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Chapter 3

In 1971, it came time to leave Blackrock College and I had a major decision to make. Except, of course, that it would be no decision at all. I would go to university because that was what my family did. Annie had only ever wanted two things for her children – for us to be happy, and to be educated. Every one of my siblings went to university except Dermot, and ironically he has worked as a porter at University College Dublin for over four decades. He wasn’t alone – my sister Miriam worked in the UCD library for twenty years.

There was no doubt that I would be following John, Peter, Miriam and Gerard’s footsteps to UCD. The university’s Belfield campus was just across the road from our house in Foster Avenue. Sometimes in life the easy decision is the right one, and as there was nothing else I wanted to do at that time, I went along with it. I was to study English and Philosophy: I had the right qualifications for it, and it made as much sense as anything else.

But before I started at UCD, I took my first trip to England. My brother John was getting married to his girlfriend Kaye in London, and Dermot and I caught the boat over to Holyhead and then got a train down to London. We were there for about five days and I took advantage of the trip by going to see a few films such as Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange that were banned in Ireland back then. It’s easy to forget what a strange, priest-riddled society we were – and in some ways still are.

When I started at UCD, I happily continued on my trajectory of being academically relentlessly average. This didn’t mean I hated the course; far from it. Some of the texts made an impact. I loved and even memorised some of the classic phrases from Dickens, and for some reason Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge had a major effect on me – this strange tale of a poor eedjit who sold his wife to somebody and had his actions come back to haunt him when he became the mayor. I sat down by a roaring log fire to start reading that book at 10 o’clock one night and had finished it by seven the next morning.

I can’t pretend, though, that I worked hard and came out of my English degree with a devout appreciation of the poems of Robert Frost or even a burning love for literature in general. When it came to the academic side of things, I did what I had to, and no more, which was reflected in my reliably ordinary exam results. For me, university was mostly about social life, girls, fun and freedom – and that was fantastic.

I had an absolute ball at UCD. Life was great, and exciting, and I felt like I was exactly where I should be. Having always been a fairly gregarious character, I found that I made loads of friends and there always seemed to be something to do, and somebody to do it with.

Obviously, with the arrogance of youth, I thought I was super-cool at college. Looking back, I clearly wasn’t. I was always pathetically dishevelled, deliberately so, and a typical day would find me mooching about with my wispy beard and duffle coat, a copy of Solzhenitsyn or The Hobbit sticking meaningfully out of a pocket, quoting the NME’s The Lone Groover cartoon strip at every opportunity. Pretentious? Moi?

My hair was a source of great angst for me. The early Seventies was an era of being defined by your long hair and, sadly, my long hair was hopeless. Instead of growing straight down like Lennon it was curly and corkscrew and would stick out at ridiculous angles. My beard was even worse. My goal was to look as cool as Let It Be-era McCartney. I looked like Catweazle.

I lived at home all through my time at UCD. It never occurred to me to move out. This might have seemed strange to some of my college mates, whose sole ambition was to rent a flat that they could take women back to, but I was perfectly happy staying at home, where the atmosphere was looser, madder and freer than in any campus hall of residence.

I couldn’t take girls back to spend the night but that was never really an issue. They weren’t exactly queuing up – maybe it was the Catweazle beard that was the problem? Even so, our house in Foster Avenue soon became a major social centre for everyone to pile back to after we had spent the night putting the world to rights over a leisurely pint in the student bar.

My mother loved having my friends round at any time of the day or night. In no time, our house was more like a student flat in Ranelagh or Rathmines than a middle-class south Dublin home. Everybody would troop in, have a friendly word with Annie as she greeted them with homemade biscuits, then we’d all head into ‘my’ stereo-room to play records. My own late-night culinary skills were always appreciated – tins of salmon and beans on toast!

Even today, nearly forty years on, I meet people who claim to have been back to my house during their years at UCD. I once read in Hot Press the Irish justice minister, Dermot Ahern, saying that he went to Dave Fanning’s house to listen to Pink Floyd. I am sure he did, but I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever.

