MY STINT AS MM’S MAN IN AMERICA Part 18 – 1974 continued.

It’s almost a year since my memoirs of the time I spent in New York as Melody Maker’s US Editor ground to halt. In the meantime, I went out of sequence by writing about my route to MM and first few days on the paper, but I’m back in 1974 again now and over the next few weeks will continue to write about what I got up to that year. So here’s the first instalment of this new instalment… 

New Yorkers will tell you that the season they call the fall and we call autumn is the best month to be in the city but I preferred spring when I lived there. Of course, I came to realise that the colour of the trees in Central Park as they shed their leaves was a beauty to behold, but Manhattan winters were mighty cold so it was a big relief when the winds that whipped around those blocks eased off and what the weathermen called the wind chill factor was no longer an issue, especially for the likes of someone who’d been mollycoddled by our temperate British climates.

One Tuesday morning in the spring 1974 I decided to walk the length of Fifth Avenue, from 78th Street, where I lived, all the way down to Washington Square, a distance of about three miles. I’d lived here since the beginning of the previous December and it was high time I tasted Manhattan on a sunny day. I wanted to look at the people, the shops and cafes, to watch the yellow cabs whizzing by, to gaze up at the Empire State Building as I passed 34th Street and the Flat Iron Building where Broadway disrupted the grid pattern at 23rd Street. I wanted to get a fix on the city I now called home, the skyscrapers, the lattice-like layout of one-way streets, bisected by Fifth Avenue, that alternated east to west or west to east, apart from the big wide ones at 72nd, 57th, 42nd, 34th, 23rd and 14th. It was only when my sister or friends from outside music arrived for a stay that I indulged in any traditional sight-seeing during my time there. I was less interested in seeing the established tourist sights than getting to know my way around this concrete world and, of course, experiencing its rock’n’roll. 

When I reached Washington Square old men were playing outdoor chess on tables with chequered boards etched on to their surfaces and young men were playing Martins, their velvet-lined cases open in front of them to collect change. A crowd had gathered around one busker. “Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow… let me forget about today until tomorrow.” I smiled at the thought of Bob carrying his guitar across this square in maybe 1964 or ’65, writing the songs for Bringing It All Back Home and this one in particular, or earlier when he lived on West 4th Street with the lovely Suze Rotolo, with whom he was photographed, hunched up against the cold, for the cover of the Freewheelin’ LP. 

The grid pattern loses its symmetry below Washington Square and the maze of streets beyond, known collectively as Greenwich Village, have names instead of numbers. I would come to know Bleecker, the most famous, well. Further south we find Soho – which stands for South of Houston (Street) – and then Little Italy, Chinatown and, finally, the Wall Street financial district, not really my cup of tea. But they’d have to wait until another day as after three hours doing nothing I was hungry. I bought a sandwich – probably ham and cheese on rye – in a deli and ate it while I listened to the busker. I gave him fifty cents, then took the subway back to 77nd Street, which cost a quarter in those days, walked back to 51 E 78th Street where I settled down to write up a review of Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band whom I’d seen a few nights ago at the Bottom Line Club.

Many years ago I owned a few of his singles on the black and silver London American label, among them ‘Poor Little Fool’ and ‘My Babe’, which I played in a teenage covers band. He was Ricky Nelson then, and from the age of eight he’d appeared in a prime-time US family-friendly TV sitcom called The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. A career as a teen idol followed, his records much enhanced by the guitar playing of James Burton, but I’d been given to understand that he was now a mature performer, leaning towards country. Indeed, his song ‘Garden Party’ was geared towards giving the impression that he’d shaken off his earlier image and entered into the seventies in a spirit of renewal. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem the case to me. 

        “Nelson is as much steeped in nostalgia as the rest of them,” I wrote. “His set at the Bottom Line Club last weekend was about two-thirds drawn from his old repertoire with very little added to the basic arrangements. Nostalgically, it was mildly entertaining, but musically it was flat. The reason was quite simple: after a while all his songs sounded pretty much the same. They all seemed to be in same key, sang at the same pitch and at a similar tempo. They were all a little countrified thanks to the steel guitar wizard in the band, and Nelson’s own sorties on the guitar hardly qualified him for the virtuoso league.

