As part of our week of celebrations we invited along our great friends from Switzerland. It is impossible to adequately describe how we feel about these guys. But, I can tell you that when we get together we have lots of fun playing music, telling jokes and singing songs over a few ales. For this visit, we had a new pad for all wayward Mariners to hangout. That place is affectionately known as The Firehouse.
 

 

The great thing about The Firehouse is that it is ours. It is owned by a Mariner and for the week the Swiss were here it was home to any that chose to make it so. Here is a list of other cool things about ‘The Firehouse’:

• We can play fife and drum music there until any hour of the morning.
• It is decorated with classic Mariner photos and memorabilia.
  
• It has beautiful stained glass.
  
• It has beautiful pint glasses…at least when there’s beer in ‘em.
  
• It has a walk in cooler with more kegs of beer than your average liquor store.
  
• It sleeps a hundred men in an assortment of hovels and lofts.
  
• There are lofts in the Firehouse where you can sleep till noon and it is still black as night.
• There is a bar in the kitchen.
  
• There is a bar upstairs.
• There are two urinals.
• The bathroom has a cool fire mural in it with a scantily clad fire woman.
   
  
  (incidentally, this painting reminds me of a song about my mother being a fireman…but I’ll save that for another time.)
• When your done in the bathroom, you can ring the fire bell.
• You can hang stuff from the red pipes that wind across the ceiling…and that is exactly what we did.

I set up three microphones for the week and flipped on a recorder anytime there was activity in The Firehouse. They were unobtrusive and guys never really noticed them. What I have, consequently, is a weeks worth of recordings. Fife and drum, fife and table, fife and pans, songs, jokes and laughter. Really it is just recordings of what we do when we hang out together without the crowds of a muster or a performance. Some of it is mellow, a lot of it is not. None of it is rehearsed and most of it is from the wee hours of the morning after spending our days on Block Island or our evenings at the Griswold Inn. And like any beautiful piece of wood where the grain and knots give it character, so too these recordings come with an occasional knot and definitely a bit of grain. I think that is what gives them their charm.
 

The first recording I would like to share is of a tune called Planxty Bill Gallagher. This is a tune that John Ciaglia wrote as a study after Roy Watrous. One reason I enjoy this tune is that we never play it until the Swiss arrive, and every time I think, ‘wow, what a great tune, we should play this’.