Seán Lennon’s Rock Dreams

Martin Hayes, Seán Lennon© 2024

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Kris Kristofferson

‘Thank you for the sadness that you saved me from the madness, baby all I’m crying now are tears of joy..’

‘In the park I saw a daddy
With a laughin’ little girl that he was swingin’
And I stopped beside a Sunday school
And listened to the songs they were singin’
Then I headed down the street
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin’
And it echoed through the canyons
Like the disappearin’ dreams of yesterday’

I drew this on the retirement three years ago of Kristofferson, who has just passed away. He had brought a new depth and honesty to country music over a six decades long career as a country singer and actor. Described as the Dylan of country music, his Sunday Morning Coming Down is a masterpiece of desolation and addiction, similar in its sense of chronic loneliness and loss to His Bobness’s Desolation Row. According to Dylan, Kristofferson had used Sunday Morning Coming Down to go for country music’s throat. “You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything. That one song blew ol’ Tom T. Hall’s world apart. He couldn’t see it coming.”

Kris Kristofferson, Rider in the Sky (22nd June 1936 – 28th September 2024)
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His Bobness

‘People are crazy and times are strange,
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed.’

Too true. Not that I’m blaming Dylan. Things, like the times, probably would have been a-changing anyway. But maybe not quite as much without him or in quite the same way.

‘Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind..’

I first heard Chimes of Freedom in the summer of 69, and school, south inner city Dublin, and the Universe itself, never felt the same again. Were these feelings just growing pains or figments of my hopping hormones? Or had a paradigm shift happened?

Looking back, things had changed. And ever since then, Dylan’s work has continued to soothe, re-inspire and encourage me. Furthermore, his work as an agent for change is not yet done. I last saw Dylan with my son Cormac in Dublin at the 3 Arena on the 7th of November 2022 and he was still at it. Presaging and agitating and bringing change about. The gig, at His Bobness’s insistence, was phone free which I loved. It also was fidget free.. as if the removal of the terrible device had a calming, civilising effect on the crowd. This was a proper sit down gig. No photographers made it inside but at least two cartoonists did, both of the Lennon variety His Bobness had done it again..

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Johnny Cash

‘And it burns, burns, burns..’

For me, country music began with Johnny Cash. I enjoyed Johnny Horton’s North to Alaska, and loved Roger Miller’s King of the Road. But never thought about them much. Johnny changed that. 

As soon as I first heard Ring of Fire I was puzzled. Where WAS this Ring? Was it that place in the Pacific where most of Earth’s volcanoes erupt? Definitely not in Dublin where we rarely saw a break in the clouds or a golden sunlight let alone fiery rings. Slowly I realised it had less to do with sun, black holes, vapours and fragments than an emotional condition. One that as a ten year old I wasn’t looking forward to. Then, recalling a phrase from a western I’d seen “hayul foyer n tarnation” I realised I was getting warm..and jes like that, I was introduced to country, realising ‘if it sounds country then that’s what it is’. This fiery rang was a country music thang 

Y’all.

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PJ Harvey

‘These, these, these are the words
The words that maketh murder.’

Drew this in 2016 after Polly’s mesmerising Glastonbury gig of that year. One of the best EVER. Here’s PJ Harvey with Rudi the celebrity Dog Wonder

‘What if I take my problem to the United Nations?’

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Leonard Cohen

‘If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They will bind you with love that is
graceful and green as a stem.’

The first time I heard Leonard was the summer of 1968. The song was Sisters of Mercy on Rock Machine Turns You On the CBS sampler album. I was immediately struck by the power of his writing.

There are only a few special songs in my DNA, and it predates all but one.
I’ve drawn and painted Cohen many times over the years.
Thank you for being there Leonard .

Sincerely,

S. Lennon.

You got me singing
Even though the world is gone
You got me thinking
I’d like to carry on

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John Prine

‘.. it ain’t such a long drop, don’t stammer, don’t stutter
From the diamonds in the sidewalk to the dirt in the gutter’

I have been a massive fan of John Prine for decades and love drawing the guy especially in his later years. That’s What They Invented Dancing For is one of my most popular prints. We’ve lost him but I am still very grateful to John and his extended Irish family for their support. His latter-day Zorba-meets-Hendrix dance off stage was a joy to behold and an unforgettable way of closing out his gigs. Upfront and defiant, it involved and included us all in the twists and turns of his health-journey.

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Willie Nelson 

Aka the red headed stranger

Up the Reds!! 

