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Nick Lethert Interview

Narrator: Nick Lethert

Interviewer: Dáithí Sproule

Date: 1 December, 2017

DS: Dáithí Sproule NL: Nick Lethert

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DS: Here we are – we are recording. It says “record” and the numbers are going up. This is myself and Nick Lethert making a second effort at our interview. It’s the first of December, isn’t it?

NL: It is.

DS: And we’re at the Celtic Junction. I suppose we’ll start at the same place as we started the last time, which was, I just think chronologically, and I think of, what is your background, what is the background of your father, your family, and origins, and your mother.

NL: I grew up just down the street from the Celtic Junction in Saint Mark’s parish to a household where the first twelve or so years I lived with my father, who was of German Catholic heritage and my mother, who was Irish Catholic. Both of my mother’s parents came from Connemara. They met in Saint Paul, and I lived with my grandmother, who was from a little village, a tiny little village called Derroe, which is in Connemara over in the area by Carraroe, Costello, sort of bogland around there. My grandmother was a very intense person, not the least of which because her husband, who grew up in Maam Cross, a little further up in the mountains in Connemara, left her and the family when they had three young children, so it made for sort of a Dickens-like life for her and for her three kids, one of which was my mother. I grew up in that. My grandmother definitely ruled the roost and it was very much a matriarchy.

DS: She was living in the house?

NL: Living in the house, and I think she helped my parents buy the house in fact. She was a very devout Catholic. I have very vivid memories of her watching every time Bishop Fulton J. Sheen came on television and she was in there watching him. She gave a lot of money to him. He was probably one of the first televangelists – you know he was Catholic, and he went on with his bishop robes and the whole thing and he would be all fire and brimstone and “Give us money.”

DS: Wow, and did they have a thing like a banner under the bottom…

NL: No, I don’t think that technology was around, but definitely the practice of giving money – striking fear into hearts and asking for money…

DS: So that was the method.

NL: That was the method. And my grandmother obliged.

DS: Did she have a job or a career previously?

NL: She had a job as a clerk at the railroad, the Great Northern Railroad, which a lot of immigrants, Irish immigrants especially, worked on. Those were the days before daycare unfortunately. Daycare’s a really great idea because it seems to have solved some of the problems that my mother had to go through when she was young where her mother every Monday morning would bring the three kids out to some orphanage run by the Catholic nuns that was somewhere on the northside of Saint Paul, where it was beyond the streetcar lines. So all types of weather -- my mother’s brother had some sort of disease like polio or something – so she had to carry him after the streetcar ended. He didn’t live long, but during those years my mother was the oldest of the three, and her sister Abby was quite cantankerous and she would always get in trouble with the nuns, but my mother would take the punishment because she was the oldest. They’d stay all week in the orphanage, then my grandmother would make the trek out to pick them up and they’d spend the weekend together. It didn’t sound as if it was the ideal childhood, but that’s the way it was in the years before daycare, I suppose. They had to bring them some place, and the nuns were the best place they could find.

Anyway, there wasn’t too much, other than living with an Irish person, that I remember that was specifically Irish, but there was a time I remember when there was another television show called Arthur Godfrey, and it was like the variety show of the day, sort of the Ed Sullivan of the daytime hours and he would always have different guests on. One year he brought on a teenager

named Carmel Quinn from -- was it Tipperary or Limerick or one of those places? She was a young red-haired singer, a beauty from Ireland and she sang all the songs, and everybody in America fell in love with her. She came over quite a few times, and for some reason, I still don’t know the reason, we ended up hosting a brunch at our house for her when she arrived in Saint Paul. I think she had a concert in Saint Paul or something.

DS: I don’t suppose you remember where would she have performed?

NL: You know, I can’t remember where that was. I should look that up. She was performing up until recently, I don’t even know if she’s still alive. She performed for a long time. She’d a great crowd of…she’d a lot of groupies in America.

DS: I think she’d have even been at Milwaukee, would she?

NL: Maybe, yea.

DS: I’ve never seen her, I don’t think, at least in the flesh.

NL: That was a big deal, such a big deal. The only time I remember that we used the china, that was always up in the cupboards – you’d wonder what’s that for? – those were for special events, and that was the only special event I can remember it being used. Maybe for weddings it would be used. Carmel got to see the china and eat off our china…

DS: So you were actually there?

NL: I was very young, yea.

DS: And do you remember anything about her demeanor or what was it like?

NL: She was very young – she was a teenager. And she was very polite and very shy, as was I. I was probably about five and I was dressed up in some sailor suit of some kind that was very uncomfortable, I remember. I just remember there were a number of people there that I’d never met and never saw again. But I suppose that was the first time there was hosting anything Irish in my house, which ended up being – a career. (laughter)

DS: A way of life!

NL: So it started with Carmel Quinn. And then as far as grade school up at Saint Mark’s for some reason everybody defined themselves as either Irish or German, and that all came to fruition on Saint Patrick’s Day. We’d have a basketball game and it would be the older boys –

six, seventh and eighth graders – and the two teams would be an Irish team who’d wear green and a German team who would wear red. They always wanted to put me on the German team – I mean this was for sitting on the bench, I was about three feet tall, so it wasn’t as if I was going to score any baskets or even be put in the game…

DS: But did you have skill in the game?

NL: No skill. None whatsoever, just a lot of maybe energy and a lot of imagination that I would be a superstar if I’d ever been let into the game. Unfortunately I was always put on the wrong team because I really identified with being Irish, and I wanted to be on the Irish team, but because my last name was my dad’s last name and he was German, I was put on the German team, and I would always protest, “No, I want to be on the Irish team.” “No, you can’t be on the Irish team.” So that really annoyed me. Later at the high school I remember, the only time I really thought about being Irish probably was on Saint Patrick’s Day, and our school, Saint Thomas, would always send a contingent off to the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. But it was all based on your last name, and you couldn’t go if you didn’t have an Irish last name, to march in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. So I would protest about that too. “Look, I’m as Irish as the next fellow here. I should be at that parade!” So I used to just skip out of school and go to the parade. That started a long period of partying very hard on Saint Patrick’s Day until around mid 70s – am I going too far? Do you still want to delve back…?

DS: Yes, I do want to go back, I do want to rewind slightly. I’m interested in – you have the German and the Irish – I don’t think I asked you this before, but what about the German language? Was there any sign of actual German culture around or German language speaking or anything like that at all?

NL: My father was born in 1905 – he was quite old when I was born, in his late forties, which was quite old to have a child, and I knew that he spoke German in his house when he was a kid because that was, I think, the main language in the house. But he was born before World War One and when World War One happened that was not a thing any more. Everybody had to stop.

DS: And was that talked about? Did you see any sign of anti-German… It seems to me, not knowing anything at all, but it seemed apparent that the German culture of America in general and say in Minnesota was just suppressed. Did you ever get a whiff of that at all?

NL: I didn’t really get a whiff of it. The only thing I knew of being German, and I was quite young when my grandparents died – my grandfather and my grandmother, and my dad, for that matter ate what I consider to be really heavy German food – a lot of sauerkraut and a lot of sausages and a lot of stews like that and a lot of things that I consider to be German – and smelly cheese – and the beer.

DS: I suppose that is German culture – that’s something of German culture.

NL: But in terms of German culture – anything to do with the language or music or anything like that, I didn’t see anything like that going on. I think that back in World War One, way back, they kind of got that sorted – “Look, guys, we can’t talk, we can’t display any kind of German culture or language or anything.” And I think that they switched over to being very patriotic Americans, disparaging their German past.

DS: You would almost think that logically that’s what must have happened. Strangely enough ,we had a little teeny bit of that in our family, because my Auntie Maeve, who was my mother’s sister, married a guy called John Pape, and John Pape’s name was von Papen. So there was an actual von Papen in the German government – he was the minister or something or other – they changed the name. So that was the German side, and, since you mention the food, we were fascinated when we came to America by this idea of corned beef and cabbage, which we’d never heard of, of course, in Ireland. Was that eaten in your house, or did you hear any mention of that?

NL: Yes, we’d have corned beef and cabbage, mostly around Saint Patrick’s Day. My sister actually still lives in Saint Mark’s parish and continues to make corned beef and cabbage, not only on Saint Patrick’s Day, but a few times a year. And I’ve always disliked corned beef and cabbage. (laughter) I mean it just seemed like your salt quotient for the year was there, for not much in return in terms of flavor, and the cabbage was always overcooked.

DS: Of course, I ate nothing as a child basically, except white bread and butter and tea – that was my diet. So I never ate cabbage. Ironically now I do eat quite a lot of cabbage in stir fries and stuff, I love it.

Your granny would have been Irish-speaking? Originally?

NL: My grandfather came over when he was a young man, twenty something, and she came over when she was a young girl. They moved to Canada for a while, up by Toronto somewhere and then they, for some reason, ended up here. I know she was definitely from the Gaeltacht – they both were really, so she may well have spoken Irish or understood it at least, but she was fairly young when she left.

DS: Did your granny sing at all or show any interest in music?

NL: I never really even saw her smile. She was a very unhappy person, and she transmitted that unhappiness wherever she went. Consequently I was terrified of her. I think her life had pretty much gone haywire early on when her husband left. And her husband, by the way, ended up years later somehow getting his marriage annulled and marrying a woman who was at least thirty years younger than he was, and she ended up as the cook at O’Gara’s where we all used to go and listen to sessions. Every time I told my mother I was going to O’Gara’s back then, she said, “Don’t talk to that woman!” and I would say, “What woman is that?”. And she would say, “That woman who married your grandfather.” “What??” So, of course, then I was determined to talk to that woman, and once I had enough pints one night I went up and said, “Hi, I’m your husband’s grandson.” She was a kind of a stern woman herself, she never really smiled, and she always had a cigarette hanging out of the side of her mouth – she was always working really hard back in the kitchen. And this is after my grandfather had died, and she hugged me and grabbed me and said, “I’m so glad you talked to me and came up to me!” They ended up having five kids together who are more my age, not much older than me. Three of them worked as waitresses at O’Gara’s.

DS: Do you ever see them?

NL: I haven’t seen them for a while. I should actually connect with them, because it’s pretty fun to meet up with them.

DS: Yes, it’s funny to have alternative families in the town. I would say we are a very closely knit family in Derry because there are hardly any Sproules anywhere, and it’s only in recent decades that it’s really come upon me that I have cousins in Derry that I don’t know, that I’ve never met, because of various stories – that I’m not going to tell now (laughs) of the tangled nature of life – people separating or whatever.

