CHAPTER TWO:
By the early ‘90s, Tom was beginning to feel restricted by sitting behind the drums. He wanted to get closer to the audience and believed he could do a better job entertaining crowds that way. “Lisa (Gutkin, the fiddle player) was the first person to say it out loud, one day in the studio. I don’t know if I would’ve been brave enough to suggest it myself.”
Pressing the issue was the fact that bagpiper Sean Kiernan was planning to go off to Trinity College in Dublin and would have to be replaced. “I had like a two year window of opportunity. (Band manager) Dianna had been pushing me to take up the pipes but I never felt confident enough to try it. Then one day, dunno why, I decided to give it a go. “I bought a set of pipes from a place in Pennsylvania called the "Wee Hoose of Supplies", and an instruction book with a tape cassette and off I went. I practiced every day for two years before I felt ready to play in front of people. Went through at least one set of neighbors, that I know about. We were living in Hoboken, and I used to take ‘em down by the (Hudson) river and play and look across at the city. “I knew from past experience that when you shrink a band down that it makes for a better show. Everybody has to do more, fill more space, and it’s more exciting to watch-assuming of course that you’ve got the right people!” Tom’s plan was to find a fiddle player who could double on guitar on the bagpipe songs. “I could already play the guitar so we had the fiddle stuff covered............we started calling around.” One of the people they called was longtime fan and friend Siobhan Barry-Bratcher. She mentioned that, funnily enough, her son Clarence was just such a musician. As it turned out, “Clarence was the perfect fit. He’d been playing since he was five, bluegrass mostly but that was pretty close. He was just 19 but he could play just about anything, and smart and funny on top of it.” Clarence studied with Jay Ungar (of "Ashokan Farewell" fame) and has played with everyone from Pete Seeger and Tom Chapin to the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He also had the technical know-how to run the sound from the stage at smaller gigs. All of this, plus the purchase of some wireless microphones, meant that Tom was finally free to to get right in front of (and often right in the middle of!) the audience. “It was kind of liberating, you know? I’d always had a certain contempt for the ‘front man’, as drummers mostly do, but really I found I enjoyed it quite a lot. “I told myself that it was okay because really, I was still a musician but doing the 'Entertainer' thing out of necessity, I guess. I secretly liked it though." Yet another ad in the Voice produced a ghawjous young drummah from Queens, Rich Graziano. Clan bassist Jim Nordstrom came along for the ride at first and then Tim Fritz came on board. This was the Lenahan lineup for the first three or four years and many thousands of miles.
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"We'd been wanting to change the name of the band because we couldn't get booked down South! To us it was just a Celtic-sounding name, but people down there were like, 'We'd like to hire you but we don't know who-all might show up......!' So this was the perfect excuse to change it. We went through dozens of names- it's hard to come up with a decent band name!- and finally settled on Lenahan, mostly because we figured nobody else was likely to be using it.
"So, we booked a couple of bar gigs out in Jersey to get things rolling. I think the name of the bar was Lenahan's actually, so it seemed like, fate!"
"So, we booked a couple of bar gigs out in Jersey to get things rolling. I think the name of the bar was Lenahan's actually, so it seemed like, fate!"
"This would've been in Spring of '95. Notice my vintage 1970s
Fender PA system! We used to use it for club gigs until Clarence made me buy a real one." |
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"That was an interesting summer. We played the
Bronx Botanical Gardens again, where we were attacked by giant insects............. |
"And went out to the Cleveland Irish Festival where Rich and Clarence decided to go swimming in the hotel pool at one in the morning and Clarence dislocated his shoulder."
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"He still managed to play the show the next day though- sling and all. It was a sight to see."
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"The first really big gig we played as a four-piece was the North Texas Irish Festival in Dallas............Rich's uncle had a car lot on Rockaway Boulevard and he came up with this Dodge van for us, a couple of days before we were supposed to leave. We'd been
renting vans, because nobody wants to own a car in New York, but this was pretty nice, and the price was right. We named it the LENAVAN and piled in..............
"The tour STARTED in Dallas. New York to Texas in one straight shot. We actually got within two hours of Dallas before we broke down! Middle of nowhere, middle of the night, but we got fixed up the next day and made it all right." (The Lenavan, with the help of one rebuilt engine along the way, held up for eight more years of heavy touring.)
renting vans, because nobody wants to own a car in New York, but this was pretty nice, and the price was right. We named it the LENAVAN and piled in..............
"The tour STARTED in Dallas. New York to Texas in one straight shot. We actually got within two hours of Dallas before we broke down! Middle of nowhere, middle of the night, but we got fixed up the next day and made it all right." (The Lenavan, with the help of one rebuilt engine along the way, held up for eight more years of heavy touring.)
Lenahan always had a good time in Texas, but this gig was special for Tom.
"After our show the first day, Tommy Makem's manager came up to me and said,
'Tommy wanted me to tell you that he likes what you're doing, he thinks you're doing a great job'.
"I'd been listening to Tommy and the Clancy Brothers since I was a little kid, my Dad used to play them all the time. Hearing that from Tommy.............I can't tell you what it meant to me. I could've quit right there, never played another note and I'd be satisfied.
"Well, almost."
