Chapter 2. Joan Rivers, Comedienne.

Joan Rivers stared at the gun in her hand. She realised suicide wasn’t simply some vague concept but had become “a definite reality, a viable option” after her husband of 21-years, Edgar Rosenberg, had killed himself, and that now it could become a reality again. But just as Rivers was about to pull the trigger a pet dog leapt onto her lap and she immediately snapped out of that suicidal mode by thinking, “no one will take care of this disgusting old dog if I go!”
Better still, Rivers not only pulled herself back from contemplating suicide, she swore she’d fight her way out of the “morass” that had engulfed her life during the late 1980’s. And it was a morass. Look at it this way. Apart from losing a husband, Rivers also had become estranged from their daughter who blamed her for his death; she was “black-listed” by NBC TV; told by the powers-that-be in Las Vegas “no one wants to see a person whose husband killed himself” and “totally” broke.
In fact, Joan is “still paying off” a $37 million debt that arose after her “comeback”, which might help explain why this “most brilliant comic mind, a woman for our own sceptical times,” as one critic called her, is still gigging at the age of 71. I know, a gentleman isn’t supposed to disclose a lady’s age but given that this particular lady readily admits that her current greatest “uphill fight” is against ageism I do so only to show how remarkable her current achievements are – such as netting a new show on Channel 5.
Then again, Rivers has always been engaged in some kind of “uphill fight” to prove herself. For example, part of the woman’s original impulse to perform stems from the fact that she was so often called “a fat little pig” as a child. However Joan’s “epiphany” in this sense came about when she was “eight or so”, telling a tale to some friends of her father and realised they were laughing not at but with her. Yet, why would these men have been laughing at the Brooklyn-born Joan Rivers – or Molinsky, as she was known then – in the first place?
“Because I was a little fat, not particularly outgoing, ugly child and the butt of everyone’s jokes!” she replies, sitting in her room at London’s Ritz Hotel. “But that day I was on a fishing trip with my dad, who was a doctor, and all his friends were really enjoying my story about my teacher and it was such as rush for me because I realised ‘I am the focal point in this. I am controlling this. I love it’!”
Rivers has said: “comedy is a medium for revenge. We can deflate and punish the pomposity and the rejection that hurt us. Comedy is power. Comedy is control.” Therefore, she “totally” understands why humour laced with sarcasm is “almost a second language in Ireland” given that we’ve been “put down” by the British for so long. This tendency is also “a defining feature” of Jewish humour.
“Why do you think two-thirds of comedians in our country come from a Jewish background?” she says. “And that tendency towards the put-down is a form of getting back at people. But a lot of the time it’s getting back before they get at you, making the joke before they do, about you. That’s certainly what a lot of my humour is all about.”
Even so, the “put down” was not part of Joan’s family life in terms of the way her Russian immigrant parents spoke to their two children.
“The opposite was the case, my mother told myself and my sister we were the most beautiful things in the world and then we got one hell of a shock when we ‘came out’ socially!” she says. “So she ruined us by seeing nothing wrong with us, never correcting us, saying we were perfect. That just didn’t prepare us for the real world. As far as our parents were concerned we were the stars of the universe so it was bound to hit hard when you get into the real world and are told, ‘you’re not pretty – you’re just fat little pig’!”
That’s why, all these years later, Joan is still trying to recover her position as a “star” of the universe, right?
“Probably!” she responds, laughing.
But, seriously, didn’t Rivers also once say that part of the “power” of comedy is that “we can get the love and the admiration and the attention we bottomlessly crave.” So, is this really her psychology at a core level?
“Maybe that is what I’m still striving for,” she muses, falling uncharacteristically silent for a moment. Either way, Joan “always set her sights on” on becoming a performer, though at first, she chose to be an actress rather than comedienne.
“I still see myself, primarily, as an actress,” she says. “’I’ve just filmed the last episode of Nip/Tuck but I’m not playing Joan Rivers, it’s a straight acting role and I just loved sitting round with the actors discussing acting techniques. And back in college, all I was aiming for was to become an actress so I appeared in nearly every school production. But because my parents were first generation Russian immigrants, their goal was all about bettering themselves, getting their children a college education and so on. And my sister was the youngest woman graduate from the Columbia Law School so that’s the pattern I was expected to follow.
“In other words, if I had said back in 1958, ‘I want to become the world’s best surgeon and that will take 22 years of training’ my parents would have said ‘wonderful.’ But I told them ‘I want to be an actress’ and they said ‘are you out of your mind?’ then, basically, disowned me. I remember a year where no one spoke to me and I lived in my car until I got a job. There had been a terrible scene and I stormed out of home one September and didn’t come back until the next. Then, my parents gave me six months to establish myself, which didn’t work, but slowly, what I was doing became more acceptable to them and thankfully, both lived to see me succeed after I got my break on The Johnny Carson Show. And late in life my mother did say, ‘I used to just worry whether or not you could take care of yourself, but now I don’t worry anymore’ which was so gratifying for me to hear.”
However, Joan’s “break” didn’t occur until 1965 by which point she’d already spent these seven years struggling, first as an actress in off-Broadway productions (“so far ‘off’ they were in New Jersey!”) and then when she changed her career having been told she’d have a better chance “doing comedy.” Her “fellow struggling” peers at the time were the likes of Woody Allen and Richard Pryor. But River’s “real turning point” came when she saw Lenny Bruce perform and was hit by the revelation that “personal truth can be the foundation of comedy and that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy” – an aesthetic that remains central to her stage act.
“But it is not outrageousness for outrageousness sake, it’s knowing that in order to make your point you sometimes have to shake people up”, she explains. “And Lenny Bruce did that by going for the bare bones of whatever he was talking about, which is what I try to do. And looking back on those years when I was struggling I realise there was a great sense of camaraderie because you were accepted by that group and no one looked down on you in that group.”
Surely, Joan also was eaten up by her bottomless craving for love, admiration, and attention.“
Always,” she admits. “But there was nothing else to do. It was like a religious calling. And there would always be an audience you’d connect with and they would love you and you could live on that. One great night, out of ten, would help so much.
Even so, nothing helped Joan as much as hearing Johnny Carson say “you’re going to be a star” while he was still laughing at her act.
“Carson was so big in those days that when he said he believed in you all the doors flew open so that absolutely changed my life”, she explains.
Clearly, it did. Within a few years Rivers was a guest presenter on Carson’s show, had a small part (“very Chaplinesque – I played a tramp!”) in the movie The Swimmer, co-wrote the Broadway play, Fun City and moved “into a beautiful colonial home in Bel Air.” Then she penned the TV movie The Girl Most Likely and wrote and directed her first feature film, Rabbit Test. By 1983 Rivers also was a headliner in Vegas, had produced a Grammy-nominated comedy album, published two best-selling books and finally got her own TV series, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers. But then everything went wrong. How? To answer that question we must flashback in time and shift the spotlight to Joan’s love life. After graduating from College, her “flair for fashion” and “a padded bra and tight sweater!” got her a job at Bond’s store in New York where she met and soon married its Vice President. So, was that, even in part, to please her parents?
“Yes because that’s what was expected of us – to graduate and marry,” she says. “That’s what all my friends did. And for the whole period I was married, I didn’t even go to the theatre; I put all those dreams away. Yet after six months I left the marriage, went home to my parents and said, ‘I’ve done what I’m supposed to do and it doesn’t work, now I’m going to do what I want to do’ and that’s when I told them I wanted to act.”
Did the break-up of that marriage wound Rivers romantically?
“Oh no”, she responds. “It was more like going to the electric chair and the warden calls at the last minute and says ‘she can live’! But even on the day I was getting married, I didn’t know why. I just stood there in my white dress and said to my sister, ‘can you believe this?’ So, it was ill fated from the start. And I do feel sorry for the man involved because he had no idea he was marrying this miserable girl!
Rivers, however, was far from miserable around the time she met Edgar Rosenberg. But then only months beforehand she’d gotten that break from Carson who also, in fact, recommended Rivers to Rosenberg – a TV producer with a script that needed rewrites. They were married within four days of their first meeting which does suggest that they were deeply in love from the start.
“We were deeply in like,” says Joan, correcting me. So when did ‘like’ evolve to ‘love’ if it did? “Well, the marriage lasted 21 years so it obviously worked and he was a terrific husband and we had a great time together and had our daughter, Melissa, who was born in 1968 so everything was going our way for a long time. But then he had a heart attack, at 51 that sent him into tremendous depression. Then we got our own show, The Late Show, and he was fighting Rupert Murdoch, who owned Fox TV. My husband thought he was going to beat Murdoch, but you don’t beat Murdoch. At one point he and Murdoch were butting heads for seven months then they brought me in and said ‘you can stay, all these stories being printed about the show failing are lies, the numbers are fine, but your husband has to go.’ I knew how mentally upset he was so I said ‘if he goes, I go’ never thinking they’d say, ‘then tomorrow is your last show.’ Yet they did. And my husband knew it was his fault and killed himself three weeks later. Direct cause and effect.”
Nevertheless, Joan also admits that during those three weeks she was “very angry” at Rosenberg and not a “wonderful wife” at home.
“I can’t say I was being gracious, I was trying to be but, believe me, I was so angry,” she says, “because it was totally his fault, as I saw it, then. In fact, I thought we were going to separate because I’d said, ‘if you don’t get help I’m out of here. You’ve already ruined my career, so if you don’t get help I’m leaving.’ Then one day he went to Philadelphia and committed suicide, which I’d never even imagined he might do. But I’m still so angry at him.”
When Joan got the call saying her husband had killed himself, did she feel guilty?
“Of course!” she responds. “There was a tremendous feeling of ‘I did this.’ But, actually, I didn’t get that call. My daughter did. Some son of a bitch told her. She was 16 and the Philadelphia police called, said, ‘is your mother home?’ She told them, ‘no’ and they said, ‘well, please tell her your father killed himself.’ So, she had to come and tell me. It was devastating for her.”
Equally devastating was the fact that Rosenberg had phoned Melissa and said, “I’m coming home tomorrow” just before killing himself.
“So Melissa had to deal with all those demons of ‘what didn’t I say, what could I have said that might have changed things?’ and she still feels that way,” claims Joan. “That’s why I’m still so angry at him, for what he did to our daughter – to say that to her, then hang up and kill himself. I go around lecturing, these days, on suicide and know that someone has to be desperately unhappy to do it – so unhappy they don’t think about the pain of the people around them – but I’m also all about survivors and I think it’s okay to be angry. Apart from the grief, the anguish and all the mixed emotions you have I even think its okay to be furious at that person until the day you die.”
Joan earlier said she and Edgar were “deeply in like” so did his suicide cancel out love, can she tell me, now, she still loves the man?
“I did love him but do I love him now?” she responds, pausing. “No. Someone said to me recently, ‘when you die and get to heaven you’ll see Edgar’ and I said, ‘I’ll kill the fucker all over again for what he did to my daughter, what he did to us’ – and I would fucking kill him.”
Patently part of River’s rage in relation to her husband’s suicide is rooted in the fact that her daughter later said, “you could have saved daddy” and then stopped talking to her for a year. Joan then discovered that she herself she was penniless.
“During the last week of his life my husband invested all our money into terrible things so it all went down the tubes” she says. “So on top of everything else I was broke and just couldn’t get a job.”
That’s when Joan contemplated suicide.
“Suicide is just a concept until it comes into your family,” she suggests. “Then it does become a definite reality and a choice. If somebody in your family commits suicide you think, ‘I can do this, it’s a viable option.’ And there was one point when I was so low I did have a gun and then this little dog, Spike, who’s just died…”
Joan pauses, murmurs “there I go” then reaches for a tissue to dab the tears at the edge of her eyes.
“Actually, Spike, came over and jumped on my lap and that made me think ‘no one will take care of this disgusting old dog if I go!”
But surely, Joan Rivers, of all people, can also see the black humour in this story and should perhaps – and I say this with all due respect to herself and the dog – call her next volume of autobiography, The Disgusting Mutt that Saved My Life!
“Maybe I will!” she says, laughing and crunching up that tissue. “But that night was another turning point because having decided not to kill myself I did set out to build back up my life and career. So, I went out and started working again in tiny clubs, which was hard. When you’ve been playing to 5,000 people and suddenly you’re saying ‘thank you’ to 70 in a club in Toronto and they aren’t particularly thrilled to see you, you really have to draw on your inner resources. But I stuck at it, partly because I didn’t want my daughter to have to say her two parents gave in. Yet it took me ten years to get back to where I had been.”
At which point “everything crashed again, though less so” when “the ageism factor came in”, Joan lost her daytime talk show “because they wanted someone younger” and her QVC TV Classics Collection jewellery company “went public and the guy who took it public with me absconded with $37 million and the rights to my name and likeness.” Rivers had “signed everything away” after being promised she’d get rich.
“So after that I had to start yet again and I’m still paying off that debt,” she says. “But the real uphill fight now is against ageism and I only now, recently, got my own television show again, on Channel 5, in Britain.”
All of which leads to a question I wasn’t going to raise with Joan Rivers because nowadays, as in her childhood, she too often is the butt of jokes though now it’s about her face-lifts. But, presumably, in part to fight ageism Joan has had extensive plastic surgery on her face and body.
“Every actress does it” she responds. “Look at Michelle Pfeiffer, who is so beautiful, but she’s given mother roles now. That’s just the business we’re in. It is youth-obsessed. Yet I also would say to any woman, or man, if you hate your nose, work three jobs to fix it, do whatever to your body that makes you happy. But, definitely, I still am fighting ageism every day, in any way I can. But doesn’t Joan ever feel it’s time to relax even retire?
“And do what?” she asks. “I’d be funny if my daughter was giving a luncheon, I’d rather be funny in Dublin on a stage!”
But what about Joan’s love life; does she currently have a lover?
“Yes, since Edgar died I had two major relationships and I am involved now.”
That, then, is what Joan could “do”!
“These men are getting older!” she says, quite seriously. “And, to tell you the truth, I am in limbo right now because I feel I don’t fit in with old people and I don’t fit in with young people, though that is good for comedy.”
Meaning? That “fitting in” can lead to the curse of complacency for any creative artist?
“Exactly, and then you are dead, on a creative level,” says Rivers. “Likewise, when they start saying you are ‘beloved’ you’re really screwed! As in, when they say, here’s so-and-so, we’ve loved her for years.’ Forget that! No matter what age you are get out there and knock a home run out of the ballpark! That’s what I still want to do. And I probably always will.”
So, for Joan Rivers her upcoming gig at the Gaiety is no less a matter of do-or-die than her first gig nearly 50 years ago?
“It’s exactly the same,” she says. “Even the producer on my new Channel 5 series said ‘we’ve never seen a producer so involved!’ Of course, I’m involved! This is my show.”
See what I mean about Rivers still needing to be the “star” of her universe? But she also has claimed that her daughter is “the centre” of her life. So have Joan and Melissa resolved their differences in relation to Edgar’s suicide, has her daughter ever said, “mom, I now understand and forgive you?”
“I don’t think those differences will ever be fully resolved,” says Joan. “I think there will always be an undercurrent in relation to unresolved problems Melissa has in terms of her father’s suicide. But she did say, on a 20/20 TV show in America, ‘now that I’m older I understand’ and she has come to grips with that better than ever before.”
So, which does Joan Rivers see as her greatest achievement, her career, or daughter?
“I always say I have two children and they’re both my greatest achievements,” she responds. “And at the end of the day, I am very proud of both Melissa and my career.”