NL: Well, it was such a thing of repression --repressed memory and repressed knowledge. One year, I was probably ten years old or something, my mother was opening Christmas cards around Christmas time, and she opened this one card and all this money fell out, and she started weeping. I said, “Who’s that from? Who’s that card from?” And she said, “It’s from father.” And I said, “Whose father?” And she said, “My father!” And I was like, “You don’t have a father.” Because he was never mentioned. He was invisible and didn’t exist. I never even thought to ask, his name was never spoken. And I said, “You don’t have a father.” She said, “Yes, I do!” “He’s alive?” “Yes, he is.” “Where does he live?” “In Saint Paul.” “He lives in the same city and I’ve never seen him?” I’d never seen my grandfather. And she was just inconsolably weeping and crying, and I’m like, ok, this is…

DS: And did you meet him? NL: I never met him, unfortunately, because the only time I would have met him was at a wedding of one of my Mom’s cousins who had moved here from Galway – her name was Chrissie Kennedy, and she used to come to all the céilís, and Chrissie Moore was her name and she married Hugh Kennedy. She was my godmother actually, and I was going to go to her wedding, but I was sick with the flu and I didn’t go, and he would have been at that wedding. And I did see him in his coffin, at his wake, that’s the only time I ever saw him. But people have often told me, like his kids and other people, my cousins in Ireland that knew him, say that I remind them of him. So he must have been very handsome.

DS: Obviously! (laughter) Handsome, talented and witty! Soap operas seem so absurd, the story lines and all. But life is a soap opera, you know. People are just walking around, living in a dream, that everything’s all neat – you know what I mean? You’re born into a family, and you’ve a father and mother, and then you get married… no, that’s not life at all. It’s fascinating.

Anyway, when you were a little child, let’s say, you weren’t really involved with music, or were you? Or were you aware of liking music? Because the person that we know – ever since meeting you as an adult – has been somebody who’s deeply interested in music.

NL: Well, probably some of the only music I ever heard as a child was Irish, Irish-American music, you might call it – I don’t know if you’d call it Irish, but you know all the typical songs that are sung around Saint Patrick’s Day and affected me deeply in a way that I ended up just loathing that music – just thinking like, why is this music so horrible? And I remember when

friends, when we were older and after high school and first planning to go to Europe like everybody was doing at the time. When people wanted to go to Ireland, I remember thinking, “Ireland! Why would you ever want to go there, with that horrific music?” I thought all the stereotypes were true of what you saw on Saint Patrick’s Day in Saint Paul. I thought that that’s what Ireland would be like. I don’t want to go there. Why would I want to go there? But I remember in terms of music in my family, we had a big radio, and the radio was always tuned to the Good Neighbor, WCCO, and I did not know, before I got technical about it, that a radio had the ability to be tuned, that there were actually more programs. I thought the radio was just WCCO, that it was just a machine that brought you WCCO.

DS: There were other stations obviously? Were there WCCO people? What makes you a WCCO person?

NL: It was the Good Neighbor of the Great Midwest.

DS: That was their slogan?

NL: Yes. I don’t know if it was back then, but it is now, probably still. And one of the things about WCCO, well, WCCO stands for the Washburn-Crosby Company. And Washburn and Crosby were these two guys that came, I think they were some of the elite old-wealth people that came from the east, and when they realized that Minneapolis had this wealth of material that they could exploit, like lumber and paper and all that, they came and sunk some of their money into that and became the grand pooh-bahs of Minneapolis and moved out to Minnetonka and set up mansions. So you see a lot of signs of Washburn and of Crosby and their doings in Minneapolis. Anyway because they had so much money they had this huge bandwidth or whatever you would call it, so they could reach the entire Midwest -- it wasn’t just the little local radio stations. Everybody in the five state area could hear because they were just broadcasting huge, they had a huge megawatt or whatever the term would be. And they would have everything you would want: the farm report, the weather report, Doris Day singing and that kind of stuff. But one day, I’ll never forget, when my parents were gone, I remember looking at the dials and turning this one dial, and all of a sudden it went to a different station. I’ll never forget the song that was playing – it was “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” by Manfred Mann. Right at the beginning when it says, “There she was just a-walking down the street,” then my life was changed when I heard that – wow! I never heard anything like this – this is really great. So that was the beginning of a whole

new era, and then I started listening to music a lot after that. I realized that anybody could listen to anything they wanted to – it was kind of a revelation.

DS: That was about ’64 or ’65, I would say.

NL: Yea, whenever that came out. Yes, music wasn’t a big thing, other than the church. My mother sang in the choir at Saint Mark’s and she loved the old Latin mass. She was a good soprano, and she would just get all devout and spiritual when she would sing that music – she loved that, kind of lose herself in it, in the beauty of it. And I can’t go without saying, she was absolutely in love with John McCormack. John McCormack was the man. She thought there was nothing better than listening to John McCormack.

DS: So you would have had John McCormack records.

NL: We would have had John McCormack. Especially when I was older because I would always go to the library for my mother and get books for her and records, and I would get her John McCormack records, and it would just stop her cold. If she would hear John McCormack, she would do nothing but sit and listen to him intently and how beautiful his singing was.

DS: How did it strike you?

NL: I thought it was unusual, I guess, would be what I would call it. (laughs) “Really, do you like that?” But it didn’t offend me. It seemed it was just something from a completely different planet – what is this? Why does his voice sound like that? But she was also really into singers, any kind of singers on television. We did listen to music on television, like Perry Como was a favorite of hers, Andy Williams, all these guys.

DS: Yea, my mother loved Perry Como. I think part of the reason was – that program was on in Ireland and England – but I think that part of Perry Como’s attraction was that he was a Catholic. I don’t know why that would have been talked about, but it was talked about.

NL: I remember – I think it was Andy Williams – or maybe it was Perry Como – did Perry Como get divorced? – one of those guys, it was probably Andy Williams. My mother used to love Andy Williams. Because my mother’s parents were divorced, and she had a horrible childhood because of it, she was so opposed to divorce. She just hated the idea of divorce. Even if she heard that a person was divorced she would not, even if she idolized that person, she would never want to listen to that person again, and one of those people was Andy Williams. I

remember her saying, “Oh, I used to love his singing, and then he got divorced.” (laughs) “I just can’t go there any more.” The worst thing a person could do was to walk out on his wife.

DS: It’s not surprising with the experience in the family.

NL: I guess my mother was really into music, was into singing for the most part. She liked classical music. I can’t remember my dad being that interested in music. We did have one German song that we did sing every Christmas, and we had a poster that maybe you’ve never seen – there was a bar in Milwaukee that published this poster but it was called “Schnitzelbank.”

DS: You’re going to sing a bit of it for me?

NL: Ist das nicht… So there’d be a question and an answer. So one person would be like the questioner, and he would say, “Ist das nicht ein Schnitzelbank?”, meaning ‘Is that not a Schnitzelbank?’ and then the answer would be, “Ja, das ist ein Schnitzelbank.” And then you’d sing “Schnitzelbank, Schnitzelbank, ja, ja, ja, ja…” And then there was some other chorus like “Oh, du schöne…” It went on and on and on. And there were ten of them or twelve of them – it was like an advent calendar of bizarre German things that you had to go through and say, “Ist das nicht ein gross whatever,” Then, “Ja, das ist ein gross…” It was always part of whatever Christmas party -- you had to sing your Schnitzelbank thing. Liz’s family sings “The Twelve Nights of Christmas” – we sang “Schnitzelbank”.

DS: That to me is very distinctive – it’s German! One positive thing about looking back, retrospective things, which these conversations would be, now maybe you’ve often thought about that, but what ends up happening is you look back and you see, you might say, “Oh, we never blah blah blah,” and then you start talking and say, “Hang on, we did blah blah blah.” (laughter)

NL: Well, somebody recently in my family found one of those posters. They were in Milwaukee. They went to the bar that published this poster and they brought it to the Christmas party, and we all sang the song once again. I thought of some other song…oh, the songs of the Mass that I remember, some of the music that I remember was the singing during the Stations of the Cross. I still remember some of the songs by heart.

DS: And the Stations of the Cross, was that an evening service? Or was this during Lent?

NL: During Lent.

DS: And was it in the morning?

NL: The only good thing about going to it was that we got out of school to do it. They’d take us out of class and we’d go over there, and we’d go through this…

DS: What time of day was that?

NL: The afternoons. We might have done it at night too. The priest would go round the church to each of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, and each one there were prayers to be said and some incredibly depressing dirge to be sung at each one.

DS: In Latin.

NL: In Latin. And the one I remember the most is “Tantum Ergo.” (sings) “Tantum ergo sacramentum, veneremur cernui.” It would go on and on and on, and there’d be the one, “By the cross her station keeping stood the mourning mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last…” So we’d sing those kind of songs.

DS: I remember “Tantum ergo.” (lilts melody) We had a different tune. My association with the Stations of the Cross is, it was an evening thing that happened, and we didn’t have any singing, but when I was an altar boy – I was very unsuccessful but I was an altar boy. I liked the soutane and surplice, the little costumes you had to wear, but what happened was, you had the candle, you had the flaming candle, did you have a lit candle?

NL: Yea, yea.

DS: So the thing is, my hair style as a child, there was a kind of a bush of hair at the front, so several times the guys beside me would suddenly go slapping my head, because I’d set my hair on fire several times. And singingwise, obviously we had hymns and things, but I loved Christmas carols – we had different melodies. These were the real…Christmas songs to me at best are meaningless, what I’d regard as Christmas songs that you’d hear in all the shops, and to me I’ve got to say, it’s all rubbish. But the few Christmas carols that we sang, I loved them: “See Amid The Winter’s Snow”, and all this stuff. Do you remember those with fondness?

NL: My mother loved Christmas carols and her favorite, which came later on -- it wasn’t a really old Christmas carol -- “The Little Drummer Boy”. If I never hear that song again, I’ll be quite happy.

DS: I wasn’t crazy about that one either.

NL: She loved that song, so we listened to it all the time. But there was sort of this seismic shift which came along with me finding Manfred Mann on the radio dial that came over from across the sea.

DS: What age were you? Were you about ten or something?

NL: Probably ten to twelve.

DS: I’d say that Manfred Mann song was from about ’64, ’65.

NL: Then suddenly we were all agitated, rhythmically speaking. We were all like, wow, this music makes me feel good, this music makes me move my body. We never really had any music like that before. As you know, everything changed back then, so we started listening to all different sorts of music, and then at that stage Irish music was, what I thought of as Irish music, was the furthest thing from my mind. It was in the same category as those Christmas carols I didn’t like. You listen to them once a year and then you never listen to them again, and you would never think of singing any of those things any other time than March 17th. You would never think of doing that, because that’s just not what they’re for. That’s what I thought Irish music was, and I didn’t want to go to Ireland because it must be a weird place if they’re all sitting around singing that stuff. (laughs)

DS: And at that age you wouldn’t have seen any real fiddlers or Irish music played live.

