lads, who were all a bit older than me, looked out for me and gave me a bed in the corner of the main downstairs room.
I had an eight-track machine beside my bed with two tapes – a Moody Blues album and the American Graffiti soundtrack, which is a collection of some of the greatest pop music ever assembled, bursting with short, sharp tunes of bobby-sox and pony-tail high-school stories. With bands like the Platters, Diamonds, Crests, Fleetwoods, Monotones, Silhouettes, Clovers, Cleftones, Spaniels, Heartbeats, Skyliners and a host of others from Flash Cadillac and Frankie Lymon to famous names like Buddy Holly and the Beach Boys, the mid-Fifties to early Sixties really was a glorious time for American pop music.
That bed in the corner of the room was where I was to lose my virginity. Frankly, it was not before time. I was 20 years old by then, and while I’d had flings with girls in the past, we’d never gone all the way or got even remotely serious. I had no interest at all in settling down with a steady girlfriend – plus, of course, I was still living with my parents, and I probably bored them all stupid talking about music!
The girl that finally popped my cherry was American. She used to hang around at the parties we held at our beach house of ill repute, and one night it just happened. I didn’t have much confidence – in fact, as it became clear we were heading to what American frat boys called third base, I was thinking, ‘Are you sure you want to do this with me, and not one of those blue-eyed, blond surfer dudes on the beach?’ And the awful thing is that I can’t even remember her name. Is that terrible – or is it just rock ’n’ roll?
At the height of summer the fairground was heaving, I was getting a huge buzz every night, and 8 August 1974 was the most exciting evening of all (with apologies to the anonymous young lady above, obviously). President Richard Nixon had been increasingly at bay and besieged by controversy as the Watergate scandal erupted around him, and on the evening of 8 August, bowing to the inevitable, he became the first US president to resign while still in office.
This was massive news across the world, across America – and certainly on Salisbury Beach. Massachusetts was Democrat, Kennedy country, where Nixon had always been loathed. In the previous election, Nixon had won one of the biggest landslides in American election history. Forty-nine of the fifty states voted for Nixon. The only one to vote for his Democrat opponent, George McGovern, was Massachusetts.
So Salisbury Beach celebrated in style. There were fireworks, a lot of drinking, and a Wicker Man-style effigy of Richard Nixon burning for hours on the beach. The air was thick with heady talk of Tricky Dicky being tried for mass murder for his 1970 bombing campaign against Cambodia (obviously, this came to nothing: instead, his vice-president, Gerald Ford, assumed office and immediately granted Nixon a full pardon). Yet for a US politics junkie like me, who had soaked in all this stuff via the pages of Rolling Stone, this was amazing: I felt like I was right at the heart of things.
The piss-ups continued unabated in the party house, but unlike my party-animal housemates, I was also broadening my cultural life. In my first week at Salisbury Beach, I had hatched a cunning, if rather deceitful, plan, and it had worked like an absolute dream.
In those days, music magazines as well as titles like Reader’s Digest and Playboy ran copious adverts for music clubs. The deal was that you joined these clubs for a token two or three dollars and were eligible for a fantastic introductory offer whereby you could choose ten albums of your choice absolutely gratis. The catch was that you were then obliged to purchase at least one album per month at full price for at least a year – but I knew that by then I would be back in Dublin and safely out of reach.
I spent my first week at Shaheen’s subscribing to these clubs, cutting out forms and posting off my selections, and by July I had parcels arriving at the beach house every single day. By the start of August, I owned a hundred new albums and my record collection had doubled in size – and all for the princely sum of $25! I even joined a book club and got the complete works of Shakespeare for $2.50.
My only fear was that I would be travelling back to Ireland with my luggage a lot weightier than when I came out and could well get hit with a mammoth excess baggage charge. I had no need to worry. When I arrived at JFK in September, Orla O’Farrell, a friend of mine from UCD who was also working a J1 visa, was on duty at the Aer Lingus check-in desk. She waved my bags through with a nod and a wink and all was well.
Before I returned to Dublin though, I spent two weeks in New York, where I spent more money every day than I had in a week on Salisbury Beach. I stayed in a place in Bleecker Street and spent a couple of days trailing round Greenwich Village trying to find all the places Bob Dylan had played. It was my own little pathetic version of a Beatles tour of Liverpool.
While I was in New York that August, Frenchman Philippe Petit did his legendary tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, later immortalised in the Man on Wire movie. I would love to say I watched it, mouth agape, but I didn’t even know it had happened until the next day. Nobody in Greenwich Village did. It’s its own little world.
Mostly I spent that fortnight devouring New York and music. It was the dog-end of a scorching heatwave summer, the sidewalks seemed to be melting, and the soundtrack to it all was Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark album and Eric Clapton’s version of ‘I Shot the Sheriff ’ – which, sacrilege as it might be, I have always preferred to Bob Marley’s original.
Inevitably, I trawled record stores to add to the groaning haul of vinyl I had collected at Salisbury Beach via the unsuspecting music clubs. One mission was to find some music by Harry Partch, a weird old guy I had read a long article about in Rolling Stone. He had speakers under the floorboards in his house and only made music on found instruments. This guy made the Legendary Stardust Cowboy sound mainstream.
Poking around inside a musty old record shop, I asked the fella behind the counter about him. He unsurprisingly told me he had never heard of him and asked what kind of music he made. I could have said ‘Avant-garde’ or ‘Experimental’ but was honest and said ‘Weird’ – at which point, to my amazement, the guy pointed me to a ‘Weird’ section in a corner of the store.
Under the word ‘Weird’, about a thousand albums were stacked up. I took a deep breath, began flicking through … and the second album from the front was The World of Harry Partch. I didn’t even listen to it in the shop, just bought it straightaway, but a measure of exactly how weird it was is that when I got it home to Dublin, the first time I listened to it I played the entire first side at the wrong speed without even realising.
At the end of my NY mini-break, I joined eighty thousand other people at a huge outdoor concert at Roosevelt Raceway in Westbury that was being billed as the sound of California on the East Coast. At that time it was the biggest gig there had ever been in New York. Jesse Colin Young and the Beach Boys played first, then Joni Mitchell, and the headliners were Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
CSNY played for a long time and each member also played a solo set. Neil Young began his by telling us that, at the end, he would reveal the fate of Evel Knievel. The legendary daredevil had proclaimed that he would leap that day across the Grand Canyon on his motorbike. Young played a magnificent set and at the end, as he ambled off, said, ‘It was a sham, it was a scam and he’s still alive.’ It was a fitting end to one of the best summers of my life.
Yet all dreams have to come to an end and, back in Dublin, I came down to a earth with a bump. I graduated in 1975 with a BA but no honours, which was pretty much what my minimal work-rate had deserved, and decided that I would take a one-year Higher Diploma in teaching.
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