“Will you phone Joseph and tell him the news [that Elvis is dead]. I haven’t the heart to tell him, I know that Elvis was Joseph’s life.”
(Phyllis Jackson, mother of Joe Jackson, speaking to his girlfriend on August 16th 1977).

“A man’s life is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those one or two great, and simple, images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
(Albert Camus).

“As long as a man has the strength to dream/He can redeem his soul and fly.”
(Elvis Presley reinterpreting W. Earl Brown’s lyric for If I Can Dream).

Author’s Note. Elvis Never Left the Building.

Elvis’s death gave birth to my life long dream of becoming a journalist. It was a dream he helped inspire. But even back in the summer of 1977, after my first three articles about the king – one about how central he’d been to me, as a fan, since I was nine, one about his music and one about his legacy were published – I said to my girlfriend, ”it’s like he gave me one last gift before he was buried. But I’d gladly give it back to have him alive.”
Nearly thirty-five years alter I’d still say much the same thing. Despite the fact that Elvis played a similar role in re-launching my career in 1985, after I left journalism in order to write an earlier, unpublished, version of this book, and he has been, a kind of spiritual mentor on many occasions since. But then, a spirit guide, above all else, is what Elvis has always been to me, even if this is something I realised relatively recently thanks, in part, to one of three interviews I did with Sam Phillips.
Even so, as someone who has been an Elvis fan since I was ‘knee high to hi-fi’, as I once wrote, I understand that 99.9% of fellow fans will want to read about the king and not about one of his “subjects.” Namely, a relative nobody like me! But here’s the deal on that. It is likely that 100% of the people I interview in this book, from those who knew Elvis, such as Sam, DJ Fontana, Gordon Stoker, to those who never met the man, like Bono, Nick Cave, Dory Previn, would not have opened up to me if I wasn’t the fan I am.
In fact, Gordon Stoker said to me at one point, “I am enjoying our conversation because it’s clear to me you truly care about Elvis and you sure do know his music!” All of which is why I include, in this book, one chapter plus, from that twenty-five chapter memoir. It highlights how Elvis evolved from being to me at first simply the ‘King of Pop’ – or ‘Pop World King’ as I called him in a childhood poem – into an emotional, psychological, and spiritual imperative. It also shows why, on the night he died, my mother got it right when she said, “’Elvis was Joseph’s life.” And why the psychic rupture caused by his death led me to write a memoir then embark on the pilgrimage of sorts, which sits at the soul of the articles that are in this book. It is my way of Working on the Building, dealing with the king’s death and of helping to keep him alive. So you see, Elvis never left the building.

Preface. Lucky Jackson.

‘I must be the luckiest life-long Elvis fan on the planet, the envy of millions, ‘Lucky Jackson’, that’s me!’ That’s what I have often thought. Think about it this way, flashback with me. I’m nine years old, watching GI Blues for the first time, ‘discovering’ Elvis and fascinated by the way all the girls in the cinema scream and seem to become delirious even when he says “huh” during a song. I knew next to nothing about him and until today I thought he was named after a herb, and called ‘Elvis Parsley.’ So, how can I know that the guy sitting behind him, as he sings Shoppin’ Around, is his drummer, DJ Fontana?
Fast-forward nearly thirty years. I’m sitting in the kind of hotel/motel room in Nashville where Elvis stayed while recording countless classics and meditated before recording his comeback LP, as far as I am concerned, plus, one of my favourites LPs, How Great Thou Art, and I’m interviewing, as a professional journalist, the drummer on both those sessions, and more, DJ. Am I All Shook Up? You bet. But I’m trying not to show it, must retain my image as a Mr. Cool, even though inside I feel like that nine-year-old boy who, by the end of GI Blues, was deliriously reply to Elvis’s call, Didja Ever? Indeed, I almost scream in delight after I slyly cajole DJ into talking about the sessions for I Need Your Love Tonight. It was the first Elvis single I owned and introduced me to rock ‘n’ roll.

“I’d no problem with Buddy Harman coming in, starting with those sessions, to supplement my percussion work. Elvis still was pushing for that ‘bigger sound.’ But to me, ‘bigger’ sometimes meant less, so Buddy and I would sit down and talk through a song like I Need Your Love Tonight, and work out where not to play, when to let Elvis’s voice ride out its own rhythms. Then, I’d often lay down just the basic beat and say to Buddy, ‘you fill in the bridge.’ Sometimes, eye contact during later sessions was enough to keep two sets of drums going. And, in time when Hal Blaine and people like that would join us on those movie soundtracks, we’d sometimes have four, five drummers all working on congas, bongo and such, and the more we had the more Elvis liked it.”

Even typing up that quote twenty three years after the interview, gives me a thrill because it reminds me of a diary entry I wrote in 1970, in which, after listening to, arguably, Elvis’s greatest blues recording – and the next song I cajoled DJ into talking about – Reconsider Baby, I said the following. ‘I wish I had a time machine like Rod Taylor had in that movie and could go back and sit in on the sessions for Elvis Is Back, or the Sun cuts, or King Creole, or How Great Thou Art or maybe, best of all, From Elvis in Memphis. Not sure which I’d pick, but what a dream!’ Now I had my ‘time machine’ and I was sitting in on those sessions, in a sense, and delighting in every moment.
Think of it this way. The first time I saw GI Blues, sang alone with Wooden Heart and had maybe my first out-of-body experience I didn’t know I also was singing with the Jordanaires. In fact, I’d never even heard of the Jordanaires, and on my tenth birthday when my father gave me that 78 of I Need Your Love Tonight, and I read on the record label, ‘ELVIS PRESLEY with the Jordanaires’ I said to him, “that must be his band!”
Fast-forward nearly three decades and I’m in a hotel room in Dublin, Ireland, my homeland, interviewing Gordon Stoker, first tenor with the Jordanaires. Not long after hearing I Need Your Love Tonight I learned that they were, in fact his vocal group, and far more recently agreed with music critic Roy Carr who said the ‘synthesis of voices’ on A Fool Such As I, the B-side of that single, was ‘as close to perfection as its likely to get.’ But I also knew that the Jordanaires were a gospel quartet and so, the sessions I felt almost religiously inclined to ask Gordon about, were the sessions Elvis did for His Hand In Mine, the LP that introduced me to the king’s gospel music, and gospel music in general. It also was the first collection of songs that did for me, at fourteen, during a time of family trauma, what the LP sleeve notes said such songs had always done for Elvis – gave me ‘a sense of spiritual ease.’ To his day, those songs still serve that blessed purpose for me. Maybe that’s why, while listening to Gordon speak about one of my favourite tracks, I had a moment that could be compared to the one he was talking about.

“He was pulling in songs from all directions, blues, pop, jazz, rock, semi-operatic” said Stoker, referring specifically to the recording sessions for Elvis Is Back. “He was so hungry to try find something new, to prove himself again and find his voice, his soul, as a singer, particularly following so soon after the death of his mother, which affected him so deeply. But I believe he really only tuned into that experience, in depth, when we did the His Hand In Mine album, a little later. Known Only To Him, from that album is one of the guy’s greatest recordings, ever, because it is the story of what Elvis was thinking, and dreaming of, even at that stage of his life. He really believed that lyric. No one could have given the performance he did of that song if he hadn’t felt every word. We watched him being transformed as he sang, ‘I know not what the future holds/But I know who holds the future/It’s a secret known only to him.’ He was talking about the Lord, of course, and I believe, it was his faith at that point that pulled him through.’

While typing those words, I could almost see, and certainly feel Elvis being transformed as he sang, Known Only To Him. It gave me shivers, thanks to Gordon and, I believe, the continuing spirit of the king. And if you reacted the same way that’s probably simply because you, like me, love the man. But while I’m on this “religious kick” to use, tongue in cheek, a phrase the patently, spiritually insensitive Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, once used to dismiss Elvis’s life-long spiritual search, and hunger, let me turn to the last in this preface of my representative trinity of interviewees. Sam Phillips.
In fact, try to think of the first of my three interviews with Phillips, the ‘Founding Father of Rock ‘n’ Roll,’ and one of my great influences, as another glorious moment when the dreams of a child, which were originally fired by Presley and Phillips, in the same year, 1961, somehow magically came true for me as an adult. And I do believe there was magic involved. Because even though I did set out on the pilgrim path of an Elvis fan, in response to his death, his death, to track down the likes of DJ, Gordon, and Sam, none of these interviews were commissioned by any publication, and all came about as a result of my hound dogged, or Presley obsessive, same thing, persistence. Flashback.
It’s October 7th 1961, I’m reading Valentine, a girl’s comic, because on its cover it says, ‘THIS IS ELVIS. Now it can be told…the fabulous life-story of a fabulous’ guy, and given that I still know next to nothing about Elvis this is a story I need to be told So, I devour the comic and discover how Elvis got his break. He was a truck driver and ‘one day, he stopped his truck and walked into a record shop to make an amateur recording.’
Six months later, however, I read The Elvis Presley Story and discovered that it was not a record shop the king walked into, it was the ‘Sun Recording Studio’, its president, ‘Sam Phillips, saw the boy had possibilities’ and let him cut, That’s All Right Mama. Reading that, aged ten, I decided I’d loved to meet Sam and thank him for giving Elvis that break.
It may have taken me nearly thirty years to do so, but at the end of our first interview, which had lasted nearly three hours and took place in his home in Memphis, Tennessee, to which “Mr. Phillips” had personally invited me, I did make a point of thanking him. So, what did I say, exactly? Well, first, here is how I concluded the subsequent article:

‘Sam Phillips had no regrets. Summing up nearly twenty years as owner of teh world’s most famous and influential recording studio, he again stressed that his real and finest legacy is that he gave poor, Southern boys like Elvis and Howlin’ Wolf – black and white – a world wide stage from which they could express themselves and in so doing, similarly influence others. “That is exactly what I did, Joe. And y’know, as much as I loved, and still love, the music, that is what I want to be remembered for.”’

