STEVE REMEMBERS THE J.C.A.S. / BUCKLE - FLOORED
I asked Steve to write what he could remember about attending the Johnny Cash Appreciation Society nights in The Hut in Phibsboro. He kept a diary at the period and the sense of the context in which Dead Elvis was doing stuff really comes through in his listing in his piece of the events he attended in and around the period of the Johnny Cash nights.
That listing set me off on a train of thought about Leagues (Foggy Notions) and Timo (Ultramack) and their substantial involvement in the ‘Crush’ gigs which took place a few years before the JCAS nights in Phibsboro. I ran the ‘Crush’ gigs with Leagues - for a while at least - and was reminded by Timo lately that he realised initially that he liked being involved in running gigs from doing the door quite a bit at the Crush gigs. I think it was through Leagues’ involvement in those gigs that the Dead Elvis gang got to know about In Motion. I still can’t even picture Timo being there at the time and it was quite a bit later on that we got to know him properly.
Remembering some of this stuff has led me into thinking about and reading online about Hope Promotions - and their influence on a lot of people who we did stuff with from 1994 onwards. There is a really vivid piece by Leagues about the Hope scene on the state.ie website which brought home to me that, unlike many many of the bands and people we had dealings with in Dublin from 1993 onwards, we had not been part of that scene at all. That is not to say that Hope and their existence and activities didn’t have an influence on what we did as Dead Elvis. We might not have been conscious of that influence at all at the time - but I think it was there. Just not in a straightforward way. That’s something I’ll talk about much more in another post.
I’ve linked to a video of a tune called ‘Floored’ by Steve’s band Buckle at the end of the post. They started up in 1994 and were quite defiantly experimental and (I’m pretty certain) focused a lot on recording their own live improvisations. I can remember Wormhole playing some of their tapes for me in Dave and Anto’s house in Ringsend in 1994. They were impressed and I have a feeling that Buckle were part of a whole lot of stuff that they were listening to at the time that was building up their interest in pushing the boat out in terms of recording improvised material.
Anyway over to Steve’s account. I’ll be throwing in a few clarifying comments along the way where I think it’s useful. They’ll be in brackets and italics.
When Eamonn asked me to write an account of my memories of the Johnny Cash Appreciation Society gigs I very quickly realised that even though I know from my records that I went to four of them I now have very few personal memories of what happened, but here goes. I lived on Black Horse Ave. which was right beside the Phoenix Park on the North side of the city and about a 10 minute cycle from The Hut in Phibsboro. I remember there was already a bit of stupid romanticism in my mind about the whole Dead Elvis social scene and its various characters like Joe Carolan, Eamonn and Og. They lived in the north inner city and drank in various old man type pubs like the Welcome Inn and The Hut. So using this venue certainly placed them very much in their natural habitat.
Straight off I wondered about the name. I didn’t know much about Jonny Cash and wouldn’t have called myself a fan. Joe and everyone else involved seemed interested in material strictly pre-comeback Cash even though this was two years after the rehabilitation of his career after his performance at Glastonbury in 1994. The Crudden Brothers and Joe were a good bit older than me and had some different, possibly more matured tastes. (The first tape I ever owned, sometime around the time I was seven years old - was a Johnny Cash album. It was one of his cheezy ones - well post the Sun period. But it was my first favourite record ever. I was always a very big fan and even more so after I got to know his early stuff and his prison albums. I didn’t hear his first record on American Recordings until sometime during the run of the JCAS. Joe also liked country stuff a lot - particularly Hank Williams.)
I probably wondered that first night if it wasn’t all a bit too ironic but then I quickly realised it was all just a bit of (drunken) fun. It was upstairs and there may have been a vocal PA or not. (There was pretty much always a vocal PA.) I seem to remember the first few were the best attended by punters and performers alike and then it degenerated quickly to die hards of both varieties. (The club hit the rocks because - a little contrary to what Steve says here - the number of people wanting to perform got bigger and bigger and Joe from the Hut became uncomfortable with the fact that our basic agreement that he would give a couple of drinks to any performer was starting to lose him money. The attendance actually got larger as the thing went along in my memory.) As it was held on a Sunday evening I know I never went to any after hour’s parties with them as I would have been almost always working the next morning. I had a regular job most of the 13 years I lived in Dublin and therefore wasn’t ever really able to experience the same 24 hour party lifestyle that the Dead Elvis crowd appeared to me to be living. This was probably a good thing personally but I felt I balanced my time out as best I could. Of course as I got to know them I learned that in reality their lives were not just one big party, or if it was it wasn’t always a very good party.
With Joe Carolan as compere you never knew if he was acting or being himself, he was of course just being himself but you never really knew for certain and what strangers must have thought I don’t know. I do remember getting to know Stan Erraught and his girlfriend Bernie at these nights. I know I missed the first one with The Sewing Room as I was in the States, so the first one I went to was on 12th May 1996 and it featured Rumble, Sunbear, Stan & Bernie, Gary and Oona. I can’t be sure but was this when this latter pair started singing together and gradually became Great Western Squares? If so this might be the one legacy of JCAS. (Gary and Oona became the Great Western Squares in front of our eyes during these gigs. They started with pisstaling country versions of stuff like Adam and the Ants but they were seriously bitten by the country bug and were playing quite amazing sets mixing comedic and tragic songs in equal doses by the end of the run. They never called themselves The Great Western Squares during the run of the club. The name came in the period immediately afterwards when various participants in the club collaborated with them to make their first album - Judas Steer.)
Next time I went was the following Sunday where Gary & Oona, Andrew (?), Shane McGrath and Stan & Bernie were on. Then I wasn’t back till 16th June when Dennis McNulty of Decal did something (can’t remember what) and Gary & Oona were again guests. Again for my final visit I made it two in a row and this time the guests were Gary & Oona, Shane McGrath, D.D.D.(not sure who this indicates) and Bernie. At one of these nights Oona was rechristened the ‘Queen of the New Cabra Road’ by Joe.
As this is an archive, from my records I can give you a flavor of what type of shows were happened at this time in Dublin within the local scene involving as it happens, Dead Elvis, Ultramack etc. while I was attending JCAS during May and June. First there was a Luggage headline supported by Jubilee (before they lengthened their name?) in Whelan’s; some good old US hardcore with Game Face and Clean Slate at the Da Club the same month; The High Llamas (remember them) supported by Jubilee All-Stars (interesting, maybe they changed their name from this show onwards) at the Olympia; Gout supported by Rumble at the Ormond Multi Media Centre at the start of June; again at same venue just a few days later for a Decal headline of a one-off club night Ultramack put on; my own band of the time, Buckle, supporting Wormhole at the Da Club with The Floors also on the bill and finally before the month was out back to the Ormond for more US hardcore from Neurosis and Unsane.
Looking at Eamonn’s posts about the JCAS so far I don’t remember any vacuum cleaner. I remember Joe always being quite political and the commie stuff rings true. I do remember seeing the reunion thing on TV with members of Rumble and Joe on a beach in Blackrock with freaked out bikers which was totally mad and very funny. All the songs - yeah they seem to ring bells - but I don’t remember anything else about their performances. Basically now JCAS for me boils down to going up stairs into a spacious lounge room, did it even have a bar?, sitting down with people I knew and didn’t know very well and talking, drinking and listening. (It was anything but spacious - thirty of forty people was enough to absolutely pack the place - and yes, there was a tiny bar in the back corner.)
