Frick Collection at the weekends. She had a part-time job as a docent at MOMA, showing children the special exhibitions. New York is a wonderful city in which to fall in love. I realised I cared for her when little jealousies would nip me from time to time. There was a boy she liked at college. And there was also Fran. One night we all went to a salsa club in Alphabet City and I wasn’t too crazy about the two of them dancing. She teased me about it. She was great.

  Plans were put together for a year-long world tour – Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, the States, then back to Europe, finishing at Slane Castle in Ireland. Eric wanted us to play 200 gigs that year. I was up for it. Why not? It would give us something to do instead of murdering each other. Alas, things weren’t so simple.

  We were ‘a self-managed band’. That isn’t too wise. At Eric’s noble insistence, we’d signed with a bookings agent and a lawyer. But then Fran got himself his own manager. Which was fine, I guess. But somehow we weren’t prepared for it. She was an amiable and immensely capable woman who cared about music. Yet it sent out signals all the same.

  Letters started arriving from attorneys to congratulate us on the ‘fantastic success’ of the record, but pointing out that something called our ‘business situation’ would now need to be ‘legally formalised’. I’d no objection to that, in fact I thought it a good idea. Jimmy, back in England, had from time to time asked if the band was a properly incorporated company, and while I’d often scoffed at his nagging, or put it down as inquisitiveness, I secretly felt he was right to point out the obvious. But there began to be what I can only term a slight loftiness about the letters from Fran’s lawyers, a subtle sense that we were all being done a favour by the maestro, even that he was in essence our employer. Seán, in particular, would often take offence. And he wasn’t a boy got offended.

  We should have said something. I don’t know why we didn’t. Perhaps we were afraid that the implications were true. Or maybe we just didn’t want a fight. To be fair to Fran, he didn’t hide what he was doing. But not hiding is the best way of hiding.

  I’ve read accounts in which it’s been stated that the band ‘stopped speaking’ at this time. That isn’t true. How could it be? Not talking to the people with whom you’re making music on a stage five or six nights a week – it simply isn’t feasible, if you think about it. It was more that the chilliness of perfect courtesy seemed to enter the room when Fran did. It used to be that Seán would slag him to his face and be polite behind his back. Now it was the other way about. As Jimmy used to put it, there are two ways to call a guy ‘sir’. The first shows respect, the second contempt. The voice has many inflections.

  Then there was Trez. I don’t know what to say. An odd change came about in her as the audiences grew. She could take a gig hard. She’d be pallid, dredged out. In truth I believe she stopped enjoying music. It was hard to understand in the Sarah I’d known, a girl who’d cross London on foot through a snowstorm to play for six drunks in a pub. Had I been a parent myself, I’d have read the picture better. But at the time, I wasn’t empathetic, to my shame.

  Trez and I grew apart. The fault was all mine. Remaining in the group, fighting off the inevitable, took every atom of effort I had. We spent most of ’87 touring. In November of that year we came back to New York. We’d played Milan, Paris, Berlin, Rotterdam, Glasgow and Barcelona, in eight exhausting nights. A bootleg exists of the Barcelona show but I’ve only listened to it twice. It was a gig where Fran did an awful lot of closing his eyes and touching his wrist to his forehead and melodramatically pulling the sky down into his soul, but his voice, shot by coke, isn’t something you want to hear. ‘I can’t rape myself every night for them,’ was an excuse he’d started offering by then. The three of us let him get away with it.

  Jools and I Harleyed out to Montauk for the weekend, with Seán and his then girlfriend, Ivelisse, a beautiful Puerto Rican who worked in a barber’s on East 7th to support herself at Baruch College, where she was studying Business Law. If you’ve ever been to Montauk, you’ll k
now it’s got an atmosphere all its own, a sand-blown, windy lonesomeness that isn’t quite charm but isn’t desolation either. The town is way out at the north-eastern tip of Long Island, nothing at all like the Hamptons. Montauk’s the kind of burg where you could imagine an old Scott Fitzgerald, shipwrecked by whiskey, slowly dying in a motel that’s been closed for the winter. Seán and I loved it. (His solo album is called Montauk Sound.) My ex-wife lives there now.

  The Stones and Andy Warhol got it on there, back in the day. There’s a lighthouse that’s said to be haunted. Minke whales, even an occasional blue, can be seen from the cliff-tops. Trawler-men with switchblade tattoos spit and gamble outside slightly forbidding bars, or whistle at the waterfront beauties. There can be – what shall we term it? – a little unease among the locals about the outsiders who flock into the town every summer. You know, I think, the sort of behaviour I mean. Some trustafarian lights up a spliff and thinks his designer sandals excuse him and quotes a lot of Trotsky at the barkeep. An Upper East Side liberal earning twenty million a year on his granddad’s investments says flying the Stars and Stripes in your yard is a sign of xenophobia. (‘These pinheads should be ashamed. I mean, George Bush? Like, come on.’) We found that if you minded your manners and didn’t get in their grille the Montaukers would be tolerant and welcoming.