After hearing Sam wrap up our marathon rap session, which had at times gotten quite combative – I may be an Elvis fan and he was the ‘founding father of rock ‘n’ roll’ but when it comes to my quest for truth I take no prisoners, as you shall see – I had to say,
“Mr. Phillips, I may not come from the Southern States of America, at least not physically! And I never became a musician, but, spiritually, I sure as hell am one of those poor kids you helped give a voice to and I thank you from my heart for doing so.” How many of us get to thank our childhood heroes? Few, I suspect. And it got better than that.
In fact, Sam, suitably enough, sent me sunward, in terms of what happened next. At that point in my career as an interviewer, which was relatively new, The Irish Times – which I’d soon start working for, and provide weekly music interviews for a decade – claimed that an Irish rock magazine was ‘noted for its probing interview conducted by’ me, referring specifically to my sometimes 12,000 word long Q & A interviews with politicians. Sam had read one such article, and agreed to do the interview on the basis that I take the “socio-political tilt” on his tale as I had promised. But when our interview was over, and I said I intended to “structure our interview in a Q & A format” which “might capture more truthfully the nuances of,” his voice, Sam suggested otherwise.

“No, boy, I like your mind” he said, as we stood eyeball to eyeball. “I got a good feeling about where you are coming from on all this. I want you to write down what you think, and what you feel about everything I told you today. Then you can say, and tell people, whether you think I am a lying bastard or not. I want you to interpret my story.”

In other words, Phillips wanted me to write up our interview as a narrative story. As I say in the introduction to my book, In Search of the Soul of Sun Records, I knew at that moment then when Sam told me he wanted me to “interpret” and to “feel” his story, he was, fundamentally, telling me to “sing” this textual equivalent of a song, my own way. I also knew that this was, again, fundamentally, the same advice he’d given to all the musicians he’d recorded, including Elvis, the night they set on tape, That’s All Right Mama. Meaning, Phillips was, in effect, “producing” my article, which was fine by me.
See why I say this was one of those glorious moments when childhood dreams – and more so, dreams I never dared to dream – came true? I even included in the published interview Sam’s tendency to call me by my first name, which gave me an added thrill. Usually, not always, I keep myself out of articles and I have even gone on-the-record, in the preface of a book I published in 1996, saying I despise ‘journalists who assume themselves to be more important than the people they write about, and who, in effect, endlessly make love to little more than their own egos through other people.’ But this time, for Sam the man, I cut myself some flak in terms of that high-minded aesthetic.
And it is high-minded, I know. How do I know? Elvis told me, in a sense, or, at least led me in that direction. Not long after interviewing Phillips, for the first time in 1989, I read Larry Geller’s book, If I Can Dream. I loved it, even though he’d beaten me to the punch by using the title of the Elvis song that I’d made my anthem twenty years earlier and hoped to use as the tile for my Elvis book. I loved, in particular, the section about
in which he reveals that before meditating in a Nashville motel prior to recording the How Great Thou Art album, Elvis said the following. Or, at least, so, Larry Geller claims.

“Millions of people around the world are going to hear this album. It’s going to touch people in ways we can’t imagine. And I know this album is ordained by God Himself. This is God’s message, and I’m His channel. Only I can’t be a channel if my ego is there. I have to empty myself so that the channel is totally clear and the message is heard loud and clear. Let’s sit down, close our eyes, and meditate. I’m not going to move out of this chair until I’m guided by that still, small voice within.”

I wondered then, and I still wonder, how much of this is actually Elvis speaking and how much is Geller, his spiritual advisor, speaking through Elvis, egotistically, or otherwise? Nevertheless, as someone who often had this sense of hearing a ‘small, still voice within’, long before I heard Elvis refer to a similar ‘small voice’ in his recording, We Can Make The Morning, I was instinctively drawn to this concept. And this I say, even though at the time I read Geller’s book, it had been twelve years since I found my fifty-year-old father after he fell to his death, largely because of his secret addiction to the kind of pills that helped kill Elvis nine months earlier, and I was still battling with my concept of God. But I’d never lost my faith in working towards the greater good of people, which had been crystallised for me when I first heard Elvis sing, If I Can Dream.
So, after reading that quote, I decided to try, no matter how ludicrous an aspiration this may have seemed for a so-called ‘celebrity interviewer’ – I see myself more as an ‘interviewer of celebrities’, it’s not the same thing, thankfully – to likewise try to rid myself of ego and become a ‘channel’ through which other peoples’ stories could be told. I know, now I probably have you All Shook Up – with laughter! But to paraphrase the title of another of the king’s songs that seem to linger permanently on the tip of my tongue, If I’m A Fool…for setting my hopes so high then that’s just what I want to be.
Yet, to end, let me tell you where I got the idea for my memoir, which was originally comprised of diary entries, poetry and images of Elvis, before it evolved into the book you now hold in your hand. On August 18th 1977, my girlfriend and I were watching on TV in Dublin, a news report about Elvis’s funeral, and both wishing we could be in Memphis to pay our last respects. At one point, we had the following exchange.
“You are lucky, Joe!”
“Yeah, ‘Lucky Jackson’, that’s me! And that was his name in the movie Love in Las Vegas. I remember, and at the age of fourteen, writing Elvis a letter telling him that when he used the name ‘Jackson’ it gave me a big thrill but that my favourite among his movie names was ‘Johnny Tyrone’! See? Ever since Elvis died, I am being bombarded night and day, especially at night, by memories like that.”
“And that’s what I was going to say. You have all these wonderful memories of Elvis going back to when you were a child whereas I was only introduced to the man’s music, over the past two years, because of you. I wish I had all those memories before it all turned into a tragedy, and I bet that millions of people do.”
“Ok, maybe I will write a book about my Elvis memories for you and then you can let all those millions read it too!”
I was half-joking but later that night I began writing the book, partly because my girlfriend’s comment reminded me two things. Firstly, the closing speech another king,, King Arthur – or rather actor Richard Harris, who would later ask me to become his biographer, how that’s for a dream coming true? – gave in Camelot, and the title song, both of which say, ‘don’t let it be forgot.’ And, secondly a quote by Albert Camus, which I first read in 1972 and have always believed to be true. Namely, ‘A man’s life is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover thought the detours of art those one, or two, great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’ What follows is part of my life, and part of my slow trek, to rediscover through the detours of my art, the earliest memories I have of my heart being opened in the presence of that, ‘great and simple image,’ Elvis.

Joe Jackson, Dublin, April 13th 2012

It now is Sunday January 22nd. For the record here is the quote, which I have on tape, and that Louis since the book was published, says he never made. He now claims he never took cocaine or smoked hash. I shall broadcast this quote to prove this is precisely what Louis told me in 1997. After that section there follows one of the previously unpublished Out Takes

Joe: Before Boyzone, did you ever get depressed at not seeing any way out of the quagmire?
Louis: Yes, terribly, because I didn’t have money to pay my bills.
J: But you seem always to be quite up, jolly. With all due respect, some would say you are superficial!
L: I don’t think I am. It just so happens I don’t talk about my problems to anyone and the reason I wasn’t broken by it all is that I still love the music. But I definitely was looking for a way out, something new, some way to finally make money.
J: Did you drink at that point?
L: I’m just a social drinker, basically.
J: Ever do drugs?
L: I did cocaine a few times, about ten years ago, did absolutely nothing for me made me even more hyper than I am. And now I’m actually anti-drugs because I’ve seen them screw up to many people. I was a bit more open then. That’s why I don’t go along with the Hot Press line of “legalise them” because they’re safe, or “cool.” They’re not. Look at Phil Lynott. [Lead singer with Thin Lizzy, who died at 36 from complications probably caused by lon- term drug abuse]. I remember Phil as always being a star in Dublin, because he was black and I saw him once in the Bailey and he was dressed all in black looked great. So, I am totally against drugs now. I’ve never taken E or any of that.
J: Hash?
L: Tried it once, got sick! There’s more to do in life, like walking, reading, enjoying it all that way.
J: But you don’t read, Louis!
L: I read all the magazines, from Billboard, to Arena.
J: Yes, but do you have interests outside pop music?
L: Probably not. Nothing as great, though I love movies and occasionally read a book.
J: So you are the quintessential pop obsessive, in other words an emotional and intellectual retard, Louis!
L: Whatever you say! I probably am! I live in record shops, watch MTV, flick to teletext to get the charts on Sunday. And these days what I love are those female singers, Dusty, Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Dinah Washington. But I’ve no time for the A Woman’s Heart [a compilation of Irish female singers] thing, Mary Black. And I hate Francis Black. She’s never in tune. Diddly-Eye [Irish traditional] music does nothing for me, either. I am obsessed with pop.
J: So, you were desperately looking for something new, and decided that Ireland needs a boy band along the lines of East 17, Take That, put the ad in the paper, auditioned guys and formed Boyzone? Is that the story, really?
L: Basically, yeah, though I also signed up Sean O’ Farrell, thought he could be the next Daniel O’ Donnell, worked at that for two years, made nothing. Then he went to Ritz records, haven’t seen or heard from him since.
J: What do you think of Daniel O’ Donnell?
L: I don’t like his music at all. Soul-less. But I admire him because he is a household name and is absolutely sincere about what he does. He is not the best singer in the world, but he’s Daniel O’ Donnell twenty-four hours a day. He signs all the autographs, does all the right things, knows his market, and plays to that. His market is older women and he’s the boy-next-door they always wanted to go out with. He’s knows exactly what he’s doing.
J: Did you style anything of Boyzone on Daniel O’ Donnell?
L: When they were starting I used to say, “Do a Daniel on it”! As in meet everyone, sign the autographs, be nice to them!
J: So there’s a little bit of Daniel in Boyzone?
L: (Laughs): Yeah!

Chapter 5. Out Takes. Previously Unpublished.

For this book I did edit that interview but nevertheless decided to leave some repetitions of earlier quotes, in order to maintain the original tone of what was, after all, the first interview Boyzone had published in a rock magazine. And, yes, once again I left Keith’s quotes until last because he gave me the best copy. But there were many quotes I didn’t use, and stories I heard, which I didn’t tell, some of which troubled me deeply and would find their way into subsequent Boyzone related interviews. For example, I didn’t reveal in that last interview that while Boyzone were hanging around the Elstree studio while waiting to film their appearance on Top of the Pops I, at one point, sat with Keith outside the studio and consoled him as he cried because of “the pressures” he was being “put under” to sign a contract. Nor did I draw upon a taped cassette memo I made in the middle of the night after I went back to my hotel and which, in fact, I haven’t heard since 1994.