Friday and Saturday nights were always about going to a party, or trying to find one to gatecrash if you weren’t invited to one. The routine was always the same – listen out in the student bar or the pub, try to get an address and a name, then just turn up as if you were expected and it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘I know Dave! No, I mean Paul! Er … Pete?’ You would always be waving a six-pack of beer on the doorstep to show you were a good guest, but once you got inside you’d seldom put it in the fridge – it’d be gone in a second. Instead, you opened the first can and hid the rest in a secret place. Duffle-coat pockets were always good for that, even if it meant Solzhenitsyn or The Hobbit’s pages getting bent or wet.

My UCD years were not too dissolute but everybody smoked stuff they weren’t supposed to and I was as enthusiastic as the next man. The first question at any gig you went to, to anyone you met, was always, ‘Have you got any skins?’ Sometimes it was relentless, and any paper or card in our path – beer mats, magazines, book covers – was in danger of being ripped up to use as roach papers.

Yet for all the enjoyable distractions, music remained my be-all and end-all, and university gave me more chances than ever to wallow in it. The Belfield student bar had cheap nighttime gigs with free ones at lunchtime in the Theatre L in the Arts building, and in my three years at UCD, I hardly missed one.

Mainly, it would be local bands that were starting out, although I did see Paul Brady in his folk-inclined, pre-Hard Station era, and thought he was great. I also remember a band called Frruup from Belfast, who had just released a debut album called Future Legends, which I thought was brilliant. I saw one of them in a bar and had a bit of banter with him: ‘I bought your album!’ ‘Oh, you’re the one that bought it!’ – that sort of stuff. That was interesting, because even then, I came away thinking, ‘I can do that – I can talk to musicians …’

Outside of college, I was still going to plenty of gigs. Horslips were the big local draw, and Rory Gallagher’s gigs were rightly the stuff of legend. I saw Blodwyn Pig supported by Skid Row at the Stadium, and got very excited when Pink Floyd were due to come to Dublin, although in the end they never did, for some reason.

I went to a lot of gigs with Jerry and Mel and any number of others and, by now, Mel had got himself a Morris Minor car and had the four symbols from the cover of Led Zeppelin IV painted on the doors. His father owned a place in Clara Vale in Wicklow and Mel, Jerry and I would frequently spend weekends there, listening to my compilation cassettes on the way down and then playing albums on some cheap, tatty little record player that we took with us.

When it came to buying records, I had moved on from Golden Discs in Stillorgan to Pat Egan’s Sound Cellar in Nassau Street, on the corner of Grafton Street and opposite Trinity College in the heart of Dublin. Sound Cellar was fantastic. You went through a tiny door that you would easily miss unless you were looking for it and then down two flights of stairs into a dingy, tiny little cellar. It had these great bargain bins and I would find some brilliant oddities and rarities in there.

Rummaging through those bins, I would come across Caravan, Gong, Weather Report, Todd Rundgren, J.J. Cale, Jackson Browne, Mahavishnu Orchestra and hundreds of others. There were some truly weird bands on the Harvest label and some excellent major-label samplers. CBS’s Fill Your Head with Rock compilation was pretty cool as was Island’s Nice Enough to Eat, which featured Quintessence, Free, King Crimson, Mott the Hoople, Nick Drake, Ireland’s Dr Strangely Strange and Traffic, whom I still regard as one of the greatest English bands of all time.

Pat was eight or nine years older than me and seemed incredibly cool. He had been involved with weird underground bands on the Irish ‘beat scene’, which was slightly before my time, and as he and his mate and assistant Tommy got used to me being in the shop all the time, they’d call me up and tip me off about new releases.

It was a great system. Pat would phone me up and say, ‘I’ve got such-and-such an album in’, and I’d be excited because it wasn’t due to be out for three weeks. He might only have one copy, so I’d ask him to keep it for me and then get in there as fast as I could. By then I was buying one album per week and I bet I got 80 per cent of them unheard – almost all on the strength of good reviews in the music comics, usually NME or Melody Maker.

