WHISKEY and MILK   by Perkin Warbeck

or, The OVERLOOKED

WHISKEY:

It was the week before Christmas when all the through the city, every creature was stirring, especially those on the finance committee.

That was the Christmas on the cusp of the 90s when one entered the Royal Dublin Hotel on O’Connell Street. In the middle of the crowded lobby , bedecked with holly and ninety types of jolly, one unexpectedly spotted a familiar face, beneath a dome-like forehead..

Without hesitation one immediately made a bee-line, with a mixture of feints, bobs , weaves and the odd crafty elbow into the small of the back of anyone small enough to be worth chancing.

-Jackie Jameson?

-Correct.

-You should be on the Irish team.

-I know.

End of encounter. What one took away from it was the tone of weary resignation in the second reply.

Jackie Jameson. Who, he? Well, one might ask. Quite simply, he was the most elegant Irish soccer player of his generation, one blessed with unbelievable balance and a pair of gifted feet which could have absconded and swopped a pair of football boots for a pair of pumps.

He was a synonym for balance. And the only reason for one to leave the comforts of Warbeck Towers (see back numbers of Homes and Gardens – not that dreadful, inferior American import, House and Garden ) of a winter’s night to take a gawk at a League of Ireland game.

He had that languid style which enabled him, to the bafflement of many, to be never in a hurry while simultaneously being always in the correct position to welcome the ball. The mark of the true natural. Diarmuid Connolly of Dublin is a product of the same vineyard. That would be Lacyrmae Christi: The Tears of Christ. The legendary wine grown in the lava-rich foothills of Mount Vesuvius, and so called because they recall the joyful tears of The Redeemer over the fall of the flat-capped Luficer.

During the Charlatan Era which was petering out at the time of the above brief encounter, and in a welter of camouflaged defeat, Jackie J from Crumlin never got a smell of a whiff of a hint of a nod to join the Irish camp from Jackie C from Ashington.

The irrefutable fact that he had a full complement of Irish ancestry under the Granny rule – two Irish Grannies and two Irish Grandas – may well have made him suspect in the eyes of the Northumberland Knob.

This is not to say that the, erm, Republic of Ireland would have have won any more games with Jackie Jameson on board than they did but at least they would have lost with style.

‘The Triumph of FAI-lure’ is one of the ‘working titles’ of the definitive chronicle of this phase of sporting sham, : the authoress of this work in ogress, oops, progress is believed to belong to the Ruth D.E. School of Hysteria. The alternative working title, incidentally, is: ‘Dud Studs’.

Jackie Jameson was not the only one to be seriously disrespected under the Chap with the Flatcap and the legendary Charlatan banana-shaped mouth.

Another was, Liam Tuohy, seriously so. In 1986, the former dribbler extraordinaire was about to deliver the half-time team talk to the Irish under-19 team of which he was manager. When, in a display of legendary loutishness, The Charlatan, who had just been appointed to be the bainisteoir of the senior team, barged in unannounced and, erm, hijacked the talk. Liam Tuohy promptly resigned after the game.

As his nickname might well indicate, Liam ‘Rasher’ Tuohy was a man of wit and humour. On another happier occasion, he found himself in a Moscow dressing room before a game, when a local radio commentator entered, looking for the correct pronunciation of the Irish manager’s surname.

Which proved a little more difficult even than might be expected. Repeated efforts by the Irish bainisteoir failed to make an impression on the commentator who kept coming up with everything from Chewbacka to Tuxedo.

Finally, with the clock ticking away to kick off time and the ref blowing his whistle outside in that peremptory fashion of theirs, the Irish manager experienced a lightbulb moment, probably not the first of its type.

Holding up the index finger of his right hand, he asked the Russian commentator to repeat after him:

-One-ee.

-One-ee.

Then, holding up the middle finger of his right hand, he did ditto:

-Two-ee.

-Two-ee.

The job was oxo.

