32. If Wishes Were Horses

© Robbie O'Connell 1973 Slievenamon Music (BMI)

15 October, 1972, Greyhound Bus Station, Worcester, MA

With a heavy heart, I stood in the rain waiting to board a greyhound bus to New York. This was the beginning of a long journey back to Ireland via JFK airport to start my third year at University College Dublin. Roxanne Vigeant, whom I had met six weeks earlier and fallen madly in love with, had just dropped me at the bus station. I didn’t want to get on the bus but my visa was about to expire and I was overdue back at college.

It has been the most eventful summer of my life. I had arrived in New York city at the end of June on a J-1 student work visa, expecting to find a summer job in the city as I had the previous year. After several unsuccessful days searching for work, I went out to Queens to visit my first cousin, Michael O’Brien. In the previous few years, he had made his living playing music in Irish pubs between New York and Massachusetts and he suggested that I should try doing that too. I had been doing gigs in Ireland, and a few in England, since I was about fifteen but it seemed to me that American venues were out of my league and besides I had no reputation or contacts there.

Then Michael called his friend, Jack Durkin, who owned the Limerick Pub in Lowell, MA and it turned out he needed an Irish singer for his pub. The next thing I knew, I was performing four nights a week in Lowell. To my amazement and delight, the gig came with a free apartment. This was so much better than I could have done in the city. I was all set except for one important detail—I had to find the material to fill four forty-five minute sets. This was twice as much as I had ever done before so I had to hustle to increase my repertoire. I knew a lot of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem songs from the early ‘60s but more recently I had been into singer/songwriters like James Taylor, Paul Simon, Cat Stevens, and Neil Young. I had a few Ewan McColl songs and some other English and Scottish folk songs but I had none of the songs that were popular with Irish Americans. That deficiency would eventually be my undoing.

The pub on Market Street was narrow with a long bar running almost the full length of the building. There was a tiny platform stage in the back corner, barely big enough for one person. From Thursday through Sunday from 9:00 PM to 1:00 AM, I perched on a stool on the little stage and managed to get through four forty minute sets each night

The first couple weeks went fairly well although some of the patrons were not happy that I didn’t sing songs like “Danny Boy” or “Who Put the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder.” I genuinely did not know those songs and I had no desire to learn them. One night a man approached the stage where I was performing and stuffed a few dollars through the sound hole of my guitar. He then sat directly in front of me and kept requesting songs I didn’t know. I was annoyed by his violation of my space and his arrogance in trying to bribe me and I probably didn’t hide it. When the set ended, he complained to the manager, a surly, ex-marine, with a crew-cut, named Hank. Upon my arrival, he had taken an instant dislike to me and I did not warm to his drill sergeant demeanor. I wasn’t fired on the spot but I was told I wouldn’t be back the following week. This was a serious setback as it meant losing the apartment as well as the job. I didn’t have any means of transport either so, as George Clooney’s character in O Brother, Where Art Thou says, I was “in a tight spot.”

Fortunately, I had been befriended by Dave, a music loving hippy from Tennessee who was a regular at the pub. He had introduced me to his hippy friends and drove me around on my days off. I had heard of another Irish pub in Framingham, about an hour’s drive to the south. My uncle, Bobby Clancy, had played there as had Paddy Riley, Shay Healy, and several other people I knew or knew of. I gave them a call and, once again, Fortune smiled on me. They were looking for a singer for the month of September. Not only was it a step up as a venue, it had a much nicer apartment, just a few miles away, and it paid better than the Lowell gig. Dave kindly drove me to Framingham and I was installed in the apartment a few days before the gig started. I still didn’t have transport so I had to take a taxi to the gig and I usually got a lift home from the owner or one of the bar staff. I think Bill Haughey, the proprietor, got a bit of a shock when he saw how young I was. I was twenty-one but probably looked younger. The first afternoon I arrived and walked up to the bar, the barman tried to card me. I just looked at him and said, “I’m the fucking band.”

