I might never have become a musician if I hadn’t heard Like A Rolling Stone. That groundbreaking single sent me helter-skeltering out of womb-like Wexford and into the maelstrom of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
I never met Dylan, though we briefly shared the same manager. However, one hungover snowy morning in Tribeca I overheard his unmistakable drawl. Sure enough, he and a lady friend were approaching me on the icy sidewalk.
As you might imagine I did a double take, whereupon he threw me a frigid glance that thundered, “Stroll on, pal!”
And I did, though I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway except, “Hey, man, any chance of an Alka-Seltzer?”
But here I was – almost a lifetime later – in Webster Bank Arena in the unaccustomed comfort of a boxed seat, far from my roots in the mosh pits of CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City.
The opening bands, Wilco, and My Morning Jacket, were excellent – for about 30 minutes – but as their sets stretched beyond the hour mark, I had to wonder, “What are you thinking, Bobby? These guys are wearing out your audience!”
But after the rigors of 4000 or so gigs I guess Dylan doesn’t concern himself with such trivialities.
Then he was suddenly, if laconically, onstage – no announcement, just a stroll on with his band.
Nor did things click straight away. The guitarist was new, and unfamiliar with some of the songs.
The audience too seemed underwhelmed. As I made my way towards the stage people were already leaving. And then there were only three rows of diehards between me and The Man.
It was a surreal scene. Dylan doesn’t play guitar anymore and the band was gathered around him in a semi-circle. They were dressed in Tex-Mex style, but they had found the groove and were beginning to swing.
Occasionally Bob tinkered with a keyboard, but for the most part he stood out front like a weathered Old Testament prophet; however, as the set progressed and the audience thinned he became more defiant, his shades unable to mask the brittle flashes of anger.
That mattered little to the audience, many of whom were wondering aloud when he would play Just Like A Woman, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, or other classics.
I didn’t care. That familiar nasal voice from my youth washed over me like warm Wexford rain – comforting, nourishing, and ultimately healing.
The new songs sounded good, though I couldn’t distinguish many words; but who cared, I knew exactly what he was saying.
Dylan may be our most gifted and enduring lyricist but, like Joyce, he has transcended mere words – he speaks his own language now and its snarls, sighs, and syllables are imbued with a universe of moods and meanings.
Still the crowd got smaller and I found myself in the front row, as close as I had been on that long-ago, hung over Tribeca morning.
Then he began She Belongs To Me and I remembered singing that song for my first girlfriend back in Wexford, and with that the dam broke.
I might have been rooted to the floor in Bridgeport but I was also ricocheting around the country through a Montana sunset, a Geary Street midnight, an East Village afterhours, a Key West dawn – down all the years of knocking about on a rock & roll journey that for once made some sense.
And in those hallucinogenic moments I experienced all the strains of poetry and music in Dylan’s voice – from Congo Square in “Nawlins” up the Mississippi Delta to Route 66, and back East to Washington Square, in shades of Kerouac and Liam Clancy, Blind Willie McTell and Buddy Holly, Walt Whitman and crazy-man Allen Ginsburg howling to the moon on East 12th Street.
And then Bobby was bowing, smirking like the joker he’s always been, heading for his bus – the Voice of America off on the next leg of his everlasting tour.
Larry Kirwan was the leader of Black 47 for 25 years. He is also a playwright, novelist, and a columnist for The Irish Echo www.irishecho.com He is the host of Celtic Crush on SiriusXM Satellite Radio and President of Irish American Writers & Artists. He can be reached at blk47@aol.com and www.black47.com This article was submitted to the IrishCentral contributors network by a member of the global Irish community. It first appeared on the World News Net https://theworldnews.net/ie-news/larry-kirwan-on-the-magic-of-seeing-bob-dylan-live-for-the-first-time
The following exchange took place among several Hard Crackers editors. It has been slightly edited.
NOEL IGNATIEV I heard Black 47 play in a bar on 29th St and First to an audience full of cops. Weird. It would be good to speculate on why they attracted so many cops.
JOHN GARVEY Weird indeed–Chris Byrne, one of the band members and a rapper, had been a cop. It’s an old tradition:
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/08/25/Irish-lash-out-at-New-York-police-march-in-pro-IRA-parade/2347525326400/
MIKE MORGAN Some friends and I approached Larry Kirwan and Black 47 at Paddy O’Reilly’s pub early one Friday evening about racist immigration policy. In the early 90s NYC, and Queens in particular, was packed with young Irish without papers. A lot of them were Black 47 fans. We argued that their predicament was universal to America, yet they were not subject to the oppression of other illegals who were not white or from Europe. Larry Kirwan was open to the idea of creating a musical front to expose this. It didn’t get too far.
