Green Suede Shoes: An Irish-American Odyssey

This rock ‘n’ roll Angela’s Ashes begins in County Wexford, Ireland, in the late 1950s, a now unrecognizable, priest-fearing backwater suffocating in superstition and strangled by sexual fevers. After an escape to the Bronx, Larry finds himself, like a musical Zelig, side by side with the Ramones and Blondie at CBGBs; the brothers McCourt, Lester Bangs, and Nick Tosches at The Bells of Hell; the Guinness soaked regulars of Paddy Reilly’s; Cyndi Lauper while she ascends and burns; Joe Strummer, Rick Ocasek, Neil Young, and Shane McGowan. The shootings at the Academy and the tragic death of soundman Johnny Byrne punctuate the revels and excesses and presage the gloom cast by 9/11 and the loss of Father Mychal Judge and so many friends. Green Suede Shoes remembers three decades of a lost New York, and celebrates the music and song in which it now lives.