Shane MacGowan (1957 - 2023)

All in one night I witnessed it. It was probably 1985 but I could be off by a year or two. The Pogues were in Boston, playing a club called Spit on Landsdowne Street, right behind the famed “green monster” of Fenway Park. Only a few songs into their set things started to get scary. A dozen or so Boston Irish had claimed the pit as their own and were using the Pogues trad-punk as an excuse to act out the stereotype of Irish song and sensibility: drink and fight and drink and fight. I’d been to quite a few rowdy punk shows by then, but I was not expecting the Pogues with their fiddles and pennywhistles to devolve into a veritable riot. In no time, however, the scene was so violent that panic set in. The crowd was too thick to allow for an easy escape. But the ceiling was low and traversed by exposed pipes. So I hoisted myself up and installed myself in the maybe twenty-four inch gap between the pipes and the ceiling. I lay on my belly looking forward and down upon the band, Shane MacGowan, drink and cigarette ever in hand, bellowing sad, romantic ballads alternating with shit-kicking, two-steps in which the word “whiskey” just barely edged out the word “love.” I also had a birdseye view of the mayhem. Boston kids in the 1980s with little love but lots of whiskey, beating the living shit out of each other. This was not moshing, but brawling, the Pogues providing an excuse to release the burdens of animosity and anonymity collected over brief lives and understood as the prevailing condition of their lot. Sure, there were college kids too who wanted just to feel something. But this was not a casual violence. It was urgent and desperate and understood itself as a kind of communication that would find expression only in the rarest moments. This was now-or-never violence. My refuge in the pipes lasted the entire show, half of it taking in the plain pub spectacle of the Pogues, the other half witnessing something I wasn’t ready for and instantly understood.

 

When the show ended and the crowd let out into that canyon behind the baseball park’s intimidating back, I walked shell-shocked into the night. I looked down at my shirt front to find it covered in blood. Thankfully none of it was my own. But that only made it more unsettling. To be covered in strangers’ blood, wending the streets of new Boston. My friends and I turned the corner onto Boylston and headed downstairs to our favorite local dive. A place so off the beaten path that the rest of the Pogues crowd were sure to miss it; a place so anonymous that I can’t now remember its name.

 

We’d been there a while when I noticed, sitting alone at the bar, Shane MacGowan. I don’t know how long he’d been there. Maybe before we arrived or maybe he slipped in sometime after. In front of him in a neat row, four drinks: a double whiskey, a glass of water, a beer, and a cup of coffee. Dutifully, he sipped from each one in turn. He had a method. Inebriation. Hydration. Caffeination. Repeat. Or, if you like: Medication. Maintenance. Forward motion. I imagined then, or maybe only now in hindsight, that this was Shane MacGowan’s existence. Providing an outlet for the pent-up frustrations and torment of rooms full of young men and then heading to a slow, quiet corner to rejoin his demons. Those demons never let go of him. Or him of them. It’s always a dance, ain’t it? He and his songs danced to the demons. They sang of love and whiskey, but also of the patina of romance in the reflection of sunrise in a curbside puddle walking home from the pub where the whole night was spent drinking away the certainty of perpetual defeat. Things would never get better except fleetingly; never longer than the length of a song. But singing along to the chorus – about a girl, about the old days, about a movie that hadn’t been made yet – could numb the pain of knowing that the song would end and that it was only ever a song anyway, not your real life or your mother’s or your dad’s or your kids' or theirs. The rain will always fall. The puddles will form. The sun will rise. And the pub and the songs wait at the end of the day to put you back to bed.

 

In 1989 the Pogues were touring America. By then, they were playing big venues: arenas, stadiums. They opened a tour for U2. 1989 was the summer of Tim Burton's Batman, the movie that launched a thousand marketing campaigns (just as it was designed to do). But Shane MacGowan’s had no truck with Hollywood superheroes or their product placement in whatever it is that took the place of hearts in the hyperconsumerist America of Ronald Reagan. MacGowan’s aspirational cultural consciousness fixed – even as a young boy - on the likes of James Joyce and Dostoevsky. Struggling with an unappreciative crowd at the University of Michigan, MacGowan exited the stage in a huff (as he often did in that drug-poisoned period of his life), only to return a moment later to deliver a bullseye critique of shallow American hubris: "Fuck you and your fucking batman!" Hardly a week goes by when that line doesn’t play across the bottom third of my mind’s eye’s mind as I look and listen to the world.

