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.