There’s never been a good time to be a Boston Red Sox fan. Good or bad, they always let you down. But that’s no reason not to be a fan, and certainly no reason to switch allegiances to a more reliable team. The day you bet your heart with the percentages, you sell it out forever.

1990 was as bad a year to be a Red Sox fan as any—another frustrating near-miss. But it was a great year for a band remembered (by the shrinking number who remember it) as a thrilling near-miss, a heap of raw talent and good intentions that never quite broke through. But in 1990, in Ireland (a country, let's remember, that's the size of West Virginia), it was one hell of a great time to be Liam O'Maonlai and the Hothouse Flowers. Cover models for a memorable May 1990 New Musical Express—headlined "It's A Trad, Trad, Trad World" and championing the flowering of Irish rock—the Flowers were also poster boys for a new hippie/gypsy chic called raggle-taggle and a crack musical unit whose spirited live shows and fine songs made them much more than colorfully adorned teen idols. No match for raggle-taggle ringleaders, drinking pals, and recently adopted sons of Eire the Waterboys on record or on stage, the Hothouse Flowers were the Real Deal nonetheless. Earnest, accessible, and Irish to the core, the Flowers were a band you rooted for like your favorite home-team ballclub. A handful of other hot Irish acts were bidding to follow the thoroughly internationalized U2 into the limelight that spring—the 4 of Us with "Fool For Temptation" and Something Happens! with "Hello Petrol" were two faves—but the Flowers and Waterboys stood head and shoulders above the rest (the London-trad-punk Pogues and Irish dance-hall diva Sinead O'Connor existing in entirely separate dimensions).

Cool, charismatic, committed, and capable as they were, the Hothouse Flowers were always problematic on several counts. The band's 1988 debut album packed tremendous promise, showcasing Liam O'Maonlai's gorgeous tenor, and a stylistic range that encompassed convincing Lou Reed-style talk-singing, Van Morrison's mystic Celtic soul, "Jungleland"-era operatic Springsteen, and the rock-and-soul preaching of Solomon Burke. The songs evenly divided mid-tempo rockers with thoughtful ballads, and peaked with the perfect Reed-Springsteen blend of "Hallelujah Jordan." Even more articulate than the lyrics was the band, a richly textured mix of O'Maonlai's warm keyboards, Fiachna O'Braonain's nimble guitar, Peter O'Toole's fine bass work, Leo Barnes' commanding sax, and more subtly applied Irish traditional elements like mandolin and bouzouki.

But for the most part the band’s Irish influence was where the subtlety ended. Nobody could deny the majesty of O'Maonlai's singing, but the pre-Vedder moral authority with which he applied it seemed unnervingly unearned, and way over the top on songs like the gospel-tinged “It’ll Be Easier In the Morning” and the ponderous “The Older We Get.” And the “Sunshine on my Shoulders” hippy-dippiness of some of the lyrics made you want to cringe at times. But the wonderfully rhythmic piano underlying a song like "Don't Go" makes it hard not to forgive lines like "There's a lot more lovin' left in this world.” And if you’ve ever seen spring bloom in the rain-drenched West of Ireland through a 20-year old's eyes, you'll believe every word.

But what made that time especially exciting if you were a card-carrying Flowers fan was that they had a long-awaited new album on the way, and the two singles that had preceded it had been warming the airwaves all winter. “Give It Up”—a heartfelt plea to “help who you can”—drove home its soft-headed-hippy sentiments with such a driving “Bobby Jean”-like Springsteen punch you had to love it. Musically, it showed the band reaching an even more richly differentiated sound than they'd achieved on their first outing. (And if you'd ever seen grimy-faced toddlers panhandling in Dublin, the song's core images were clear as day and convincing as hell.) The second single, released a couple of months later, was a knock-your-socks-off cover of Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” that obliterated the original and suggested that if the band ever tried an all-cover Labour of Love album (a la UB40), it might be the greatest thing you ever heard.

Released in early June, Home was an album nobody would mistake for the best LP ever, but another solid effort all the same, showing the band in stellar form and tempering the ponderous sentiments of the band’s first record with less overripe vocals and arrangements. The album still fell way short of the band's by then-legendary live act, and one too many songs about the virtues of sharing made you wonder if the band realized how much like the Care Bears they were starting to sound. They also drew scattered jeers for O'Maonlai's apparent pre-occupation with Ireland's mythical Dingle Dolphin and the terrors of tuna traps.

But there was no denying the album rocked. And one of its best tracks, “Movies,” hinted at the key to appreciating this befuddling band. O’Maonlai is in fine voice as always, and his rich, full tones easily carry you from “Find a friend in the film/Hold hands with the heroes/Fall in love with the heroine” to the final, spoken, “Find a friend/Hold hands/Fall in love.” Sure it's corny, but it's so well-delivered that it gets you. Somewhere in the middle the song draws a clumsily written parallel between movies and rock 'n' roll, and at least for the Flowers, it’s right on the money. Like a movie that asks you to suspend your disbelief that your heroes and heroines fall in love with a few significant looks, appreciating the Hothouse Flowers takes the same willingness to go with the moment and revel in such sunny sentiments, however naive they might seem. The payoff is the fine rock 'n' roll that accompanies them and the pleasure of admitting—at least to yourself—that “it doesn't matter if you're jumbled up inside, long as you know love is endless and the world is wide” are some pretty encouraging words.

An aging ’60s ex-dropout once told me that if you didn’t read Kerouac’s On the Road in your teens, forget it—you'd never be able to tolerate its ludicrous verbal excesses, manufactured Moments, and hyperbolic platitudes. If it caught you at the right time, though, it would stay with you forever. If you didn't catch the Hothouse Flowers at their peak—when being a fan or (presumably) a member of Ireland’s best-beloved home-grown band made life seem like a never-ending world party—their appeal may stall out after a song or two as the platitudes pile up. By the 1993 release of the band's third album, Songs From the Rain, their moment was gone, and stentorian sentiments like “Take the time to listen and you just might meet your soul” were starting to get embarrassing. O’Maonlai’s punctuated delivery of the line "I believe in things of beauty—do you?" on the album's best track, "Thing of Beauty," was a knowing enough nod to old Waterboy pal Mike Scott that it felt a little like old times. Divorced from the band's “moment,” though, Songs From the Rain has to be judged on its musical credentials alone, which are passable but less resonant than its predecessors.

In May 1998 the all-but-forgotten band released its fourth record, Born, which was annoying from the minute you opened it because these self-affirmed environmentalists had shipped the disc with a fold-out inlay card including eleven blank pages Their inspiration apparently dried up, the band's latest songs sound like mediocre imitations of mid-’90s U2, who've seemed as out of ideas as the mid-’90s Rolling Stones.

The album does feature one standout track, however, a melodic epic set among lush, swirling strings. Called “At Last,” the song's about not giving up on unrequited love, and although the spirited sax of old is gone, the thrill is not. It's the Flowers of yore at their warm-hearted best, unabashedly displaying their true colors in the hopes that we’ll shine ours right back. “This boy is far from giving up, his time spent here is far from past,” O’Maonlai sings, and in that instant time disappears, spring comes to Spiddal, and Ireland is alive again with music and magic and a love-to-love-'em home-town team called the Hothouse Flowers. As the strings swirl to a crescendo, O’Maonlai completes his meditation with a corny-as-hell couplet that I’d suffer from no one else, but would gladly accept from him anytime:

“Oh, magnificence
Share your innocence.”

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