 

 

 

Shane MacGowan’s songs were full of blarney. They might have had the secondary effect of charming us while we sang along. But it seems pretty clear that they were first and foremost written as songs that Shane MacGowan could sing along to. They were the songs of his Irish immigrant parents. But they were his parents' songs made a little harder and more truthful, a little more foul-mouthed and a little more desperately romantic. The songs were excuses to get out of bed. But they were also acknowledgments of going back to sleep with nothing having changed. As Michael Lenzi said to me about MacGowan, “he always seemed to be saying goodbye.” That strikes me as true a thing as one can think or feel or say about Shane MacGowan. He was never sure he’d see you in the morning, or you him, or the sun in the sky kissing that same damned puddle once more before a new rain started and another glass of whiskey got poured.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

Robbie Robertson (1943 - 2023)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m pretty sure a full-skeleton x-ray would reveal traces of the Band in my bones.  Their music and something of each member’s musical personality is braided into my ribs and spine. If Aristotle hadn’t said of tragedy that it

is an imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions,

I would’ve said it about the Band. The trajectory of their individual and collective lives arced from Olympian heights to the grey liquid layer at the bottom of the dumpster. A loneliness haunts their music and their biographies, pulsing with the indolence of an out-of-breath EKG. Richard Manuel hanged himself in a Florida motel room after a downer gig. He was 42. Rick Danko spent time in a Japanese prison for possession and died of a heart attack at 55. Levon Helm died after a long struggle with throat cancer. Now Robbie Robertson is gone, leaving only Garth Hudson.

Where to start? I guess with that faux-alligator cassette case that my dad kept in the cabinet in the den. It held ten or twelve cassettes. A few of them never caught my eye. But a few of them did. I remember finding an incongruous Black Sabbath tape in there. I know for a fact that my dad was not into Sabbath or anything like it. Maybe he thought it was a Friday night jam for the lost tribe of Jews in Ethiopia? More likely it was given to him by one of his younger drug buddies. There was Neil Young’s Harvest which got play in the car with some frequency and which I promptly made my own. I bought the vinyl shortly thereafter. I treat my vinyl with kid gloves. But Harvest I wore out. At some point in the 90s, I bought another copy and inserted it into the original gatefold sleeve. That’s the one I still listen to.

And there was The Best of the Band. This too got play in the car. And this, too, I ran off with. But I never bought it on vinyl. I needed to go back to the sources. First, The Band, which I learned only later – I was thirteen, there was no internet – was their second album. Then their first, the epochal, majestic, otherworldly, and wholly-of-this-world, Music From Big Pink. It is one of the three or four greatest rock albums ever made. I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. Before college I had the Band’s complete catalogue on vinyl and I’d seen The Last Waltz at least five times. Our Aunt Pamela painted the cover on the back of a denim jacket for my brother Matt and I’m jealous to this day.

The tragedy that is the Band casts Robbie in the role of villain. But real life doesn’t have roles. Time and circumstance change people. They make people weak. They make people do things they wouldn’t have/couldn’t have done at other times, in other circumstances. Time and circumstance can force an ordinary person to do and make extraordinary things. But they can also wring the talent from a person like blood from a workshop rag.

This can’t simply be a eulogy for Robbie. It must also be a requiem for the Band.

At the beginning, the Band was a collective. Look at the photograph in the gatefold of Music From Big Pink. Really look at it. Totally confounding. A group of thirty-three people – six of them children – gathered for a portrait in front of a barn. In the foreground, planted at the children’s feet, two oversized plastic mushrooms, red with white polka dots. The adults range in age from their twenties to their seventies. The men wear mostly plaid shirts and dungarees. A few wear suits. The women are in their rural Sunday-best. Printed on the photo, to the left of the group, in black, all-caps, serif font, are the words, “NEXT OF KIN.” They’re hard to make out because they’re printed atop a picnic bench and partially on top of the trunk of a tree. At the upper left corner of the photo is a smaller – roughly one inch by one inch – inset photo of a middle-aged couple. One must assume they couldn’t make the group shoot, but that someone deemed it important to include them. It’s like the missing members of the Latin Club cropped into the high school yearbook page. Amongst the large group of thirty-three, the five members of the Band. They are not out front like the Beatles on Sergeant Peppers’. They don’t stand out from this crowd. They’re mixed in, dressed like the rest of the gathering in farm hats and work shirts. The image tells us something. As an ardent fan at Bob Dylan’s 1965 press conference said, “that’s an equivalent photograph it means something it’s got a philosophy in it.”