The first Roxy Music album is probably my favourite debut album of all time. I was hooked from the first single, ‘Virginia Plain’. It was all about sha-na-na, quiffs and Teddy Boys, which weren’t really my thing, mixed with early 1970s glam rock, which was, the songs were magnificent and, crucially, it sounds as good today as it did then. Pat got copies of their next four or five albums a few weeks before their official releases and called me each time. I was usually in to buy it within the hour.

By the end of my first year at UCD, I was happily settled in to the student lifestyle and having the best time I could imagine – but I also had itchy feet. I fancied seeing a bit of the world and also earning enough money to keep me in albums for the next academic year.

One major perk of being a student was that you were eligible for a J1 visa, which allowed you to work abroad during university holidays – in America or nearer to home. A sizeable number of UCD undergraduates took off to Germany when term ended and in the summer of 1972 I decided to join them. As the term ended, I headed for Gross-Gerau, an industrial town twenty miles south of Frankfurt with my friend James O’Nolan. We had secured three months’ work in a steel-pressing factory that made hinges and various other parts for BMW cars.

This was a hugely intimidating prospect for one very good reason – I had never done a day’s work in my life. Sure, I’d had my early morning paper round for a year or two, but besides that and a week on a farm in Ballivor in County Meath, that was about it. Some kids might have had to clean their house from top to bottom before they were allowed to go and play but that had never been my parents’ style and they’d never really made me do anything I hadn’t wanted to. In truth, I’d had it pretty easy.

So on my first day I was pretty horrified as the factory foreman showed us around the thumping, clanking workplace full of vast noisy machinery. ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering,’ I was thinking. ‘This is a big mistake and I’m out of here.’ I’m pretty sure that James and a couple of others I was with felt the same – young, scared and a long way from home.

Given this trepidation, I felt very proud of myself that I stuck it out. It wasn’t easy. We started work at 6 o’clock each morning, alongside a whole load of other immigrant workers who were mostly Turks or East Europeans. We were working on conveyor belts that turned flat pieces of metal into hinges, and given that each BMW had twenty-four hinges, there was no shortage of work. We’d make thousands of the things every day.

The factory was deafening, there were no earphones and the work was tedious and repetitive, so I survived the long days on the floor by pretending I was giving a concert. In my head, one minute I was Kevin Ayers and the next I was Roxy Music, on stage in Theatre L back in UCD. The foreman used to laugh when he came by and caught me singing my head off but I didn’t care – it was my escape from the boredom.

I suppose it was a bit like Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File. There is a scene where he is being tortured but he has a screw hidden in his hand. He grinds the screw so hard that it tears his flesh and blood seeps out but it helps him to survive the torture because it is his own pain; he’s controlling it. OK, a bit dramatic, but that was how it felt to me, anyhow.

The four of us stayed in a little house next to the factory and we hardly mixed or learned any German at all. It was our childish way of rebelling against the banality of the whole experience. About the only language I picked up was arbeiten (work), Fabrik (factory) and Förderband (conveyor belt).

We were there to earn money and were so determined not to spend anything that we got into the bad habit of stealing stupid stuff from the local supermarket. I got particularly skilled at nicking coffee. I would walk around the supermarket, come out apparently empty-handed and the other lads would say, ‘Ah, you couldn’t do it today! No worries!’ At which point I would open up my coat to reveal two huge jars of coffee nestling in the lining. I didn’t even drink coffee at the time.

It was ridiculous. We even resented spending five Deutsch-marks on potatoes, so we would go down to some huge local farm after dark and steal them from the field. We were doing that one night and a plane flew over us, unusually low. I somehow doubt the pilot could even see us or, if he could, was not too bothered about a handful of Irish eedjits nicking spuds but I remember yelling, in all seriousness, ‘Hit the dirt!’ and we did. There I was, face down with a mouth full of field and a German plane flying overhead, feeling like a wartime soldier from the Valiant or one of the other comics I used to read.

The best part about the German trip, by far, was that we got to a few major concerts. With Stephen Russell and Donal Foley and about thirty-five thousand others, I went to my first proper stadium gig near Frankfurt. Eighty per cent of the audience were American GI’s, who were all smoking something: joints, pipes, bongs, whatever.

