Gigantic.59

Celtic Tigers

Friday Dec. 10, 1999

My first time flying into Dublin Airport, I’d barely wheeled my little black suitcase twenty feet when the PA system echoed through the terminal:

Adam Snyder, please contact an airport representative at the Information Desk…

What did I do now? The way it hit my consciousness, it might as well have said:

Adam Snyder, this is Ireland speaking, we know you’re here…

I found the information desk. A lovely airport rep just wanted to pass along the message that my friend Leagues was running slightly late but was on his way, not to worry.

Even in their busiest airport outside their biggest city, Irish village culture was alive and well.

I changed some British pounds for Irish ones. This was two years before they started using the Euro. The coins had animals on them, the ten pound note had James Joyce on it. A country where they put a novelist on the currency, can you imagine?

Leagues arrived two minutes later, he really wasn’t that late at all. We rode in a cab back to his place, which was right across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, built on the site where Patrick himself had baptized early converts to the Christian faith back in the 5th century. Even though Leagues lived in a new apartment building, the locale had some gravity.

I told Leagues how I’d bumped into Howe Gelb at Heathrow, that Howe insisted I find this girl at South Street Pizza and say hello for him, but I couldn’t remember what her name was.

“Is it Montserrat?”

“Yeah, that’s it, how did you know?”

“She’s my neighbor.”

Of course she is, I thought.

Leagues took me over to the next building and introduced me to Fiona, with whom I’d be staying. The three of us walked over to South Street Pizza, it was dinner time anyway.

We found Montserrat, I was able to pass along Howe’s message. It was a Friday night, the place was slammed, but she found time to chat with us anyway. Several other friends joined us, including Dan, who I knew pretty well already since he did Rev’s PR in Ireland.

Afterwards we went to Whelan’s for a pint to scope out where I’d be playing the next night. No surprise that everyone I met was both nice and an excellent conversationalist. The only real surprise of the evening, from a New Yorker’s perspective, was that South Street turned out to have really excellent pizza.

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Saturday Dec. 11, 1999

I folded up the couch and snuck in a low-pressure shower. When Fiona woke up, she took an artificial Christmas tree from its box. We set it up together, added lights, tinsel, listening to Christmas music on her boombox.

It felt really Christmasy. At the same time, I’d barely just met Fiona, and here we were setting up her Christmas tree and she was telling me all about her family. It could have been a Tom Waits song, Waking Up In Someone Else’s Life, or something? Or maybe it should have been an Adam Snyder song? (still haven’t written it).

Walking over to Whelan’s later in the day, a horse and carriage flew past us at a good trot. I tried to imagine when this was the dominant sound instead of automobiles. The sun came out, but it was still cool and there was a mist in the air. A real Dublin day.

I don’t remember what all happened, but it was busy afternoon filled with promotion and interviews and whatnot. I was amazed how many people, who were fast becoming friends, had come together to make this thing happen.

Leagues promoted it, John booked it, Rory found me a Telecaster, Eamonn worked the door, Fiona sold cds and got someone to project videos behind me, Dan called Hot Press and got a little article, Dave O’Grady probably did something because he always does…

All these talented people were coming of age during the first real economic boom since the 1840s. If they’d been born in any other decade half of them would have emigrated to seek their fortunes. I was witnessing a new Ireland.

But it wasn’t the Celtic Tiger that welcomed me to Ireland. It was collective generosity of spirit. Something I would’ve found here no matter what decade.

David Kitt opened that night. He played a great set with a drum machine backing track. My own felt a little sloppy, but they like a good story in Ireland, and my songs have stories in them, so I think it went over pretty well.

I talked to so many people. For every Guinness someone bought me I had to politely decline another five. I don’t think I ever met so many nice people in one place in all my life.

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Sunday Dec. 12, 1999

Considering how late we stayed out the night before, it felt like an ungodly hour on a Sunday morning. Any human would be justified saying goodbye to me the night before and expecting me to call a cab and get my own ass out to the airport.

But there was Leagues, as tired as I was, retrieving me from Fiona’s, and there was Dan, meeting us for an early breakfast at Bewley’s, the quintessential Dublin cafe where bespectacled scribblers have sat trying to be the next Joyce for the last hundred years.

We talked about what a good little trip this had been, and how another one was already in the works that would take me all around Ireland. Then Dan drove me to the airport so I wouldn’t have to take a cab.

I flew back to London, stayed for few parties but made it home to Kingston in time for Christmas.

For New Years I would head down to NYC. It was the end of the century and I was ready for a big finish. 1999 had been the busiest, most bustling year of my life.

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