There are obvious contradictions here, and we tried to force the issue. Noel mentions the audience being a mixed bag, cops, firemen etc. That’s true, although they were not all so. I saw Black 47 a bunch of times there. I think the best comparison is Bruce Springsteen. His audience are those same people and then those in-between and on the other end of the spectrum. His song “41 Shots” about the Amadou Diallou police slaying pissed off his base, toady Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey being a member. But it inspired us. Cops demonstrated in front of Madison Square Gardens during that series of concerts. And then later, he sang for the Clintons and Obama. Springsteen nails some things, but he is a real political jumble, worried about America’s history and future in an odd way. However, I would rather have him than have his voice not exist in that popular world.
I feel the same way about Black 47.
NOEL Black 47 consciously set out to build links between Irish Americans and black people, and are to be commended for that. They often performed against a backdrop of larger-than-life portraits of Paul Robeson and James Connolly. Nevertheless, they provide a useful lesson in the limitations of verbal and symbolic opposition to white supremacy; the presence of all those cops at their concerts is no accident.
Their starting assumption was that there was a natural affinity between the Irish, oppressed by British imperialism, and black Americans. True enough—except that the Irish as such are not an oppressed group in America; they are white. They bear a resemblance to the Boers of South Africa, also victims of British imperialism, who made their peace with the devil by swallowing the poison bait of whiteness.
Black 47’s blindness to the impact of whiteness emerged most clearly in their song “The Five Points,” a celebration of the so-called “Draft Riots” in New York City in 1863. Among the verses in the song is the following:
D’ya remember back in the Five Points
When the Fire was in the air
The streets were hot as the hob of hell
The bodies were everywhere
“Won’t join their bloody army”
Sooner burn down Kerosene Row
So to hell with your kings and your presidents
Let them fight their own bloody wars.
The riots, although they were triggered by the draft and the undeniable inequities in it, were the result of forces that had been operating long before. Their underlying cause was the opposition of Irish unskilled laborers to a war they feared would result in their being forced to compete with black workers in a free labor market. In order to prevent that, they attacked symbols and representatives of the federal government, fought with the police, tore up railroad tracks and destroyed telegraph lines and port installations. In the course of their week-long insurrection, they killed hundreds of black people, in many cases setting them on fire and perversely mutilating their bodies, and burned the Colored Orphanage. They did all these things at a time when enemy armed forces were a hundred-odd miles away, making clear they understood what they were doing by running up and cheering the enemy’s flag. They were finally put down by federal troops.
In other words, at a time when revolution and counter-revolution were locked in mortal combat on a “great battlefield of that war” (Gettysburg), the rioters stood with the counter-revolution—in defense of their interests as whites against their interests as proletarians. It was a gruesome anticipation of the Trump upsurge.
As Lauren Onkey wrote in Race Traitor number 10, “There is no suggestion in the song that the riot was about anything more than immigrants rising up against their living conditions, no sense that the war against slavery might be a worthy cause.”
I don’t know whether Larry Kirwan ever saw Onkey’s review; he never replied to it. I would not assume his guilt without talking with him, but neither would I give him a pass over the episode. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This discussion poses some of the same questions I raised in my critique of Redneck Revolt: the danger of limiting “anti-racism” to the verbal and symbolic and of failing to challenge programmatically the material basis of whiteness. Of course, there are limits to what even the best song can accomplish; guitars are not cannons, and I would not expect an artist to solve problems that can only be solved on the battlefield. But I would ask that a revolutionary artist not celebrate one of the most shameful episodes in the history of this country, without any apparent recognition that it was in the least bit problematic.
Do I think that any movement among white workers will inevitably take the side of counter-revolution? Of course not—but it must be acknowledged that whiteness provides a material base for a drift in that direction, and there is at least as much likelihood of it taking that direction as the other, and that a great deal of the outcome may depend on what people like us (and Larry Kirwan) do.
I advise people to read Lauren Onkey’s review. To access it, go to http://www.racetraitor.org. Click on Print Journal, scroll down to issue #10, and then click on Constructing Whiteness at the Gates of Hell (underscored).
Celebrating the Civil War “Draft Riots” the way Black 47 did would be the equivalent of celebrating the 1922 Rand strike in which white South African miners raised the red flag and formed soviets around the slogan “Workers of the world unite for a white South Africa.” In both cases the workers, after failing to overthrow the government and being crushed militarily—in S. Africa, the government bombed them from the air—were granted major concessions: in S. Africa the Job Reserves Act of 1926, in NY the effective nullification of the draft.
MIKE Too true, Noel. Their blind spots were apparent and more than irritating.
JOHN Kirwan went on to write a musical about Five Points. I’ve looked around a bit for a script but haven’t been able to find one. I don’t know if his politics remained as they were:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/theater/reviews/hard-times-an-american-musical-at-the-cell-theater.html
In any case, I think it would be great to some up with a full discussion of the issues involved and perhaps reach out to Kirwan to see if he’d be interested in an interview.