Galway man joins celebs to bid farewell to US chat show king
As tall tales go, the one about the Galway man who was once in the Magic Band ending up playing accordion with Tom Waits, chatting with George Clooney – handcuffed to David Letterman – on the American chat show host’s second last show would take some beating.
But that’s what happened to Gabriel Donohue, the singer/songwriter from Rathgorgan in Athenry, best known here through his years on the showband scene – with Johnny Carroll in the Magic Band – before he headed to Philadelphia.
Gabriel is not just a singer – he is also a multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar and piano and everything from bouzouki/mandolin to accordion. He has also shared the limelight with a host of stars like Art Garfunkel, Diana Krall, Dan Akroyd, the Chieftans and Liam Clancy, to name a few.
But he owes this big brush with fame to a funeral – when Tom Waits needed a singer for his father-in-law’s funeral . . . and the singer brought Gabriel along to accompany him. And as he left, he handed the singer his card.
Then when Waits needed backing for a new song – Take One Last Look – he needed a folk sound, which is where Gabriel’s business card and Tom’s father-in-law’s funeral played their part.
“It was pretty unlikely for him to find a musician out of the blue like that, so I kept thinking ‘he’s probably not going to go through with this’,” said Gabriel, who left Ireland for New York in 1978, finally settling in Philadelphia, where he now lives.
But Waits did go through with it, rehearsing with Donohue the day before last Thursday’s appearance on the ‘Late Show with David Letterman’, the second-biggest nightly chat show on US television.
“He was very specific about what he wanted. He didn’t want any strict tempo. Originally I was going to play the pump organ but we went with the accordion in the end. He only wanted the high notes, and we weren’t locked into any rhythm,” he said.
George Clooney was also on the ‘Late Show’, handcuffed to the host in a bid to get him to stay on in the presenter’s chair.
Waits and Donohue talked Ireland together; how the former had spent a month in Tralee when he first met his Irish wife, how he has spent many months here since.