Liam Tuohy passed over to the Great Out Yonder this August at the age of 83. Jackie Jameson passed over, under tragic circumstances at the age of 45 in 2002. There is a bar named in his honour in Dalymount Park where he is still referred to as The Great Man.

MILK:

It was the week before Christmas when all the through the city, every creature was stirring, especially those on the finance committee.

On this occasion, it was Christmas 2010 and the city was Music City, aka, Nashville, Tn. And The Perkin found himself in Dan McGuinness’s Irish Bar near Music Row, just a throat-clearing yee-haw away from the storied studio of RCA.

Where everyone, everyone that is who was anyone from Elvis P to Roy O to the Brothers E to Marty R to Don G to Gentleman Jim R recorded their deathless contributions to the musical marketplace of the human race.

And whose side wall still bears the time-honoured scars where the rear-fender of Dolly P’s Oldsmobile in reverse gear once whacked it in 19 Forgotten: rotten car-parker, outrageously gifted bench-marker for the musical genius of the female gender.

A real lobster pot of a lounge bar is the Dan McGuinness Irish Bar, not least with that particularly frosty   Sunday morning coming down: the company ranged from, among others, Alan Reynolds who penned , amongst other songs, ‘Dreaming My Dreams of You’ to Michael Cronin, a genial young Englishman who spent his childhood holidays in Bantry where he witnessed the burning of the Betelgeuse at Whiddy Island in 1979.

Right now, Michael Cronin is one of the brightest stars in the constellation of sound engineers in Music City, USA. While he now calls Nashville, Tn home in truth he is in such global demand that he spends time in far away places with not so strange sounding names as Switzerland and Japan. The particular project he was engaged in that Festive Season was installing a sound system in the Nashville home of one, Taylor Swift, whose name one has heard of but whose music, alas, eludes one.

It was not easy to drag oneself away from Dan McGuinness’s that Sunday morning, but one had another venue to visit, for a particular reason.

-Don’t tell me you’re going already, Warbeck ! But if you must, you must, but before you go I want to show you something. Follow me.

The Perkin followed Michael Cronin to the car park where he opened the trunk of his modest automobile which was only as long as a sentence of Augustan prose.

-What do you make of that?

By ‘that’ Michael C. was proudly referring to three purchases he had earlier made that morning at a local art auction. One by one, he lovingly took them out in turn:

-Two original cartoons by John Lennon and one abstract in oils by Stuart Sutcliffe, the original ‘fifth’ Beatle, and upon whose left shoulder Lady Death laid her icy finger at the too-early age of 21.

No, it wasn’t easy to leave those congenial surrounds that Sunday morning ; but one had promised oneself a rare one-off treat at the Coyote Ugly Bar in Downtown Nashville. Nor, was it easy to make one’s way downhill to one’s destination, two miles away or so.

The underfoot conditions were as treacherous as a mixture of Macbeth and Brutus: so icy one’s legs tended to go in opposite directions. Thus, one was only too happy to seek unplanned refuge in the (gulp) Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral on Broadway.

Where an unexpected choral treat greeted one, as it tends to do in Music City, USA.

-Jesus , the light of the world.

Surely one of the most stirring  show-stoppers (composed by the ill-starred Philip Paul Bliss who was killed in a train smash at the age of 38 in 1876)  of all gospel songs. It brought one back to where one had first heard this unforgettable song: in Kwara State, Nigeria, forty years or so before then.

Though a Protestant song one heard it while seated in a Catholic church: as follows. In the town wherein one dwelt there were ten or so Christian churches of different denominations located, cheek by jowl. Thus, one could get the best of both worlds: Catholic service, Protestant music, as all the windows were invariably wide open.

This road might have been called ‘Ecumenical Row’ though the E-word hadn’t been invented then.

(The villages of Christian Nigeria could be identified by which missonaries had reached there first: palm trees were pronounced ‘pom trees’ in those evangerlized by British missionaries; ‘pa’am trees’ in American missionary villages (it rhymes with ‘ma’am’) and finally, ‘paalm trees’ in Irish missionary villages in (it rhymes with ‘qualm’.)

