My name is Keegan McInroe, and I am a singer-songwriter from Lubbock who’s been living in Fort Worth off and on since 2001 when I began my four years of study at Texas Christian University. Over the course of my ten-plus years writing, performing, and recording original music, I’ve played hundreds of shows and traveled thousands of miles throughout the United States and Europe. My latest tour is a four month trek and ramble north, east, south, and west around the Old World. Whether you’re a fellow musician, a fellow traveler, or simply a reader who loves a good tale from the road, Texas Troubadour Abroad –– my bi-weekly travelogue published here on the Weekly’s website –– will have something for you.
“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.” — Oscar Wilde
It’s nearly three in the afternoon. Outskirts of Dublin. I’m at a friend’s house shaking off yesterday’s wake. When someone is born in Ireland: You go to the pub. When someone marries: You go to the pub. When someone dies: You go to the pub.
And you stay there. And when you get home, you polish off a full bottle of bourbon and sing songs and play guitars and dance. Maybe someone breaks a glass and maybe someone cuts their foot open. And maybe there is still blood on the kitchen tile.
The first stirrings of life here are beginning to sound. Full Irish breakfast being prepared. Crackling of the skillet. The smell of meat and coffee. Groanings from various corners. The muffled murmur of an Irish radio news broadcast. A friend informs me there’s been vomiting.
“My God. Is it really 3 ‘o clock?” More groaning.
From the living room couch where I took my rest, I have been aware of the stirrings of life outside for some hours. Cars buzzing. Pedestrians talking. The clicking of horses’ hoofs upon pavement pulling buggies. That familiar, misty, gray Irish light lazily making it’s way through the window.
Tonight will be a rare Saturday off. A friend of a friend is turning 30. There will be pubs.
But now is the calm between storms. A seized opportunity to relay the happenings of the last two weeks.
After my brother and mother and I disembarked in Stockholm all those days back, we met up with Fort Worth bar owner and guitar-picking, harmony-spitting extraordinaire Cody Admire at the train station and boarded the wagon to Oslo. Over the course of the six plus hours west, seven or eight modest-sized bottles of red were taken down.
The night in Oslo was spent with friends from previous tours and many shots of Fernet Branca, beers, and whiskey.
The following day we bid adieu to my brother whose responsibilities back in Texas called him home. Cody, my mom, and I made our way to the next day’s venue, the charming restaurant Lille Herbern, which along with a boat club, is located on a little island with a striking view of Oslo proper.
Cody and I played there last summer. I came and played it again later in the same tour. It’s hard to imagine a more peaceful, beautiful setting to pass the hours or a nicer, lovelier staff to pass them with. Great people. Great environment.
We didn’t leave until the morning after our gig, when Cody and I, due to the early hour of our departure, had to row ourselves, my mother, and all our gear on a little rowboat to the mainland.
We managed to navigate the small expanse of water without any of us falling in. A success, indeed, given our condition: Cody on zero sleep, me on two hours.
Then it was adios to my mother, who went on to do some work in Germany. Cody and I boarded a bus south to Gothenburg.
We played that evening in a fantastic little coffee house, which also serves as a bookstore and music shop, Soulstore Coffee & Moments. Last year, after my performance there, I was gifted a copy of Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man.
This was my introduction to Charles, aside from a few poems and excerpts. It further twisted me, though I would argue the overall effect has certainly been of the good in many respects.
I left this gig with a gifted copy of Post Office.
My Swedish friend Bill Werngren, who frequents Fort Worth in search of Texas’ finest music for his Gothenburg radio show Bill’s Texas Bar was in attendance, as was Irish country-rocker and Gothenburg transplant, Eamonn Dowd.
Two women from Stockholm sporting cabana-boy t-shirts joined whispering of savageries with tickets for the ride in hand and a suitcase full of medicinals, grapefruits, and lizard tails.
Together with Mr. Dowd we took to the streets after the gig until service was refused us. We made for greener pastures. A bartender with come-hither eyes bought Cody a drink. Bukowski, read aloud, provided the evening’s bedtime story.
A human of uncertain sex in full-on chicken costume, beer in hand, strutted nonchalantly along part of our hurried path to the train station the following morning, pulling at the bottle occasionally. We left the chicken unmolested. The chicken left us unmolested. Neither questioned the other for their crossings. It seemed a reasonable character to greet the new day given our night.
Said day’s itinerary was two-fold: first to the city of Nässjö, a couple of hours east of Gothenburg City, to the converted church bar and restaurant Vita Amandi where Cody and I were to provide entertainment for a delicious t-bone steak cook-out; second, further east and south to Vetlanda for a long, late night of tunes to hard-drinkers at the sole pub in town, The Old Barn Corner, complete with tequila, a multitude of helpful intoxicated locals offering their talents on shouted, improvised utterances, Jameson, tequila, a lonely harmonica in a mysterious key played incessantly, India Pale Ales, tequila, a hundred repeated suggestions for our setlist, tequila, and a fretless bass at volume, occasionally in tune and time.
The night ended over a bottle of red in a hotel room sans Bukowski — the next morning began sans beer-swilling chicken. Coincidence?
One of the owners of the new day’s venue, The Tea Room, along with Maya, the boxer, drove the hour plus to retrieve Cody and I and bring us the 100 kilometers or so south to Örsjö. We played two sets to an attentive, appreciative sold out room of 50 people. After I was interviewed by a local paper, 24 Nybro, which did a nice write up of the gig.
The evening was spent there on the property polishing off a box and a half of red over rambling conversations of heartbreak, pain, and woe — well, I told a story.
Then it was back to Stockholm for a gig at Pet Sounds Bar, which was organized with the help of a trusted advisor through a soon-to-be-shaved individual with the Swedish Music Group. There was a woman in a hat whom grabbed attention and might have been grabbed herself, a messy hamburger requiring fork and knife, two free lagers, which became three and a half, whiskey, a double encore, and talk of a possible future — these talks have ceased.
I spent the remainder of the night and following morning and afternoon in bat country with plenty of rope, contemplating Catholic iconography and a Clint Eastwood shower curtain.
Cody and I split ways. I made for the airport where I would fly to London, spend the night sleeping tucked behind a Nero’s Coffee, and travel on to Dublin the following morning. Cody would stay in Stockholm, travel to Oslo the following day, party hard, and meet me in Dublin the day after.
When I arrived in Dublin, I saw a friend from Fort Worth was in town. We passed a magical day pub crawling, Guinness upon Guinness, before sucking down a bottle of Jameson in Phoenix Park, publicly urinating, interpreting auras, mashing up flower bits, painting ourselves with their blood, cursing in French, delving blindfolded into epic Tom Fooleries.
Cody joined me the following day. We played a Make a Wish Foundation event at the Hard Rock Cafe, then picked up a gig at the rock and blues bar Gypsy Rose for my friend Tania Notaro, whose guitar player was M.I.A. Then it was a night on the dirty old town to the wee hours.
Yesterday was the wake. Today is the hangover. Tonight is the party. Tomorrow — tomorrow will reveal itself in good time — but I imagine tomorrow will look something like today.
Keegan McInroe
August 8, 2015
Outskirts of Dublin
