Dammit.

Dammit!

I invested well over an hour in composing a blog, a very important one, and half way through have accidentally deleted the whole damned thing. This has happened before and usually I deal with it by getting up, going away and never writing again about whatever it was I was trying to say.

Not this time. This is much too important and while the best of my writing is now lost I will attempt to quickly reconstruct the most important points here.

Part of the trouble with delivering this important message though, is that there are certain things I am simply not in the position to share yet and when I am in the position to share them, they won't really matter so much anymore.

A conundrum, but then conundrums are a bit of a specialty with me. I shall be oblique in some ways and trust that you take my meaning when all is said and done.

It was 1993 when I moved to Chattanooga and from then 'til now there has usually been at least one venue that supported local musicians.

Usually, but not always. There have been stretches ranging from a few months to a few years when there wasn't a place for local music bums to go and make good. In those times you either made your own place (The Mollys played a St. Patrick's day show at Parkway once, a bar not known for having bands beyond the Strut and New year's... Hell, we played rather unofficially on the deck at Pickle Barrel) Or you just didn't play here, relying on places like Knoxville, Nashville, Huntsville, etc. to provide you with gigs.

As for the venues that did occasionally open their doors here in support of local music (and more importantly diversity...) there have been a few. Something Different, The Scarlet Tanager, The Attic, The Lizard Lounge, Jacob's Ladder, Chameleon... Some did well, others not so much but they all went out of their way to provide opportunities for Chattanooga (and outlying regions) musicians.

But none like the Local. Bonnie has operated the Local Performance Hall for over five years, something of a record for that sort of venue in this city and she has brought in marvelous talent from across the country while never turning her back on the singers and songwriters and thrashers and punks and rappers and emo kids and swamp boogie bands and twangers and freaks and geeks who make up the Chattanooga music scene.

Why, it was just a year and a half ago that some smartass in an Irish cap came in to her bar, ordered a Guinnness and then started hitting her up for a gig.

As I recall my opening gambit wasn't as well chosen as it could have been.

The first thing I asked Bonnie was, "How many people can you fit in here?"

The first thing Bonnie said to me was, "Are you a cop?"

Well, not actually, she really asked if I was the fire marshall but I thought "Are you a cop" would make some of you spray coffee on your screens.

Once we established that we were on the same side of the law (ain't sayin' which) she told me that they were rated for 50 (maybe it was 75) but that the previous weekend they'd had over 200 come through for a show.

Magnificent. Of course it helped that the old Local had a spacious (and oddly smokey) courtyard to handle the overflow.

I didn't get the St. Patrick's Day show that year, it was already booked, but I did get a weekly Sunday night show that The Molly Maguires have done ever since. In fact, in a year and a half we've only missed four shows. Once when I was in Jamaica (and Michael showed up and played so really that doesn't count,) once when the Local was moving and therefore not open, once when I was too sick to stand much less sing or be funny and most recently the Sunday after Roots Fest which in retrospect we should have played as a good many people who do not ordinarily get to come to our Sunday shows were present...

But that leaves a pile of Sundays when we did play and some of those nights were brilliant, were magical really and transcended our actual ability to play. Oh sure, there were off nights as well and nights when the Local saw some drama. There were nights when I sang loud and happy to you while I was dying on the inside from some rather personal and painful events in my own life. There were nights when Mike or Julie were really too sick to be there but played anyway, nights when we might have been overzealous with our pre-show drinking and nights when things just never really clicked but even on the worst of nights there was always something worthwhile to take away and by and large there were far, far more good nights than off ones.

From the stage at The Local I have seen couples get together and I have seen couples break up and when they were happy they sang with us and when they were sad they took comfort in some of our other songs. There was the night when our friend Cam was in a coma and his closest friends in the world came to the show because they're Molly people and so is Cam and it was the right thing to do and we all sang and drank and cheered and cursed our friend, our worries fading for just a while.

Yes, playing every week gave me the opportunity to witness firsthand from the stage tragedies and triumphs and all the while the band played on, playing our part in events however great or small it might have been at any given time.

It gave us a place to practice our particular brand of Irish music too...

