On Seeing The Pogues, A Long Time Ago

When I came to Amherst I brought my electric guitar. I played in garage bands back home in Clinton, New York, where, thanks to Hamilton College, there was a good local radio station. Sidelined by a growing-pain condition, my mom got me to take lessons on a borrowed guitar, and after a slow start I never looked back. There was good music, and bad music, and once me and the band caused a bit of a scene at the high school talent show. I cut my thumb doing a windmill and the blood got spattered over the pickguard of my Stratocaster copy. The principal sought to cut the power to our amplifiers. I ran up the aisles of the high school auditorium, much to the chagrin of my parents, but to howls and cheers and general liberation, and the next day, girls looked at me differently and asked how my thumb was. Bands got better after that, as we’d actually rehearse, and plan out our songs. We did English Beat songs, David Bowie, the Cramps, rockabilly, reggae, a bit of whatever New Wave you could bang out on a guitar.

At Amherst I played guitar and a bit of upright bass with the jazz ensemble. I tended to experiment with the tempo until I was clued in by Chicken, an excellent drummer, and the very nice fellow Don who conducted us. I tried to keep up with the chords, which were difficult ones, meant for jazz men, in need of simplification if I was going to play along. Improvisation was fun, and I wasn’t so bad at it, maybe because that was a part of being in a rock band in Central New York, Freebird and all.

One year Black Uhuru came to play UMass. I forget now how I knew about music back then, but I knew who they were and I got my ticket and walked down to UMass one warm spring night. I got there a little early, and as I was standing outside the hall where they played, a basketball court, if I remember, I saw these big Jamaican cats in their big leather hats holding their dredlocks, smoking a bit of weed. I approached them, not making a big deal about it, ‘til I was just sort of standing around like they were. “Hey, man, you go to school ‘round here,” a big fellow in sunglasses said to me, as the joint was passed. “I go to school up the street,” I said, my voice warmed up a bit by the sweet smell of pot. I took a look around at the band members, each with independent removal while remaining a band. I guess I had figured out by then the friendly man asking me if I read a lot of books was Robbie Shakespeare, the bass half of a famous rhythm section. Sly Dunbar, the percussionist, didn’t have a lot to say, but smiled quietly with a shy leather-clad congeniality from behind his own pair of reflective sunglasses.

“Someday you are going to be President,” Robbie Shakespeare pronounced. “Mr. President,” he said, pleased with himself, gently and with a happiness toward the world. He liked playing college towns, he seemed to be saying. He went around introducing me to the members of the band. Puma, the singer, and Johnny Danger, the guitar player. “You come on the road with us, man. Johnny Danger teach you a thing or two. That’s how you learn man, you have to go out on the road with Johnny Danger.” There was some private knowing laughter and Johnny Danger, without his black Les Paul slung over his shoulder, looked me over without looking at me.

Perhaps it is that musicians recognize each other, a certain friendly innocence music maintains in them a common habit. Robbie Shakespeare saw to it that I had a backstage pass stuck onto my dad’s old pale green and worn-soft oxford cloth shirt. And after the show I went backstage and drank Heinekens and shyly told Puma that her singing was beautiful. Robbie Shakespeare tried again to get me to out on the road in the tour bus with them, and eventually I ended up parting their company and heading back to campus with what to me anyway was a decent story. If I remember, there was a party at Chi Psi, and Flash, the bass player from the college’s finest band, heard me tell the story as he poured beer from a keg, and begun to believe me when he heard me tell it again. I didn’t look like much of a big liar back then anyway.

Now somewhere around this time, the North American continent grew more and more exposed to the punk coming out of England. The Clash, of course, I played London Calling on the old turntable in our house on summer nights without my dad minding because he understood I liked it. Sid and Nancy was a movie one of those winters, and I went to see it in Northampton. How the hell I ever heard first about The Pogues I cannot remember. Was it the Hamilton station? Or, seeing my punk qualities, did someone turn me on to them. Somehow, they fit the bill for me perfectly. The family had gone to Ireland the summer before first grade, and we kept a trove of Irish music records by the stereo. I remember in the big music room in the music building at Amherst there was a forgotten floor tom from a drum kit, and it sounded like one of those traditional Irish drums thumped upon for war marches and the like, and I thought, maybe even before hearing The Pogues, blessed as they are with an excellent drummer, Andrew “the Clobberer” Rankin, that such a drum was all one needed in a band. In fact, in the early days, The Pogues drum set pretty much consisted of one tom and snare, very simple, just something to pound out the beat on.