The philosophy of the photo is “we.” The band, the family, the families. Not the hedonistic selfishness of hippie sex, hippie drugs, hippie music. The Band put their backs into it. They pull as a group, ten hands on the frayed rope, hauling the past up out of the well. In the history of rock and roll, few bands – very few bands – have worked as cooperatively as the Band. Each member is more interested in making nooks and crannies than in filling them with jam. It is the irregular contours of each player’s part that fit together with the others’ like the grooves of a key in a lock, like the unexpected joinings of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Here is one of Robbie Robertson’s great gifts: chipping away at the surface of the song – his guitar quite recognizably the sound of stone directed at flint – leaving excavations, indentations, evacuations, and abdications; small, rhythmically sporadic gaps and crevices where Manuel, Danko, Helm, and Hudson can gain purchase, place flourishes, or further abrade the smooth swellings of the odd constructions they called songs. Together, the five of them each scatter fragments that somehow coalesce as music. This little miracle is why so many of their contemporaries took a big step back when first they heard the Band. So many who thought they knew what a song was, how its little machinery worked. So many who retreated and doubted what they thought they knew.

J. Royal “Robbie” Robertson (the J is for Jaime) was plucked from relative obscurity by Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas rockabilly howler who made his living performing north of the border. Hawkins’ music demanded that the singer regularly hand off to the hotshot guitarist who would fan the song’s flames with a solo. (Witness Hawkins return the favor as he opens the proceedings of The Last Waltz, the Band’s farewell concert filmed my Martin Scorcese.) Yet, despite his hotshot bona fides, Robertson rarely took a proper solo in the Band’s songs. He preferred to make those little jigsaw shapes than to slash through the song with samurai flash. When he does take a solo they tend to be brief. And rather than grabbing the song by the throat, they prick its belly, they force it to convulse ever so slightly, to change shape ever so briefly. Listen, for example, to the solo in “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” Robertson enters at 2:52. His guitar is miniscule, a gnat buzzing in the ear of the field ox. He chokes the neck of the guitar, forcing it to fight its way out of his grip. Harmonic shards squeeze out of the song like little metallic bubbles. The solo almost recedes back into the song. It trips itself like a Catskills comedian. Resting a moment to allow the audience to fill the gap where a “real” solo would have made hay, it then starts to tighten the line, tauter and tauter, while the Band catches its balance and slithers across the canyon on the solo’s tense vibrations.

On Music From Big Pink, Robertson wrote only four of eleven songs. Most people, even fans of the Band, miss that. Richard Manuel wrote three and co-wrote one with Bob Dylan. Rick Danko and Dylan collaborated on another. They also include a cover of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” and the 1959 country ballad “Long Black Veil.” The following year, for their self-titled second album, Robertson wrote or co-wrote all twelve songs. There’s a very reasonable argument to be made that Robertson became the leader of the Band because he had to; because the Band could no longer function as a cooperative. It’s the same old rock and roll story: the drugs, the alcohol, the sex. The trappings of fame interfering with the reasons that fame arrived in the first place. Robbie was ambitious. Robbie wanted more. He learned the nuts and bolts of recording during the second album so that he wouldn’t have to trust others with those crucial tasks. Robbie is cast as the villain in the Band’s bio. But without Robbie it’s likely there wouldn’t have been a Band bio to speak of.

I do think, however, that it is fair to say that Robbie wasn’t, at heart, a songwriter.  He was a great guitarist, an inventive arranger, an accomplished bandleader. But he lacked anything like the lyrical gifts of Dylan, under whom the Band apprenticed, and many of his songs are weighed down by rigid perspective-taking: “Stagefright” written in the voice of an anxious performer, and (ugh) “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the first-person account of a bereaved Confederate soldier. Other songs – think for instance of “Life is a Carnival” – are hogtied by barbed-wire conceits that trap the song in the constraints of all-encompassing metaphors. For a while, though, he had enough musical tricks up his sleeve to keep the songs lively, often surprising. “Jawbone,” from the second album, is a musical obstacle course, careening from syncopated waltz time to drunken-sailor shanty, to a thorny, hiccupping chorus riff as off-kilter as King Crimson at their proggiest. But the Band was nimble enough to navigate the song gingerly, making it feel casual. The five of them had the kind of instrumental and vocal charisma that could start a fire even with waterlogged kindling. In the Band’s early days, the weary, yet ethereal voice of Richard Manuel could break your heart singing the contents of a soup can.

