Seamus Kelleher on lead guitar.
He learned guitar at 14 and at 15 he was playing gigs around his native Galway. Then it was onto the local band circuit and eventually, to a 14-year stint with Sean Fleming in New York. In 1995, he joined the hot Philly-area Celtic rockers, Blackthorn, as lead guitarist.
He’s been in the music business since Nixon was president, so why, at the age of 53, is Seamus Kelleher just getting around to putting out his first solo CD? “I just wasn’t ready,” says Kelleher, whose independently produced “Four Cups of Coffee” is getting both critical claim and airplay.
“I just didn’t have all the tools to say what I wanted to say,” he tells me over his cellphone while he’s driving home to north Jersey after a Blackthorn gig a few weeks ago. “I didn’t feel my voice or my songwriting was in the right place. I’m highly developed as a lead guitar player. It took me a while to get the confidence in all the rest. I didn’t want to do a CD where there were five or six good songs and all the rest junk.”
And this is the spot in the story where you find out that he succeeded. There’s not a clunker in the dozen tunes on the CD, from Kelleher’s touching “My Friend Ben,” a tribute to his late friend, Brendan Glyn, to the direct-to-trad “Nashville Ceili Band” on which he’s accompanied by musicians who usually sit behind Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, or LeAnne Rimes. In fact, the CD was produced in the home of country music by Pete Huttlinger, 2000 national finger pick guitar champion who played with John Denver and can be seen and heard on YouTube backing up Rimes. Huttlinger also arranged some of Kelleher’s tracks.
“I was so intimidated having someone of that skill producing my CD, but I felt it was a chance to really open my eyes and it did,” he admits. “Pete elevated my playing and I came back a better musician, not just a guitar player.“
In fact, Kelleher was awestruck by the caliber of the musicians Huttlinger assembled, most of them Grammy winners. “And not one of them was ego-driven,” he says. “I was talking to one guy who never told me he plays with The Dixie Chicks. We talked about how he has this new house in the woods that he loves and oh, he goes out on tour every once in a while. ”
And he was totally blown away when Huttlinger invited him to a birthday party for one of Huttlinger’s friends, country megastar Vince Gill. “It was toward the end of the week and I put on my one remaining shirt, a silly Hawaiian thing, and we get to Vince’s house and this beautiful lady answers the door,” he says. It was singer Amy Grant, Gill’s wife. “She smiled and put her arms out and said, ‘Congratulations on finishing your CD!’ I was speechless.”
There was a tent set up in the Gills’ backyard and Kelleher mingled with people whose work he’d long admired from afar–songwriters whose credits included “The Gambler” and “Mr. Bojangles,” singers like Janis Ian. “One guy got up–he looked like a tramp–and started singing. I never heard a voice like it. He sounded like a 90-year-old blues guy. Then Vince and Amy sang together. I said to someone next to me, ‘If the Lord were to take me, this probably wouldn’t be a bad time.’ Six weeks later, he almost did take me.”
“Four Cups of Coffee” was just five days old when Kelleher, drinking with some friends at Kildare’s Irish Pub in King of Prussia, tumbled down a steep flight of stairs as he was leaving to go home. “Someone called me, I looked back, and the next thing I remember I was in a chopper. I had fractured my skull, several ribs, and hurt my back,” he recalls. He was taken in critical condition to the University of Pennsylvania Hospital where he remained in the intensive care unit for three days.
Once he was weaned off morphine, the pain hit him with a vengeance. But that wasn’t his biggest concern. “The hard part was wondering if I would get better,” he says. “I had a brain injury and not everyone comes back from that. These were very tough days, to be honest with you. I even had trouble remembering my kids’ names. I covered it up because I didn’t want anyone to know. I knew I was fighting a battle.”
When he came home, he was besieged by constant headaches and excruciating back pain, and for a time was mostly bedridden, though he would force himself to get up and walk back and forth in a hallway with the aid of a cane. “I was determined to get better,” he says. He realized he had so much to live for — “four lovely kids, a wife, my CD and a great band” — that he just couldn’t quit. “It’s amazing what you can do when you want to do it,” he says.
One thing he did quit was drinking. The title track on his CD–a bluesy riff on addictions both harmless (coffee) and not (3 shots of gin and two Irish whiskies)– turned out to be a little more autobiographical than he intended. “I was poking fun at myself, my own demons, and I’ve battled alcohol to some degree, I don’t mind saying,” he admits. One line goes, “Lord I’m all alone, I don’t know where I’m going. Can you help me so I can see.” Kelleher now considers it an unwitting prayer.
“I haven’t taken a drink since my fall,” says Kelleher. “This was my ‘come to Jesus’ meeting, though,” he adds with a wry laugh, “I wish he’d put his arms out before I hit the concrete.”
Kelleher was back on stage with Blackthorn six weeks after his accident. The first gig, he admits, was a little shaky. “I was really scared driving up to the gate, petrified really. Was I going to be able to do this or that? Could I bend down to pick up my guitar? Would I remember the songs? I was still in a lot of pain and I knew it could be deadly if I moved the wrong way. And standing next to McGroary (button accordionist John McGroary) you never knew when you were subject to attack.” He laughs. “But after one song, I knew everything was going to be fine. I still had a ways to go, but I was back.”