        “He still looked good, though, in his Nudie western shirt with rhinestone collar, but it was all too easy going for me; sort of supermarket pop brought up to date, if you know what I mean. The material included some out and out rockers like ‘My Babe’ which was a hit for him long, long ago; some of the traditional Nelson melodies like ‘Hello Mary Lou’, ‘Travellin’ Man’ and ‘Lonesome Town’; and some new material which, of course, included by far his most impressive recent offering ‘Garden Party’.

        “The audience lapped up the older material and remained totally indifferent to the newer stuff, which probably frustrates Nelson when he tried to introduce something new along the way. One member of the audience insisted on yelling for ‘Poor Little Fool’ between every other number, but it transpired that the Stone Canyon Band (bass, lead, drums and slide) didn’t know it.

        “When The Ozzie and Harriet Show was the biggest thing on American TV, their two sons portrayed everything that the all-American clean-cut kid ought to be. Rick ain’t changed much.”

        The Bottom Line, which held about 400, hadn’t been open that long when I arrived in New York, and I would go there to see shows at least once a month. In the next couple of years I saw dozens of acts there, among them Bruce Springsteen and Little Feat, and most times I had a ‘tab’ from the record company whose acts were playing. This meant I was entitled to free drinks. I asked the waitress for whatever I wanted and gave her my tab so she could add it on, and at the end of the night handed it in at the bar. I can’t remember if there was a limit – there probably was – but the bill was then sent to the record company. 

        All of which meant that I never needed to have much money on me when I set out for evenings like this. The Bottom Line was on West 4th Street, not far from the Bowery and Lower East side, an area I’d been advised to avoid at night, so I always made a point of dressing like someone who wasn’t worth mugging, which more or less meant I fitted in quite easily with the clientele at the Bottom Line. After a show there, I could catch the subway all the way back uptown, switching from local to express for 72nd Street, and be home in less than half an hour, all for a quarter, the price of any subway journey, regardless of length.  They ran all night too, and though they were much dirtier and noisier with  uncomfortable metal seats, they certainly had the jump on the London Underground. 

PALAZZO DARIO – The Palace That Tommy Bought

A family trip to Venice affords the opportunity to explore one of the more arcane tributaries of Who folklore, the Palazzo Dario that their co-manager Kit Lambert, flush with the revenues from Tommy, acquired towards the end of 1971. Located next to the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery near the mouth of the Grand Canal, Kit paid £115,000 and an unknown sum in bribes to officials so that he could move in during April of 1972. Part of its attraction for Kit was its reputation as a house of ill omen – a series of previous owners had met (and would meet) with tragic ends – of which more later.
          Right now (see below) the Palace is covered in scaffolding, its current owner having evidently decided to spruce it up. This was unfortunate as it spoilt the view from my water taxi as we sailed along the Grand Canal last Saturday. The scaffolding is covered in netting and there is a large poster stretched across the front of the building, presumably advertising the name of the architect and construction company engaged in its rehabilitation.

“The characteristic façade is covered with fine ornaments, marble of various colours, discs and interwoven roses,” according to one reference book I found in the apartment where we stayed. Another stated: “[It is] jewel-like in its combination of surface richness and small size… it has four storeys and two piani nobli [floors with just one huge room], and a generous water storey.”

The Palazzo Dario, or Ca’ Dario as it is known locally, was built in 1487 by Giovanni Dario who in order to make room for it arranged the demolition of an earlier Gothic house on the same site. Giovanni was a Venetian diplomat and a former envoy to the Turkish court and on his death in 1494 it was inherited by his daughter Marietta who just happened to be married to the son of the owner of the neighbouring Palazzo Barbaro, and the two adjoining palaces therefore remained in the possession of the Barbaro family for over three centuries.