NL: I wouldn’t have, no, in those times. Then there came this time of the whole revival. And a lot of people I knew had been listening to rock and roll, rhythm and blues for a really long time, and suddenly we started listening to a lot of folk music too. Of course, Bob Dylan right from the beginning, and then the whole folk revival and the whole Newport Folk Festival, so we’d be aware of Peter, Paul and Mary and Pete Seeger and all those guys.

DS: Because some of that was in the hit parade too. Peter, Paul and Mary would have been in the hit parade, obviously Bob Dylan was.

NL: So they started breaking things. For me it wasn’t until, say, ’74, when I would have been twenty-two or so, when this good friend Chris Bohen, who lived a couple of houses away from Saint Mark’s and I’d gone to grade school and high school with, one of my best friends -- he had a brother Greg Bohen who you may know. And Greg was a couple of years older, very into 12

music, played a lot of music. He liked to tell his younger brother what to do and what he should read – “Read this book” – “See this movie” – he was very much of an intellectual for the time. He was actually married for a long time to Essie McKiernan, Eoin’s daughter, who is a good friend, and because he was married to Essie, he had been to Ireland a few times and really loved it, and he told me once I should go see this band at the O’Shaughnessy, “Do not miss this”, at O’Shaughnessy Auditorium. And I said, “Ok, what’s the band?” For some reason this wasn’t part of an Irish discussion or anything about Ireland, or I didn’t think it was anything about Ireland, and he said, “They’re called the Chieftains.” And I literally assumed it was some Native American thing, because Greg would have been into all manner of eclectic music or any kind of music, and I went, “Ok, if Greg says I’m going to go see it, he’s never wrong, I’m going to go see it.” And I did not know it was an Irish band.

DS: I was the same – I remember the first moment I heard of the Chieftains in Derry – this guy told me. And I thought that’s a really weird name, it sounds like Red Indians, as we would have thought of them then.

NL: So I went to O’Shaughnessy with Chris and it was absolutely shocking to me. I was completely taken with everything about it. And I was uncontrollably dancing all over the place and going wild. And afterwards I just remember saying to Greg, “What is that?” and to Essie, “Why didn’t I know about that? Why did I not know about that kind of music? Do they play that kind of music in Ireland?” “Yes, they do.” “Oh, my god, that is so great! That’s the best music I’ve ever heard.” And even though now I don’t particularly like listening to the Chieftains, at the time I thought this is the most astounding music I’ve ever heard, and that began my lifelong appreciation for the music and the culture.

DS: Particularly back then it was real traditional music played on real traditional instruments. You would obviously never have heard of the uilleann pipes or conceived of the uilleann pipes.

NL: No. By that stage I’d been into all these Nonesuch recordings of music from Bali and music from Afghanistan and just loving that. I remember probably before I even went to see the Chieftains a friend of mine produced the Irish Pipes of Finbar Furey record on Nonesuch, and I remember listening to that and thinking, “Oh, my god.” But for some reason, I don’t know why, that didn’t strike a chord with me – like, this is from Ireland, this is Irish. That to me was the

most mysterious of all those Nonesuch records, like, what is that sound? Why does it say it’s from Ireland? It doesn’t sound like it would be from Ireland. You remember that record?

DS: No, I never had that record, no.

NL: So that was probably the first time I heard it, but for whatever reason I was never really conscious, it didn’t strike me the way that it did when I went to the…probably because I went to see the Chieftains. I couldn’t understand that sound, like what that sound would come from on a record, but when you see that thing being played…

DS: That strikes a big chord with me because there have been various different musics that I have heard and it didn’t make any sense to me. An example is Pentangle. My friend Jim McCloskey played Pentangle to me about 1967 or ‘68 and said, “This is great.” I listened to it and I could hear this is very complex, but I don’t know what to think of this, I don’t understand what’s going on. And then I went and saw them, we went and saw them in UCD in Dublin, and of course I was blown away and fascinated and amazed to see what they were doing. Something in your brain sometimes doesn’t compute, and I think it’s because music isn’t just notes. It isn’t just sound. Something in your brain is now painting the proper picture. It’s a human being that’s happening and you still can’t say it consciously, it’s an unconscious thing, you can’t explain. And it happens over and over again with musicians too that mean nothing to me, and then I go and I see them, and that’s it, I get it now.

NL: I remember I had a lot of friends who play kind of out there jazz. They turned me on to John Coltrane, and I loved most of the early Coltrane recordings, and I listened to those a lot. Then they’d say, “You should listen to these.” Those were at the time his current recordings that were really out there, and I remember listening to them and thinking, “Ok, this sounds really interesting to me, but I cannot listen to this right now, but maybe some day when I figure this out I may be able to listen, but I’m not going to listen.” And now it came true – I listen to that kind of music all the time and I love it, but back then when I first heard, I was like, I don’t understand this. This is too crazy. But now it just doesn’t seem crazy at all to me. It seems like it makes perfect sense.

DS: Yea, it takes time.

[END NICK LETHERT PART 01—filename: A1005a_EML_mmtc]

[BEGIN NICK LETHERT PART 02—filename: A1005b_EML_mmtc] DS: So the Chieftains were the big thing as far as Irish music was concerned? Still and all, I’ve got to say that you said you had been listening to music of Bali and round the world and so on – you and your friends were listening to what we call “world music” now?

NL: Right.

DS: That’s sort of interesting – how…who was leading the way there?

NL: Drugs probably.

DS: Oh, I see. (laughter)

NL: And whoever those stalwart folkologists, musicologists, folk collectors were, going around the world – Patrick Sky and types of people like that. It was a thing in the early 70s, at least with us – we had a friend, Mikey Moore of the Moore family who lived next door to the Bohens – fourteen kids, classic Irish-American family, Catholic family. The father was a mail carrier, the father died of a heart attack, the kids were all in grade school and high school, and the mother said, “I’m moving to Australia because they’re going to give me a piece of land for free if I homestead it, so she moved most of the fourteen kids over to Australia and started a new life, and Mikey, who was our age, came back through Asia a few years later, after we graduated from high school. Here we see Mikey, who was this star athlete, a great guy – he came back looking like the biggest hippie you’ve ever seen, and he’d gone the land route from Australia, hitch-hiked through India, the Middle East, Afghanistan, all the places where you can’t even go any more, for two years, and when he got to us he had all these stories. He was like the Marco Polo of Saint Paul. Of course we all wanted to do that. I wouldn’t say we were all into it, but my group of friends were very much into anything that was trance-like in quality, Bali in particular – they had that monkey dance, we’d listen to that, we loved that stuff. It was funny – any American that did that, like Sandy Bow – you know Sandy Bow?

DS: Yea.

NL: I just pulled out an old CD, the other I have of Sandy Bow, and I started listening to that and I thought, “You know, I don’t really like this any more.” (laughter) It was just like kind of noodling around on the guitar for half an hour at a time, with effects, that I thought was so profound when I first listened to it.

DS: I suppose there are just phases.

NL: And so the pipes is probably the closest thing, the Irish pipes, that come into that zone, where you can easily trance on that stuff – wow, where did this come from?

DS: And the underlying drone. And then they’re just mysterious – the sounds that come out of them are very mysterious.

NL: And also the flute does that to me. A person who can play the Irish flute well is always astounding to me, the sound that comes out of it is like a wild animal or something. It’s not like any other sound I can think of.

DS: It’s funny the words that come into your head – a word I’ve never said – corporeal – what I mean is, it’s the most part of your body. I know that from being close to a lot of flute players. The fiddle is separate from you. The guitar is separate from you. The flute is not separate from you. It’s the one breath going from you to the flute. It’s the most organic, I suppose. It’s amazing.

You heard the Chieftains, so were you then looking around and saying, “Is there any music like that here?” How did the connection with the current musicians of the time happen?

NL: Well, immediately after that I was entirely energized by that, probably more so than I’ve ever been about anything. Suddenly that was all I wanted to do, to the point where I just stopped, completely stopped listening to every aspect of popular culture in America so there are whole periods of time when I don’t remember anything from any popular artist of the time because I had so immersed myself in Irish music. I don’t remember any Michael Jackson songs or hearing them on the radio, or I don’t know any of those things. I don’t know anything from the mid-70s to probably 1990 practically or the mid-80s at least that was popular at the time because I just went all the way in. I just wanted to know everything about it, about Irish music, and so I think it was probably Essie or Greg who told me, how can I hear more of this? And somebody turned me on to going – once again – down to Saint Mark’s, into the auditorium, which is a kind of a

magical place for me because so many things in my life have happened in the small gym at Saint Mark’s school. One of them was seeing you and James and Paddy for the first time. Your first gig here was in that same auditorium. And also when I was a young, first grade, I played the baby Jesus in a school play there, which was a pretty easy part – I was the smallest kid in the class – they put me in a crib or something, and looked at me – lovingly. Another thing, in that room we had our Mantoux test – did you have Mantoux tests in Ireland? Oral vaccines. Any time the whole school needed to be vaccinated they’d do it in that room. The Mantoux test was a little prick of a needle underneath your skin and supposedly prevented tuberculosis. So that’s where I had my Mantoux test. I took a good few tests there. And that’s where I met you. And that’s where Essie told me to go, or Greg, and go to the once-a-week Irish dance classes there. And that’s where I met some of the people that are still good friends of mine, including Sheila Jordan and Mary Hartnett, who taught me my threes and sevens. And the great thing about it, there was live music, because people were so into playing at the time that they’d show up for everything, even if it was just this dinky little Irish dance class. Laura MacKenzie was there, Jamie Gans was there, Sam Dillon was there, Mary MacEachron was in there – playing for us who were dancing. Mike Whalen was there, who I knew because he had gone to Saint Mark’s as well. And Jeannie Rogers, who just sadly died recently, was there. At the time she was Jeannie Merrill before she married Jim Rogers. It was a great group, we ended up being very social, and through them I learned all about MacCafferty’s bar on Grand, who would have musicians regularly that would stay for a month at a time and we’d go and listen to them and party afterwards at night. And so it became a thing. It suddenly became my entire social scene, an Irish scene.

