It's About the Music
These days, I've mostly given up on TV. I have a few shows that I sometimes watch, and often that's online. One of my prime media entertainments is YouTube, and I admit to spending some time listening to performers I like a lot.
The YouTube above is of the group Planxty, and it is the opening set of their 2004 reunion concerts in Ireland. During a trip to Scotland in about 2005, I purchased the 2004 concert CD at Virgin in Glasgow, and I remember popping it in the player as the family drove from Glasgow back to Gargunnock, near Stirling, where we had a rented cottage. This track builds beautifully, and you can tell the audience is with them all the way, and when Liam Og O'Flynn breaks out the pipes, the place goes crazy. And, I don't mind admitting, I actually got all choked up listening to it.
My first Planxty record [long-playing 33rpm] was The Well Below the Valley. I was dating a girl in first-year university, and her sister's boyfriend showed up with it. He explained that his brother was into weird British rock, and ordered lots of records, and was dismayed to find that this was "some bagpipe crap." The boyfriend said, "I know a guy who likes that stuff," and thus I was introduced to Planxty.
It turned out, I loved it, and I chased down all their albums as they came out, and I learned the words, and was so enchanted by the piping that I started into learning the uilleann pipes, which I have played [not well] off and on since 1983.
In 1980 or 81, I was able to hear Planxty live in concert at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. I had a three-day pass to the Edinburgh Folk Festival, and bought tickets also to the evening concert with Planxty. It was magic: 3,000 people jammed into the hall, and the main floor held about 1,000 Irish rugby fans who were there for a match that day at Murrayfield. The band was amazing, the sound of O'Flynn;s pipes filled the hall. I remember the feeling walking back to my friends' place after the show...I was walking on air [substance free].
Shortly after that, the band broke up [again], and there were years of ups and downs, different members in and out, and various formations of Planxty, some which were better and worse than others. Because the band was so amazing in its prime, traditional music fans of the band were always saddened that it didn't continue. There was politics, and band politics, and boozing, and families, and other projects that all got in the way of what the band did.
And that's why the 2003-4 reunions were so great. Here are these four titans of Irish traditional music, and they've all seen and done a lot, and there's a ton of history, and...it all seems to wash away under the power of the music they are making.
And I think that's the power of what we do, even in bands like ours. The music is a force unto itself, and at the end of the day, it's not about the politics, the trophies, the contests or all the other stuff. It's about the music, and the pure enjoyment that people get making it, working on it, and playing it together.