The Spencer Davis Group and Colosseum (with Gary Moore) opened up the show but the main draw were Sly and the Family Stone. They had never meant a lot to me but they were soul-funk legends and it was good to tick them off my list. Sly was pretty notorious for not turning up to shows, so when he appeared on stage the place went crazy. However, he did no more than twenty-five minutes before slouching off, leaving the crowd seriously unhappy. They wanted at least another hour.

Sly wasn’t even the headliner. That was Rod Stewart, who at the time was enjoying worldwide hits with ‘Maggie May’ and ‘Your Wear It Well’ from the Every Picture Tells a Story album. This failed to win over the disgruntled GI’s and I heard one of them grumble to his mate: ‘We want funk rock, not faggot rock.’ Rod and Sly share a surname and a chant soon started up: ‘We want Sly Stewart, not Rod Stewart.’ Rod seemed pretty oblivious to it all and the protest petered out after about twenty minutes.

A week later we were back in Frankfurt to see Frank Zappa, once again entertaining mainly American soldiers. The GIs seemed a pretty demanding bunch and Zappa wasn’t exactly a ‘play the hits’, crowd-pleasing kind of performer, but he had enough authority and charisma to see off any audience revolt and lead them by the hand into fairly experimental areas.

The big-deal show of that summer, though, was the Rolling Stones playing an indoor gig at an ice-hockey arena. They were touring Exile on Main Street and Mick Taylor, Brian Jones’s replacement, was in the band. You could see there was friction going on: at one point Mick Jagger went over to Taylor and ruffled his hair. Taylor looked at him like he wanted to kill him. After the gig we missed the bus, walked the ten miles home, got in at five in the morning and were back in the Fabrik on the Förderband by six.

My merry band lasted six weeks in Gross-Gerau and we couldn’t wait to get back to Dublin and the pampered student life. We got the trains and boats back to UCD saying ‘Never again!’ so of course it goes without saying that I was back in the exact same factory the following year. This time I lasted more than three months – the others all quit and left before then, but things are never so bad second time around, and I wanted to earn as much money as possible. After all, those albums didn’t buy themselves.

I was so fixated on saving money that I would sometimes hitchhike home across Germany and France to save the train fare. US GI’s eager for company would often pick me up. On one journey, a young soldier asked where I was from. When I replied ‘Ireland’, he said: ‘Wow! So have you seen the monster, huh?’ It took me a few seconds to work out he meant the Loch Ness Monster. We then discussed this mythical beast for the next half-an-hour, during which I never had the heart to tell him it actually lived in Scotland.

Far more often, when I told people I was from Ireland, they asked about the unrest in Northern Ireland, or the Troubles, as they were called. I never knew what to say. It wasn’t that I didn’t care – I just felt so helpless and unable to do anything about a situation that looked insoluble. Whenever the latest bad news came on the television, I’d often just turn it off. It was a head-in the-sand attitude, but I wasn’t alone in adopting it.

In fact, I was much more interested in American politics. In my teenage years I had pored over Rolling Stone as much as I had the NME. They had a lot of political and social-issue coverage and American public figures just seemed so much more larger than life, vital and – let’s face it – glamorous than the grey men of Dublin and Belfast. The assassination of JFK had been an incredible drama and I had been equally fascinated by Edward Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick scandal, which began the day before the moon landing.

Many UCD students were consumed with anger after Bloody Sunday in 1972 and I remember an air of numbness around the campus that week. We had hated the mad tit-for-tat paramilitary response to everything and their intransigence in the face of just about any offer put to them. But this outrage was something else entirely. It took almost forty years, until the summer of 2010, for the British Government, in the person of Prime Minister David Cameron, to issue an admission of guilt and an apology.

If there was complacency of any sort, it was shaken in May 1974 when three car bombs went off in Dublin during the early evening rush hour. Nobody I knew was hurt (although within days we all felt we knew the victims) but there were tales of near misses and I guess for the first time it made us realise the huge shadow of fear that people in Belfast, just a hundred miles north of us, were living under.