But I think when the thing really changed was – I don’t want to miss this one – was one day I was in my apartment over on Ashland in Saint Paul and the mail man came. I heard the mailman outside the door, and he slipped a thin package under the door, and I opened the package. It was a gift from my friend Lance Hotch in Philadelphia, and it was the first Bothy Band record. And this was then I was still basically listening to the Chieftains or… And it wasn’t like now when there are five new Irish records every day. There weren’t that many Irish records out there, so I was trying to find things on the Chieftains label, whatever that was, Claddagh, and it all sounded vaguely classically classical. The Chieftains could sound like a chamber orchestra, and it was all kind of that sort of thing, and that was pretty good. But then when that record arrived, the Bothy Band’s first record, that really sent me into overdrive, because that was the marriage of all the

music I grew up with, like Manfred Mann basically meets the Chieftains, and it was like, oh my god! Then you look at the picture of these guys and, ok, these guys are all my age and they’re like hippies. They’re playing this stuff. And that’s when I thought, this is a real, living thing that’s happening right now with people that I can identify with. The Chieftains who I thought were all amazing characters and great guys, they seemed like another realm, they seemed much more like an older generation than I was. But these guys seemed like somebody who just lived down the block from me that was also going to parties.

DS: Did you get it immediately? Did you put them on and did they blow you away?

NL: I put it on and I never took it off. That was as exciting to me as hearing the Chieftains, because it sounded completely different than the Chieftains. This was unbelievable. This now makes everything seem possible, wow.

DS: Did the names of the individual Bothy Band people mean anything to you, did you know them at all?

NL: No. But they soon meant a lot to me. They soon became legendary and some of them became good friends, and some of them I followed. I held them in very high esteem. Even though they seemed like normal everyday people, I sort of promoted them to demigod status, as non-musicians often do with musicians. You have your own personal heroes and everything, but I remember the first time I went to Ireland and I ended up on Henrietta Street in a group of people who had just finished college, and so they were really in party mode. And there were all these parties that summer, 1979, and I’d go to all these parties. And I remember one of the first parties I went to, and this was still when I was expecting to hear Irish music around every corner in Ireland, and I went to this party in Little Mary Street, right round the corner from Slattery’s. It was like 1979, so it was very much the punk era and the era of UB40 and these kinds of bands were all the rage. I went into this party and all these people with long hair like me were all dancing, and it was all to punk music and music I’d never heard because, like I said, I wasn’t following along. And one of the people at the party was Donal Lunny. And I just remember looking at my friend Trish McAdam, who I was staying with, and I said, “Is that Donal Lunny dancing over there?” And she said, “Oh,yea, that’s Donal.” “You’re kidding me – that’s Donal Lunny?” And she goes, “Yea, I went to high school with him, it’s no big deal, right?” Like, he’s a guy! (laughter) It’s not like you think he is. He’s this guy who plays guitar, I went to high

school with, and he comes to the parties, you know. So that was a great thing, kind of straightened my head out a little bit.

I’m still trying to get my head straight about what that island really is, you know. Every time I go there – it’s like a shapeshifter of some kind. I have so many different ideas about what Ireland is, I’ve pretty much given up trying to figure it out and just enjoy it, whatever it is, whenever I’m there – it’s always different. It’s like any place, I guess.

DS: If you were going to describe what you saw in Ireland the last few times, most recently, that’s different, what would you say?

NL: Well, the last time – there’s so many situations you can go there with. And as a visitor you’re always confronted with the necessities of travel. You’re trying to work out how do I get from A to Z. So you’re always seeing it from a place of, how do I get there, how do I get here, or who do I go see, what do I do? So I don’t really know how I’d feel about it if I really lived there. I never have lived there for a long period of time. But I guess the latest thing that struck me when I was there was how people adapt to their environment, whatever their environment is, or whatever their climate is, is so interesting to me. For whatever reason I think the Irish people have adapted to a number of very unusual circumstances in a really brilliant way. I just think it’s a problematic place to live in so many ways – climatewise, communicationwise, travel -- all these things. And sizewise. The fact that there’s really a finite amount of space there, that for some reason always seems infinite when you’re there. It seems like if you look at the map before you go, “Oh, great, we’ll just hop over to there!” But for some reason it seems worlds away when you’re there. So it has this effect on me of being this surreal place where no measurement that you normally would use when I’m at home, no measurement of the distance between me and you, the distance between my town and your town, nothing makes that kind of sense over there that it does to me here. So as an American and as I see Americans over there, I really try to somehow get away from the logic you learn from growing up in a particular way – whenever I go any place really. This is a weird concept but I grew up in Saint Paul, I grew up in a grid, on a flat grid, and the sky is a certain distance from me. And so you get used to all these particulars about it. Then if you try to go some place else, it’s amazing how engrained all those distances and relationships are in your head to your surroundings. And if you try to apply those to a place that’s markedly different than yours, you’re going to be in for some surprises, and not all of them

are going to be pleasant. Ok, in Ireland you’re in the sky. The sky is not above you like it is in Minnesota. The sky is not miles above you. You’re in the sky and there’s no grid anywhere to be seen. It does something to your brain to think right around the corner I can get over there. It’s not only a distance thing where you think that -- your beliefs about certain things can go… Ok, I’m thinking this way right now – if I just turn right, that will happen. In Ireland if you just turn right, anything could happen. If you turn left, anything could happen. That’s just generalized and I’m making it up as I go along.

DS: No, it’s very interesting and it’s something obviously I’ve never heard from anybody else at all. (laughter) And it’s brilliant. But if I wanted just to freely associate it, what you’re saying, I actually think the instinctive thing that comes into my head is that there is a density, the first thing is there’s a density in Ireland. There’s a density of everything. It’s been a densely – and it’s not actually jammed full of people – but it has been densely lived in by people for a long time and by the same people. I was doing my class here last night about Early Ireland, in this room, teaching. And I was trying to set the scene because it was the first class, and I was talking about Britain. I talked about Europe and the Celts and all this stuff, and then I got to Britain. Britain, say at the beginning of Irish history, the fourth, fifth century, and all the mixture of people that you had in Britain. You had the British who became the Welsh, the natives in what we call England and Wales now. You had the Roman settlements. And then to the north up in Scotland you had the Pictish people, kingdoms, and you also had an Irish kingdom, which was the origin of the Scottish kingdom, which had been invaded from Ireland. And then you had the German tribes coming in, the Angles, the Jutes and Saxons. There’s this whole immense mixture of people in what we call Britain – not to mention later on the Vikings and the Normans. And then I started talking about colonialism and all this stuff. At that same time, Ireland was pretty cohesive. There’s traces, maybe there’s been other mixtures of people, population groups, but really Ireland was all Irish-speaking. It was just one place, one people, broken into all these different kingdoms. And then in spite of the colonization that we did get, the real Irish always outnumbered the rest of them. So that is what I was saying. Colonialism is a numbers game. What happened in America really was, as a terrible example of the numbers game, which is that there were millions of people here, but the vast majority of them died off because of disease when the white people came, and then some of them were killed off. So in a sense you had an emptying out. North America was emptied out. It wasn’t empty – it was emptied out. And then

the white people came – who are ourselves – we’re the colonists – but in relationship to what you were just saying this is like a gut feeling thing. There’s a kind of an emptiness here. There’s actually an emptiness. It’s vacant. And what you’re describing in your poetic way and instinctive way, that’s how it strikes me. And you go to Ireland, and it isn’t empty, this is dense.

But there’s another interesting thing that, and this is maybe taking up too much space with my ideas. But there’s another thing that I talk about, again in my lessons. And that is the idea of human space that human beings try and impose on the world, and the world is really a veneer over reality. It’s not reality – it’s a veneer over reality. And that reality is the Otherworld, and all the Otherworld forces, which are real. You could call them gravity and protons – people used to call them gods and goddesses. We put our veneer over it and part of that is a framework, like a grid – exactly what you’re talking about. So we put a grid in our farms…if you see human habitation from above, you see fields and you see roads and you see lines. If you go beyond the human habitation – and that’s just a veneer of course – walls of fields are just a veneer – they don’t really separate anything, they’re just a veneer stuck on top of the land. You go beyond it, that disappears. So there’s lots of myths, lots of legends, and lots of whatever, about this business, and the grid is a good way of describing it. We put a grid on the year too, the calendar. It’s just a grid imposed. But Ireland in a sense it’s still a human-filled world, but in a sense the romantic mystical idea is true. The Irish are closer to the Otherworld and the reality of the Otherworld and so on. I think there’s something there anyhow.

NL: One of my favorite symbols of that is that to me almost every time – I’m lucky enough to go there a lot now – almost every time I’ve flown there and almost every time I’ve left there on a plane, you’re coming in and it’s just this dense cloud, almost always, and as you’re coming down it becomes more of a light mist, but still you can’t see anything. And then, bam, it’s right there, it’s just green, it’s this thing, you feel like you’ve found Atlantis. And it’s the same way when you leave. It’s like you’re leaving, you’ve been there for a while, normal, everything is beautiful, green, and then the plane takes odd and you’ve seen everything, and all of a sudden you get above the clouds and it’s gone. And it seems like, it just seems like you’re dropping in on some… it’s not like any other country I’ve ever gone into. It just seems like you’re suddenly just dropping into a different dimension. The clouds open up and you get to see it. And then you get to land there. And then everything gets crazy after that. The first sight of it and the last sight of it is always really striking to me. Why does this place even exist? I’m always thinking really 21

bizarre thoughts, like, how does it even happen that…and it’s almost the perfect size for certain things to happen. It’s like, who thought this up? It’s too big to be an insignificant country. And it’s too small to make it an easy country to be in because there’s so many people and so little land really. But it’s big enough so there’s a rail system and bus systems and postage and governments and all these things, but there’s something about the size of it that always struck me. It’s half the size of Minnesota, if you’re talking a perimeter. But inside the perimeter it’s like this infinite stuff. It’s like a laboratory of surreal activity (laughter) that is physically confined by its borders and by typography and all that. But it’s not confined by anything else. It’s become like a state of mind, like so many places.

DS: One of my images is Doctor Who’s phone box. You know Doctor Who’s phone box, don’t you? It looks like a phone box and then you go inside and it’s this huge big thing. I actually thing of that about Irish music – that’s usually where I’m using the analogy, where you see this thing and you go in, but once you’re inside you realize it’s not this little thing – it’s this huge thing. (laughter)

So all that is really fascinating. In terms of the history in the Twin Cities, you had been introduced to O’Gara’s and the céilí scene and so on. I’m just thinking of a couple of firsts. Obviously you’ve got so much background in so many areas that we could talk about. I just thought of a couple of firsts. We were talking about posters – you used to make posters for all these events. Do you remember anything about the first few posters you might have done or what that was like?

