Pub Tales, and Finbar Doyle, Where Are You Now?

There was a time a few years back that I did most of my drinking at The Green Briar in Brighton, Massachusetts. In my opinion, the Briar is one of the best Irish pubs in the Boston area; not a dive, but not a place that caters to the upscale crowd, either. Every other person in the place is fresh off the boat from Paddy’s green shamrock shore, and some of them are probably even here legally. (I was surprised to find that the greatest percentage of illegal immigrants in the Boston area is not Cambodian, Haitian or Guatemalan, but Irish. Really.)

I used to frequent the place with a couple of friends from work. Where I live, Irish pubs are in short supply. In fact, there’s only one that claims to be “Irish”, but just because they hang pictures of Eamon DeValera and Michael Collins on the walls next to a map of Ireland doesn’t necessarily make it so. (Once I went in there and saw a Nelly video on the big screen TV. I rest my case.) The Briar is a cozy, wood-paneled pub with two bars, complete with brass foot rails. When it’s packed, as it often is, you’re lucky to find a seat. One time we brought this girl from work with us that I didn’t particularly like. She screwed me over more than once, and seeing how she was my supervisor, it was pretty easy for her to do so. Eventually, she got targeted by the higher-ups herself, and suddenly (in her mind) she was one of us. My friend Jeff suggested we bring her along to commiserate over some drinks, so we did. In an attempt to mend fences, I offered to buy the first round.

So here I go, up to the bar with my drink order. “Two pints of Guinness and a Mai Tai,” says I. The barman looks at me like I’m retarded, which, after I realize what I just ordered, is an opinion I’m inclined to agree with. See, The Green Briar don’t serve no Mai Tais. It’s an IRISH PUB. Raspberry Stoli is about as fancy as they get. I got her one of those instead.

On another occasion, my good buddy Jeff (who absolutely should have known better) tells me to get the first round, as he had to piss. He tells me what he wants and I belly-up to the bar while he hits the john, and I order a pint for me and a Newcastle Brown Ale for His Dudeness.

The Green Briar does not have a jukebox. Nevertheless, when I uttered these words, the unmistakable sound of a needle tearing a sizable groove in a vinyl record was heard throughout the pub. All conversation came to an abrupt halt and the faces of all the pub’s patrons swiveled towards me, expressions of scorn, horror, disbelief and outright disgust apparent on every one. After a tense few seconds of complete silence, the bartender—who I didn’t realize was so large and intimidating until that very moment—says to me:

“We don’t serve Newcastle. Proudly.”

(For those who are ignorant of the political ramifications of ordering beer, allow me to explain: Newcastle Brown Ale is an English concoction. The English, generally, are not well-liked in Ireland, and certainly not in the Green Briar, even though it’s in Boston. This is likely due to the centuries of oppression, woe and misery the English have visited upon the Irish people. I was lucky to escape with my life.)

Nonetheless, I came to be accepted as a regular at The Briar despite these embarrassing faux pas and despite the fact that I drank Guinness drafts while every true Paddy was drinking Bud Light from a bottle. I couldn’t understand why; after all, Bud Light tastes like warm piss (and YES, I know what warm piss tastes like…don’t ask) and Guinness is the best fucking drink ever invented. Here are the two reasons I was given: 1) bottles of Bud Light are cheaper than pints of Guinness. Much cheaper. Hence, you can drink more for less money. 2) According to my friends at The Briar, the Guinness we are familiar with in the USA is not worthy of the name. (I plan on confirming reason #2 when I head to Ireland next year, and believe me, by the time I return to this country, I’ll have done enough research to be more than certain.)

The Angry Piper has the bladder capacity of a small woodland creature, and so after drinking a few pints, I invariably have to piss like a racehorse. I was usually good for a few trips to the bathroom in the course of a night. On more than one occasion, I would enter The Green Briar’s men’s room, which has two urinals and a stall, and I would always seem to find myself doing my business next to the same guy. After the third time, we started laughing and I said, “Dude, we’ve got to stop meeting like this.” After the fourth time, he looked at me and said “This isn’t about the pissing for you anymore, is it?”