I think it was the late winter of my junior year The Pogues came to Northampton, a venue named Pearl Street, probably on old dance hall by the train station just as you came into town proper. I got my ticket, couldn’t convince anyone else to come along, and fuck it, off I went in the bus. (Steve Talty, a year ahead of me, also a bit of a punk, and an obvious music connoisseur, was on the same bus, headed to the same show.) There was a cute girl at Smith who’d grabbed me one night at a party, me in my dad’s old cashmere overcoat hanging about me, some silly haircut like Flock of Seagulls, and I really didn’t mind being a bit of a punk, even though my hair was a bit more conservative both when I saw Black Uhuru and when I got down to Noho to see The Pogues on their first North American tour ever.

I went in up the stairs, and stood by the bar, checking out the place. It was empty at the time, and there was a sort of post sound-check air to it. So I’m drinking my beer and standing not far away from the opening of the music hall when I see about five or so tall men in overcoats walking toward me, tipsy grins on their face, laughing about something as they sort of half-stumbled, half-sailed past me. And I can remember now Shane MacGowan, the young pure-faced Shane MacGowan, tall, big like a young horse passing by me, looking sort of like a young John F. Kennedy with different teeth and hair that stuck up sort of gotten a bit drunk. More than a little drunk maybe, maybe with a little sideways sway, maybe an arm over one of his bandmates. It wasn’t a long moment, and they didn’t stop. They made clear they were off for a bit of mischief, and certainly a barroom.

And being a kid back then, well, maybe I was too shy to ask if I could come back in if I left. Looking back now, I have to regret not trying to follow them out into the street. I could have told them about how I went to Ireland when I was a little kid, me and my brother touring it the backseat of a Vauxhall, east and west, north and south, Dublin, Galway, Mayo, Connemara, places in between. I’d been to Yeats’s grave, been to the jail in Dublin were the Irish Patriots of the Easter Rebellion were executed. I could have told MacGowan about studying literature up the street. I could have told them about my parent’s records of the old songs, and how I too had a punk band and bled in public to live music. I probably couldn’t have been able to keep up with them, I would probably had ended up puking out in the street, but it occurs to me how I could have gone a little further than I did, having gotten myself to the show at least. I think I remember them coming back in, with that drunken silence, trying to keep a straight face, breathing in and out, their caps over their faces, their hands stuck in overcoat pockets, mumbling the notes of tunes. They quickly passed by and were gone behind a door, then the lights went down and finally they came out.

They were Irish alright, and the guy banged on his drums just as he had in my vision of him, proud and loud with his thumping. The crowd was swaying and slam dancing and jumping and I didn’t go out into the middle of it. I stood there watching and listening to some miracle of music that in Brando’s Kurtz terms, hit me ‘like a diamond bullet.’ It was me, and I didn’t even know me. Tradition, and old school, and folk, and common wisdom, but also rebellion, bypassing the head, speaking from the heart, not the neat wasp stuff you’re supposed to go and ape but the raw beautiful poetry of life and its ups and downs. It was goddamn beautiful music, and a brilliant band, what else can I say. “Dirty old town,” it seemed to go well with Northampton, with all the towns you knew, in fact. It was all deep in my genes, in what I had to share with the world, innocent, beautiful, worldly.

