Philadelphia
Folk Festival Photo Collage
LIAM CLANCY AT THE MAIN POINT
Interview with John McLaughlin
Reprinted from The Folk Life Quarterly
The Folk Life, Fall, 1979.
[The
stereotype of the stage Irishman is the first thing that comes to mind when
you think of Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem. Their stage act, derived to some
extent from the years when the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem toured with
Josh White, Sr., is a known crowd-pleasing mixture of rebel songs and sentimental
ballads with dramatic monologues ad comic stories.
But it’s no haphazard grab-bag of melodies and soliloquies, as the following
interview makes clear. Rather, it’s a carefully put together stage show,
with a beginning, a rising middle, an a clear end, with artful placement of
music and poetry in a varied, deliberately paced show that’s guaranteed
to send the crowd out of the door humming along with the closing verses.
The background for this skilful, professional structuring of an evening’s
entertainment is described by Liam Clancy in the interview which follows,
obtained at the end of their evening’s performance at The Main Point,
Bryn Mawr’s long-established folk music showcase. Asked aboutLiam how
they’d so skillfully structured the closing set we’d just seen,
Liam offered to describe it to us, and out came the trusty tape-deck, so that
we could put it in front of readers of The Folk Life. So here he is, and there
you are. From here on, you’re in the hands of a master].
John: Liam, what I’m interested in is the way you fellows structure
a set – its opening and its closure for an audience, especially. Where
does your skill in that come from?
Liam: Well, it comes from, I suppose, basically (laughs) twenty years
of doing it!
Also from our background in the theatre. All of us – in the original
group, and also Tommy and I – were first of all actors, and studying
the plays we were in, just watching the way that a skilful playwright would
build his play – layer on layer, building a scene until he had established
a mood – and it works! Another thing that influenced us is that when
we’re doing a new concert, as we’re doing in our new tour of Ireland
coming up later this year, we can’t go back with the same concert that
we’ve done the last tour. So Tommy and I, we’ll go into seclusion,
and we’ll go through our heads, and we’ll delve up a way of approaching
it – and, as you say, openers and closers. Where do you go in the second
song, how do you build it, where do you let down…? You move from –
well, the problem is you’re out on the stage, spending two and a half
hours a night, and you’ve got to keep people all the time interested.
And that means movement and changes of mood. That means surprising them. Well,
some of the wee things we’ll do – as apart from the songs themselves
– there’s the sound of the tinwhistle followed by the concertina,
then an unaccompanied song – then there’ll be a new change of mood,
change of lighting. Or I’ll tell an Appalachian folktale.
John: Like "The Split Dog" you did tonight.
Liam: Right (laughs). Or we’ll do a Gaelic song. Sometimes we’ll
get a bit out of tune, and I’ll do a little Japanese song – because
of the Yamaha guitar, you know (laughter) -- oh, they’re little tricks,
you know. An awful lot of them we learnt from working with people like Josh
White [Sr]. He was a master at this. We were his opening act in our own younger
days. He’d be backstage, waiting to go on, and we’d finish our set.
And, as you know, amateurs have no real "level of performance."
John: Exactly the point Utah Phillips makes! And there’s no books
to teach that, either.
Liam: Well, one night we’d go out and we’d have a few jars,
and we’d all be in a great mood. And, being amateurs, we’d go out
and we’d have this wild – animal! – thing going on. And we’d
come off with the audience all going wild, and Josh would be standing in the
wings laughing, you know. And we’d say, "So let’s see you follow
that!" And what he’d do, he’d come out onstage, and he’d
look right in the eye of every person in that theatre, moving his head from
one to the other, all across the audience. And he’d pull up a chair,
very quietly, and he’d put one foot on it, and he’d caress that
old guitar, and he’d start off, "I gave my love a cherry…"
and silence would pervade the hall. And then he’d finish, and he’d
crowd that guitar, ‘way up the neck, and he’d go "Da-dadadadum!"
And he’d run his hand up the sixth string, until there was blood coming
out of it – and the electricity in that audience and they were his! We
were just totally forgotten, do you see? And the following night, we’d
come off the stage just as limp – we’d have done a lousy show, we
didn’t know how to handle it, we’d be getting this slow, rubbery
applause from the crowd – there was no way we were going to win them,
they were Josh White’s audience – and he’d be back there laughing,
and he’d stride out there, and he’d grab that chair, and go right
into "Dadadadadum!" – and there was just no way we were going
to take over that audience.
John: And that was the craft.
Liam: That was the craft. And the structure of his set was incredible
to watch too.
He would break a string on purpose if the set was going bad on him.
John: I’ve seen that! He would break a string at the same place in
the same song on a couple of nights running!
Liam: Oh, sure! And then he’d turn to Bill Lee, the bass player,
and he would give him a note, and he’d start singing unaccompanied, "Summertime,
and the livin’ is easy…" and he’d go on
John: That is a craft. But it’s a …different… kind of craft
from just singing a song, isn’t it?
Liam: Basically, that’s what we do too. We’re onstage for two
and a half hours, and you have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end,
and you have to be building through the different sections in mood as you
go.
John: You know, when I first ran across you fellow, it was through Clancy
Brothers and Tommy Makem albums. But one I ran across had Sarah Makem, singing
"Little Beggarman."
Liam: Ah. Yes.
John: And then I found another version, of Tommy singing it, and it was
the same, but different too.
Liam: Right.
John: And that kind of use of the tradition was what I was interested
then, and it had nothing to do with the kind of set-building concretizing
we’re talking about here. It was a different kind of focus.