“Keith told me that in ways they are wary of Louis and that the contracts they had checked, they were told not to sign and had to sign with a “gun, held to” their heads. Because the contracts had things like, if the band falls apart and the guys go on to form new bands, or whatever, then 20%, off the money made off that band must go back to Louis. I love Louis but I told Keith not to yield to those pressures and to tell the other guys to hold out for the best contracts they can get. Also, according to Keith, they hate the way they can’t disclose that they have girlfriends, and they basically feel as Keith said – and he did say something like this during the actual interview – “If Louis came in here and I said ‘I’m freezing’ he wouldn’t give a damn about my health, it would be his investment he’d be worried about.”
It also seems there was an “explosion”, says Keith, and that Louis attacked Mikey’s girlfriend, which led to Mikey leaving the band, for a day. Then, when Louis came over here for the Smash Hits awards, said he wasn’t happy Mikey had walked out, but had had it all checked legally and told the other guys that he could haul Mikey over the coals if he leaves Boyzone. But Mikey left because of Louis’s explosion and Mikey’s girlfriend told Louis, “feck off and mind your own business, if I told him to leave the band in the morning he’d leave.” Yet, then, when Louis said he could drag Mikey through the coals, legally, Keith said, “If you get rid of him you get rid of all of us.” This created a stronger bond between the guys and Keith says that right now there is no relationship between Louis and the five guys. Certainly today, yeah, they were tired, but there was a noticeable lack of warmth, enthusiasm, the dreams, and the hopes I noticed back in May when I first met them. Steve basically ignored me as he wandered around for most of the time, on his own, and on his mobile phone, so I’ll have to use old quotes.
The guys also are clearly terribly lonely. Keith said he is aching to see his girlfriend, who is coming over here to London tomorrow, but now that Louis is here, he won’t be able to see her.
Another story Keith told me- and Louis told me this story too – is that they have found out that Steve, who is 17, “put himself around” starting years ago and there are “a few old queens from Cabra” who “had him when he was younger” and who are trying to sell this story to newspapers. Maybe that’s why Stephen was so preoccupied yesterday. And Keith told me he really hopes that Stephen doesn’t bring them all down, as in Boyzone, if the story breaks about him being a homosexual and having that kind of past.
As such, it’s going to be very hard for me to present in an article Boyzone as the five cheery guys who made it all the way from Dublin to the BBC to make their debut on Top of the Pops when the truth is that a lot of what I encountered today was Boyzone wasted and low. They saw the Smash Hits magazine when I was there, and were a wee bit excited but they just flicked through it and then tossed it to one side. That is not the way it should be.
Keith also told me Boyzone believe that if they could get rid of Louis in the morning, they would and they feel closer to Paul Keogh. Now I know why Louis said Keogh dislikes him. There is a power struggle going on. Keith also says he’s really angry because for every thousand pounds Boyzone earn, Louis gets 200, then the “lighting, staging, insurance, all the other people are paid” and what is left is split five ways between the boys. So, Keith said Louis will get richer must faster than they will. This pisses them off. Also, Joe, make note of the fact that even though the interview started on a high it ended relatively joyless. And say that after the show, two members of Boyzone went on to see Eternal, but three others were driven back to the apartment, being rented for them in London. and told me they are just counting the hours until Friday when they can get back to Dublin.
They’ve been away for a month but will be back in Dublin for only a day then it’s back to Britain to do more publicity and then back to Dublin again for their first show at the Point. The pressures of fame are taking their toil.

Author’s Note. The Back Story of the 1988 Gabriel Byrne Interview.

Author’s Note. The Back Story of the 1988 Gabriel Byrne Interview.

“Our primary objective is to get the best Gabriel Byrne interview, ever. Would you be free to go to LA to do it?” That’s what the editor of an Irish magazine asked me on January 29th 1988. At first, thinking he was joking. I responded in kind. “Is this April Fool’s Day?” I said. In response, he somehow managed to laugh while at the same time, remaining to look deadly serious. That’s when I knew he was. So, just as dualistically I replied, cool as ever, “Sure, why not? even though, deep inside, I was like a child, dancing wildly, and delighting at the idea that I was Going Hollywood, to cite the title of a song by Bing Crosby.
Even so, part of me couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And not just in terms of flying to LA, which I had dreamed of doing since I was a child, in fact, since around the time the Beatles first flew to New York to do the Ed Sullivan Shows. This editor, whom I’d rather not name, but who was the first of the species I had dealt with on a consistent basis in my relatively new role as a ‘celebrity interviewer’ usually seemed loath to praise my work, lest I ask for a raise, I reckoned. And even though he did tell a group of my peers at our Christmas party that I had “brought psychology to” the interviews in his magazine, he’d also privately expressed “serious concerns” about my writings of late.
He hoped, for example, that the 1987 College Degree course I’d taken on the subject of Popular Culture, which I told him, “took a socio-political tilt” wouldn’t make my articles “too academic.” He’d said the same thing after I was appointed Ireland’s first Writer in Residence at a Vocational School, even though I explained that my role as “a facilitator” for teenage students helped me greatly when it came to defining my role as an interviewer. Either way, now he was sending me to LA to try get the “best Gabriel Byrne interview, ever.” Had he gone mad?
And there was another dimension to all this. Even since May 1987 when my career “really took off,” most people agreed, thanks to a 20,000-word interview with Boy George, most of the subjects I’d chosen to interview were heroes of mine, Dory Previn, Eartha Kitt, Richard Harris, whose work I knew and loved, whereas, I knew nothing about Gabriel Byrne. I hadn’t a clue, for example, that during the years 1978-1982, he’d become a heartthrob in my homeland as a result of his role in a rural soap opera called Bracken. Nor had I seen any of his movies. All of which meant that within seconds of this editor making this offer, the part of me that couldn’t believe what was happening, wished it wasn’t and I began to fear I wouldn’t be able to deliver a good interview much less the best.
Compounding my sense of insecurity, which was rooted in the fact that my background is in Creative Writing, not journalism, I knew that the magazine had a correspondent in LA. So, I said, “Why me? Doesn’t Gordon Thomas have a file full of interviews?” For a moment, I hoped the editor would say, “You’re right, I’ll give the gig to Gordon.” But instead, I was told, “He’s the other end of the scale altogether” what made me feel good for me, bad for GT, kind of.
In fact, at this point I began to feel honoured by this offer from the editor. I also was fully aware that, whatever about the battles we’d had in relation to, say, pay and copyright, and despite his tendency not to praise, he genuinely rated my interviews and me personally quite highly. Better still, whenever I said anything that sounded precious, or pretentious, such as, “I always got for a definitive interview, why settle for anything else?” or “I see the Q & A format as if it were a One Act play” these were traits of mine he was never slow to point out. And, at least, he didn’t laugh too loudly. So, I accepted the commission and set off on my quest. Was I crooning that Crosby tune as I left the office that day? Yes.
And, happily, the more I read about Gabriel Byrne and the more of his movies I watched on videocassettes, – sadly I couldn’t track down a seemingly steamy movie he did called Siesta – including a pre-release copy of his latest The Courier, as part of my research, the more I began to like the guy. I really loved the fact that Gabriel and I had two core experiences in common. We both came from a gloriously “common” Dublin working class backgrounds and once were would-be, tradesmen, in his case, a plumber, mine, a sheet metal worker. I began to feel, ‘he may even be the kind of guy I’d like to go and have a drink with.’ We also shared a passion for cinema, theatre, women, and seemed to be dumb ass, irredeemable, romantics. Now I was excited by the idea of meeting the man.
In fact, as the day of my departure from Dublin drew nearer, that child inside me, started to dance like a dervish. I definitely couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that when I was eleven years old my mother gave me for Christmas that Valentine Pop Special annual which first made me dream of going to Hollywood. It’s opening article had the headline, ‘At Home With Elvis’ and a photograph a beautiful blond British Ice Skater, Jean Alsop, standing outside his house in Bel Air. I decided ‘that’s for me!’ Namely, the job journalist Roy Pockett had, interviewing blondes in Bel Air, and meeting, as Jean did, the King.
Now here I was, twenty-five years later, flying to LA where, yes, I knew I was unlikely to bump into the king, but might meet a beautiful blonde. As I boarded the plane all I said was, “God bless my new angel Gabriel – Gabriel Byrne!”

Joe Jackson, Dublin April 24th 2012.

Chapter 1. Preface to the 1988 Gabriel Byrne Interview.

Once upon a time Los Angeles, as its name claims, may have been the “Land of Angels” but by the time I got there, 9 pm on February 3 rd 1988, to be exact, it was the “Land of AIDS.” So I was told – and this observation, as with many of my first impressions of the city seeped into my Gabriel Byrne interview the following day – by my Irish magazine “contact” after I spent my first night in a ‘Travel Lodge’ on Sunset Boulevard. Not that I could really hear what this guy was saying. I was so besotted by the idea that I had slept anywhere on Sunset Boulevard, the same location as the movie of that name, that I almost ran out onto the highway, and shouted, “I’m ready for my close up Mr. De Mille!”
Likewise, when the same guy, who seemed to know a hell of a lot about the “coke scene” later offered me the first lines of cocaine I’d ever seen and said, “you can’t visit LA and not do a line of this!” I declined for similar reasons. Primarily because my father died at fifty because of his addictions, so, I was disinclined to indulge. But also the moment my contact said I should do coke to help me enjoy my “first night on the strip” then explained he meant “Sunset Strip” I got a natural high, thinking that I was about to see the same street, strip, bog road, whatever, I first thrilled to as a kid when I saw 77, Sunset Strip. I wondered if Gabriel Byrne felt the same the first time he landed in LA?
However, I also had my own “contacts” in Hollywood. Most notably, thanks to Joby Baker – who played a drummer in Elvis’s movie, Girl Happy, and married Dory Previn, and both of whom were my friends – his son, Scott Zimmerman. Scott worked for the William Morris Agency and during our first phone call he asked me if I might be interested in flying to New York to interview Matt Dillon. A few days later, I did, after interviewing Mickey Rourke. Scott also said he’d try to get me “onto the set of Cheers” and an interview with Big Country.
All of this, maybe not surprisingly, left me feeling not even slightly intimidated the next day as my contact drove me through the guarded gates of Bel Air. But I did have to tell that child inside me to stop shouting, “We made it!” Byrne himself then made me feel more at ease by greeting me at the door of a mansion – which I believed belonged to his one of his managers, or was rented – when he responded to my shamefully Americanised. “Hi!” by saying, “How’s it goin’?’ in a Dublin accent so thick I could smell the river Liffey at low tide.
The opening for my article I got, however, from something Gabriel said during our three-hour interview. It made me realize that we had, as I suspected, connected at all the levels I’d anticipated, but even more so at a core level. We each turned out to be passionately committed to the concept of spreading hope. Then again, I learned something new about Gabriel during this interview, and it was something he had never discussed in public, which highlighted the fact that we had something else in common and why we each might be inclined towards spreading hope. Both of us, as kids, irrespective of where life had taken us since, theologically, had wanted to become missionaries. That’s why, after the interview ended, we got down on our knees and said a decade of the rosary.
I’m joking – about the rosary. But seriously, as a grown-up version of the kid, who at the age of eleven, when I read that article about Elvis’s home in Bel Air, first dreamed of flying to LA, and now was sitting in that location, it seemed fitting that I should kick off my article by sending out a similar message of hope.

The Gabriel Byrne Interview. 1988.

Inspiring hope is of paramount importance to Gabriel Byrne. When he says, “I’ve come a long way from boiling water in a billycan in a plumber’s shed in Dublin” it is not spoken in those sickly tones of chest thumping, self-aggrandizement so common among movie stars/celebrities; particularly in Hollywood. His claim is made even more palpable when one realises that the journey Gabriel is referring to is more spiritual than physical and has less to do with amassing wealth than rising above his sense of fear and anonymity. If self assertion now is a prime concern of Byrne’s it is, fundamentally, an assertion of the self as a cipher, and maybe even to cull a concept from the title of his new movie, The Courier – a courier of dreams self as courier of dreams?)
“Ten years ago I was in Dublin devoid of hope now you and I are sitting in Beverly Hills doing this interview” he told me at one point during this interview. “And that, to me, is an indication that dreams, ambitions can be realised. If someone is reading this, as I used to read interviews I want them to say, ‘He did it, so can I whatever it is they’re reaching for I want to tell them to go for it.’”
Going for it has led Gabriel through a diverse range of roles in theatre, on television and in movies. He got his start in the Project Theatre in the late ’70′s and on RTE’s [Irish television station] The Riordans. However, his “break” came via Braken, which led to Byrne being branded ‘Ireland’s first real sex ¬symbol.’ He also appeared in the English National Theatre’s production of Brian Friel’s, Translations, and in the title role of the TV movie Christopher Columbus, plus feature films like Defence of the Realm, Gothic, and Lionheart. In the United States, his latest movie is Julia and Julia, with Kathleen Turner and Sting. In Ireland, his latest movie is The Courier. We met in Hollywood.