As the summer of 1974 dawned my thoughts were very much over the Atlantic. I got to use my J1 visa again but this time I was giving Deutschland a miss – it was time for my first visit to America, with Mel as my equally pumped-up and excited travelling companion.

We flew into JFK but almost immediately our plans began to come apart at the seams. Mel and I had no fewer than three jobs, or potential jobs, lined up in or around the airport, but they all fell through when we arrived. So we bunkered down in Lefferts Boulevard, near the airport and right at the end of one of the subway lines, while we worked out what to do.

New York was amazing. I guess I always knew it would be, but the place was wonderful. It was almost too much to take in, and at first I was totally green and naive as I wandered around in the stifling summer heatwave. I strolled into a deli and asked for a ‘baggle’ rather than a bagel, which caused much hilarity at my expense.

In another café I ordered a Coke and asked the guy behind the counter, ‘Can you put some ice in it?’ He looked at me as if I had two heads, clearly thinking, ‘Of course I’m going to!’ But he didn’t know that I was only too used to buying warm cans of Coke in places like the west of Ireland, where the can could have been in the window in sunshine for six weeks, with a few wasps buzzing around it.

I loved walking around the streets in New York. The sights are so familiar to us through years of watching TV – the yellow taxis, the hydrants, the steam coming up through the grates on the street corners – that it just felt like being in a movie. I loved even more the fact that all the clichés were true: on the rare occasion you clambered into a cab, for example, you really did have to shout your destination to a surly and uninterested driver with a very precarious grasp of English.

So New York was great but we were still stuck in that dodgy place at the end of the subway line with no income, and we were beginning to seriously stress out about our situation. It was time for Plan B. Two years earlier, my brother Gerard had come out to the East Coast and worked at a fairground, Shaheen’s Fun-O-Rama Park, at Salisbury Beach near Boston. I had brought a brochure from home with the fairground’s number on the slim chance that we needed to fall back on the place.

I phoned up the amusement park and because I was ‘Gerry Fanning’s brother’ we were promised jobs on the spot. Our luck was turning. Mel and I went to Grand Central Station to buy tickets and an American guy called Bill Luce introduced himself by the ticket office and offered us a lift, saying he could use some company. He was a great guy and so we drove down in his big car, picking up a female hitchhiker on the way. It was grand: it all felt so cool, so American, so right. He even gave us his place to stay in overnight.

Salisbury Beach was in a place called Newburyport, seventy miles from Boston, and Shaheen’s Fun-O-Rama was a typical old-fashioned amusement park such as you might find in Black-pool. We got our uniforms, which had red-and-white stripes like a Sunderland FC football kit, and we also got some important news: we would have to get haircuts.

This was the last straw for Mel. I couldn’t have cared less, because my hair looked shite anyway, but Mel’s hair was like Dave Gilmour’s from Pink Floyd and was a statement of cool. He refused to cut it, worked one day at Shaheen’s, told me, ‘Fuck this place, I’m not doing this one day more!’ and flew back to Dublin, where he worked all summer in Captain America’s burger joint to claw back the money he’d spent.

So I was on my own in Salisbury Beach – but not for long. The park bosses billeted me in a house on the beach with five good-time, fun-loving party animals from Northern Ireland, including one called John Coll, whose cousin I knew in Dublin. All five of them were fiery, mostly redheaded heavy drinkers; I remember one of them lay on the beach for a whole day and got so sunburnt he had to go to hospital. I lived with this crew of likeable rogues for three memorable months.

The fairground work was no more intellectually demanding than had been the steel-processing plant in Gross-Gerau but it was a lot more fun. I would be working one of the rides, which involved taking the tickets off the customers as they walked up the steps, making sure they were safely strapped into the cars and pressing a button to set the whole thing moving.

There was a definite hierarchy to the amusement park. The big central ride was the rollercoaster, and all the cool American guys worked that, the jocks wearing accessorised red-and-white striped tops with blue slacks who would try to pull the girls as they helped them on to the ride.