For the second time, one was, erm, almost persuaded to stay. Almost Persuaded, curiously enough for the musicologist at least, as it happens, was used twice (at least) as a title: first of a hymn by PP Bliss in the 1860s and as a title of a C W song by David Houston in the 1960s,

And so, one reluctantly dragged oneself away. But not before spotting a bitter-sweet announcement on the notice board of the porch: that Emmylou Harris would be singing at a carol service a few days later. By which time one would be, alas, south of the Border down Mexico way.

By one of those peculiar flukes which Music City, USA has a habit of throwing up, the angelic Emmylou had recorded the most famous song of the singer one was on one’s way to see and hear:

-If I could only win your love.

This was the superb, self-composed signature tune of the close-harmony duet, the Louvin Brothers. And it was the surviving bro, Charlie (83) who was down to appear in a rare appearance in the Coyote Ugly Bar.   His mercurial, mandolin-picking brother, Ira (!) had been totalled in an automobile crash in 1965 at the age of 41. Having already survived a multiple shooting by his third, and second last, wife who subsequently ended up in chokey.

One plodded on, amidst much slippin and slidin’, passing the plaque on the birthhouse of a poet who had been killed , freakily, and in a hit and run smash just months after the death of Ira Louvin:

-Randall Jarrell (51).

It was here that one almost suffered the most sensational example of the splits in Nashville, Tn at least since Tammy Wynette and George ‘No Show’ Jones split up (for the second time). George Jones, of course, the singer who was known as the Man with the Rolls Royce voice. Notwithstanding that, he was known to drive his mobile lawn mower two miles down to the nearest liquour store.

This was a house truly divided against itself – not once, but twice. After the D-I-V-O-R-C-E they got together again, remarried and of course, as the nightmare follows the day release, went through the Big D again.

Problem seemingly boiled down to a disagreement as to which in-house anthem sought prevail:

-Stand by your man.

Or:

-He stopped loving her today.

Sadly, the gig at the Ugly Coyote was cancelled, as the road conditions were considered too icy and therefore too dicey. Even more sadly,   a month later, almost to the day, when El Perco had taken up residence in an adobe hacienda in Mexico, the news came over the wires that Charlie Louvin had passed over to the Great Out Yonder.

Without any slips of prolixity or crossing the plain highway of talk this brings one, by swerve of shoe and bend of knee, by a commodious vicus of recirculation to ábhar an lae / topic du jour :

-The Overlooked.

While the first part dealt with Jameson, the second deals with milk, Loudermilk. An inordinate number of personalities in the biz of show died during the year and all will be duly commemorated at Year’s End. Well, almost all, bar one.

That will be the phenomenal John D. Loudermilk who shuffled off the mortal coil on September 21 , 2016 at the too-early age of 82, one year younger than his first cousin, Charlie Louvin (né Loudermilk).

In his heyday, the Sixties, John D. Loudermilk (‘the D stands for Damn-all’ as he used to say) was a prolific songwriter whose songs were covered by everyone who counted (and who could count) from Johnny Cash to Johnny Tillotson, from Brenda Lee to Marianne Faithful, Chet Atkins to George Hamilton 1V, Paul Revere and the Raiders to the Nashville Teens .

Songs such as:

– Abilene (‘Prettiest town I’ve even been, Women don’t treat you mean in Abilene’).

-Tobacco Road.

-Talk back, Trembling Lips.

-Road Hog.

-The Language of Love (‘Oo-be doo-be doo-be do’).

Etc etc etc etc.

It is not without significance that both Loudermilk and his Louvin cousins had a profound influence of the Everly Brothers: Don and Phil as schoolboys were mesmerised listeing to the close harmonises of Charlie and Ira while John D. penned one of their most bigly of hits:

-Ebony Eyes.

Let’s hear it then for the phenom that was John D. Loudermilk.

Louder, youse down there at the back of the class.