Joe Jackson: What to you, are the important differences between being a
plumber’s mate and being a movie star?
Gabriel Byrne: I always hated the nine to five routine, hated the idea of know¬ing exactly what I was going to be doing in ten years time and as a
plumber, I knew I could have been consigned to work for JM Baird in Abbey St for the rest of my life. Being in movies, on the other hand gives you the chance to travel, meet different people and that’s always appealed
to the explorer in me. So, even if I wasn’t a movie star I’d still be doing something like that. And of course, the pay is better! Though here
in Beverly Hills it’s s hard to tell the maids from the people who employ them’
J: If you hated routine so much why did you choose to be a plumber in the
first place?
B: Because I failed my Inter Cert and couldn’t get any other job. My
dad was a laborour in Guinness’ and he knew someone who said they’d take me on even though I hadn’t got my exams. I’d originally trained to be a priest. We used to get The Divine Word [Irish Catholic magazine] at home and I’d read this art¬icle when I was twelve and saw these pictures of guys playing billiards and oft in Africa on the missions and that was it. Later I found myself with seven other Irish kids setting out from Dun Laoghaire to join a sem¬inary. I was about and a half years there and there was this uproar when a traveling group of players performed and one girl took off her dress in the play and we saw her slip! And when they were leaving, we were all hanging out the window and I remember thinking ‘now this is exciting.’ I discovered women then and the theatre! So, I wasn’t too upset when the top guy caught me smoking and said, “I’ve been looking over your conduct, and I don’t think you have a vocation.” It was a glorious day. I left.
J: What kind of legacy was left from your time as a seminarian?
B: I’m still a sucker for Plain Chant! I’m still interested in the idea of being a priest. I couldn’t be one, of course, but the whole concept still fascinates me. Even when I was a plumber’s mate, I still had the idea that I might go back.
J: Apart from fleeting excitement at the sight of that girl in her slip how did you cope with awakening sexual awareness in those circumstances?¬
B: When you’re discovering sexuality and you are deprived of it you have to live the life of the imagination and most of us did that. When the lights went out the beds would become tents immediately! That was the way we lived. There was homosexuality though I didn’t recognise it as such. Nor, I imagine did most of the guys who were doing it. But putting all those young guys together at the age of awakening sexual awareness and telling them that women are equated with evil and sin then exploring sexuality in that way is to be expected.
J: Did you partake [in homosexual acts]?
B: No. There was ‘horseplay.’ That’s how I’d describe it but we did know
there were guys who were more serious about it than others.
J: Did all this leave you nervous of women?
B: Yes. Because of this veneration of the blessed Virgin and purity and all
that stuff about women being unapproachable and inaccessible and not
int¬erested in sex, it took me years to get over all that. One of the great
joys of my life was discovering that women love sex as much as men do! I didn’t really go out with my first ‘real’ girlfriend until I was l9. I was very much in awe of, and afraid of women. I’d have to say that those days in that seminary definitely fucked up my sexuality for a long time.
J: Was the first time [you made love] part of a loving, shared relationship or was it just a fleeting fuck?
B: It was in the Gaelthacht [Irish language school] and we had a loving and a passionate relationship set against the rugged Kerry landscape.
J: A closeted life in a seminary often can lead to a lack of confidence
in the outside world. Was that ever a problem?
B: Yes. I do have confidence now but it is a very delicate confid¬ence. Yet I’m now more confident than I’ve ever been though believe me, it took me quite a long time to gain confidence in my ability as an actor.
J: There never was a conscious decision to become an actor, someone asked if you’d like to appear in a play and you accepted. Did that leave you feeling you’d entered the profession by default?
B: Exactly. I felt I didn’t have anything special to offer, wasn’t gifted in any way so I kept saying, “Why the fuck is this happening to me? I don’t deserve it.”
J: Couldn’t that also be seen as part of the legacy of Catholicism?
B: Yes I think that is part of it. Many Irish people, Catholics in particular do suffer from that sense of, ‘ I’m not entitled to what I have’ and
‘I should feel guilty about it all and not joyful but miserable.’ But I
don’t think that way now. I know I deserve to be here in Beverly Hills.
I’ve worked for it and I’m entitled to the breaks I get and make. But this
sense has come after a long struggle. I was like that when I first moved
to London. Isolated, insulated, suffering in silence, it was a really
painful period for me. But it made me realise that you must confront pain, feel it rather than anaesthetise or avoid it. Avoiding pain is what stunts
our growth. I know too many people who spend their lives avoiding feeling pain.
J: Did you use drink or drugs to anaesthetise pain?
B: Yeah. I went through a period of drinking and doing drugs when, like any people of my generation I thought that was the answer to everything. Never heavy drugs, never snorted cocaine or tried heroin but I have smoked mar¬ijuana and why I enjoyed it was that it distorted my perception of the world and gave me a perception, which I thought was real and true. But I now realise you can get to that heightened state of consciousness without drugs. And as for drink, I really had to fight a hard battle against that.
J: Have you won the battle?
B: I couldn’t say I’m in control but I knew if I wanted any kind contented life I’d have to stop drinking. I can’t say I’ll never drink again, I face it one day at a time, that’s the only way I can live. And it’s not easy because drink is so much an accepted part of the film and theatre world.
J: But in Hollywood hasn’t cocaine taken the place of alcohol?
B: Exactly, it is the drug of choice here. People don’t drink they snort
coke. And I now can tell immediately if someone is on coke and I don’t
want to work with people who are.
J: If the stories I’ve heard are to be believed then finding a clean [film] crew seems to be next to impossible. One hears so many tales of movie sets on which everyone from the grip to the director is coked out.
B: I think that’s changing now, especially since Belushi’s [John] death. But yes I hear there was a time it was very much like that and that no doubt affected the style and pace of films for a time.
J: So would this stance make you socially unacceptable in certain sections
of L.A.?
B: No. The difference here is it’s just a case of, ‘if you snort, fine, if
you don’t, that’s fine too.’ It’s not like Ireland where there is a social
stigma attached to not drinking. But I tend not to go to places where
they do coke because I’ve got an addictive personality, I don’t need
the temptation.

Book blurb David Norris: Trial By Media.

David Norris was elected as in Irish Senator in 1987. In March 2011, he put himself forward as a nominee to become President of Ireland. Two months later, the Senator was mired in a controversy caused by the reappearance of two old interviews he had given and that threatened to derail his presidential campaign. “This is the cruellest thing that ever happened to me,” Norris told Irish journalist Joe Jackson at the time of the original publication of one those interviews in 2002. More recently, Norris has claimed that an interview Jackson himself did in 2002 was the “definitive rebuttal” of the allegations made against him nearly a decade ago and he says it “saved” his life. The senator made similar assertions in relation to an interview that was conducted by Jackson in 2011. This book contains the full transcripts of those characteristically probing interviews and presents a critical perspective on the way in which the Irish media dealt with the controversy. Trial By Media also is David Norris’s own, sometimes tearful, but more often joyful, and endlessly inspiring, life story told in his own words and in his own ebullient fashion.

Joe Jackson is an author, journalist, and broadcaster. His books include Troubadours and Troublemakers (Ireland Now: A Culture Reclaimed) Boyzone, Our Story, and Other Voices, Other Rooms, A Personal History of Folk Music, which he co-authored with singer Nanci Griffith. Jackson’s articles and interviews have been published globally in magazines such as Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Humo. He has interviewed roughly 1,000 musicians, artists, and politicians and worked for Ireland’s most prestigious media outlets, such as RTE Radio 1, The Irish Times, and the Sunday Independent. Jackson is currently compiling a collection of his most inspirational interviews, titled Walk On With Hope in Your Heart, and working on a play and a memoir based on his thirteen years as the last, official biographer, of Irish actor Richard Harris. The play and memoir are both called, Excuse med While I Disappear.

What follows is the prologue of the book. This is the copyright of Joe Jackson and can not be used, in part or whole, without permission in writing, from the author, myself. Any breach of copyright will be rigorously pursued.

Prologue.