“They just let Liverpool win all those titles out of kindness I suppose”

(after Pancho & Lefty)

Yet another product of the decade of change that was the 60s Willie may not even know he is a supporter of Liverpool Football Club. This drawing was inspired by his landmark album Red Headed Stranger. The Red of the title and his favoured bandana proved irresistible for this fan of both Willie and LFC. 

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Shane McGowan

‘And a blackbird broke the silence
As you whistled it so sweet
And in Brendan Behan’s footsteps
I danced up and down the street..’

When I drew this one Shane McGowan had already stopped performing live. For some, his magnificent laments and timeless classics were small beer compared to the tales of his drunkeness and bad behaviour. But great songs like Streams of Whiskey are so much more than that. Drinking stories and health battles aside, then, Ireland’s greatest songwriter Shane McGowan will be remembered by most of us for one thing only: his songs.

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Sinéad O’Connor

‘..maybe it sounds mean
But I really don’t think so.
You asked for the truth and I told you’

Drew this one while listening to I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Still sounds amazing. One of a small number of classic Irish rock albums that will stand the test of time.

After her death I drew Sinéad, and I drew her. Again and again. How could anyone ever get tired of drawing such a beautiful woman?

While talking about her recently to an old friend I remarked on how I had been affected by Sinéad’s passing (of a broken heart) in a way that surprised me, as I like to keep the loss of rockstars and such at a realistic distance. He remarked he too had been surprised in much the same way. We concluded we had perhaps been in love with her for decades.

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Miles Davis

”I have to change. It’s like a curse.”

For Davis, life and music were both about style. Musically Miles seemed to be forever ahead by the widest measure but by the time the “musician’s music” bebop came about he was well out of sight.

This drawing is one of Davis in classic jazz trumpeter mode. However it was when his second wife Bette, the great 70s funk Queen, became his muse, that Miles the fashion-template emerged in psychedelic shirts, platform boots, leather jackets and jet-age shades to re-define cool. The ‘evil genius of jazz’ had arrived.

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David Bowie

‘Blue, blue, electric blue
That’s the colour of my room
Where I will live
Blue, blue.. ‘

Bowie had Tipperary roots on his mother’s side. He owned original works by Irish artists, loved Beckett and included the ace Dublin-born guitarist Gerry Leonard in his band. 

The Strypes shared the same spirit as the British R n B groups of the early to mid 60s I’d always loved: Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, Animals, Yardbirds, Spencer Davis, our own Them. On January 30th 2016, three weeks after Bowies death, we attended a gig in Dublin’s Olympia by these stars of the Breffni County who faithfully delivered a set of nitty-gritty rhythm n blues. A great band with great taste.. they began, brilliantly, by way of tribute, with Bowie’s Rebel, Rebel.

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Joni Mitchell 

‘It’s coming on Christmas
They’re cutting down trees
They’re putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on’ 

I enjoyed doing this one. It is, I think, only the second time I’ve drawn a lady of Joni’s vintage playing electric guitar. The first was Rosetta Tharpe. 

Joni’s appearance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival as a guest of Brandi Carlile and ‘performer of honour’ was a huge surprise. Past the first flush of youth but more than capable still of picking a tune, she resumed her rightful place as one of the great singer-songwriters with grace and dignity. Of course nothing could have changed that, not even the aneurysm she’d suffered in 2015.

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Patti Smith

‘And the sky split and the planets hit
Balls of jade dropped and existence stopped
Stopped, stopped’

This was drawn some time ago, from the Frank Stefanko photograph. Patti, of course, is the real deal. With the release of Horses in 1975 the punk poet laureate had found her creative voice and already was nurturing her inner world. Today she has the status of something like a polymath or renaissance artist. “Most of my extreme fame as a performer was in Europe. That’s where I had the most recognition and still do. I was embraced there not just as a rock-and-roll singer but as a poet and an artist. And it was exciting.”

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Seán Lennon has been active as a cartoonist for many years in Dublin, where he continues to work as a freelance artist, illustrator and cartoonist . He has in that time published widely in Irish newspapers and magazines, including the financial pages of the Irish Independent, the Irish Times and several magazines including The Phoenix.

He has published several books of illustrations – the most recent of which, “Godot Go Deo”, was described by Books Ireland as a ‘piece of Beckettry that no collector should overlook’ and by the Irish Independent as a ‘welcome antidote to the po-faced product of so much of the Beckett industry’.

He exhibits frequently in Dublin. His most recent ‘Joyce: The Missing Hours’ ran at the Central Bank of Ireland for most of June 2024