San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
AN IRISH BAR WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD.
Irish seisún has welcomed generations with song
First, there’s just one fiddle. A quiver of a tune, rocking back and forth up through the scale, then two in tandem, ducking back down and circling around again. Then three, the fiddlers peeling off their coats and setting down their pints on a table at the center. Someone brings out a concertina, the uilleann pipes, a guitar. “Hup!” one calls, with a nod, and they’re off to the races on the next tune.
They’ve played this way on Sunday nights at the Plough and the Stars in the Richmond District for decades now. And I hope they always will.
When you first open the front door on Clement Street, the place doesn’t look like much: a pool table, a dark wooden bartop, empty tables and chairs. The cavernous space is painted red, and there’s that unmistakable divebar smell, the scent of years and years of spilled beer. Neighbors watch a game and lift a Jameson under old posters and paintings. But when you look closer at the fading photos of famed Irish musicians who’ve fiddled and sung and drunk a Guinness here, you’ll see that something special happens at the Plough.
Owner Sean Heaney, who is from Newry in County Down, and took over the Plough from its previous owner in 1981, ran some pubs in Ireland before he arrived in San Francisco in the early ’80s. Though he doesn’t play any instruments himself, Heaney couldn’t shake the memory of one bar he really loved, where musicians played every night of the week. A fiddler, Peter McArdle, who stayed upstairs with the owners, would come down each evening to lead a seisún — the traditional gathering of fiddlers, flutists and other players — which Heaney has kept going at the Plough and the Stars ever since.
The seisún isn’t really a performance, though sitting nearby with a pint to listen is one of the most pleasant ways I know to spend a Sunday or Tuesday night in San Francisco. There’s no microphone; the players aren’t onstage. Instead they face each other, gathered around a table as if they’re playing cards. This gathering is an essential part of what’s mostly an oral tradition: Irish music is passed down by playing and listening, taking turns and joining in.
“It’s kind of a collector’s thing,” says Jack Gilder, who plays the concertina (a relative of the accordion) and the tinwhistle. “When you go to the seisún, you’re sharing what you’ve collected with other people that have collections.”
Many of the players know hundreds of tunes, which are played a few times each, in sets of two or three or four. “The more of these tunes you learn,” says fellow concertina and tinwhistle player Autumn Rhodes, “and the more you learn about the ins and outs of it, the more fun it is.”
The transition from one song to the next doesn’t always come with much of a warning. “The energy between the musicians on a really good seisún night, it’s telepathic, really,” says Tim Hill, who plays the uilleann (or elbow) pipes, a sort of Irish bagpipe.
Hill says the seisún has much more to teach than just the music’s notes. For him, it’s long been a model of how to interact with others. “It’s not a freeforall jam session,” he says. “There are rules. You learn not to domineer things.” The Plough is known in Irish music circles worldwide, and the seisún often welcomes visiting players from as far as Japan, Chile and Australia — and of course, many musicians from Ireland. “Wherever you go,” says mandolin player Susan Spurlock, “you’re trying to find the intersection of the Venn diagram — which tunes do we have in common? Maybe you wait for 20 minutes because they’re playing a set of tunes that you’ve never heard. But there will always be an intersection.”
There’s a lesson there, I think, about finding common ground.
As the players start to tune up, I head back to the bar to ask for a reup from Heaney’s son, Eoin. A pint of Guinness here takes time. Each glass ($7.50) gets about threequarters of a fill, then sits a minute to settle before it’s topped off and rested a moment