This was the oldest picture I could find. Note (below) the different chimneys and changes to the facade, presumably done towards the end of the 19th Century.

The Palazzo Barbaro is on the left

Between 1838 and 1842 Ca’ Dario was occupied by Rawdon Brown, a British student of Venetian history, and thereafter it has had several owners. At the end of the 19^th Century the proprietor was the Countess de la Baume-Pluvinel, a French aristocrat and author, who undertook a good deal of restoration, including a new staircase, chimneys and replacing the marble on the front. In 1908, the impressionist Claude Monet was sufficiently impressed with its fancy façade to paint it from the other side of the Grand Canal.  

Monet's view of Ca' Dario

It is the series of later owners who contributed to Ca’ Dario’s macabre standing: the partner of Charles Briggs, a rich American, committed suicide in Mexico City; Count Filippo Giordano delle Lanze was assassinated there (shot several times in the head by a disloyal friend in 1970); businessman Fabrizio Ferrari went bankrupt; and industrialist Raul Gardini shot himself at another of his homes in Milan after being involved in a political/financial scandal. Kit arrived between Lanze and Ferrari, owning Ca’ Dario for seven years until he sold it in 1979 for £360,000 plus, controversially, £34,000 for its contents. His tidy profit was scooped up by his creditors as he too was bankrupt by this time, thus continuing the tradition of misfortune among the owners of Ca’ Dario. It was then purchased by the opera singer Mario Del Monaco but in keeping with morbid custom he died from a heart attack three years later at the age of 67.

In Andrew Motion’s book The Lamberts, his study of three generations of Kit’s family, Pete Townshend says the members of The Who were dismayed by the number of sycophants that stayed there at Kit’s expense. “He desperately wanted us to go [and stay there], but we weren’t interested, or too busy,” says Pete. In the event his principal visitors were his old Oxford college friends Daria Chorley (whose Christian name added a further incentive to buy it) and Robert and Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall. When Kit was detained elsewhere his assistant Anya Forbes, once married to Byrd Chris Hillman, found herself looking after Ca’ Dario for months on end.

Today the building is privately owned but occasionally used as an extension of the neighbouring Guggenheim Gallery for large art exhibitions. On Saturday I wandered around the back and at the ‘land’ side rear gate pressed the buzzer but no one answered. Even if they had I doubt I’d have been invited inside.

Two views of the rear of Ca' Dario

It’s not hard to understand why this strange and wonderful city appealed so deeply to a man of Kit Lambert’s sensibility; the ornate splendour of its architecture, the intrigue of the masks and old-fashioned costumes worn during carnival, the fine wining and dining, the romance of the canals, the elegance of the strong and handsome gondoliers who ply their trade amongst the waterways in their traditional striped tops and straw hats – so much more evocative than humble London cabbies.

Like Kit, the city of Venice is steeped in art and culture, so it wasn’t hard to imagine the man I once knew clambering out of a gondola to enter his palace from the front or stumbling over the bridges and through the narrow alleyways towards the rear, fumbling drunkenly with his keys in the lock on the gate and making his way unsteadily down the narrow passage that separates Palazzo Dario from Palazzo Barbaro next door.

Forty years later I took great pleasure in following in his footsteps, taking a few photographs and playing both ‘The Overture’ and ‘Underture’ from Tommy on my iPod as I gazed up at the rear of Ca’ Dario and imagined Kit in his pomp, the proprietor of a genuine palace no less.

My daughter Olivia took this picture of me (making the ‘Lucky Who’ sign) by the back gate. Unfortunately it’s hard to make out Ca DARIO on the cross beam as it’s very faded. The rest of the pictures were either taken by me or scanned from the reference books I found. 

Information for this post was obtained from several guidebooks and histories of Venice, the internet and Andrew Motion’s indispensable book The Lamberts: George, Constant & Kit (Chatto & Windus, 1986).