NL: Well, one of the things that went hand in hand with discovering the Chieftains and at the same time meeting Eoin McKiernan, Essie’s dad, after that I actually started working in the Irish American Cultural Institute, just as an assistant for Eoin and was really struck by him, a really interesting man. I hadn’t been around too many academics in my life, so he was just a very interesting guy. It was Eoin’s guiding, it was what drove him was, what got him up in the morning, was to wean Americans of this idea of their culture, Irish Americans, of this idea of Ireland being just the green and the leprechauns and these weird songs and the drinking – everything that we did to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day was not something he wanted to deal with. So he was amazingly trying to… he started by taking phone books from every major Irish American city and writing down or typing – I don’t know how he did it – the names and

addresses of everybody with an Irish name. And he created material which he would send them and say, “Did you know that these great poets were Irish? Did you know these great writers were Irish? These great musicians and artists?” He was on a mission to convince people that so much amazing culture had come from this island and that it’s nothing like you think it is, and we should really be celebrating that and supporting that, and he raised a lot of money for Irish writers in particular and did a lot of amazing work. But part of that whole thing was that we of course – and I come from a generation of people that grew up in the 60s who loved causes – and so our cause in those days was to further the interests of the Irish culture in America and to show people that there’s more to it that they think there is. I was pretty messianical about that at the time.

I’ve always been an artist and drew a lot of intricate, weird drawings. Shortly after hearing the Chieftains I started seeing the Celtic knotwork. So then I clearly thought this is exactly where I’m getting all these weird drawings – it all makes sense to me now. So I got involved with that for a long time, for a year or two. That became sort of the basis for those posters I was making. I really wanted to show people Celtic knotwork. It really wasn’t very well known at the time. Now you see it everywhere. I was getting manuals out of Essie’s bookstore, how to make this stuff, and I was painstakingly trying to recreate knotwork along the edges of these posters. I would stay up all night – this was pre-computer – and I’d have my pens and pencils out, and I’d be up basically like a monk, without any training, trying to make it up. So that’s all those first posters. That was what drove me to make such intricate posters because I really wanted to make them look somewhat like old Irish art. That urge left fairly quickly when I realized that there’s nothing in me that’s monklike or able to stick to any discipline whatsoever, or to follow any kind of script – it’s all very mathematical and I was by this stage untrainable in that regard – I was pretty much all over the place. I kind of gave up on that. But I still appreciate people that can do Irish knotwork and I love looking at it – I just don’t do it any more. But that’s what I was trying to do in those early posters. And I was also trying to help with publicizing those events because they were all my friends now, and they were all playing what I thought was great music and I wanted other people to hear it. I’ve always been kind of a promoter in terms of trying to get people out to go see things that I thought they’d like. I did that for years. I remember I bought 25 tickets to see the Mahavishnu Orchestra at the Guthrie Hall, at the Guthrie Theater, and then offered them to my friends and said, “If you don’t want to buy them, I’ll pay for them,” so everybody took me up

on that, most of them paid me for it, most of them hated the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but that’s the kind of thing I would do, because I thought, “This is the greatest, John McLaughlin is the greatest guitar player of all time – you’ve got to see this band.” I’d have a whole two rows of people watching this, maybe 20% of whom would think this is fantastic, and the others were going, “What is wrong with you? (laughter) Why did you think I’d want to come to this?”

But I was the same way about Irish music. I wanted everybody to hear it. I got a better percentage with Irish music than I did with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. But still there were people who’d say, “How can you listen to that?”

DS: But your interest in design obviously continued since you’ve continued designing posters and doing art and doing websites.

NL: But I’m a lot lazier now that I have a computer.

DS: You still put in a lot of time.

NL: All the time, yea. (laughs) So that’s how the posters started.

DS: I told you that Sam mentioned it – you know, we had the talk with Sam and he mentioned that.

NL: The other thing was the thing at the Landmark Center. Some of the first posters I did were for the Landmark Center event that was just starting.

DS: The Saint Patrick’s Day thing?

NL: That for me at the time was a really important event because it was right there in the middle of the whole festivities. Before that thing started it was just chaos in the streets there, and I was part of the chaos because it was the only day that I would drink during the day. After high school for instance we would just…it was a thing to get up in the morning and have beer for breakfast and just get stupid, because it was Saint Patrick’s Day and this is when you can do this – you can do whatever you want. So it was just complete bacchanalia for the whole thing, and then suddenly I got very fastidious about the culture, and we’re going to show people what the music is really like. So here we were setting up camp in the middle of this circus, basically it was like a revival tent – we’re going to show you the true culture here.

DS: Who started the Landmark event?

NL: I think it was the IMDA – the Irish Music and Dance Association.

DS: So that must have been about late 70s, early 80s.

NL: It would have been Erin Hart and Jenny Bach, and people. And then I joined Mooncoin Céilí Dancers. I was always interested in dancing, and I always was a wild dancer and enjoyed dancing, and people usually enjoyed watching me dance or dancing with me, so I was really into Irish dance. I did that for a good few years and that was fun.

DS: Yea, my first memories of you are you whirling around with the long hair.

NL: That was always fun.

DS: I’m thinking of the list of firsts now. Another first would be this unending series of parties. It’s a huge contribution to our culture. Is there such a thing as a start, yea?

NL: Well, first of all I’d always loved parties. I always loved giving parties. And Liz, my wife, who I didn’t meet till 1980, meanwhile was also living in the same kind of culture in Minneapolis, and her family, the Welch family, were very seriously into parties and always had parties. And so when the two of us met, it just meant for more parties. Anyway, I was living with my girlfriend at the time in an apartment in Saint Paul at the time all this was happening when I was getting into Irish music, a woman named Denise, and we had an extra bedroom, and at the same time I was open to anything of an Irish nature, and so Mary MacEachron, who was always a ringleader for many of these activities, told me about this group called Comhaltas, and we dutifully started a Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann branch in Minnesota, in Minneapolis or Saint Paul or wherever it was. I didn’t know anything about Comhaltas and thought, “This is great, sure, I’ll do that.” Then once a year Comhaltas would send around a group of varied ages – some established musicians and some young up-and-coming talents, and they would have a concert. And that sounds great. They said, “They don’t stay in hotels, we need hosts.” So I’m always into hosting anybody, Irish or not, so I go, “Yea, we’ve got an extra bedroom, that’s fine – or two bedrooms.” We would have bedrooms and we would have parties. We should have a session and a party. And so we’d have a party, and it was always really fun.

One of the things that happened that first time was – it was a weird mixture in those times because you had these groups of Irish, a lot of people from Ireland who had started these fairly conservative organizations, like the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and groups that basically were

for some sort of support of immigrants who came in who were looked down upon by the rest of the population, so they formed these groups and they were all fairly Catholic and conservative. And then, because of this whole revival and because of all these young people in Ireland playing this music, suddenly there’s an influx of a totally different sort of people with different ideas, who were from the same communities, but it was the hippy generation and suddenly was thrown into the mix, and they had kind of a hard time dealing with it. There was not only the mixture of people who were very interested in Irish politics and Northern Irish politics in particular, and then there were people who were very much interested in the Catholic Church, and then there were other people like me and my friends who were just interested in the culture. So one of the things that happened was Mary, in her wisdom, said, “Ok, Kieran Hanrahan can stay with you and this woman Mary who is a dancer can stay with you.” All right, cool – didn’t think a thing about it. Well, they were both pretty young. Kieran Hanrahan was a great banjo player, later played with Stockton’s Wing, and now he has a very popular show for years on Irish radio, a music show. I can’t remember what happened to Mary – I think she was a dancer or singer? But we were just completely out of bounds in the eyes of most of these people hosting, and I didn’t realize that Comhaltas itself was a very conservative organization. I didn’t know anything about it. So we took a lot of flak for hosting a young couple…

DS: And they weren’t really a couple?

NL: They weren’t a couple at all – in fact they didn’t like each other at all – they barely even spoke to each other. (laughs) Not to mention touching or looking at each other. They wanted nothing to do with each other.

DS: You caused scandal.

NL: We caused great scandal. It was kind of an ongoing thing – the old-timers versus the young folks. It was an interesting dynamic, because there would be arguments in bars all the time. There might be people both on the same side of, say, running guns to Northern Ireland, but some of them would be very conservative, American businessmen, very religious Catholics, very conservative politics Americanwise, who would be supporting Irish Northern Aid. And there’d be other people who would be socialists or identify themselves as communists even who also wanted to do the same thing and find themselves on the same side but arguing about what was going to happen once their campaigns were a success. “It’s not going to be a socialist country,

I’ll tell you that.” So there were all these amazing little debates – maybe I hang out in the wrong places, but I don’t see too much of that kind of thing any more around Ireland.

DS: But it’s common where there are political movements – freedom movements or whatever it is.

NL: They’d play the Irish national anthem, and everybody in the bar would stand up. It was an amazing time for that, and I can’t speak too much about politics, because I usually shy away from them, but there was much more political activity. Have you spoken to Mike (Whalen) because I’m sure that Mike…

DS: We haven’t done Mike yet, no.

NL: Mike’s an amazing character because he’s very much of a leftist, very radical, but he’s also very cultural – a great dancer and very much into the dancing and has called dances for years and years and years. And that mixture he found to be very unusual because a lot of people that had his politics, in Irish politics, wouldn’t at all have been into the culture and would come to conferences here and go, “What’s with this music stuff? And dancing? Why are you having dances? Why aren’t we talking about politics all the time?” So it was kind of an interesting breeding ground of all types of activities that went on.

DS: Yea, it’s very apolitical now – obviously our music scene is completely apolitical. And one thing that fascinates me is friends – so I can’t name any names – there’s no need to name names – but what’s interesting to me is – myself and Lisa, for example, would be obsessed with politics in America. How could you not be? And I have friends, musician friends, who never have mentioned politics to me. I just leave that there. I’ve nothing to say about that. It’s just fascinating – astounding. But it was a different era. So your first parties would have been when the Comhaltas people were visiting?

NL: There was always something really magical about those things, beyond all the inter-political things that were going on, but the greatest thing of all was that the tour usually included Joe Burke, who’s just one of the most amazing and electrifying characters, and another person that you really have to see play to understand. You can listen to his music and go, ok, that’s brilliant, but when you see Joe Burke sit down with the accordion and light up a room, just with his

presence, even before he has the accordion, there’s nothing like that. It’s just like, what’s going on here? This guy is turning this room upside down on this box.

DS: He’s a very charismatic person. And did you see him hanging out and telling stories, because he’s an amazingly entertaining person?