Let me explain: Calling any one thing "Irish music" is no more accurate or descriptive than calling any one thing "country music." Country music is justifiably The Carter Family and Hank Williams Sr. but country is also just as much Garth Brooks and Dixie Chicks, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Hayseed Dixie and so on... So it is with Irish music. We are not traditionalist, though we play a good many trad songs. We are not instrumentalists though Michael could be, fingers furiously flying over the frets to deliver jigs and reels. I tease Julie about her other band Olta, but Olta is actually quite a talented band. They play reels and jigs and hornpipes and all sorts of ceilidh music. They're good. Is it Irish? Absolutely. Is it remotely akin to what The Molly Maguires do? Not one whit. Does that mean our tunes aren't Irish? Oh no my dears, that isn't true at all and I have a virtual army of Irish friends who'll support me in that.

Irish music to me has always been a matter of words. The songs we play (and the way we play them) tell stories about love and hate and tragedy and comedy and romance and jilted lovers and war and famine and ultimately about the shared response, the joy, perserverance and indomitable will of a group of people in the face of all of life's adversities...

That is MY Irish music and that is what the Mollys are to me and that's what Sunday at The Local has been.

It's the craic.

Don't know what craic is? You do if you're Irish. You do if you've attended a good Molly show. You do if you've ever been in the company of friends and loved ones and strangers who do not remain strangers for long and you have laughed and forgotten your troubles for a while while you danced and sang in the warmth, light and brotherhood of the moment. But don't take my word, go google the word craic and then know that The Molly Maguires live for it, and The Local has helped us stir it up.

I have been to a good many Irish pubs and so-called Irish pubs. The best of them were in Donegal in my opinion but there have been some fine ones, even in Tennessee. There have also been some shitty sports bars that sprinkled some "Irish-ey" looking stuff around the place, gave themselves a clever name and somehow billed themselves as "authentic."

Sure. And Ian Paisley is going for his confirmation next week...

I do not patronize such places and WILL NOT play in one, but I said all that to say this:

On Sunday nights, the Local is and has been as authentic an Irish pub as you'll ever find. It isn't about the trappings, the furnishings, the cutesy names and pictures and crazy crap hanging on the walls. It is about the feeling of the place, the staff, the patrons... The sense of community, the extended family of humans that we all are deep down, the sharing of good times despite the bad times that haunt us.

All this and much much more is what The Local has been for The Molly Maguires and our fans and friends. Not a bar, but home.

If you have EVER been a part of this, if you know what I mean by all of this, then Sunday night, June 10th 2007 you need to be at The Local around 8:30 or 9 p.m.

If you have NEVER been a part of this then Sunday night, June 10th 2007 you need to be at The Local around 8:30 or 9 p.m.

If you have ever cared about local music, local artists or the people who try to provide somewhere for those people to be, come to The Local this Sunday night, June 10th, 2007.

If you respect and appreciate small business owners who offer something besides the mainstream, cookie cutter fare that corporate pre-fabs offer, come to the Local this Sunday.

Come to The Local this Sunday. Bring your whiskey or whatever suits you. Bring money to buy Bonnie's beer and put in her tip jar. Bring money because The Molly Maguires will have CDs (old and new) T-shirts and our brand new laser etched shot glasses (which we will be selling cheaper there than at Riverbend...) Bring your cameras as well.

If you were ever going to come to a Molly show at The Local Performance Hall, come this Sunday. If you simply cannot because of time or distance, well, we'll drink a few for you and sing a song for our absent friends.

If you don't come out because you're kinda tired and you don't feel like fooling with it this time around and you'll just catch the show next time, well, we'll see...

All good things my friends.

All good things.

We Molly types love you fans and friends and lovers who put up with us, who enjoy what we do, who lend your voices to our music.

We love Bonnie too, and JW and Jen and Ada and Adam and Ellen and Doug and Bart and everyone who makes the Local happen. And we love the Local itself, the notion of a bar where everyone can be comfortable, where everyone can feel welcome, where artists and poets and musicians and other associated weirdos can have a voice in a community that doesn't always care about hearing from artists and poets and musicians and other associated weirdos.

This Sunday night friends and lovers.

It will be a memorable evening, maybe the most memorable evening.

I'll see you there.

I'll be the guy with the Guinness.