Another memorable Briar bathroom story: I’ve just finished having a piss and I’m zipping up, when the guy next to me (different guy for once) finishes up, shakes himself off and says: “Right. Now I’m ready to stick it in her.”

I have no idea who she was, but for some reason I found (and still find) that extremely funny.

But anyway, on to the real subject of this post. The Green Briar is the kind of pub that features live entertainment almost every night; on nights when major sporting events (including soccer) happen, the music waits until the game is over. When I frequented the place, Mondays were for a traditional Irish seisun where anyone with an instrument and an inkling could show up and make music. The weeknights usually featured local bands which may or may not have been Celtic; Saturday was for big (local) names; and Sunday nights were for Finbar Doyle.

I first saw Finbar open for Seven Nations, one of my favorite bands, when they played the Hard Rock Café in Boston on their Dewar’s sponsored tour. It takes an awful lot to impress me, particularly when 7N is coming out onstage, but he did. Finbar doesn’t have a band. He’s just one guy with an acoustic guitar and a bodhran (Irish drum). He was the only opening act that I could remember wanting to listen to and despite the fact that my favorite band was due to come out any minute, I wasn’t in a hurry for Finbar to get offstage. I remember thinking I had to find out who he was, and see if he played anywhere locally. He was tough to find, but eventually I tracked him down about a year later at The Green Briar.

There, Sunday was Finbar’s night, and despite the fact that most of us had to get up on Monday morning and head to work, for a while we made the fifty mile trip to Brighton faithfully each week. I’ve spent a lot of time in pubs, drinking and listening to pub musicians’ songs and tales. None of them have ever come close to Finbar Doyle.

Finbar knew the sad songs, the rebel songs, and the sing-along songs. It wasn’t just what he sang, it was how he sang. He could belt out The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York in July, and no one would care that it wasn’t anywhere near Christmas. With Finbar on guitar I—along with everyone else—sang along to songs like Back Home in Derry, Fields of Athenry (Oh baby let the freebirds fly!), Dirty Old Town, The Town I Loved So Well, and The Wild Rover. He made us laugh with Many’s the Pint I Had With the Pope John Paul and his own rendition of Useta Lover by The Saw Doctors. Then he’d play the bodhran and have us all stomping and singing Rocky Road to Dublin and Some Say the Devil is Dead, with only the drum as accompaniment. The Wolfe Tones, The Irish Rovers, U2, Van Morrison; Finbar covered them all with a healthy dose of ad-libbing, and even wrote his own stuff; notably a song about Veronica Guerin and, on some of the last few times I saw him, one about 9/11. Finbar genuinely loved the music he played, he played with feeling and passion, and he made us love it too.

He even covered American Pie. Finbar claimed it was for all the Madonna fans out there.

I don’t know why I stopped going. Now that I’m writing this blogpost, I wish I never stopped.

Recently, I found myself at The Green Briar again, but this time it was during the week, and I stopped in for lunch. I was working. The pub was empty, the stage broken down. It was myself and the barmaid—a girl from Carlow who has been pulling pints there since before I ever set foot inside—and some old guy sitting at the end of the bar, getting started early. I asked her if Finbar still played Sunday nights.

“No,” she said. She said it in a way that made me think there was more to the story than that one word.

“Did he go back to Ireland?”

“No,” she said. Obviously, I wasn't getting anywhere. I let it go.

So far, Finbar has no Myspace account that I can find, which is too bad. I’m not even sure if he has a computer, but I hope so, because I confess that one of my purposes in writing this post is the hope that Finbar will one day Google himself and see it. I’d like to know if he’s still playing and where (or even if he’s still alive and in the country). And Finbar, if you read this, know that “that bagpiper guy from down near Rhode Island” still thinks it’s worth the fifty mile drive on a Sunday night and the hangover on Monday morning to raise a glass with you and hear you play.

As long as it’s a glass of Guinness.