It’s Bloomsday, June 16th 2011, and as I write these words, the political future of noted James Joyce devotee, Senator David Norris, hangs in the balance – like a sea green snot at the end of a sailor’s nose, as Joyce might say. Three months ago, almost to the day, the senator launched his campaign to become the next President of Ireland, and then, ten weeks later, listeners to one of the country’s most popular radio programmes voted him the person most likely to win the race. But that was before journalists Helen Lucy Burke and Jason O’Toole, dashed centre stage brandishing a brace of old Norris interviews, and accused him, in one case, of having the kind of “evil beliefs” that make him unfit to hold the highest office in the land. Now, according to one tabloid, ‘Norris has blown it’ by which I presume they do not mean his nose.
Then again, I can’t remember a time when David Norris was not being put on trial, in a sense, by the media. Or, at least, having his sexuality explored, sometimes to a pathetically prurient degree. In fact, my earliest experience of this particular, and maybe peculiarly Irish phenomenon occurred the first time we met. It was late one evening circa 1994, and Norris – someone I knew little about, apart from the fact that he was a senator, gay, loved James Joyce and had won a landmark case in the European Courts of Human Rights which led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland – approached me in a Dublin restaurant that was run by Norman Hewson, the brother of Paul Hewson, aka Bono, who I’d recently interviewed. Incidentally, I was in that restaurant not to be fashionable but because that afternoon I’d met, in the offices of a nearby rock magazine, which sometimes published my work, an American U2 fan and now I was, let’s say, exploring all possibilities. As such, Norris’s contribution didn’t necessarily add to the mood of tentative romance.
Either way, as the senator approached I noted that he did so rather tentatively and that he looked somewhat perturbed. But the latter didn’t really surprise me. I’d noticed earlier that he was being interviewed over dinner by a journalist who, let’s say, had always struck me as far less interested in the art of interviewing than in the more basic, and, some would say, base, act of self-promotion, at the expense of interviewees. One of whom, Mary Black, an Irish singer, had told me she was “deeply upset” by “the sexist, condescending c**p” he had written about her.
“Good evening, my name is David Norris and I am extremely sorry for interrupting you while you are having dinner”.
“I know who you are David, and this is Alycia”.
“And, you, if I’m not mistaken, are Joe Jackson who does those weekly music interviews for The Irish Times and I hear on The Arts Show?”
“Guilty, on both counts, my Lord!”
“Then let me ask you something. And again, I’m sorry for interrupting you and, Alycia; forgive me for what I am about to repeat. But, Joe, this chap whose is interviewing me and who has just gone to the toilet –”
“I know who he is”.
“Well, he keeps asking me the most impertinent of questions, such as saying ‘When you were young, did you masturbate to pictures of Oscar Wilde?’ Is this the norm during interviews, over dinner? It’s certainly not, in my experience. What am I supposed to say in such circumstances?”
“Nothing. Don’t even say ‘no comment’ because even that quote gives him an excuse to print the question, which he probably will anyway. Just move the conversation ahead or stop it in his tracks by asking, ‘Why? Did you?’ That should do the trick”.
“Oh that is good! So, maybe this is all transference on his behalf!”
“Maybe! But David, go easy on the wine. I noticed he’s barely drinking while you are, let’s say, less immune to its charms! That’s another trick I hear he uses, getting people drunk while he remains sober”.
“That’s all called ‘yellow journalism’ where I come from,” said Alycia.
“I’m familiar with the term, and I guess that’s what this is, in a way,” Norris responded. “Ok, lovely to meet you both, albeit fleetingly, I better get back to my table before he returns. And thanks for the advice, Joe”.
“And I’ll send over a crate of mineral water! Good luck”.
With that, David Norris departed and we did not meet again until nearly a decade later, in 2002, when our paths crossed again largely as a result of journalism, yellow, or otherwise. By this stage, lured by the prospect of extending my journalistic palate beyond what Norris called, “those weekly music interviews” I had left The Irish Times, was doing broad-based interviews for the Sunday Independent and during that February, and found myself caught in the middle of an minor media tiff, which did, nonetheless, directly influence an interview I’d soon conduct with Norris.
Ronan Collins, a DJ on Ireland’s national radio station, RTÉ Radio 1, for which I myself also worked at this point, presenting a music series called, Under The Influence, had described the debut single by Irish pop group Six, There’s A Whole Lotta Loving Going On, as “absolutely awful” and “lacking in credibility, imagination and musicianship”. Their manager, Louis Walsh, responded by declaring that Collins was “a failed show band star” and then added, – referring to the latter’s charity work –that he should “go and save the children of the world”. So, in two interviews published on February 3rd, and February 10th, respectively, I gave Louis Walsh his say, and Ronan Collins, the right of reply.
What each actually said, as with much of the ephemera that defines the world of pop, is now largely irrelevant. However, I was more than happy to let each state his case in a national newspaper that had a potential reach of one million people, roughly a quarter of the Irish population, and leave it to our readers to decide who was right and who was wrong.
All of which brings us back to David Norris. The same Sunday my Ronan Collins interview was published, I saw, in another newspaper, Ireland On Sunday, the headline ‘Senator Backs Sex With Children’. Under that was the line, ‘Fury at gay’s “pedophilia is ok” message,’ beside which was a photograph of Norris. Shocked, as no doubt most readers of that newspaper would have been, by these claims, I read the article and discovered that the allegations were based on comments David had made during an interview he did with a restaurant critic, whose name I was encountering for the first time at this point, Helen Lucy Burke, for Magill magazine. I bought the magazine, read the article, and realised immediately that Norris’s comments clearly had been sensationalised and broadly misrepresented by Ireland On Sunday. Even so, the Magill article itself raised some troubling questions so I phoned Norris on February 11th, requesting an interview, which we did two days later in his office in Ireland’s government building, Leinster House. What follows, in the first section of this book is almost a word-for-word transcript of what was said, allowing for edits which, as with all exchanges I quote, and, indeed, all my interviews, are made purely as part of a tightening-up process.
Why am I returning to these tapes, after nearly a decade, and to my notes and diary from that period, plus all the related material surrounding my two most recent interviews with David Norris in 2011? Simply because there is the perception that he has “blown” his chance of becoming president and I happen to believe the man is too often being judged on headlines – a tendency of which Norris is aware – and on articles that continue to sensationalise and to misrepresent his beliefs and, for that matter, who he is.
Of course, I’m not deluded enough to claim that the three interviews we did, the articles that emanated from those interviews or this book, David Norris Trial By Media, capture what some might euphemistically call ‘The Truth About Senator David Norris’. Nevertheless, Norris himself does describe our 2002 interview as the “definitive rebuttal” of those accusations that were made against him by Ireland On Sunday, claims that our interview, in response, “saved” his life and makes similar assertions for our most recent interview. Though, in terms of the latter what David Norris – who tells me he does not like “sucking up to people” but who is, in my opinion, inclined towards hyperbole – said was that I had “saved” his presidential campaign. Although, realistically speaking, whether I did or not, to even the most infinitesimal degree, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, Senator David Norris definitely insists that he last interview we did, on June 9th 2011, includes what shall remain, presumably for the duration of the presidential campaign, his “final comments” on “quotes or controversies that have arisen from old interviews”. By which he means specifically, those he did with Helen Lucy Burke and with Jason O’ Toole. As such, now, a week later, on Bloomsday – the date I choose because Norris and I both adore the life -affirming aspects of Ulysses and I love even the similar resonances in even the word ‘Bloomsday’ – I have decided that everything we discussed, over nearly a decade, and as set against the backdrop of the frequently polar opposite positions that have been taken in the Irish media vis-à-vis Norris, should be a matter of public record. If only, again, in my own infinitesimal attempt to help my fellow Irish people to decide, in four months time, who they want to elect as our next President.
This really is my core reason for writing this book, although no doubt I will be accused of having other motives. It’s title, Trial By Media, incidentally, comes from a phrase that Senator David Norris himself used at one point, suitably enough, while being interrogated during a programme on Irish radio. So, let the trial begin. Or rather, let it continue.

Joe Jackson, Dublin, June 16th 2011.

On flyleaf it said “Joe Jackson is renowned for his in-depth, and frequently controversial interviews which have become a frequent feature of both —- and The Irish Times. He is an interviewer who sems to possess the uncommon ability to immerse himself so deeply in the psychology of his interviewees to such an extent that they invariably reveal more about themselves, and the world they inhabit, than they might have originally intended. This pursuit for what he sees as “the hidden truth” often sets up a tension which is not unlike the dynamic one finds ion a one-act play’.

Quotes were “Thank you for the most penetrating interview I’ve done since, at least The Dick Cavett Show, in the 1960′s” Richard Harris 1987

“Hot Press is noted for its probing interviews conducted by Joe Jackson”, Deaglan De Bradun, political correspondent, The Irish Times 1988

“Once a week in The Irish Times you are marking the Irish psyche with The Joe Jackson Interview” Shay Healy, broadcaster, 1994

“There’s no one in Ireland doing what you do, in terms of these in=depth — interviews on politics and the arts. These are important social documents.” Ciaran Benson, Professor of Psychology UCD, Chairman of the Arts Council, 1995.

As an aside all these years later, I haven’t a clue who these guys are talking about!

The blurb says ‘Nanci Griffiths distinct blend of pop, rockabilly and folk has made her one of the most respected, popular and lover singer-songwriters working today. Having released fourteen of her own critically-acclaimed albums as well as recording countless guest appearances on other artists’ albums and contributing to film scores, Nanci crates music that has taken root all over the world – her melodies and lyrics resonating wherever they are heard. The Grammy award-winning album, Other Voices, Other Rooms – one of the most successful albums of contemporary folk music ever – marked a watershed moment in Nanci Griffith’s career. Not only is it her sole album of cover songs, but it is also a seamless blend of tradition, collaboration and innovation.The follow up album, Other Voices, Too: A Trip Back To Bountiful, continues that tradition of passing on other writers’ work and presenting folk music as a vital force in today’s music.
Go behind the scenes with Nanci Griffith and listen in on a very special conversation with Joe Jackson, an acclaimed music journalist, as they explore the roots and inspiration for Nanci’s extraordinary career and trace the history of the folk music movement.
The book is a guide to Nanci’s trip back to bountiful – to the place where inspiration springs freely. With more than one-hundred behind-the-scenes photographs and candid interviews with Nanci and her collaborators, including John Lomax 111, Emmylous Harris, Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger, Odetta and members of the Blue Moon Orchestra and many, many others, this book offers a rare glimpse into the artistic heart and soul of one of this country’s greatest musical treasures: Nanci Griffith

Nanci Griffith on Joe Jackson, from preface to this book: ‘I am grateful for the collaboration on the text for this book with my friend, journalist Joe Jackson. Joe writes regularly for — and The Irish Times, out of Dublin, Ireland, and for many publications worldwide. He is the rare music journalist who actually listens to music. His knowledge as a musicologist has been treasured and invaluable to this project. His contribution to the text is deeply appreciated as well as the time he took out of working on his own book to come to America and work with me and to interview all the artists quoted here.
Like DJ’s of a generation ago, music journalists who are also great writers are few and far between these days. I hope that contemporary music will always maintain writers like Joe Jackson in Ireland and the UK and America’s own Steve Morse who writes full time for the Boston Globe. Without these writers and their rare peers we might never see another book like Folk Songs of North America, from an archivist the like of its writer, Alan Lomax

Blurb says ‘Little more than a year ago Shane, Ronan, Mike, Keith, and Stephen were five ambitious working class lads from Dublin’s northside. Now they are Boyzone, Ireland’s first pop group poised on the edge of international stardom. Voted the best newcomers by Smash Hits magazine, their first two singles – Working My Way Back To You and Love Me For A Reason – reached the top of the UK and Irish charts
In Boyzone: Our Story the boys tell their own stories to Irish photo-journalist Joe Jackson, who has had a unique working relationship with the band since it was formed. Here they speak intimately about their families, love lives, reaction to stardom and hopes for the future.
Containing exclusive photographs of the boys from childhood through to superstardom, many of which were taken specifically for this book by Joe Jackson, Boyzone: Our Story is the only official book about the band; the only book that tells their story in detail, in depth, and in their own words. It is the book no fan can afford to be without.

Days of innocence, indeed, relatively speaking.

A Family Torn Apart By ECT. Joe Jackson

‘I hate the bastard doctors who proscribed ECT for my father. It’s tearing him, me, and my whole family to shreds. May those doctors rot in hell.’
That’s what I wrote in my diary on October 10th 1972. Not exactly the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi, is it? Nevertheless, nearly forty years later, even though I now am disinclined to damn nameless doctors and know that Electro-convulsive therapy can help some people, it still is something I despise.
These days I hate it more than ever. Why? Because my mother, who is 85, hospitalised, and recovering from a stroke, sometimes looks back over her life and says, sadly, not knowing that I wrote in that diary entry, “the day your daddy had his first session of ECT is the day our family began to fall apart.”
So, I welcome the news that the government, under the watchful eye of Health Minister Kathleen Lynch, intends to overhaul the Mental Health Act 2001. Better still, among planned reforms is the lifting of restrictions that prevent patients from taking legal action against psychiatrists, plus the enactment of a new law prohibiting ECT without the permission of a patient.
The government also wants the views of “interested parties.” Ok, so maybe the powers-that-be can learn something from my dad’s story. That said it would be a travesty of his life were I to focus only on the monster he often became as a result of ECT. First, let me give you an insight into how precise, lyrical, and poetic his mind was before it was ravaged by those electrodes. .
One night in May 1972, I read in the Radio Times that a TV show to be broadcast that evening, which was called, That Monday Morning Feeing, was about, ‘men who work on an assembly line’ and ‘perform a vital job’ which nonetheless can be ‘dull, mindless, and soul destroying.’ The latter was precisely how I saw my job at the time, as an apprentice sheet metalworker, which I’d become, in part, to please my father, even though I’d always wanted to be a journalist. I hoped we’d talk about this after the show ended. We did.
“I’m looking at the height of your forehead and if one can judge anything from that, you have greater potential than I had at your age,” he said, initiating the conversation. “But you can see, from that TV show, that whatever you go on to do in life, your task is set out for you. It’s going to take unceasing effort. It’s going to take fighting on when you are sick and tired of the whole lot. It’s going to take what Kipling there, (dad points to a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If on his bookshelf) says is the strength to, ‘Force your heart and nerve and sinew/To serve their turn long after they are gone/And so hold on when there is nothing in you/Except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on’.”
“So, what happened in terms of you and your dreams?”
“I didn’t make it because I didn’t put enough effort into it. But having read all of Behan’s plays, Joyce, Shaw, Shakespeare, I have always cherished the secret dream, which I know now will never be realised, of being a – I won’t say ‘author’ because that implies your primary goal is getting published – literary creator. But I would like to see you taking up journalism, if that is your thing.”
He was a remarkable man, right? And my life was re-routed by even that one conversation, which went on for hours – I’d been making an audiocassette of that TV show so I secretly recorded part of our chat – and was representative of hundreds we’d already had. That night I wrote in my diary, ‘it breaks my heart to hear dad say he is giving up on his dreams. But I shall become a journalist and a literary creator, for both of us or die in the attempt, so help me God.’
Tragically, my father and I never had another conversation quite like that. Four months alter he had his first session of ECT. Not that I was informed what was happening. All I knew was that tea time one day he suddenly seem unable to complete a sentence, and kept asking over and over again the same kind of fragmented question, such as “Joseph, that shirt, hanging, is that, on the door, yours?” even though mom kept reminding he’d bought it that day. Then, my father flicked open my 8 mm movie camera, as if he’d forgotten that exposure to light would damage the film. Worse still, when I asked, “dad, what are you doing?” he looked at me as if he couldn’t understand what I was saying, regarded me as stupid to ask that question, and didn’t seem to know who I was.
Finally, I followed mom to the scullery and asked what was going on. She told me that doctors wanted dad to “go away for a while, to St. John of Gods” – this thought chilled me as I knew that was an institution for the mentally disturbed – but he didn’t want this “social stigma” imposed on his family so he choose, instead, to have “some kind of treatment to cure depression.” But it was what mom told me next that remains a savage indictment of how families were kept in the dark, and had their darkness deepened vis-à-vis ECT, in 1972.
“But your daddy couldn’t tell me exactly what the treatment was because they don’t seem to have told him,” she said, starting to cry. “They couldn’t have. Because this morning I said, “Joe, do you want me to go up to John of God’s with you?’ and he said, “No, Phyllis, it’s ok. But will you leave out my togs and a few sandwiches; I’ll probably go for a dip when I get back.” Then, a few hours later, I got a phone call from some nurse who gave out hell to me. She said, “your husband should not have come up here on his own for this treatment, someone better take him home.” So, I went up, and Joseph, Jesus help me, I will never forget, until the day I die, the state your daddy was in.”
A few weeks mom learned dad was having ECT, which was not explained to my family, and we were not allowed to discuss. So, I wrote about it in my diary.
‘Dad’s ‘cure’ for depression has left him more depressed than ever. Once he told me that a son should never see his father cry, now he’s crying all the time, especially on his own late at night, listening to Sinatra LPs like No One Cares. And he accuses mom and me of talking about him, even when we aren’t. He can’t even spell simple words anymore. It’s horrible, like seeing your father slip into senility even though he is only 44. And I can’t help him in any way because he’s not talking to me. It’s even getting dangerous for us to be in the same room. His mood changes so quickly into a sudden rage, usually directed at me. He’s taking it all out on me, says mom, and even that fact alone is breaking her heart. It’s all so sad.’
Then on October 10th, the date I wrote the diary entry with which I opened this article, dad and I had a conversation that ruptured my psyche. It started with me walking into our living room, near midnight and him saying, “sit down, or I’ll knock you down, no, stay standing until I tell you to go to bed.” It ended three hours later, with dad decrying my “imbecilic efforts to communicate” and then musing, aloud, “ If I had to look back over my life and see you as its end product, I’d have to say, frankly, that my life had been a waste of time.”
The moment those words sliced into my skull, I heard a child scream deep inside me. Before I knew what I was doing, I punched my fist through a glass frame on dad’s shelf. When he saw the blood on my knuckles he smiled, and said, “Now you can go to bed.”
You get the picture. It’s not a pretty one. But this is what happened to my family in l972, thanks to that “cure “ for depression, Electro-convulsive therapy. Therapy. Two years later, I finally decided I had to leave home. Three years after that, my mother made the same decision. We loved the man but couldn’t take his behaviour anymore.
That’s why there was no one in the family home to save my father’s life when he fell down the stairs one night in 1978. It was only afterwards, while reading his diaries; I discovered that apart from being introduced to the delights of ECT in 1972 he also was proscribed, as part of his “cure” for depression, the uppers and downers that, to a great degree, led to his death. So, now you know why I still despise ECT.
See Joe Jackson’s articles about his father on his website joejacksonjournalist.com.