I saw the band only once. I was a little too young, born too late. It was after the Last Waltz breakup and the subsequent reunion, without Robbie. I’ve seen other bands past their prime, sometimes missing key members. But without Robbie, the Band was merely a cover band of themselves. The Band was precisely the sum of their parts. More than any other band, subtracting even one member reduced it to a one-wheeled Schwinn. It might still go, but you couldn’t call it a bicycle anymore. Still, the evening ended in glorious Dylanesque fashion when, peaking on mushrooms, I spilled from the theater with the crowd onto the still-light summer evening streets of Boston, directly into the midst of a Shriner’s parade, dodging fez-topped men in miniature cars weaving synchronized patterns down Tremont Street. Maybe life is a carnival after all.

It's hard to know what other people hear when they listen to music. But reading tributes and reviews of the Band, one comes continually across descriptions which emphasize their “homespun” sound, their rejection of the acid-inflected electric music of the late-60s, their attachment to a relaxed, back porch American musical mood. Rarely does anyone mention how physical this band was. There is so much feel, so much body in their music. Consider their radical reworking of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It,” a staple of their live sets. Watch their bodies in the encore version performed in The Last Waltz. Try to sit still through the 3:05 mark of this 1971 version at New York’s Academy of Music. Robbie’s fiery guitar solo drains into a mournful horn figure and it sounds as if the song has run out of gas, as if it’s gonna have to pull over to the shoulder. Levon confesses “my biggest mistake was loving you too much” while stumbling down his drumset stairs in his clumsily tied emotional bathrobe and the Band kicks back in with the renewed vigor of desperate bodily love. The Band extracts the funky unconscious of Gaye’s version, nudging the horn section punctuations into rhythmically vicious positions. The Band’s version is testament to their skill as listeners, as bodily feelers of a song. It’s as if they’ve dug down deep into Gaye’s version and excavated the devastating funk buried deep within.

I think that way back when, watching the Band on the big screen in Scorcese’s film, I was subliminally hooked by their bodies. Rick Danko’s bass playing is not about the notes, it’s all about how they fall in time. He drops brackets, allowing the phrases and riffs of the song to make sense as units of thought, units of feeling. When you watch Danko play, his body is a conduit. The song pulses through him, distending, extending. He lopes like he’s riding a horse, easing out of the saddle and back down again. You could turn off the sound and just watch Danko and you’d still be able to feel the song. Levon Helm is spindly and sly, like a back-alley assassin who rejects the revolver as too ostentatious, opting instead for a short blade that can get the job done with minimal exertion or attention. He’s in and out before anyone knows they’ve been done. Watch his hands in “Up On Cripple Creek.” His grip is lethal, halfway up his drumsticks. He’s stabbing more than stroking the drums. Watching his shoulders, you might conclude that this is where the song really resides. In his shoulders the rhythm of his drumming meets the phrasing of his singing, sometimes at odds. But they both live there, in some kind of harmony. And, returning to Robbie, in the darkness of whatever theaters I sat in back then as a thirteen or fourteen year old – you couldn’t rent The Last Waltz yet, the technology hadn’t arrived – I watched Robbie’s body infected by the songs, dancing along to Saint Vitus’ palpitations. His right arm flying up as if he’s just touched a live wire, as it does here at 1:34 of “Ophelia.” With his hand he stirs the air, vibrating the already-vibrating molecules, insuring that they continue shivering until every last oscillation is exhausted. This is what it means to inhabit and be inhabited by a song. In Robbie’s body, in the collective body that was the Band, the songs quiver like the hum of cosmic background radiation, the energy that surrounds all matter, of which we are a part. This energy, this vibration, coursed through the Band. Its intensity has reduced by increments. Now, Robbie’s gone and the light is almost out...but for those songs. 

