Photo: Original Grass Band members (mid-’60’s), LtoR; Alan Cullen (guitar & saxophone), Pete Cummins (guitar & flute), Tony Gannon (bass) & Sid Gray (drums).
During the late 1960’s and 70’s, quite apart from Secondary school and later college, I spent many hours playing a plethora of cheap electric guitars with friends. I used to hang about music stores in Dublin, (Walton’s was one of them), pretending to sales people that I could afford to buy an electric guitar. After a year or so however, I was competent enough to join a number of Dublin beat groups. Each group had their own degree of competence, or incompetence, as well as earning capacity. Guitar-wise, my greatest influences were from artists such as Buddy Holly, Everly Brothers, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the original Fleetwood Mac, Moody Blues and later the Eagles. I appreciated the early recordings of Elvis Presley, however once he joined the US Army, his music in my opinion was much less exciting.
Some of the groups I played with included – The Grass Band, The Difference, and for a period I was a professional musician with the Dublin-based Up-Town Band. Apart from performing many original numbers in live dance performances, as the Uptown Band, we also penned and recorded the original soundtrack for ‘Like Now’. This weekly live television show, a poor mans ‘Top of the Pops’, was hugely popular throughout Ireland. Perhaps the band might ‘make it’, I thought to myself. Instead all those dreams came to a crashing halt one evening. BTW, do you have a copy of the Like Now theme? If so, I’d love a copy.
Following the band’s appearance at a popular dancehall in Belfast, Northern Ireland, our entire plethora of musical instruments and sound systems were stolen from the group’s van. The equipment valued at thousands of Irish pounds, was never to be recovered. Unfortunately, our manager Larry Mooney, had parked the van containing the equipment in a dangerous and politically active corner of that city. With no insurance to cover the loss, and troubles brewing between the Nationalist and Orange communities, we were advised to ‘let it be’.
It was May 1969, and unbeknownst to me at that time, the summer of love was about to commence in the US. Probably more in a gesture of wanting to run away from my disappointments, I secured a university student J1 Visa from the US Embassy in Dublin. Then further overdrawing on my already overdrawn current account at Allied Irish Banks, I swept aside my dubious musical career, to undertake a leap of faith and work the summer of ‘69 in the United States. It was a move I never regretted.