I worked the smaller rides in the main part of the park and was just as interested in the music that was being blared out by Shaheen’s on-site DJ. It was mostly the same few songs repeated all the time: ‘Rock the Boat’ by the Hues Corporation, ‘Rock Your Baby’ by George McCrae, ‘(You’re) Having My Baby’ by Paul Anka and ‘Sugar Baby Love’ by the Rubettes, which had been a big hit in Britain but had only just come out in America.

It was all a blast but, as ever, my focus was on making money to see me through the next term in Dublin and finance my trips to Pat Egan’s Sound Cellar, so I worked like mad. The site didn’t open until three in the afternoon but I would normally report for work at nine-thirty in the morning to clean the place up.

Then I’d be on duty on the rides until the fairground closed at 1 a.m., which made it an eighty- or even hundred-hour week.

The park was pretty quiet during the afternoons, as everybody stayed on the beach, but was buzzing every single evening as thousands of scantily clad sun-worshippers thronged the boardwalk. The weekends saw an incongruous, unlikely mix of parents with young kids and rowdy Spring Break types.

My sixteen-hour days might have been OK had I been able to relax and sleep at night but our place on the beach was party central. The Northern Ireland guys were all pissheads and loved to invite one-and-all back for parties of some description every night. Our Irish accents were a major plus point. It sounds daft, but we were almost celebrities.

Initially, I was a fish out of water after Mel had left, but living with this fun-loving group was a good experience for me, and they treated me really well. Because I was last in, all the bedrooms had gone when I arrived, but these lads, who were all a bit older than me, looked out for me and gave me a bed in the corner of the main downstairs room.

I had an eight-track machine beside my bed with two tapes – a Moody Blues album and the American Graffiti soundtrack, which is a collection of some of the greatest pop music ever assembled, bursting with short, sharp tunes of bobby-sox and pony-tail high-school stories. With bands like the Platters, Diamonds, Crests, Fleetwoods, Monotones, Silhouettes, Clovers, Cleftones, Spaniels, Heartbeats, Skyliners and a host of others from Flash Cadillac and Frankie Lymon to famous names like Buddy Holly and the Beach Boys, the mid-Fifties to early Sixties really was a glorious time for American pop music.

That bed in the corner of the room was where I was to lose my virginity. Frankly, it was not before time. I was 20 years old by then, and while I’d had flings with girls in the past, we’d never gone all the way or got even remotely serious. I had no interest at all in settling down with a steady girlfriend – plus, of course, I was still living with my parents, and I probably bored them all stupid talking about music!

The girl that finally popped my cherry was American. She used to hang around at the parties we held at our beach house of ill repute, and one night it just happened. I didn’t have much confidence – in fact, as it became clear we were heading to what American frat boys called third base, I was thinking, ‘Are you sure you want to do this with me, and not one of those blue-eyed, blond surfer dudes on the beach?’ And the awful thing is that I can’t even remember her name. Is that terrible – or is it just rock ’n’ roll?

At the height of summer the fairground was heaving, I was getting a huge buzz every night, and 8 August 1974 was the most exciting evening of all (with apologies to the anonymous young lady above, obviously). President Richard Nixon had been increasingly at bay and besieged by controversy as the Watergate scandal erupted around him, and on the evening of 8 August, bowing to the inevitable, he became the first US president to resign while still in office.

This was massive news across the world, across America – and certainly on Salisbury Beach. Massachusetts was Democrat, Kennedy country, where Nixon had always been loathed. In the previous election, Nixon had won one of the biggest landslides in American election history. Forty-nine of the fifty states voted for Nixon. The only one to vote for his Democrat opponent, George McGovern, was Massachusetts.

So Salisbury Beach celebrated in style. There were fireworks, a lot of drinking, and a Wicker Man-style effigy of Richard Nixon burning for hours on the beach. The air was thick with heady talk of Tricky Dicky being tried for mass murder for his 1970 bombing campaign against Cambodia (obviously, this came to nothing: instead, his vice-president, Gerald Ford, assumed office and immediately granted Nixon a full pardon). Yet for a US politics junkie like me, who had soaked in all this stuff via the pages of Rolling Stone, this was amazing: I felt like I was right at the heart of things.