This article is the sole copyright of Joe Jackson and may not be used in whole, or in part, without his written consent.

The Joe Jackson Files. The Strength to Dream. Joe Jackson Senior.

“So, what’s your book about?” is a question I hate being asked these days in relation to a memoir I am writing. In fact, I usually joke, in response, “Well, actually, I hope it will be about six by four inches in size and about 14.99!”
Why is that question such a pain in the ass to me? Simply because I find it so hard to stand outside something I am writing and label it coldly, truthfully, analytically. That’s why, knowing I would soon have to do just this in order to make a “sales pitch” for my literary agent I was delighted when a friend of mine, a fellow journalist, read sections and said, so succinctly, “This is the story of a father with a secret and son with a dream.” Stand up Beibhinn Byrne and take a bow!
That said, I later realised, this also is the story of a mother driven to near suicide by that father yet saved, in part, by her love for, and by love from, that son. And that drawn into this psychological maelstrom are, the son’s girlfriend, best friend, and sister, meaning, fundamentally, it is the story of a family that falls from grace.
And out of all that came this article in which I will focus, largely, on the single factor that my mother and I still agree contributed, above all else, to our family’s fall from grace. Namely, the eight sessions of Electro Convulsive Therapy my dad had in 1972. However it would be unfair to my father – who, incidentally, I never stopped loving, a fact Nuala O’ Faolain once told me she found hard to believe – if I focused only on his/our fall. So, first let’s flash back to the greatest high, in every sense; even literally, he and I shared during my childhood. In fact, pretend I am Rod Taylor in The Time Machine, and I’ll set our time switch to a night in 1964.
“Go on, Joseph” my dad says, as he pushes me past a watchman’s hut on the Christiani and Nielsen building site at the West Pier in Dun Laoghaire. “But be quiet! I don’t want your man to hear us, though he’s probably pissed and asleep!”
Then dad punches me in the side as if he’s forgotten this tickles me and makes me laugh. So, I bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud as we dash towards what he tells me is “the biggest tower crane in Ireland”. Then he pauses, takes a breath laughs, says, “And, just imagine, that makes your ol’ man, who as you know is the biggest bastard in Ireland, the driver of this country’s biggest tower crane, right!”
“Right!” I say. And I love it when dad jokes about being a “bastard”. Especially this summer, a time we’ve spent so many afternoons driving around Dublin trying to find this real mother and father. Just like I hated it, when dad told me he was only eleven, playing a match in the “Pres Grounds” in Glasthule, when some fella said, after he scored a goal, “I wouldn’t be getting so uppity about meself if I was you, sure you’re only a dirt bird’s droppings”. Imagine, that was the terrible way dad learned he learned he was “illegitimate”. Don’t want to think about that now.
“Not bad for someone who started out as a child labourer, after I got out of that hellhole in Glencree, is it son?
“No, dad. It’s great” I reply. But I don’t want to think about his time in Remand School, either, where he was sent “for stealing a few measly rashers” and Oblate Christian Brothers, he says, “seemed to get great delight from beating the shite out of kids” like him. So, instead I think of something funny, like how, today at the dinner table mom said she had a “little Ulster” on her toe and we all laughed, including her, when dad explained, “The word is ‘ulcer’, Phyllis, not ‘Ulster’! ” Then dad told us what mom said was called a “Malapropism”, and this was named after a Mrs Malaprop, from a play, who “mixes up words.” Must remember that.
But now all that meters is that we are standing beside the half built base of the new Kish lighthouse. Or, to be more precise, as dad always tells me I must be, especially if I want to become a journalist, what he says is called its “caisson”. That word reminds him of some fella from another play, by Shakespeare, and me of ‘Cassius’, as in Clay. Though I know ‘The Greatest’, would deck me for using his old name now that he’s known as ‘Mohammad Ali’. But, as I listen to the waves swoosh against that caisson what really, nearly knocks me on my back is the fact that I’ve gotten this close to its three concentric – there’s another of those big words dad uses and loves me to use – walls with their diameter of 104 feet! People tell me I’m tall for my age but right now, I fell like David gazing up at Goliath.
Then, as I lean back even more to look up the full length of that tower my gob obviously drops open, and dad jokes, “So, Joseph, are you trying to catch flies in your mouth?” I want to reply, “No, but I was thinking that crane must be as tall as the Daily Planet Building I thought was real, until the day I told you, “That’s where I want to get a job with Clark Kent” and you said, “The Daily Planet is just a makey-up office for comics, son!” But before I can say anything dad locks my mouth open, maybe forever, by telling me he wants me to climb that tower so I can see its cabin! Is he mad? What if I fall? Does dad think I am Superboy, and can fly?
“And don’t worry, if you fall, I’ll be behind, to catch you!” he assures me, as if reading my mind as we seem able to do. So, as always, trusting whatever my father tells me, I climb. Then he follows and starts yapping non-stop but I know he’s only trying to keep me from being afraid I will fall. If so, he’s chosen the wrong story.
“So, did I ever tell you that some of the lads throw themselves in the harbour there, then tell the foreman they fell in, so he’ll send them home for the day?”
“No, dad.”
“Well, they do. And he does. And the fella, lovely man, doesn’t notice, or if he does, he never says, that this always happens on Thursday, after we get our pay and the lads are gutting to go up to Smith’s pub for a pint! But what they do is wrong, they’re telling lies, which you know I hate. What do I tell you about honesty?”
“Without honesty we have sweet –“
“ Sweet fuck all, right! But don’t ever let me hear you use language like that, ok!”
“Ok”.
But I’m only half listening, trying not to look down. Then I almost miss my step because I swear to God I see Konga rising out of the water, just like I always seem to, since I saw that King Kong type picture, where he surfaces outside the harbour in Dalkey. I close my eyes. Open them. He’s gone. Lucky for him, I reckon because me, and dad, together, could easy beat the bollix out of Konga, or any monster.
“Joseph, re you ok? You’re very quiet.”
“Fine, just trying to get to the top.”
“Aren’t we all? That should be your motto!”
At last, we’re standing in the cabin.
“That part of the crane, there, is the slewing unit” dad tells me. “It makes the jib and machinery arm rotate so don’t touch that lever or we’re all in trouble!”
All? There’s no one else in this cabin except you and me dad, so was that a malapropism I want to ask but don’t. But I sure do want to pull that lever.
“Joseph, ever hear of a book called Ulysses?”
“I saw the picture.”
“How could you? They never made a picture of Ulysses!”
“They did. It starred Kirk Douglas.”
“Not that fucking Ulysses!” dad says, laughing. “I’m talking about a book that is, ok, based, in part, on the Greek myth of Ulysses, and that’s what that picture you saw was about. But the book I’m talking about is set in Dublin at the start of this century and it comes to my mind, now, son, simply because it starts there.”
I turn around. Dad is pointing towards Sandycove.
“In that Tower” he continues.
“Joyce’s tower?”
“Exactly! And that’s who wrote the book, James Joyce, the man with the same initials as you and me, and who happens to be the world’s best writer. Maybe even, in a sense, the world’s best journalist. He writes part of Ulysses as a newspaper! ”
“But I bet he’s not better than Clark Kent and can’t fly!”
“ Of course he’s better than Clark fucking Kent! But, Joseph, Joyce would find it very fucking hard to fly right now because he’s dead! Yet, when he was alive, the man could fly; believe me, on the wings of his words. Better still, he could take us with him. But Ulysses really is the world’s best book – the tower crane of literature! And I want you to read it when you get older. By then, one hopes it won’t still be banned in this God-forsaken piss pot of a country. Know where I had to read it?”
“Here, when no one was looking?”
“No, though I do read Joyce here during my breaks! Today I was reading his play Exiles, which he wrote before Ulysses, but after another book I want you to read, Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, which is written in the voice of that young man as he grows older, a marvellous literary device. But, no, I read Ulysses in the library of Trinity College, every Saturday, for weeks. And it wasn’t easy for me, as a “common labourer” to even walk through the gates of Trinity, a place for rich people. But know what I said to myself walking through those gates?”
“Just try stop me?”
“Pretty much! Though, actually, what I thought was, “fuck this shit!” And I want you to promise me now, Joseph, you will always kick out against that kind of shit.”
“I promise.”
“Good. But another reason I thought of Ulysses after we climbed up that tower is because, James Joyce also based that book on the Greek myth of a father, Daedalus, and his son, Icarus. Now I could tell you their story, but I won’t. Why? Because when we go home I want you to go to our new, New Elizabethan Reference Dictionary, look up the section on Classical mythology and learn about that myth.”
And so, I did. I also, incidentally, when dad wasn’t watching, pulled that lever, which sent the jib and machinery arm circling, made him laugh and say, “I should have known you’d do that!” and ruffle my hair, a feeling I loved. But here we must leave our modern day Daedalus and Icarus – the father who made wings for himself and his son and sealed them with wax which melted when Icarus flew too close to the sun thus sending him plummeting into the sea – and focus on our bloody fall.
To do so, I’ll set our Time Machine at September 1972, when I’m in a high again. This time, Killiney Hill but even more so romantically, because I am discovering the joys of making love, with my girlfriend. Then, we head back to Eden Villas.
“Joseph, Frieda, you must have been able to smell the fry from Killiney, you’re just in time for tea!” says my mom as we walk into the living room. But something is wrong. She looks distracted, sad. I become anxious, follow here to the scullery.
“You ok?”
“I’m fine, son, just sit down, and I’ll get your tea.”
Even so, I sense mom isn’t hiding something from me. Yet, I do as I’m told, stroll into the living room, can’t believe what I see, then race to the dinner table.
“Where’s the fire, Joseph?” dad asks, making me feel even more confused.
“No fire, dad” I reply; as I almost slap his right hand away from my cine camera, and slam its side panel closed. “But, surely you know if you let light in there it could ruin the film, that Frieda and I we were making today up on Killiney Hill.”
What the fuck is happening? My father is looking at me as if he isn’t aware of that fact, and doesn’t know me.
“Don’t get your fucking knickers in a twist, I was only checking to see how it works” dad says, before smiling across at my sister, who is sitting beside Frieda. I sit down beside her as he continues. “Killiney? I know – Audrey, that’s – It’s -”
“It’s what dad?” asks Audrey.
“Killiney, love, where your brother and his girlfriend go a lot for – Seems to be – So, Joseph, did you just say you were using this thing here to make a film today?”
“Yes dad” I reply, staggered by the fact that he seems unable to form a sentence.
Then, thank God, mom walks in, before dad can ask exactly what Frieda and I were filming, places Audrey’s fry, then his, on the table, pours his tea. He seems fixated on the tea strainer, as if he’s never seen one before. Am I going mad?