I’m putting on “Tears of Rage” right now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Verlaine (1949 - 2023)

 

I could hear a picture of how it feels to be alive. It was thin and brittle. Nothing plush about it, nothing rich, luxe, warm, or consoling. It tore across the air like a rusty can opener against a rusty can. Not fast enough to draw sparks. Flinty and cantankerous, Tom Verlaine’s guitar ripped like a fang or a fishhook. He rejected the equation of tone and reassurance. No archtop, tweed, or 6L6s to soften the inevitable blows of landing hardscrabble on the smashed bottles, the discarded syringes, the broken bodies already fallen beneath the fire escape. If you’re going to jump, you’re going to fall. And no amount of reverb can soften what it feels like to really fall, fail, falter, flounder, flame-out, or fizzle: in other words to be alive. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I first heard Television’s impeccable Marquee Moon it already felt like it had happened aeons ago. The time of the pyramids. In truth, it had been less than a decade. But the days that had spawned it and the New York City which had necessitated it were gone by then. I’d gotten a glimpse. My father worked in the South Bronx. On Willis Avenue. I’d worked there one summer in high school, ’78 or ’79. The prevailing sense was desperation. Clawing for a breath of fresh air or at least an hour in the oxygen tent. The oil painting of the world was threadbare and marked down. Everything had to go. Verlaine’s guitar could make these sounds: the bottles, the rust, the can, the syringe, the vein. The shrill vibrations he yanked from the strings divined the fact that there was an inside and an outside, an above and a below; they pierced the membrane that separated one from the other. One could pass through. But it was gonna hurt.

 

A little later, maybe ’83 or ’84, I spied Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel” single on Ork Records on the wall at Vinyl Solution in Port Chester, New York. They wanted $35. I paced and mentally prevaricated. $35 for one song seemed an impossible indulgence, well beyond my means. But something told me that this was a make or break moment. In fact, it was make and break. As I’ve said elsewhere: making = breaking. I think I learned that from Tom Verlaine partly.

 

In 1998, when my band, Number One Cup, decided to record four cover songs, each chosen and sung by one member of the band, I chose “Little Johnny Jewel.” I knew I was tipping my hand. But credit where credit’s due. I’d wrung so much out of Tom Verlaine’s songs, his singing, but most of all out of his guitar playing. Throttling the neck, forcing it’s shallowest breaths, the ones that stood as the last line between being alive and being inert, dormant, torpid like so much music that passed without friction into the collective consciousness. Like so much that passed for being alive. Tom Verlaine’s guitar, especially, demanded friction. As one of his songs would have it, “Too much friction / But I dig friction.” Take a moment and listen to the guitar after Verlaine sings “My eyes are like telescopes.” Yeah, they are. And like microscopes and periscopes and oscilloscopes. They see infections, enemies, electricity. That guitar knows that there’s more to it all than that which meets the eye. Beneath the glossy veneer: a tangle of wires, a cluster of solder, a routed-out cavity: guarded secrets of the tremulous fallacy.

 

It would be stupid, self-serving, and false to say I feel like I’ve lost a limb. But a little less of each to say that, for some forty years, Tom Verlaine has inhabited my limbs. Every time I put my fingers to the frets, there’s more than a little of him animating the motion that ensues. If it doesn’t come as a surprise, if it doesn’t make your hair stand up, if it sounds like it could have been somebody else (even Richard Lloyd) then it’s a waste of time and sound. Every note has to be a struggle. If not it’s a dirty, deceptive platitude. I know I learned that from Tom Verlaine.

 

I’ll go back to Adventure tonight. And I’ll spin Verlaine’s solo records: The first one, just called Tom Verlaine is really good, like a lost Television album. The songs “Yonki Time” and “Breakin’ In My Heart” measure up. “Mr. Blur” on Dreamtime is amazing too. Flash Light is overproduced with tellingly 80s drums, but beneath that there’s some pretty compelling literary songcraft and, as always, that guitar. Warm and Cool, from 1992 is lovely. It aerates Verlaine’s sound, putting it in conversation with previous wonders like Chet Atkins, Les Paul, and Santo & Johnny. But most of all and many times more, I’ll go back to Marquee Moon, although every note and every rest, every bass line, every Billy Ficca hi-hat flourish, every syllable is forever entwined with my synapses. That album bristles with a pent-up energy demanding release while also denying any permission granted to escape. Instead, especially on the album’s wondrous side one, the sound elaborates and extenuates to the very boundaries of its enclosure. It threatens to explode the world that contains it. Somehow, in that tension, that friction, a new world is, if not invented, at least suggested. We can see a different light, callow and threadbare, but not burdened with the same old stories, the same old songs and dances, the same old surrenders.