There’s an old joke in the music business: What’s the difference between a trumpet player and a government bond?
Answer: Bonds eventually mature and earn money.
Except in the case of renowned trumpeteer Johnny Carroll. He is maturing nicely on the cusp of his 80th birthday, and he has also managed to make a living for a staggering 67 years by blowing wind down a brass tube.
“It must surely be a world record I think,” says Carroll. “Some fellas say they’ve been playing music all their lives – fair enough – but I’ve been playing professionally since I was thirteen!”
Known as the man with the golden trumpet, the money Carroll now plays for goes to charity.
Proceeds of the musical extravaganza organised to celebrate Carroll’s career next week – on Tuesday, November 28, 6pm at Galway’s Clayton Hotel – will go to the Galway Hospice Foundation. Dozens of Ireland’s finest singers and musicians are lined up as special guests on the night.
“I’ve made so many friends over the decades playing music,” he says. “Of course, being a musician is the best job – I couldn’t do anything else: people are attracted to your music, they appreciate you, and you’re making them happy.”
It was investment from Westmeath showband promoter turned Fianna Fáil politician Donie Cassidy that was Carroll’s lucky break. He hired the expensive Windmill Lane studios in Dublin to record Carroll’s breakthrough album A Touch of Class in 1987.
“He really threw the kitchen sink at it,” says Carroll of Cassidy’s support. “He got the best recording equipment, the best instrumentalists, and backing singers. But ultimately, he was right: the product was good, and it sold,” says Carroll. “And I didn’t sound too bad myself,” he adds, mischievously.
Carroll’s early career was spent touring internationally with top tier showbands from the 1960s. Even as a teenager he toured holidays and weekends, rushing his homework in the band’s van. With the Premier Aces, Carroll topped the charts in Britain and Ireland, and became one of the first showbands from this side of the pond to successfully break America.
Perhaps recognising that pop music and nightclubs would eclipse the dancehall scene, he went solo, releasing five albums that went gold, and cutting Ireland’s first purely instrumental number 1 chart single with ‘Oh Mein Papa’ in the late ‘Eighties. Later, he played the cruise ship circuit, basing himself in places as exotic as Australia, Fiji and Thailand.
With too many tales of touring to fit on a page, Carroll doesn’t come across as wistful or pining for a glorious past. He is at pains to point out the sheer physical effort of constantly touring England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales; traversing bumpy roads and muddy fields to marquees in the back of a rickety van. Sweat from his hands has burned through nearly six trumpets in his lifetime. Surely there’s a book in him?
“A friend [Philomena Gallagher in 2009] already wrote a heavy book about me, and by God did I lug those boxes around libraries and shops all over the country trying to sell them!” jokes Carroll.
Carroll has shared the stage with some giants. Names like Roy Orbison, Chubby Checker, Johnny Cash, June Carter and Glen Campbell trickle out with some prodding.
Yet he’s not shy. Originally from Roscommon, his home in Galway is the only house in the city with trumpets on the iron gates – a statement, if ever there was one, that it was this tool that let him have a family and build a life.
“I couldn’t have ever done anything else. The only thing maybe is be an electrician – a sparky - and that’s only because of all the times I was fiddling with equipment in county halls where the red wire was where the earth should be. I was knocked on my backside a good few times. Sadly, I can think of three or four people, mostly guitar players from those days, killed stone dead from electrics on stage.”
Carroll faced loss in his own life when his wife Stella was defeated by cancer aged just 38, leaving him and their children David, Michelle, Priscilla and Zanda cruelly bereaved. Choked with emotion, he offers no anecdotes for this dark time, and yet it seems Carroll’s trumpet may, inadvertently, have helped – several years later – find the second great love of his life.
“I was playing in West Limerick, at the Devon Inn Hotel. I met the owner’s marvelous daughter… ” he trails off. Now “Anne from Templeglentan” has been his wife for 30 years. “I couldn’t have managed without her,” he says.
Although Carroll clearly loves being a musician, he describes his industry as “fickle”, and “an unsure business”.
“I’ve done well, but I don’t want to blow my own trumpet,” he rattles off, with well-practised ease.
“Seriously though, if it wasn’t for England we’d have been finished early on,” he recalls, noting that in the Republic outside Dublin during the showband days, dancing was banned on Saturdays. This meant regular trips up North on Saturday nights before the Troubles fully erupted, and long trips to Britain during the seven weeks of Lent and four weeks of Advent. “No dancing music then; you’d be condemned from the pulpit.”
Asked about highpoints of his career, Carroll says occasionally he receives a note from someone who tells him a lost loved one requested one of his tunes be played in the church at their funeral. Life goes full circle.
But where does the music come from? Carroll says he didn’t hail from a particularly talented family, alongside three sisters and one brother. His father, Joe, was a painter at the sanitorium in Roscommon. It was he who pushed Johnny to attend brass band practice in Castlereagh, and bought him his first cornet on hire purchase. His mother, Rose, “wasn’t bad” on the fiddle, according to Carroll.
“Your readers should know, she lived ‘till she was 104,” Carroll exclaims, cryptically.
One suspects the bold trumpeter is letting us know: there are a good few gigs left in him yet.
For tickets for the celebration on November 28, see www.eventbrite.ie, or call Clayton Hotel on 091 721900.