Liam’s Irish Tavern was a classy operation at that time. The pub was on the second floor with a good restaurant below. The clientele was mostly comprised of couples and families who went out to dinner and stayed on for some music. It often felt more like a concert setting than a pub. The regulars seemed to be familiar with some of the songs and I got off to a great start. It got a little rowdy on Friday nights but by then I was learning to cope with it.

One night a very pretty girl, sitting with a group of people, seemed to know all the songs I was singing so on my break I wandered over to their table. “How come you know all the songs?” I asked her with genuine curiosity. She told me her name was Roxanne and that she had been going there, on and off, for a couple of years, either with her parents or a friend. She had met Bobby Clancy and Paddy Reilly and had even babysat for Shay Healy’s kids. That night she was the designated driver for friends, one of whom, Jack, was celebrating a promotion. She said she also played guitar and sang. It soon transpired that we had both learned the same first songs on guitar and liked a lot of the same music. We were having such a great chat that I almost forgot to get back on stage for my next set.

At the end of the night, they invited me to join them as they continued the party at Jack’s apartment nearby. Roxanne and I ended up playing songs together until the wee hours. We arranged to meet again on my day off and she drove me around to see the brilliant New England fall foliage which was just beginning to appear. It was an exceptional year for the seasonal color display brought on by a couple of frosty nights and a long dry spell. I quickly fell in love with rural Massachusetts and was soon totally smitten with Roxanne as well. She took me on a memorable trip to Sturbridge Village when the fall colors were at their peak. I was overwhelmed by the variety of vibrant colors and the pleasant feel of the crisp sunny days. After that we ended up spending all our spare time together.

When my month-long gig ended, I moved to her apartment in Stow. I worked on songs during the day while she was at her job in Maynard. I wrote a song called “Stowaway,” inspired by my situation, but I think it is now languishing in a pile of old cassettes somewhere in the attic. My final two weeks passed in a happy blur of contentment slightly marred by the knowledge that my time there was running out. At some point, Roxanne used the expression, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” I had never heard it before but it seemed like the perfect title for a song. I filed it away in the “musical ideas” compartment of my brain and not long afterwards I wrote the song.

That Christmas, Roxanne came to visit me in Ireland and we had a wonderful time. By early February, I couldn’t endure being apart any longer and, against my parent’s wishes, caught a plane back to Boston. A little over a year later, we were married. Within a few months, Roxanne quit her job and joined me on stage. We spent the next two years performing at Irish music venues around New England and as far afield as Chicago, IL and Washington, DC. We recorded “If Wishes Were Horses” on a 45 rpm single with “The Ferrybank Piper” on the B side. A slightly amended version of the song later appeared on my Recollections Vol. 1 CD and that is the version used here.

Lyrics:

IF WISHES WERE HORSES

© Robbie O’Connell 1973 Slievenamon Music (BMI)¹

II had started painting pictures just to pass away the time
But the colors all were changed for me when your eyes looked into mine
And the pictures have all faded now and I'm singing lonesome songs
'Cause you touched me much too deeply and I know I can't stay long

Chorus
But if wishes were horses and beggars could ride
I would always be with you, always here by your side
I would stay
And I'd never go away

Now all the flowers are dying and the leaves are on the ground
The cold winds they are blowing and the winter's coming down
And soon I will be leaving you though my heart will stay behind
My thoughts will all remain here, you'll be always in my mind

The rain is softly falling and the streets are cold and grey
I keep thinking now if only I could stay another day
But the pictures are forgotten now and the songs have passed us by
Leaving only memories and time to say goodbye

1. PRODUCTION NOTES:
Robbie O’Connell: Guitar and Vocal
Produced by: Jimmy Keane
Recorded by: Gerry Putnam
Recorded at: The Old Vienna Kaffehaus, Westboro, MA
Mixed and Mastered at: CedarHouse Sound and
Mastering, New London, NH in 1996
Cover Design: Paul O’Connell and Roxanne O’Connell