LAS VEGAS - Dawn & Glen Campbell

Being as how it’s the coldest day of the year here in the UK, I thought I’d post my report from the hottest spot I ever visited in America. In December of 1973 I took my first and only trip to Las Vegas to see, of all people, Dawn and Glen Campbell. My report for MM was part travelogue and part music.

“Hang on tight,” said the man in the next seat on the Western Airlines jet. “Landings in Las Vegas are the roughest in the world.”

He may have been referring to the plane's descent on to the runway, but it's conceivable that more Americans have had rough landings in Las Vegas than any other city in the world.

For when the money runs dry in Vegas, you sure come down to earth with a bump.

I've just returned from 24 hours in that city, so readers – as a frequent visitor to the city once said – come fly with me, across the inhospitable Nevada desert, over Death Valley, to Vegas, the great gaudy plastic monument to greed where the off chance of acquiring something for nothing has mushroomed into America's gambling and show business capital.

Las Vegas is situated in the southern tip of Nevada, the only state in America where gambling is legal. The only other town in Nevada of comparable size is Reno, but Vegas is the capital city and, consequently the gambling capital of America. Like Monte Carlo, gambling runs the economy of the town.

Gambling is not just available to the visitor, it's forced down the throats of everyone with frightening intensity. It cannot be avoided, no matter how hard you try, and most folk don't, anyway. The rattle of fruit machines begins at McCarran Airport and continues 24 hours a day, every day, every week, every year.

Since 1950, when Las Vegas residents numbered less than 25,000, its population has increased a remarkable 400 per cent to its 1970 figure of 125,787. The population of the greater Las Vegas area, however, is now 273,288 – all thanks to gambling. It is surrounded by desert with a climate to match: the sun shines over 80 per cent of the time, and the average high temperature is 80 degrees. Rainfall is consistently under three and a half inches a year.

But back to the gambling, which has resulted in scores of hotels being erected in the town, mostly super luxury enterprises and mostly within the last two decades. Each hotel is really a massive residential casino, a skyscraping monument where the activity hums around the green baize tables rather than around the kitchens, lobby or bars.

These casinos take up almost the entire area of the ground floor, making it impossible for the visitor not to miss passing them on their way to various parts of the hotel. To walk from the lift to the lobby, from the lobby to the bar, from the bar to the dining room, or from the dining room to the show room always involves a trip past the lines of tables where hopeful punters risk their greenbacks on the spin of the wheel, the drop of the cards, or the shake of the dice.

The only sound that rattles above the constant chatter is the spinning of fruit machines, lined up in rows in their thousands, patrolled by cute little change girls in micro skirts who temptingly offer 40 quarters for a ten-dollar bill, wish you good luck and sigh to themselves.

There are no clocks in any of these rooms and neither are there any windows, a state of affairs designed to make the gambler lose sense of time and carry on spending his dollars into the early hours without realising just how late it actually is.

Various casinos, offer cheap breakfasts to the all-night gambler – if he's any money left to afford it. Others offer free drinks and one I saw promised a free wig to those still at the tables at 6.30 a.m. Gambling at this rate I should think, can turn a healthy head of hair into a bald dome in a matter of weeks.

The largest such emporium is the Las Vegas Hilton where it is rumoured Elvis Presley's father, Vernon, has lost a small fortune. But shortly the Hilton is to take second place as MGM are investing around $150 million in the Grand Hotel which with its 2,000 rooms will become the largest hotel in the world.

Dean Martin is due to open it next March, and no-one's worried about whether they'll fill the rooms or not.

Caesar's Palace is the gaudiest – and currently newest – hotel of them all. Here you can relax like a Roman emperor with slave girls all round to pick up the cigarette ash – and there are countless others all offering the same inducement... spend, spend, spend.

The streets of Vegas are lit by neon that make Picadilly Circus seem dim by comparison. While the Strip itself is impressive, it is when you turn the corner to downtown that it really hits you.

Here you can almost feel the heat from the millions of priceless watts oozing through the advertising hoardings. It's daylight at night downtown, in a city that never shuts down.

