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.

Liam: 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.]