“Joseph will you help me with the next two plates, they’re roasting hot from the oven?” mom says. But it’s a request I don’t understand because I can see that between her fingers and those hot plates she, as usual, has placed a dishcloth.
“Mom, what’s happening?” I ask as she absentmindedly cleans the frying pan.
“Dad opened my camera, as if it he didn’t know what he was doing, and he’s acting strange. Did something happen today that I don’t know about?”
“Yes, love. Though what, exactly, I can’t tell you because I don’t know. But your daddy has been acting funny since he came back from -”
“Where?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you.”
“Says who?”
“Your daddy.”
“Mom, I need to know.”
“And I need to tell you. So, ok, last night your daddy sat me down on the sofa and told me that doctors wanted him to go away, for a while, to John Of Gods.”
Those last three words seem to echo like a death knell.
“But, mom that’s a place for people who are mentally disturbed.”
“I know it is, son. And I got the shock of my life when your daddy told me. But the doctors said that’s what would beat his depressions. Yet, he told them and he said to me, last night, God love him, “Phyllis, I don’t want to be locked away because I don’t want anyone saying to the children, ‘wasn’t your daddy in the nuthouse?’ It’s bad enough people that know their father was born a bastard’.”
Mom can’t finish saying that sentence, and I can’t absorb what she is saying, without us both starting to cry. But we fight the tears with a shared intake of breath.
“So instead, your daddy said he’d let them give him some kind of treatment. But he couldn’t tell me what it was because they don’t seem to have told him, exactly. They couldn’t have. Because this morning I said to him, “ Joe, do you want me to go up there with you?” and he said, “No, Phyllis, it’s ok, but will you leave out my togs, a towel and a few sandwiches, I’ll probably go for a dip when I get back.”
Mom pauses, again fighting tears. I hug her.
“Then a few hours later, I got a phone call and some nurse starts giving out hell to me. She says, ‘Mrs Jackson, your husband shouldn’t have been allowed to come up here on his own, for this treatment, someone better come and take him home’. So, I got the bus up to John of Gods, and Joseph, Jesus help me, I will never forget till the day I die, the state your daddy was in. He was like a baby, babbling, saying the same things over and over but nothing made sense. Then – and this really broke my heart, son – when we got off the bus in Dun Laoghaire, he held my hand. Your daddy hasn’t done that for, oh I don’t know how long, since, you were a baby.”
Now mom and I can’t help but cry. But when she starts to dry her tears in that dishcloth I reach across, take it from her hands – God almighty no sight hurts me more than seeing tears in those pale blue eyes – and say “that’s dirty, use this”. Then I lift the rim of my shirt and as mom stoops down, she suddenly seems to become my child and I wish to God I could protect her from all pain for all time.
Minutes later, I sit back down at the dinner table, dad looks at me, says, “Joseph, am I seeing things or have you been -”
“No dad, splashes from the pan got into my eyes, I splashed them with water.”
But Frieda, for one, doesn’t believe me.
“Ok, but there was something I wanted to, to, to -” he continues. “Ask you. Oh yeah, that jazzy shirt there, see, hanging on the coal room door, yours, is it?”
“No, dad.”
“It’s yours Joe”, mom responds tentatively, as she enters the room. “We bought it today, in McCullough’s, after getting off the bus from – Well, anyway, you saw it in the shop window, said you thought it was nice, so we bought it, remember?”
“If I fucking remembered I wouldn’t be asking Joseph if the shirt was his, would I?” dad suddenly roars so angrily it startles us all. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that fucking thing. Now why don’t we all shut up, watch TV, and have our tea?”
And so descended The Silence – to cull a concept from the Ingmar Bergman movie of that name -which came to settle, like a shroud, on our home over the following two months while my father had what I’d later learn were his eight weekly sessions of ECT. How I learned, I’ll tell you, later.
But before that happened, even my mom noted, much to her distress, that dad – for some reason neither of us could fathom – seemed to be “taking it all out on” me. His depressions, far from being cured, also seemed to deepen and were, truly most painfully apparent, to me, on those nights, after I went to bed, and I could hear him downstairs listening to LP’s like Sinatra’s No One Cares, and sobbing to himself.
And so, I’d cry, too, for my father. Especially – at least whenever I’d remember John Lennon once said that people only cause pain when they are in pain – if I’d asked, en route to bed, “dad, are you ok?” only to be told, “Why don’t you fuck off, you stupid cunt?” Or else, other nights, I’d write tearful diary entries such as this.
‘Can anyone but me know how sad this is? My father, the man who once told me he has devoured dictionaries and who nurtured dreams of being what he called “a literary creator” – that golden gauntlet I picked up the night he threw it down –
now needs me to help him write letters. He can’t even remember how to spell simple words. It’s like dad has suddenly become senile at the age of forty-five.’
Then came my first long dark night of the soul, if not the night that ruptured my soul. It certainly made me cling even more desperately to my anthem, Elvis Presley’s recording, If I Can Dream and, even more specifically, to its lines,
‘As long as a man has the strength to dream/He can redeem his soul, and fly.’
In fact, my continuing faith in the promise of those lines – which, having come close to death three times, I’ve already decided I want on my tombstone – is why I really have no choice other than to call this memoir The Strength To Dream. But, in this article, I must skim, relatively speaking, over the details of that night, simply because its facts have only recently become known to my mom and cause her grief.
Ok, what happened, on October 10th 1972, my girlfriend’s 17th birthday, was that I gave her, on the wishing steps on Killiney Hill, a Claddagh ring, with two hearts entwined and on which I had engraved ‘Freejoe’ – an abbreviated form of Frieda and Joe – thus making her “happier than ever before” and then I came home to this.
“Sit down before I knock you fucking down” dad says as I enter the living room. He is sitting on a sofa. “No, on second thoughts, stay standing until I tell you to move. I hear you bought your girlfriend a ring for her birthday and that – this – that thought makes me want to puke. I have been out of work for a month and you never bought me (snaps his fingers) that, not even a pack of cigarettes.”
“I didn’t know you were so broke that you -”
“There’s a lot you don’t know and think you do but what I really want to say is – What was it? Yeah, every day of your life, you prove your so-called love for Elvis fucking Presley and for your girlfriend and you say you love me, so prove you do.”
“How can I do that dad?”
“Action speaks louder than words and you could have proved your ‘love’ for your father over this last month by buying him a pack of cigarettes, couldn’t you?”
“I just didn’t think of it.”
“But you thought of it to buy your girlfriend a copy of that Rod McKuen LP and not me, didn’t you?”
“That was early in the summer. You weren’t out of work then.”
“It’s the thought that fucking counts. In fact, I have a list here, of all the – I mean, I made, of all the – Where the fuck did I put that list?”
As dad rummages through his pockets, mumbling, “fuck it, fuck it, fuck it” like some demented version of the blessed trinity, I want to cry out ‘Christ help us.’
“Forget it, I can’t find that list” he says, finally. “But I will, do you hear me?”
“Yes, dad.”
“But I do remember is you calling me, last time we talked, an insensitive animal.”
“ I didn’t.”
“Don’t fucking make me get up off this chair, Joseph, or you will live to regret it, if you live. Did you, or didn’t you, fucking tell me you thought I was insensitive?”
“I never said you were an animal. All I said was that you seem to have become insensitive to the feelings of others and hypersensitive when it comes to your own feeling. Like when you think me and mom are talking about you and we’re not.”
“That’s the same as calling me an insensitive animal. So, I suppose now you’ll tell me you didn’t say you think I am sick.”
“I will. Because just like I’d never use the world ‘animal’ to describe my father and kill anyone who did, I’d never say you are ‘sick’. I merely suggested that your hypersensitivity, in this sense, might go back to normal when your treatment ends.”
“So, are you saying I am abnormal?”
“No, dad, I’m saying current circumstances are abnormal.”
“And what the fuck do you know about my ‘treatment’?”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, dad.”
“Then you better watch every word, every fucking syllable that comes out of your mouth or you will find out exactly what a ‘sick’, ‘abnormal’, ‘animal’, can do.”
So it continued for an hour, maybe three, with me standing there, pleading my case for the love this son feels for his father, until finally, I realised he couldn’t hear a word I was saying – at least if it contradicted what he was feeling. Then he said:
“You know what I was thinking tonight, if I had to look back over my life and see you as its end product, I’d have to say, frankly, my life had been a waste of time.”
Hearing those words, ‘I swear I heard a child scream’ – as I said in a poem I wrote later that night, which I called, taking my cue from a song by Richard Harris, Cries For Broken Children – then I turned and punched, on my father’s bookshelf, the glass frame that surrounded my Confirmation photograph. Some shards of glass remained caked in my knuckles, which began to bleed, some fell onto out carpet.
“Pick up every fucking piece of that glass” my father hissed, in response, as he rose to his feet, formed a fist, with his right hand, and looked like he was about to beat to a pulp the first person who ever called him a “bastard.” Then he stopped.
Why? Because he saw tears in my eyes, I hoped. But that hope was ripped right out of my heart when I saw dad smile, then heard him say, as if delighting in the fact that he had finally broken the son he sometimes called “Cool Hand Luke”. Then, compounding my pain a thousandfold, he said, “You can go to bed now, I’m finished with you” as if he was disowning me, like he’d been disowned at birth.
But it wasn’t until five minutes later, when I woke my mom, saying, “I need to talk to you”, told her the least hurtful details of what had happened and she said,
“Joseph, I blame that bloody ECT treatment your daddy is on” I first heard any mention of this particular ‘treatment’. And so, later again, I wrote in my diary, ‘Fuck the bastard doctors who prescribed ECT for dad, because, whatever it is, it’s tearing him, our family, and me to shreds. May they, and their families, rot in hell”.
Histrionic little fucker, wasn’t I? So, now that I older, seemingly more sensible, rational, and mature, have my views on ECT tempered, even slightly? No. That’s why I would say to anyone considering so called Electro Convulsive ‘Therapy’, think about it ten thousand times, and then think about it again. Then, when you do, remember that it has been outlawed in certain States of the USA and that, here in our own country, there is a group called Mind Freedom Ireland who are trying to get involuntary ECT banned. I’m with them. So, too, I guess my father would be.
But I’ll never know for sure, will I? Why? Because – and here’s my real punch line in relation to ECT – after my dad had that savage ‘treatment’ he became addicted to the pills he was prescribed, and, when he didn’t have those pills, to alcohol, both of which killed him at the age of only fifty. And I found his body.
So, if you meet me at a party, don’t, whatever you do, mention fucking ECT.
© Joe Jackson. See chapter of The Strength To Dream at joejacksonjournalist.com.