Aside from the gambling, Las Vegas offers the tourist certain secondary attractions. As with gambling, Nevada is the only state that has legalised prostitution, so $100-a-trick hookers filter through the casinos all the time.

There's also a few artificial golf-courses mined from the barren desert landscape. Glen Campbell, who's playing the Hilton right now, prefers golf to greed anytime.

And, of course, there's the shows – really a secondary attraction, but still an important part of Vegas life.

It's here, after all, that Presley appears regularly (two seasons a year at the Hilton) the Osmonds can be seen (they were at Caesar's Palace in September) and Frank Sinatra has chosen for his comeback in January (Caesar's for seven days from January 25).

All the hotels contain concert halls of various sizes, some several, all comparable to our Talk of the Town where you dine and catch the show to break the monotony of gambling.

There's always plenty to watch, in the lounges and supper clubs and an added attraction at Caesar's – where the showroom is called the Circus Maximus – is the opportunity to shake hands with Joe Louis, the now penniless boxer, who just stands there and smiles as folk file forward.

On the evening I visited Vegas I saw two shows, first Dawn at the Riviera (where I stayed) and then Glen Campbell at the Hilton. Dawn were actually the supporting act for comedian Don Rickles, an American comic whose act is based solely on sloppy sentimentality and jibes about the various nationalities that populate the US.

Dawn – Tony Orlando, Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent Wilson – had just 25 minutes to present a review which reportedly cost them $50,000 to stage. Dancing girls, old time music and heavy reliance on ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon’ made up the act which was slick in the best show-business fashion and intended to promote their new US LP Dawn's New Ragtime Follies.

Tony Orlando is very much the front man, while a large orchestra and eight dancers provided the background action. It was typical nightclub stuff, entertaining in a jolly sort of way but not the kind of act I’d pay to watch. The steaks in the showroom, incidentally, cost $18.50 a time.

Glen Campbell, at the Hilton, was a different matter. He's an all-round entertainer in the strict sense of the word, not just singing but playing guitar (expertly), impersonating Elvis (not so good) and playing the bagpipes (competently, if not spectacularly). And while he’s another artist I wouldn’t go out of my way to see, he put on an exceptionally entertaining act.

The highlight for me was his ‘Duelling Banjos’ sequence, closely followed by the Lone Ranger theme accompanied with a film of the cowboy himself, astride Silver, galloping across the Nevada plains.

This is the stage that Presley appears on and his Presley imitation predictably raised a few squeals from the crowd of largely middle-aged diners. But then the real thing wasn't there tonight... another time, maybe.

The audience is predominantly male, predominantly white and very middle class. The poor can't afford Vegas and it’s too gaudy for the rich, unless the rich happen to enjoy gaming. The old man with a young girl is a common sight.

Backstage at the Hilton, the dressing rooms are quite something. Campbell was using Presley's dressing room, which is actually the most luxurious such convenience I've ever seen in countless visits backstage in various parts of the world. There's a fully stocked bar – and barman – and gun-toting security guards outside to watch over the artists' privacy. A private elevator transports the star to their penthouse suite so they don’t have to mix with the hoi polloi.

In the dressing room I talk to a girl who tells me she's a retired Bunny, once a Playmate of the Month, now married with a child. She says her husband is always being mistaken for Glen Campbell, and looks incredulous when I tell her I won $70 on the roulette wheel earlier in the evening.

“No-one ever wins here,” she says, and Campbell backs up the theory. He’s just taken a house here as he’ll be appearing often in Vegas. He’s a big draw, although Presley seems to be the biggest of them all.

Back at my hotel, it’s 3 a.m. and the tables are still crowded with punters playing their chips. With the shows over, the serious business of gaming can begin.

Next morning, at 9.30 when I leave business is still brisk in the casino. Who can tell whether the gamblers have been at it all night? Here, it never stops, and even at McCarren Airport the lines of fruit machines find a ready trade among waiting passengers, leaving town and hoping for a last minute change of fortune. Rough landings? Ask these people. They should know.

