Our next stop was in Omaha where we did have a gig. It was a larger club and our audience consisted of the headlining band. There was some discussion as to whether or not to bother playing and we played and the other band applauded. This took some of the wind out of us but it was on to Minneapolis, an overnight drive, despite a tornado warning. We pulled off the 35 North to give the tornado some time to itself and got some fries.

Scott Seskind did not know how to play the guitar when I met him. He learned to play and write songs in a short flash. Soon he'd written "Bobby Sands."

Bobby Sands was one of ten Irish Republicans who died in a hunger strike in the H-Block of the Maze Prison in Ireland, in a protest demanding political prisoner status from the British government. The strikers demanded the right to wear their own clothes, the right to refrain from prison work and the right to associate freely between other Republican prisoners.

A bomb had exploded at the Balmoral Furniture Company at Dunmurry, (Belfast, Ireland) followed by a gun-battle in which two men were wounded. Bobby Sands was in a car near the scene with three other men. The Royal Ulster Constabulary captured them and found a revolver in the car. Sands was never connected to the bombing but was convicted of possession of firearms in September 1977 and sentenced to 14 years.

On March 1, 1981, another in a long history of hunger strikes by Irish Republicans began with Bobby Sands refusing to eat. Other prisoners would join the strike at staggered intervals in order to maximise publicity.

"They have turned their violence against themselves through the prison hunger strike to death. They seek to work on the most basic of human emotions--pity--as a means of creating tension and stroking the fires of bitterness and hatred." -Margaret Thatcher

5 weeks later Sands was elected to a seat in the British Parliament in the Fermanagh & South Tyrone district, narrowly defeating the Unionist candidate, Harry West. Many of the prisoners had expected that Sands' election would end the protest but 30,000 votes for Sands didn't sway Margaret Thatcher. Less than a month later, Sands, after securing a promise from his mother not to intervene after he lost conscioussness, died from his hunger strike on May 5, 1981.

Three of my four grandparents were from Ireland. My great Uncle, Peter Heslin, spent a year in the Mountjoy prison for IRA activity. But it was my Eastern European Jewish friend, Scott Seskind, who wrote:

"bobby could see beyond his own grass to the love at the end of an impossible task."

That's a powerful line. I like "beyond his own grass" as poetry. And "the love at the end of an impossible task" confounds and comforts me.

Back on the 35 North to Minneapolis, we arrived in the early morning at the apartment of Louise Bach, our #1 fan, who'd written and offered to put us up. We slept for a couple of hours before heading over to the U of M where we would play for students while they ate lunch in a cafeteria.

We were both about a year away from having our first child.

Despite the occasional good gig or nice write-up on the road, we, mostly, wandered in obscure shadows. Underated underdogs. Maybe we were comfortable there but it didn't sustain us. We concluded our first tour by blowing off gigs in Providence and Cinnncinatti and heading for home.

chris

vote for klitschko for mayor
ccc
-

cassius
-