NL: At the time there was a bar down closer to Dale on Grand called O’Connell’s, which is now the Grand Tavern, which was a great place. They had a back room, and that’s where a lot of those sessions would be when there’d be a big room full of these young kids and these old-timers like Joe Burke. It became this thing where if the music was playing we couldn’t leave. Then we’d go upstairs to MacCafferty’s where the musicians would stay that were playing there. It started going beyond the whole idea of the band, like the Bothy Band and stuff. That was really great. But then you went into this thing of these musicians who were playing in sessions. And that’s when it really got infectious to me, where this is even better than the bands. This is like wow – three or five or six unbelievable players playing together unscripted. We literally could not leave if they were playing music. And then they’d stop and we’d start to leave, and then they’d play again – we’d be up all night because it was just so infectious. It was what I’d imagine being in a jazz club in New York in the 60s or something like that.

DS: There was some special expression they had for house parties? Where they would all gather, come to a house – they would have the drink and whatever else and they would all stay up all night.

[END NICK LETHERT PART 02—filename: A1005b_EML_mmtc]

[BEGIN LETHERT PART 03—filename: A1005c_EML_mmtc] DS: Nick was talking about the parties and Comhaltas and the scene in O’Connell’s, which I don’t remember from the time Nick was talking about, but a bit later we had sessions in O’Connell’s, and there were a lot of gigs there. So there are a couple of things, tags, guideposts along the way, and another one is the Plough and the Stars and your first involvement with them and what do you have to say about that?

NL: Some of the folks like Laura and Jamie who were at the Irish dance classes had a band and that had been going for a while, a year before I kind of joined up or met everybody, and they were playing with the Dayhills – Tom and Barb Dahill – who were just amazing characters to me, and they had gone to Martin McHugh – and Martin McHugh is worthy of a 12-part miniseries, the importance he had to the whole thing – here’s this living link to the old music, the old people, the old country. Here was this guy who at the time seemed back in those days in the conceit of the young that he was the oldest man on earth. Now all of us are older than him and he still looks like he did then – he’s like a fount of youth and of great times – an incredibly good- natured and humorous man with endless music. He did so much for the community – what he gave in so many ways. Anyway, Martin was in the band, of course they put him in the band. It was great for him because I think he’d kind of become, as far as I know, the person who would be hired for Saint Patrick’s Day, and he’d play solo to a bunch of people who’d want to hear “Danny Boy.” Then Tom and Barb and everybody else got him playing the tunes, so they had this venue called the Snelling Commercial Club, where they had céilís and people said, “You should go to a céilí.” I said, “What’s that?” “That’s an Irish dance.” And that’s a word it took me about a year to learn how to spell because I had to make all these posters for céilís. And I kept going, “How do you spell céilí again?” It was the same when Dáithí first came to town -- I had to call Mary MacEachron about eight times to say, “What’s that name? What’s that guy’s name? Sproule, what’s his name? How do you spell that, and how many accents are there in that name?”

There were céilís at the Snelling Commercial Club, which was very much of a long room rather than a square room. It had a very small entrance, and it was on Snelling by University, and you’d walk in and it just went on forever, and it was very narrow, so it was kind of hard to have a céilí dance there. It was good for the Haymaker’s Jig but not much else. One of my favorite memories of the place is the fact that all the old Irish guys, all the old Irish Northern Aid guys, the really political guys, would be there, drinking whiskey – people would bring their own liquor and stuff. I don’t know what the nature of this place was.

DS: Yes, I was going to ask you, what is a commercial club?

NL: Those guys would all be out talking politics and drinking whiskeys in the middle of the dance floor, which we considered to be the dance floor – they didn’t consider it to be a dance

floor – and the band would be playing, and we’d be trying to learn these dances, learn and dance these dances that we were just learning and just loved to do, like the Haymaker’s Jig, the Siege of Ennis, loved it, and you’d always be bumping up against one of these guys who were always kind of gruff, older men going, “Get out of my way! What’s this dancing all about? Can’t you sit still?” For some reason I just loved those guys, and I kind of dreamed about the day when I could do that. I would just stand in somebody’s way. (laughs) And tell them to get out of my way! Damn folk dancers! That was the Snelling Commercial Club, and we eventually expanded to bigger and better venues like the Odd Fellows Hall, a couple of different Odd Fellows Halls, where I had one of my first meetings with Liz, who I fell in love with. So I have a lot of great memories from those céilís. But then what were we talking about?

DS: The Plough and the Stars and all that stuff. I was naming a few firsts. I was lining up a few firsts. And we talked about the posters. Then I was asking you about, you are a legendary MC for concerts here, and how did that start?

NL: It was a great era for a number of different institutions, and one of those institutions was the Coffeehouse Extempore over on the West Bank where many of the great folk musicians of the Twin Cities got their start. It was open, I think, every night or most of the nights, and you could go up there and hear some of the greatest music by all these guys – Pop Wagner, Dakota Dave Hull, and Sean Blackburn and all these folk musicians, and the woman at the time who was running the place, towards the end of its career was Deb Martin, and then Deb ended up kind of starting the Cedar Cultural Center after that. Deb had a distinct fondness for Irish and Scottish music. She was always promoting that. And she had a lot of energy for organizing, she loved to organize things. And she loved to delegate authority – she was very good at it. She also started the Minneapolis Folk Festival – I don’t know if she started it, but she was running the Minneapolis Folk Festival, which I don’t think lasted very long, but a few years. And I volunteered to help do things too, just schlepping stuff around and whatever. And Deb in her great way of delegating authority said, “Nick, you’re going to MC” “What do you mean?” “Well, you’re going to introduce all the bands.” So I said, “I’ve never done that.” She said, “That doesn’t matter – that’s what you’re going to do.” Ok. I took the job very seriously, and I studied up on the groups, and I did all the things to learn about who was playing. One of the first bands I introduced was De Dannan, who were coming and who I was also very fond of, one of the seminal Irish bands of the 70s. So I got up on stage and made what I considered to be a very 30

serious introduction, very researched, and people just were laughing hysterically. (laughter) I couldn’t understand why. And then I went up again at halftime and said something else -- same thing. People thought it was hilarious. Afterwards people were just going, “Oh, my god, that was so hilarious – you’ve got to do that more often.” And I went, “What? What did I do?” That’s when I started to discover this whole thing about timing – I had good timing – that’s the whole thing. And also stage presence, a pretty much dry take on things. It evolved into a kind of surreal show.

The great thing about doing something like that is if you establish a persona like that, which I didn’t even know I was doing, you can just rely on that persona. You can just say whatever you want and people will think it’s funny. They’ve already come to the conclusion that you’re funny – you don’t have to be funny. You can just say whatever you want, and if you say it in the right way people will think it’s funny because they come there expecting to laugh at whatever you say. So they do, because they’re not going to let themselves down – you might let them down, but they’re going to carry out their part of the bargain by laughing. Unless you do something completely outrageous, they’re going to think it’s extremely funny.

So as the years went on, it just got more and more absurd, and because Deb really only brought in Irish and Scottish people to the Cedar, the only bands I ever introduced were Irish bands, because that was the music I loved anyway. There was kind of a point there and I don’t know if you can say pre-Riverdance, post-Riverdance, but there was a period of time when Irish musicians had to stay with other people, and maybe it was something to do with what age they were at the time. There was a time in your life when you kind of liked staying with other people, and then there’s a point in your life when you say, “I want to have my own room somewhere.” I don’t know if it was that or if Irish bands started getting respect and audiences, and I don’t know if that had anything to do with Riverdance or not, but to me I noticed a distinct change in this whole community when Riverdance happened, because suddenly almost overnight a lot more people were interested in Irish dancing and Irish music because of that.

DS: What year did Riverdance happen? – I can’t remember.

NL: But the point is, we used to put up a lot of people, because I would end up meeting them in the first place because I was introducing them, and then people knew that I would like to have guests, and people knew I liked to have parties, so it was all kind of a big package. “Yes, I’ll

introduce you and I’ll have a party and I’ll put you up.” That was a fun thing to do for years. It was also a great way for our kids to get into the Cedar for free. It was kind of like our social life for years when our kids were little. We’d go see all the bands at the Cedar because we’d get in for free. And then when Bill (Kubeczko) took over, he continued his love for Irish music and also English music, and then he also expanded it further, Bill Kubeczko did, and started having me introduce other bands. Then I got into introducing the Nordic Roots Festival, which was way more intensive – a week’s worth of bands in a few nights, so that became like a stand-up routine, and I actually got really good at it in those periods. But it was like a weird little other person that I was – basically when I wasn’t doing it I didn’t think of it at all – I didn’t rehearse it, I didn’t write material. It was just something that somebody told me I had to do once, and I started doing it and I got good at it. But then that’s all it was. “This is fun – yes, I’ll do that.” It turned out…the thing that drove it is I actually liked being on stage for whatever reason – I don’t know what that is. I like having a microphone in my hand, even -- I almost always will run away from anyone with a microphone in their hand. But I like to have one and I’m really comfortable with it, and I’m sure you and most musicians would agree that there’s a special thing that happens when you’re on stage with a bunch of people looking at you, and adoring you.

DS: Well that’s not the way I perceive it. (laughs)

NL: I perceive people doing that to you. What is interesting is you really can feel the interest, people are interested, and also I never did get past the thing that lots of musicians have to get past – what if there’s no one in the room or what if there’s three people in the room because if there’s only three people in the room my act would just die. I could not get past it. But I see a lot of musicians that I’m amazed by who can actually do the exact same brilliant performance whether there’s a thousand people in the room or five people in the room – which I’m always really impressed with, because to me you really feed off the energy in the crowd, and so if the crowd is really loving it, then it just gets better.

DS: Well, obviously there’s that huge element of improvisation in what you do, and again it’s very interesting to hear what you have to say about it because almost immediately I thought of Jack Benny. Of course a lot of people would be too young to know Jack Benny. But if you think of Jack Benny and John Cleese, for example, now they both would have probably had brilliant scripts – John Cleese himself is a brilliant scriptwriter, but John Cleese, there’s something about

his demeanor and the way he looks, he’s already funny. And you’re saying people expect you to be funny, but part of it is just something about the way you look and the way you sound and how you deliver things, your timing. And Jack Benny was one of those people, a lot of the time wasn’t doing anything at all – he’d just turn round and look at the audience, and people would start laughing – it was funny – who knows why?