NEW ORLEANS

When I went to live in the US in the Seventies there were two cities I most wanted to visit, San Francisco and New Orleans. The former was easy, as I lived firstly in LA and was soon wafted there on music industry business, to interview Carlos Santana as it happens, and it was everything I’d hoped, full of free-thinking people who shared my attitude to life, and I've been there many times since.   

         New Orleans wasn’t so easy, but I managed to take a holiday there in 1974, spending a week in a hotel in the French Quarter with a girl called Debbie I'd met in St Louis on my travels, hanging out most of the night and sleeping most of the day. It was fabulous, its downtown architecture lovely to look at with its wrought iron frontages dripping with plant life, and probably the most un-American city in the USA I ever visited.

         For a start, there was music everywhere, in the bars, in the clubs and on the streets. Bourbon and the surrounding streets simply dripped with music, all audible from the outside as you walked along. n one bar I drank a mint julep and, obeying local custom, threw my glass into a fire. I suppose I'd paid for it in the price of the drink. Many of the indigenous population spoke French, as did I, a bit anyway, and I’ll never forget the look on Debbie’s face when we walked into a French restaurant and I chatted with the waiter in his native tongue, asking for a table 'pour deux pres de la fenetre'. This elevated me in the eyes of the staff and the service was très très bien, and Debbie was pretty impressed too as we took our window seat.

         One night in a bar, very late and unsober, Debbie and I found ourselves in the company of some British Navy sailors on shore leave who invited us back to their ship, a well dodgy enterprise. Debbie tottered up the gangplank on her high heels but we were thrown off by an officer whose job it was to make sure security wasn’t breached in this way. Good job as heaven knows what might have happened if she was the only girl on board. In the daylight we rented a car and drove over mile-long bridges into the humid bayous and at night we hung around in bars listening to jazz and blues and R&B. And yes, I did pay five dollars to hear the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, senior citizens all, play ‘When The Saints’.

All of this flashed back to me that week in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina visited its havoc upon this lovely city. I watched my TV in horror as the coastline was reduced to rubble and great waves washed up in the city streets, and I couldn’t help but think that America, the great USA, was in times like this as utterly helpless against the forces of nature as those countries on the eastern Indian Ocean who suffered so much that Boxing Day when the tsunami hit. My heart went out to the people stranded in that great sports stadium, among them the musician Allen Toussaint I heard, almost every one of them poor and black. And then I read about how the Bush administration had cut funding for storm defences and yet again found myself shaking my head in bafflement at the damage he inflicted on the country he lead so ineptly, and shaking my fist at his image on the screen when he made some pathetic speech about how… this great city will rise again. Tell that to those terrified, angry, starving people, I thought, when he failed to differentiate between looters who stole jewellery and those who helped themselves to a loaf of bread because they and their children hadn’t eaten for three days.                                                                                     
          I didn’t intend this to be a polemic against ol’ Dubya when I started writing… it just ended up that way. It’s intended merely as an expression of regret towards a beautiful, music-drenched city that I once had the great fortune to visit.

THANKSGIVING & ST PATRICK’S DAY IN NEW YORK

This weekend it is Thanksgiving in America. I never knew what to do with myself at this time of the year during my stay in New York. I felt like an orphan at Christmas, always at a bit of a loss, what with everyone being away from work, taking a long weekend vacation to be with their families, but the London office, where Thanksgiving was an alien concept, was expecting me to be toiling away as normal, so I usually went into hibernation with a good book, a pile of LPs and a bag of grass, and didn’t emerge for 48 hours.

          One thing I did like about Thanksgiving was that it wasn’t commercialised, nor had it been annexed by religion. It was a bigger deal than Christmas – the Americans didn’t have Boxing Day and went back to work on December 26 – but you couldn’t buy Thanksgiving cards and presents weren’t exchanged either. Thanksgiving, of course, originated when the first white settlers in the US marked a day to thank the Native Americans for the hospitality they showed on their arrival. Fat lot of good it did them.