John: You know, there’s someone who’s a master at this building
a show too, and you wouldn’t think at first he would be. It’s Joe
Heaney, from Connemara. He sings in the Gaelic mostly, and he sings unaccompanied,
but he’s a master of looking an audience in the eye. He has a very strange,
twisted kind of humor too, that he introduces his songs with, and it’s
almost like watching a snake, he’s hypnotic.
John: Like Seamus Ennis?
Liam: Like Seamus Ennis. I’ve seen Seamus come out on the stage at
a fleadh ceoil, and all these unfortunate tenors had been there, all twisting
their program books in their hands until they were shredded to bits with nerves
by the time they were through with the song, and Ennis would walk out onstage
– he came out one night, and the audience was bored to tears with the
concert by this point, and he walks out, with his coat still on, and his pipes
still in the old case. And he walks up to the microphone, and he says, "Hello."
And the whole audience says "Hello" back to him. And he then turns
his back to them, puts down the case, and he took off the hat, opened the
case, and started taking out the pipes and putting them together.
John: The audience must have been stunned.
Liam: They were. He puts the pipes together, as he says to them, "There
was a man one time, and he was going home, and he found this golden ring…."
John: Och, all right, man!
Liam: Right! "And it was too small for the finger of his hand, and
he had fallen asleep during the night, just listening to the music of a fairy
piper, and when he awoke this was shining in the grass near him. He knew that
it must belong to the people who were making music the night before, so he
went up to this cliff, and he kicked on it, and this little man came out,
and said, ‘What’s all the kicking about?’ And he says, ‘I
found this gold ring, and it must belong to one of your people who were singing
and dancing and playing last night.’ And the little man says, ‘That
is a ring belonging to us, and we’ll be forever grateful to you for returning
it to us. What can we do for you in return?’ And so the man says to him,
‘I’ll tell you what you can do for me then. I’m a piper myself,
and I’d love to have that tune the wee piper played last night.’
‘No sooner said than done,’ says the wee man, and he went in and
he came out with a tiny set of pipes. And he played up the most beautiful
tune that was ever heard in the world. And to this day, that tune is called
"The Gold Ring." And I have it…."
John: "And I have it"!
Liam: -- and at that minute the pipes were ready, and away he went –
and at that point, no matter what the tune was, the audience was bound to
love it.
John: Of course! That’s great setting.
Liam: There we are.
John: You know, there’s something I’ve noticed that we’re
talking about. People who have a few songs, people who’re just beginning
to get out and perform a bit, may be musicians, but they’re not necessarily
performers yet. They don’t have a set. And as you say, you do have to
move an audience along with you – you have to start them up, to open
them up and get them going – but then you have to close the audience
down too, at the end.
Liam: Well, you know, I once got myself into a very dangerous situation
one night at an Irish festival. We had a crowd out on the street – millions
of dancers – the pubs were all closed – and this other fellow and
I started singing, started out down the street, and everybody joined in, and
they all followed us, because they figured we knew what we were doing, and
where we were going. And by the time we got to the other end of town, we had
an army! We tried to stop them, and there was no way, and I could see that
it was getting a bit dangerous. Somebody got hit on the side of the head by
the skin of an orange – it was a small thing, but it could get sour in
a minute. And I knew we had to get back to the hotel, which had big iron gates
in front of it. So we started into the songs again, and got back into the
mood one more time. And by the time we got back to the hotel gates there were
several hundred people following us. I tried to get through the gates –
the old Brown Hotel in Ennis – they would have torn the gates out of
the cement! If I had gone in there then and they couldn’t get in after
me? I thought, "What in the name of God am I going to do?" So what
I did was, I stood up on the wall, and very quietly I started to singing,
"The Parting Glass." Slowly, bit by bit, the audience – it
was an audience by now – all started joining in. And some people carried
it, and, at the end of the song, I was able to step off the wall, slip in
through the gates, and the crowd quietly dispersed.
John: That’s a great story.
Liam: I realized that night exactly what you’re saying, that an audience
has to be brought in, and then it has to be sent out.
John: You know Mick Moloney?
Liam: Sure.
John: We had a conversation once, in an interview that was printed in
The Folk Life, and he said that very few young musicians in the US are learning
the slow airs, like "The Parting Glass," and so on. And he explained
how that was, with the learning of music in the pubs, that kinds of social
context and so on. You know, where with a slow air you need to have an audience
listening, where for the jigs and reels the musicians can all join in together
and learn them as they go, you know? But if that’s the case, then where
do these young musicians learn to close a concert, as you’ve just described?
Liam: It’s hard. Going back to Seamus Ennis, I was in a pub in Dublin
one night, and Barney McKenna was singing "Roisin a Dubh" –
you know [sings it].
John: I never associated Barney McKenna with singing slow airs. I always
thought of him as the classic machine gun banjo picker.
Liam: Well, he was singing this, head back, eyes closed, and you could
hear a pin drop – and this was a big, rowdy pub, usually. And Ennis,
he leant over to me and he said, "Now, there is a man who loves every
note of the music." Now, that is the secret! Loving a song, or loving
what you’re doing – it’s infectious!
[It is, indeed. And now if you want to hear how that translates into he kind
of a concert we’ve been discussing, you could get in touch with Rounder
Records, for the two-record set, The Makem and Clancy Concert (Blackbird BLB
1002), with big roarers like "The Rocky Road to Dublin" and "The
2,000 Year Old Alcoholic," as well as a dramatic reading of the Gordon
Bok poem, "Peter Kagan and the Wind," and a version of Eric Bogle’s
"The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" that is second only to Ian Robb’s
tender version. And you’ll see why there’s a lot more to Liam Clancy
and Tommy Makem than the stage Irishmen they’ve all too often been taken
for.]