NL: If you wrote down what he said and showed it to somebody and they read it, they would not think it was funny at all. It was just his moves and the whole thing is really – and I guess this is off topic – the whole thing is pauses, it’s all about timing. If you just rattle it off… And that’s why any time I wrote a script, the few times I got it together, like a week ahead of time, a day ahead of time, it would almost always fail because I would just read it off, or I’d memorize it or I’d try to read it, it would almost always fail. But if I was just making it up as I went along, then it would be great. But the problem with that is, for me then there’s all this tension before the thing. The majority of the times I’ve absolutely no material – not the majority – I have written material almost all the time, kind of ideas floating around in my head. But sometimes I would have absolutely nothing, and I’d just have to go up there and by making certain moves attract some sort of laughter, which would make me then respond by saying something somewhat outrageous that people would laugh at. But for some reason just the thought of “Will that work?”, you can’t really depend on it. Ok, I’m going to go up there like an idiot. But ultimately the easy part for me is that it’s not as if I was trying to make a career out of it, not like I ever made any money out of it other than getting in free, or trying to make any money out of it. I was just doing it for fun, which made it a lot easier than… I think a lot of comics are serially mean people. (laughs) They’re all angry and pissed off and I can be like that too – because you’re just constantly thinking, “OK, I’ve got to do something funny.” And I think that if you had to do that every night or on tour, being paid loads of money to do it, then that would be incredibly stressful.

DS: It’s a lot of pressure, that’s what I think, particularly if you’re tired. I think it would be really, really hard to be spontaneous and feed off that thing when you’re not fresh. I’d say it is really very difficult.

NL: I’ve thought that about musicians too and marvel that there’s lots of gigs that I want to go to as a listener, when I just go, you know what, I do not feel like going out. I’m just going to lie

here and do nothing. I’d love to see that show, but I’m not going to do it. And then I think about the musician: “I wonder if they ever think like that.”

DS: Obviously if you’re there, you have to get up and do it. I have a rhythm where coming up to the gig, an hour before or whatever, I lose energy. My energy kind of dips. I don’t think about it, I don’t worry about it, but it’s just a fact. And then you get up and you just have to do it. For me it’s not to do with entertaining or any of that stuff, it’s got to do with, say we got together, we had our interview, and I was tired, but now I’m with Nick, I’m interacting with a human being, therefore that just brings up your energy immediately.

Now, wait there till we see – in our previous conversations we talked about – this is to rewind again – maybe this is how it came up before – I’m interested in what people talk about and also what they don’t talk about, or what is not talked about. In fact I mentioned people who never talk about politics – it just never comes up. So in some of the interviews so far -- and we’re probably approaching half way through the interviews with people -- I’m very aware of the fact that this is the era of the Vietnam War, and people haven’t even mentioned it. And it must have been a very big thing. In your case I don’t know if this really connects with the Vietnam War -- you went to, as an Irish person this slightly incomprehensible thing, the school you went to was sort of a military academy.

NL: It was a military academy.

DS: But it wasn’t attached to the military? It was run by nuns?

NL: No. Here’s what it was. It was run by the Catholic Church basically. It was Catholic priests there. There were no girls, no nuns. Before I went, it was Saint Thomas Military Academy, which they changed to Saint Thomas Academy, but it was on the grounds of Saint Thomas College for years, until the year before I went there they moved to their present location in Mendota, and the weird thing was, for me it was very strange because when I think back on it, here we are with this huge population of Catholic kids in Saint Paul. In Saint Mark’s, for instance, just my eighth grade class, a hundred and eighty-three kids, boys and girls. Now there’s probably eighteen in the eighth grade class at Saint Mark’s, and there were huge families. None of us to my knowledge, other than maybe their fathers, were in the war and talked about it, probably didn’t talk about it. There was nothing about the military growing up, in grade school, anybody I knew. Suddenly you get to high school, and you have to make a decision, as a

Catholic almost universally you’re going to go to a Catholic high school, your parents are going to say, “Which Catholic high school are you going to?” or they’re going to tell you which Catholic high school you’re going to go to, and the choice was, for people in my area, either Saint Thomas or Cretin, both of which were Catholic military high schools. And what they had was a thing called ROTC, Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, which was part of the US military, and they would send actual professional military people, each of the schools had five or six or seven, maybe ten at the most, military personnel who worked in the school but were being paid by the government. The whole idea was to train young men to be officers. They thought the hook was for us, if you go through this training and then you enlist, you will become an officer, you will become a lieutenant, you won’t have to go through the whole private/corporal/sergeant. You will be an elite, because you’ve gone through this training. So maybe in a different era that was appealing to somebody, and to a lot of people maybe. But in our era, our era was defined by the Vietnam War, and so that was a different thing, a different kettle of fish because the Vietnam War was the defining era of my life, the defining event of my life, and I would never say this to a Vietnam veteran, and I don’t mean any disrespect by it, but everyone who went through that era is a Vietnam veteran in the sense that they have been affected by the Vietnam War in an incredibly deep way to the effect that these are still the divisions that are going on to this very minute in our society, the divisions that were fomented in the Vietnam War. And it was an incredibly intense time for me and for everybody I knew – protest, fear, you name it.

Right in kind of the beginnings, and I arrived at high school in 1966, which was just the beginnings of the unrest about the Vietnam War – before this time it was more kind of “This is a good fight, this is a good thing, this is our chance to be like our father in World War Two”, not that my father…my father was too old to have been in World War Two, and he was too young for World War One, so I had no military influence in my life whatsoever. And suddenly you’re fourteen years old and you’re having the last great summer of grade school, and suddenly you’re brought into a barber’s shop where all of your hair’s gone. It’s just like you’ve enlisted in the army, you’re going in being fitted for this incredibly uncomfortable uniform. You’re given shoes and tie and a brass buckle, all of which you have to shine every night, or you get demerits. Suddenly you’re thrust into this alien military environment. What did I do to deserve this? What just happened to me? I went from my relatively carefree days at Saint Mark’s school where the only thing bad was nuns beating us up to suddenly I’m in with all these crazed priests and crazed

lay teachers who are punching people for the slightest infraction, like maybe throwing a gum wrapper from far away into a waste basket or maybe speaking one word to a friend in a class. A priest or a lay teacher could come down and punch you in the face and often did or whack their book into your face. Fortunately the military, because they were government employees, couldn’t do that. They were probably the most brutal of the people there, but they were not allowed to touch us, which was a good thing. But I remember one of our teachers, Sergeant- Major Bray, had just left Panama, he’d been stationed in Panama where he’d had to leave because he was wanted for murder, but he remained in the US military. There were just all these wild guys. Some of them were fresh from the battlefield in Vietnam who were basically shell- shocked, and they sent them there for recuperation to all these young kids, some of whom were very wealthy and would never see Vietnam because of it. It was just an incredible environment of basic fear I felt for four years, like, how am I going to hide my long hair, which would be like very short hair right now. How am I going to get by without shining my shoes? There were so many things going on that had nothing to do with academics, and definitely there was nothing there that dealt with anything cultural. You’d have art class for an hour a week, music class for an hour a week, all the rest was like…

DS: For four years you were wearing this uniform?

NL: Wearing a uniform every day.

DS: And your hair was cut to military length?

NL: And then you’d have inspections every week. And they would check your hair, they’d check the brass on your collar, shine properly your buckle, shine properly your shoes, spit shine, and then they would give you demerits for all those things if they were out of line. Then if you had accrued a certain number of demerits in a week, you would then have to work them off by marching around the square after school with a gun, with a rifle, it was what they call hour lines. How many demerits you had, that’s how many hours you’d have to march in the hour line. All of this was just, as you can imagine, repugnant to us, like, how did we end up here? Why did this happen to us? Certainly there are Catholic schools that don’t have military in them. Why are there two of them in Saint Paul and why are those the only schools we can go to?

Meanwhile my friends at Cretin High School had it even worse because they had the Christian Brothers – we had Catholic priests. Christian Brothers are trained, as you know, in like medieval

torture methods that they’ve handed down over the centuries and so those people were in bad shape because they were really getting tortured.

Then, of course, this was the era of a lot of pot and LSD, and there was a lot of that, a lot more of that going on at Cretin High School, and because of its proximity to the city, it’s in the city – we were kind of out in the suburbs, and so we escaped some of that thankfully because I probably wouldn’t have survived it.

DS: It sounds like being sent to prison.

NL: It was. In fact I was just visiting a friend in New York, and he wrote a book about it, or he was being interviewed about it – he’s kind of a famous artist now. He says the only thing I can describe it as is a prison camp that you were allowed to leave at night. It was like that. I’m sorry for any of you who are listening to this who went there or had children who went there or parents who went there, who think very highly of the place. This is my own personal experience and will always be – the biggest waste of four years. And the most damaging four years I ever had in my life. It took me years to de-school myself from that place. There were some really shining lights of professors who were incredibly good teachers, and a lot could be learned there.

I remember speaking to you about this before – you can learn a lot if there’s a threat of punishment hanging over you (laughs) the way we grew up. In a lot of ways that’s the way things were drilled into us. And we remember a lot of those things, we know a lot of things because of that. But this to me in particular because of the era, if you look at the things they consistently send me every month about which class gave how much money for instance, over the years if you look at the era of the Vietnam Years, the people that went to Saint Thomas in those years give almost nothing compared to almost every other year because the whole military training was taken in a new light. Here we were in a war that we considered to be completely unjust and evil, and here we were training for it and being made to look like complete imbeciles in terms of our appearance in a time when it was the roaring sixties. We wanted to be like everybody else. We wanted to have long hair and wear wild clothes, to have fun. We were being trained to go to Vietnam and kill people.

DS: I still feel, being here for a long time, I don’t think the trauma of Vietnam is even understood in this country. Did you look at the documentary?

NL: No, I was out of town. I watched the first one.

DS: I watched them all on line. And actually I didn’t learn very much from it. In other words, I had read a few books about it. I knew. I feel that your imagination can fill in a lot of gaps if you have any empathy at all. The problem of war is often a failure of empathy, that people can’t visualize what we’re really talking about, and therefore they think it’s a good idea. The idea of trauma is the only word for it, and that’s an experience I share from my secondary school and my education, which we have common ground on. It was traumatic. My wonderful, academically brilliant secondary school that I went to was like a prison camp too, where there was arbitrary terror, arbitrary punishment. The weak were punished more than the strong. And I think it’s the arbitrary nature of punishment that is the essence of prison camps.

NL: Right.

DS: And wars for that matter.

NL: That’s where I got a lot of my satirical nature. It was very early on – you know the old trite term, question authority. Well, that’s where I began questioning authority because when I started out I was pretty much, Ok, I’m going to do this, I’m going to be really good, I’m going to do it right, and shined everything at night. And then right from early on I got demerits, for everything, and right from that point it was like, I don’t believe in this. (laughs) This is not right. This is not something a fourteen-year-old kid should be doing right now – doing their homework and then staying up all night shining their shoes…

DS: It doesn’t make any sense. I think youngsters are very sensitive to several things. One is something that doesn’t make any sense. Why am I wasting my time shining… What is the meaning of shining this buckle? Another one is hypocrisy. So you’re being taught by a religious organization, and they’re talking about the bible, love your neighbor, do good to those that hate you. And they’re beating the hell out of you, intimidating you. So that doesn’t make any sense, or they’re blessing battleships. That’s my image – blessing battleships. That is obviously completely unchristian. So therefore that undermines their authority. They are pretending to have authority and they have undermined their own authority.