I remember too that there was one other day of the year when I felt the need to maintain a very low profile, St Patrick’s Day, March 17, when all those New Yorkers with a grain of Irish blood in them took to the streets to watch the 5^th Avenue parade and, emboldened by drink, recite slogans hostile to the British.

I knew all about the Troubles in Northern Ireland in those days, the mid-Seventies, the sectarian divide that existed between the majority, Catholic, pro-independence-from-Britain faction championed by the IRA, and the Protestant, pro-British lot who flew the Union Flag and loved our Queen, and although in a minority tended to be wealthier and in positions of power. Of course, I had a British perspective on the troubles gleaned from the Daily Telegraph, the only English newspaper I could find in NY apart from ghastly tabloids, and like all my fellow Brits despised the IRA in much the same way that Americans today despise Al Queda. The Telegraph, which I usually read a day late, considered them murdering bastards and I saw no reason to disagree.

But it was the IRA, and not the Unionists, who’d managed to secure some support for their cause in the US, and this was evident in the St Patrick’s Day Parade, so I stayed away for fear that if I opened my mouth my accent might betray me and I’d wind up bloodied in the gutter. I was also unsettled when I attended a concert by The Chieftains at Carnegie Hall, outside of which IRA supporters with collecting boxes sought donations ‘if you love the old country’. This would have been highly illegal in the UK where anti-IRA sentiment was running high and it was actually quite shocking to me to see open support for the IRA on the streets of New York. I had half a mind to tell those who put their dollars into the buckets that the money would be spent on explosives that would more than likely kill and maim innocent Irish people. But I didn’t, of course. I was too scared.

There was an Irish bar with shamrocks on its green awning a couple of blocks east from where I lived on the upper East Side, where a small glass of draught beer could be had for a quarter and out of curiosity I went in once, just to experience the ambience. It was dingy and no one spoke. There were no women present. Everyone smoked cigarettes. All eyes were either buried in copies of the downmarket tabloid New York Daily News or fixed on a TV screen high above the counter on which baseball games were in permanent rotation, and the commentary, which was delivered in a high pitched monotone, was the only sound in the place. “It’s the Cardinals four down in the eighth. Pitcher looking to third base. Homeplate… diamond… catcher…” I knew absolutely nothing about baseball so it was complete gibberish to me. It wasn’t even necessary to speak to the barman who filled up your empty glass when you nodded at him, and since everyone left their money on the bar in small, tidy piles, all he needed to do was silently extract a quarter for every refill. I came to realise that every fourth refill was free insofar as he didn’t collect a quarter after each third beer, but it wasn’t really free because unlike in the UK it was the custom in NY to tip the barman when you left, and the size of the tip was relative to the number of times he’d refilled your glass, approximately 25% of your spending, which worked out at a quarter for every four refills, including the free one. So instead of the fourth quarter going into the till it went into the barman’s pocket.

I didn’t look like the other men in this bar. I was much thinner with longer hair and my clothes were different. The men in this bar were all much bigger than me, fatter, and wore short-sleeved polyester shirts and they looked on me suspiciously, unfriendly. I decided that even though I maintained my silence, paid my quarters for my tasteless beer and feigned interest in the baseball game, I was somehow disturbing the environment simply because I didn’t fit, so I left and never went back.

In truth, I lived in a bubble in New York. I lived in the music industry and the outside world, ordinary New York, ordinary America, didn’t really touch me. I wasn’t part of it, which is why the Irish bar was so alien to me and why I was an alien to it. I took next to no interest in anything in America other than its music industry in which I had a total, absolute, 100% engagement. I only went sightseeing when I was entertaining guests from the UK, and I regret that now. I was very narrow-minded, just closed off to anything apart from the noise made by electric guitars and drums, and the people who played them and promoted this music. I guess it was a bit of a lost opportunity but I did take one holiday, to New Orleans, which I’ll write about tomorrow.