The Thing is…

Far more often, when I told people I was from Ireland, they asked about the unrest in Northern Ireland, or the Troubles, as they were called. I never knew what to say. It wasn’t that I didn’t care – I just felt so helpless and unable to do anything about a situation that looked insoluble. Whenever the latest bad news came on the television, I’d often just turn it off. It was a head-in the-sand attitude, but I wasn’t alone in adopting it.

In fact, I was much more interested in American politics. In my teenage years I had pored over Rolling Stone as much as I had the NME. They had a lot of political and social-issue coverage and American public figures just seemed so much more larger than life, vital and – let’s face it – glamorous than the grey men of Dublin and Belfast. The assassination of JFK had been an incredible drama and I had been equally fascinated by Edward Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick scandal, which began the day before the moon landing.

Many UCD students were consumed with anger after Bloody Sunday in 1972 and I remember an air of numbness around the campus that week. We had hated the mad tit-for-tat paramilitary response to everything and their intransigence in the face of just about any offer put to them. But this outrage was something else entirely. It took almost forty years, until the summer of 2010, for the British Government, in the person of Prime Minister David Cameron, to issue an admission of guilt and an apology.

If there was complacency of any sort, it was shaken in May 1974 when three car bombs went off in Dublin during the early evening rush hour. Nobody I knew was hurt (although within days we all felt we knew the victims) but there were tales of near misses and I guess for the first time it made us realise the huge shadow of fear that people in Belfast, just a hundred miles north of us, were living under.

As the summer of 1974 dawned my thoughts were very much over the Atlantic. I got to use my J1 visa again but this time I was giving Deutschland a miss – it was time for my first visit to America, with Mel as my equally pumped-up and excited travelling companion.

We flew into JFK but almost immediately our plans began to come apart at the seams. Mel and I had no fewer than three jobs, or potential jobs, lined up in or around the airport, but they all fell through when we arrived. So we bunkered down in Lefferts Boulevard, near the airport and right at the end of one of the subway lines, while we worked out what to do.

New York was amazing. I guess I always knew it would be, but the place was wonderful. It was almost too much to take in, and at first I was totally green and naive as I wandered around in the stifling summer heatwave. I strolled into a deli and asked for a ‘baggle’ rather than a bagel, which caused much hilarity at my expense.

In another café I ordered a Coke and asked the guy behind the counter, ‘Can you put some ice in it?’ He looked at me as if I had two heads, clearly thinking, ‘Of course I’m going to!’ But he didn’t know that I was only too used to buying warm cans of Coke in places like the west of Ireland, where the can could have been in the window in sunshine for six weeks, with a few wasps buzzing around it.

I loved walking around the streets in New York. The sights are so familiar to us through years of watching TV – the yellow taxis, the hydrants, the steam coming up through the grates on the street corners – that it just felt like being in a movie. I loved even more the fact that all the clichés were true: on the rare occasion you clambered into a cab, for example, you really did have to shout your destination to a surly and uninterested driver with a very precarious grasp of English.

So New York was great but we were still stuck in that dodgy place at the end of the subway line with no income, and we were beginning to seriously stress out about our situation. It was time for Plan B. Two years earlier, my brother Gerard had come out to the East Coast and worked at a fairground, Shaheen’s Fun-O-Rama Park, at Salisbury Beach near Boston. I had brought a brochure from home with the fairground’s number on the slim chance that we needed to fall back on the place.

I phoned up the amusement park and because I was ‘Gerry Fanning’s brother’ we were promised jobs on the spot. Our luck was turning. Mel and I went to Grand Central Station to buy tickets and an American guy called Bill Luce introduced himself by the ticket office and offered us a lift, saying he could use some company. He was a great guy and so we drove down in his big car, picking up a female hitchhiker on the way. It was grand: it all felt so cool, so American, so right. He even gave us his place to stay in overnight.

Salisbury Beach was in a place called Newburyport, seventy miles from Boston, and Shaheen’s Fun-O-Rama was a typical old-fashioned amusement park such as you might find in Black-pool. We got our uniforms, which had red-and-white stripes like a Sunderland FC football kit, and we also got some important news: we would have to get haircuts.

This was the last straw for Mel. I couldn’t have cared less, because my hair looked shite anyway, but Mel’s hair was like Dave Gilmour’s from Pink Floyd and was a statement of cool. He refused to cut it, worked one day at Shaheen’s, told me, ‘Fuck this place, I’m not doing this one day more!’ and flew back to Dublin, where he worked all summer in Captain America’s burger joint to claw back the money he’d spent.

So I was on my own in Salisbury Beach – but not for long. The park bosses billeted me in a house on the beach with five good-time, fun-loving party animals from Northern Ireland, including one called John Coll, whose cousin I knew in Dublin. All five of them were fiery, mostly redheaded heavy drinkers; I remember one of them lay on the beach for a whole day and got so sunburnt he had to go to hospital. I lived with this crew of likeable rogues for three memorable months.

The fairground work was no more intellectually demanding than had been the steel-processing plant in Gross-Gerau but it was a lot more fun. I would be working one of the rides, which involved taking the tickets off the customers as they walked up the steps, making sure they were safely strapped into the cars and pressing a button to set the whole thing moving.

There was a definite hierarchy to the amusement park. The big central ride was the rollercoaster, and all the cool American guys worked that, the jocks wearing accessorised red-and-white striped tops with blue slacks who would try to pull the girls as they helped them on to the ride.

I worked the smaller rides in the main part of the park and was just as interested in the music that was being blared out by Shaheen’s on-site DJ. It was mostly the same few songs repeated all the time: ‘Rock the Boat’ by the Hues Corporation, ‘Rock Your Baby’ by George McCrae, ‘(You’re) Having My Baby’ by Paul Anka and ‘Sugar Baby Love’ by the Rubettes, which had been a big hit in Britain but had only just come out in America.

It was all a blast but, as ever, my focus was on making money to see me through the next term in Dublin and finance my trips to Pat Egan’s Sound Cellar, so I worked like mad. The site didn’t open until three in the afternoon but I would normally report for work at nine-thirty in the morning to clean the place up.

Then I’d be on duty on the rides until the fairground closed at 1 a.m., which made it an eighty- or even hundred-hour week.

The park was pretty quiet during the afternoons, as everybody stayed on the beach, but was buzzing every single evening as thousands of scantily clad sun-worshippers thronged the boardwalk. The weekends saw an incongruous, unlikely mix of parents with young kids and rowdy Spring Break types.

My sixteen-hour days might have been OK had I been able to relax and sleep at night but our place on the beach was party central. The Northern Ireland guys were all pissheads and loved to invite one-and-all back for parties of some description every night. Our Irish accents were a major plus point. It sounds daft, but we were almost celebrities.

Initially, I was a fish out of water after Mel had left, but living with this fun-loving group was a good experience for me, and they treated me really well. Because I was last in, all the bedrooms had gone when I arrived, but these 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.