NL: And in our era too, like I said, there was a threat, unlike most of the time since then. All we ever thought about in those years was how are we going to get out of going to this place.

Everybody I knew, the main goal in their head was not going to Vietnam. How am I going to get out of it? People tried many different ways to get out of it. And not that many people went, because we were told by people that came back, you do not want to go there. And they’d give us very detailed reasons why we didn’t want to go there. We spent a good part of our post-high school years, I’d say five years, resisting the draft, thinking of ways to escape, thinking of moving to Canada, We weren’t going to go there, and we came from a group of people that at least had that option or had that mindset – no, we don’t have to do this. There were a lot of people who had to do it economically, or they had to do it because people told them they had to do it. A lot of them got way more messed up than we got, from just having to live with it – they had to go and live it and breathe it and eat it and die in it. It’s crazy, it’s crazy.

DS: Two of the ideas I have – one is – I think the terrifying thing about being an actual frontline soldier is the arbitrary thing. It doesn’t matter what skill you have – it’s arbitrary which one of you is going to catch a bullet or a bomb. And there’s nothing you can do. You can’t avoid it because you don’t know where it’s… So I think that’s what destroys people’s nerves. But the other thing, it was a new thing, I think – this is my theory based on nothing. The reason why it was such a big trauma – because America’s still fighting in wars – America is always fighting in wars – but the reason why that was a trauma in my opinion was that the 60s and the early 70s were the peak of education in the United States – more people were getting an education. And this I see as the top of a parabola, which then started going down – people started doing better in life – people had a better situation – people were earning money, people were having pensions, African-American people were actually getting ahead, some rights. Now at that very time then people were being sent off into these fields to get killed and to kill people – and these were now educated people. What the hell, I don’t want to, this is crazyi! You know I’ve read books, I don’t want to be sitting in this field getting shot. You know what I mean, I think it was – part of education was a moral education. And then it just didn’t make any sense – what the hell are we doing here? And I honestly feel that was part of the trauma. It was so horrible.

NL: Some people were just suddenly in a jungle.

DS: There must be previous eras where… no doubt it was always horrific but… They hadn’t been educated up to a level you might almost say of civilization. (laughs) This may be complete

baloney, but my gut feeling is that these things were all part of it. (Laughs) Why are we killing these people? And why are they killing us? I’d prefer to be at home watching the television.

NL: I had a friend that used to argue that – we were all against the draft – but he, a very intelligent person, he argued for the draft because he said in the draft you get people of all types in the military, and so you will get a lot of intelligent people, then the makeup of the military will by definition more intelligent. I went, mmmm, but I’m not going to be one of those people. (laughter) That sounds like a generational change or maybe an eon to take place – I’m not going to be around for that.

DS: People say that’s a problem with the volunteer army.

So let’s say, you’ve given us masses and masses of material, Nick.

NL: What haven’t I talked about?

DS: What haven’t you talked about? I was going to say – once or twice, say, with Sam who was…I said at the end is there anything you’d like to have talked about or made some comments on and you hadn’t had a chance to – obviously there’s a million different things.

NL: We didn’t get much past that early era. Is that what you’re looking for?

DS: No – our theoretical marker was actually to ’90. I suppose what we’re most interested in was the development in the earliest part.

NL: You were talking about Frankie and Mairéad.

DS: One thought I had was just that – obviously I’ve been living here almost the whole time, then I played with Frankie and Mairéad and was involved in bringing them here, and I really associate Frankie and Mairéad and Altan with your parties throughout all the years, and obviously Anna growing up in that environment. I was wondering – I did say off mike at one point, have you any particular memories of the first times that they came?

NL: We’ve been talking about all these sort of revelations, like seeing the Chieftains for the first time and listening to the Bothy Band for the first time, listening to Joe Burke for the first time. I just keep thinking this is an incredibly rich culture, an incredibly rich scene that’s happening right now. Every year I’m coming up with some new discovery – how could this place be producing so much rich music? Then that kind of settled down a little bit. I’m thinking I knew

pretty much about Irish music, I know what’s going on, I know what things sound like, where they come from and different types of music. And then suddenly Dáithí comes up to me and says, “Hey, some friends of mine are coming over and they’re thinking of making a go of it. They’re school teachers and thinking about taking a sabbatical and seeing how it would be if they played music.” And I said, “Sure, right up my alley. Let’s do a house concert.” Because nobody knew who they were. “And we’ll have a party and the whole thing.” And so we put the wheels in motion as usual, and here comes Frankie Kennedy and Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh – another name that I had to ask how to spell about sixteen times. So we had this house concert and here comes Donegal music, which had for some reason escaped me through this whole thing. And that’s a whole nother revelation, like hearing a different kind of music, and everybody in the room considered themselves at that point fairly expert on Irish music and what it sounds like and all its different forms. Suddenly we were all completely blown away by what Dáithí and Frankie and Mairéad produced that night. It was like, what’s this now? This was another thing altogether – the vitality and the energy and the rhythm of it – everything about it was like a new thing. And that started a whole new spirit. They came a few times, I think, before they called themselves Altan.

DS: Yes, there were at least two years and maybe three years.

NL: And then they became a really big band, and we had a house concert in our present house – I think there were three fiddle players – that’s when Paul O’Shaughnessy was in the group. I think that’s also the year when both you and Mark Kelly were playing guitar in the band, and they were all in our living room, lined up. And it was the summer. And so we had all these great parties and there were always one or two of them who would stay with us too, so that was always fun. And Anna grew up in that whole environment of just having all these Irish musicians in the house. So it was always fun for her, and she continues to have great appreciation for Irish music, and now she’s married into a great Irish music family, so she is really steeped in it.

DS: Yea, she’s married into the music and Dermie and Tara who are your in-laws – they were part of that Northern music scene, a big part of it. And also they gave tunes to Frankie and Mairéad – some of the first selections that they played that were associated with Altan actually came from Dermie and Tara. Then Dermie and Tara also contributed tunes that are part of the repertoire in the Twin Cities. There’s this selction of polkas which as far as I remember I would

have played for Kate and Jode a long time ago that came from Dermie and Tara, the Diamond Polkas. Then I forgot and then I heard this, some people talking about the Diamond Polkas, and I was thinking of diamonds, the jewels – what are these Diamond Polkas? It turned out to be the tunes from Dermie and Tara.

NL: I love all the stories of all of you guys when you were kids up in Gaoth Dobhair at Mairéad’s parents’ house, all being young kids and hanging out together and going to summer school – it sounds like an amazing time.

DS: Well, there’s a lot of past back there. (laughter) We’ve accumulated quite a lot of past.

NL: With Anna having gone over there and gotten completely into it, I always tell people, be careful what music you let your kids listen to, because you might lose them. Well, we haven’t lost her – we’ve gained an incredibly rich family of Diamonds.

DS: Jewels in the crown.

NL: What else? So up to ’90?

DS: One little thing I remember you talking about – maybe I’ll draw a line after this here – one of the great characters in and out of our scene is Dean Magraw, who plays jazz and plays everything, but who also has been a great Irish accompanist – played with Martin Hayes and John Williams and so on. You had some story about how you first met Dean or something?

NL: Well, Dean is one of my best friends. I first met him across the street from my house – I was living in my parents’ house still – I was probably about nineteen years old, twenty years old, just after high school, and I was walking down the street, across the street from my parents’ house, and there was an apartment building there that I’d never known anyone who had lived in that apartment building. I didn’t know any renters, so it was a foreign idea. I was walking down that street one summer day, and I hear this music, jazz guitar music, coming out of a basement window of an apartment. And I looked down, and I see Dean Magraw, who I didn’t know, and a friend of mine who I’d gone to high school with, not a great friend but an acquaintance from high school named Tom Zachary, who’s kind of a blues musician, and I saw him down there, and I said, “Tom, what are you listening to?” because I didn’t know Dean was playing music. And I said, “What are you listening to? It sounds fantastic.” And Dean looked up, and the first thing he said to me was, “We’re not listening to it! We’re playing it!” (laughter) He said, “Get down

here!” And I said, “Ok.” So I walked down to the basement and watched Dean play for the first time and went, “Oh, my god, how are you doing that?”

So we became really good friends. And he, speaking of Greg Bohen – Greg Bohen and Dick Rowan and Jim Bohen had a band called Prismer’s Luck. It was a classic sort of name that Greg or Jim Bowen would come up with. They played every Friday – Friday and Saturday -- at a basement place at the Commodore Hotel, and they would play. And every other week would be Prismer’s Luck, and then the next week would be Dean Magraw and a guitar player called Paul Storms. We used to go down there every week. I don’t know if you know Paul Storms, but he is a very good guitar player. So they would play together. Dean isn’t so much like that any more but – he would get completely unhinged on stage and get into different voices. He’d have fourteen different impersonations in one sentence, like different people. And he was just a fantastic person to go watch. And then years later he went away to Berklee, somewhere, for music, came back and ended up marrying my friend Laura MacKenzie, who I knew from the Irish crowd and I was seeing a lot of, everywhere I went. And then suddenly she starts appearing with Dean, and nobody really knew Dean, and I went, “Dean! I know Dean! That’s my old friend!” That was always amazing. That was like the merging of my two great musical loves – jazz-blues with Irish music.

DS: There are so many strands. Joseph Campbell, who had so many wonderful things to say, one of the things he said in one of his interviews, was when you look back on your life it seems to have been all intricately planned by somebody, but you’re not aware of it at the time. I think we will wind up. We might have to do Nick Lethert Part Three some time, but I was very touched and delighted the first interview that we did, it was with Sam Dillon – I’ve just transcribed it. Sam was part of those days, and then he went away, and it was wonderful to talk to somebody who had been in the early days – left about 1980, and now he’s visiting and he was able to talk about stuff. When he talked about the history and lots of interesting things like yourself, and then he said, “No, I’ve one more thing to say. I want to mention people, unsung heroes,” and then he talked about Nick Lethert and his postering and how much he contributed, and then the other person is David Aronow and all the photos he’s taken, and I was thinking – even as I was transcribing it, isn’t that amazing? – he’s just named my two best men pals in the Twin Cities! As if somebody had scripted it. Anyway we’ll stop there, Nick, but thanks a million, and apparently we have succeeded in recording the whole thing and not losing it. 43

NL: A typical life of an Irish-American in Saint Paul!

[END LETHERT PART 03—filename: A1005c_EML_mmtc]