The piss-ups continued unabated in the party house, but unlike my party-animal housemates, I was also broadening my cultural life. In my first week at Salisbury Beach, I had hatched a cunning, if rather deceitful, plan, and it had worked like an absolute dream.

In those days, music magazines as well as titles like Reader’s Digest and Playboy ran copious adverts for music clubs. The deal was that you joined these clubs for a token two or three dollars and were eligible for a fantastic introductory offer whereby you could choose ten albums of your choice absolutely gratis. The catch was that you were then obliged to purchase at least one album per month at full price for at least a year – but I knew that by then I would be back in Dublin and safely out of reach.

I spent my first week at Shaheen’s subscribing to these clubs, cutting out forms and posting off my selections, and by July I had parcels arriving at the beach house every single day. By the start of August, I owned a hundred new albums and my record collection had doubled in size – and all for the princely sum of $25! I even joined a book club and got the complete works of Shakespeare for $2.50.

My only fear was that I would be travelling back to Ireland with my luggage a lot weightier than when I came out and could well get hit with a mammoth excess baggage charge. I had no need to worry. When I arrived at JFK in September, Orla O’Farrell, a friend of mine from UCD who was also working a J1 visa, was on duty at the Aer Lingus check-in desk. She waved my bags through with a nod and a wink and all was well.

Before I returned to Dublin though, I spent two weeks in New York, where I spent more money every day than I had in a week on Salisbury Beach. I stayed in a place in Bleecker Street and spent a couple of days trailing round Greenwich Village trying to find all the places Bob Dylan had played. It was my own little pathetic version of a Beatles tour of Liverpool.

While I was in New York that August, Frenchman Philippe Petit did his legendary tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, later immortalised in the Man on Wire movie. I would love to say I watched it, mouth agape, but I didn’t even know it had happened until the next day. Nobody in Greenwich Village did. It’s its own little world.

Mostly I spent that fortnight devouring New York and music. It was the dog-end of a scorching heatwave summer, the sidewalks seemed to be melting, and the soundtrack to it all was Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark album and Eric Clapton’s version of ‘I Shot the Sheriff ’ – which, sacrilege as it might be, I have always preferred to Bob Marley’s original.

Inevitably, I trawled record stores to add to the groaning haul of vinyl I had collected at Salisbury Beach via the unsuspecting music clubs. One mission was to find some music by Harry Partch, a weird old guy I had read a long article about in Rolling Stone. He had speakers under the floorboards in his house and only made music on found instruments. This guy made the Legendary Stardust Cowboy sound mainstream.

Poking around inside a musty old record shop, I asked the fella behind the counter about him. He unsurprisingly told me he had never heard of him and asked what kind of music he made. I could have said ‘Avant-garde’ or ‘Experimental’ but was honest and said ‘Weird’ – at which point, to my amazement, the guy pointed me to a ‘Weird’ section in a corner of the store.

Under the word ‘Weird’, about a thousand albums were stacked up. I took a deep breath, began flicking through … and the second album from the front was The World of Harry Partch. I didn’t even listen to it in the shop, just bought it straightaway, but a measure of exactly how weird it was is that when I got it home to Dublin, the first time I listened to it I played the entire first side at the wrong speed without even realising.

At the end of my NY mini-break, I joined eighty thousand other people at a huge outdoor concert at Roosevelt Raceway in Westbury that was being billed as the sound of California on the East Coast. At that time it was the biggest gig there had ever been in New York. Jesse Colin Young and the Beach Boys played first, then Joni Mitchell, and the headliners were Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

CSNY played for a long time and each member also played a solo set. Neil Young began his by telling us that, at the end, he would reveal the fate of Evel Knievel. The legendary daredevil had proclaimed that he would leap that day across the Grand Canyon on his motorbike. Young played a magnificent set and at the end, as he ambled off, said, ‘It was a sham, it was a scam and he’s still alive.’ It was a fitting end to one of the best summers of my life.

Yet all dreams have to come to an end and, back in Dublin, I came down to a earth with a bump. I graduated in 1975 with a BA but no honours, which was pretty much what my minimal work-rate had deserved, and decided that I would take a one-year Higher Diploma in teaching.