Hats Off to Beer - START HERE!

I wrote the song, "Hats Off to Beer" back in the early 1990's, when I was a guitar player in an Irish Folk Band called The Black Velvet Band. We were based out of New Dublin (New London), Wisconsin, and we played Irish-related events all around the northeastern Wisconsin area. Here's a picture of us performing under the big top at New Dublin's annual IrishFest.  Left to right, that's Dave Mulroy banging on that Irish drum thingy, Judy O'Connell is seated at her keyboard, I'm singing and playing sloppy rhythm guitar, and Mike O'Connell is blowing on the tin whistle.  It's actually very likely, given the details of the picture, that we are singing "Hats Off to Beer" while this photo was snapped.  I didn't sing a whole lot of songs with the band, and I do remember that Mike used to play the whistle on this one.  Furthermore, it was a very popular song with the New Dublin crowd, so that just might be what I was singing there.

We actually recorded "Hats Off to Beer" in a real, live recording studio: Irish Sounds, in Appleton, WI.  That the name of the studio had the word "Irish" in it was more coincidental than anything.  I believe that "Irish" was the fellow's last name who ran the place.  Anyway, it made for good karma.  We recorded it live to DAT with the instrumentation that you see above, except that Mike played the mandolin instead of the tin whistle.  (In retrospect, I like it better with the whistle!)  If memory serves, we did it in one take.  Here is the result:

That's where the whole thing started.

Forward Fast about six or seven years.  Online music and mp3s are becoming the next big thing.  I decided to upload some of The Black Velvet Band's music to the now defunct website called mp3.com.  They had this deal called "Payback for Playback", whereby you would earn a fraction of a cent every time someone clicked on and listened to or downloaded one of your songs.  Somehow, "Hats Off to Beer" became a featured song on their home page.  That was all it took.  People were listening to and downloading "Hats Off to Beer" like they were drinking it.  We made a good chunk of change before the website realized that they could never pay their artists as much as they thought they could.  Nevertheless, the song was downloaded by thousands of people worldwide, making it an international success.