As I look back on that that show, I realize how little I knew about The Pogues then, beyond that gut level total identification that sometimes makes my skin crawl a bit. There wasn’t much known about them back then, I guess. Amherst was a good place to find a record of theirs. After I graduated I went back to my first fall homecoming weekend, and there was this girl I wanted to see very badly. I’d gone out on the road and my car wasn’t doing so well, a head gasket problem so it wouldn’t go above 45 too comfortably on a rainy day, and so I got off the thruway, good thing I did, and by the time I got back to the apartment complex where my dad lived it pretty much died, the CV joints in the front axle giving out as I pulled up, never able to turn again. Dad let me borrow his car and I went, and that night I called the girl, and she said, ‘who’s this,’ and it didn’t go so well after that and I ended up fucking it all up by not doing anything because I felt so bad about how she couldn’t be nice to me, but anyway that’s another story, only vaguely related to this one. I felt so terrible about it, and the unresolved Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca nature of it that the only consolation I had before leaving Amherst to go back was finding Red Roses For Me, The Pogues first album in a record shop down on North Pleasant Street at the UMass end of town. And music has that ability to help you lift your chin up and carry on when you really don’t fucking feel like it. Maybe particularly Irish music because it’s raw and not overly defined the way more processed and commercially designed music is. It’s not hostile, it’s not syrupy, it’s just real. Irish music doesn’t tell you how you’re feeling, it just is how you are feeling, and for that reason it is tremendously uplifting and thank god for it and all its simplicity. That was all I had to take back, not a nice talk, not a hand held, no, just a lousy vinyl record of some raw drunken blokes from Ireland singing from the heart about human love and suffering, and even in my great not-wanting-to-do-anything I kept that record with me as a sort of magic talisman of my recovery, waiting for the day when it would finally come like the fairy who would come back and turn the seal back into the child you lost, or when simply the seal would turn into a child, or I would turn into a seal. Or when she herself would simply be nice to me, because I didn’t want anything from her anyway.

Over the years I would see Shane MacGowan play with a band once or twice, and then see the reunion of The Pogues as I did this year in Washington, DC, a show that brought me back to that night in Northampton. (He looked pretty good, I thought. And he sang, he sang.) I know better now, thanks to a couple of documentaries about him and a book called A Drink With Shane MacGowan, about the lives I passed in passing one cold night twenty something years ago. I know that as a school kid MacGowan wrote a piece about the very same poem I myself took a special liking to, the paper I wrote for Richard Elllman’s daughter, “Preludes,” by T.S. Eliot, a poem I knew so well back then, committed to memory, even though I never became an English teacher or an academic. (I remember a fine moment from Maud Ellman’s classwhen we were about to move on, after she had suggested the poem had a pessimistic note to it, and I raised my hand and said I didn’t see it that way, but just how it showed that we were just animals, that this was the source of the very best of us. I remember how my hands trembled as I spoke.) I learned about how he had witnessed a nervous breakdown of a parent when he was a kid, and how he had one too. I learned about the basic problem a healthy farm kid faces when he comes to a city, in his case London. I learned about how fucked-up life can be for a person, and how sometimes it’s poetry that saves them. Poetry and music, something uninhibited, free, that goes back to the land where one came from, that keeps one’s heart alive, not so crazy after all maybe. I read some words of his and found out that he wasn’t exactly a dummy when it came to discussing matters of the spirit as such matters have been discussed over the ages in light of words of people like Buddha or Jesus Christ or the Taoist.

Now I’m not going to encourage anyone else to be like, to live like Shane MacGowan. I’m not going to encourage anyone to go on the road with a band of heavy drinking Irish musicians. I’m not going to encourage myself to be like any of that, except in a quiet private way, maybe allowing myself to grease my throat with a bottle of red wine late at night in the garden after a shift or after writing something and lifting my voice and a guitar chord to the depths of night the last before the dawn, or maybe very rarely standing out on street corner not far away from my house and singing “Rainy Night in Soho,” or “Kitty,” or my own version of “Born to Run.” Yeah, why not? Doing one form of art always feeds the other forms you practice.

But I will say that after I left Amherst I didn’t feel so good. I can’t put my finger on it, at least if I’m trying to be as polite as one is called upon to be here in such a venue, but in my eyes there was something I found a little bit discouraging about Amherst. Maybe it’s because we’re showed the best, like when we read poetry with Benjamin DeMott or William H. Pritchard. Maybe it’s the discouragement of the world outside, beyond the old quadrangle of what was once a cow pasture or a stand of woods transformed by local farmers seeking a place of education, maybe it’s the discouragement that comes with realizing that the daily business of the world does not, by necessity I suppose, seem to place a great importance on literate understandings and literate works, at least those of some young punk kid who acts funny and who is apparently hard to understand. It’s not like the leaders of the world’s nations turn often and explicitly to poetry, at least not like Lincoln did, or not like Robert Kennedy did. But on the other hand, it is proper to leave poetry to the personal realm, simply remembering how very essential poetry and words and literary expression are for health, for retrieving stuff from the depths. While it seems enviable that someone can make a living out of literary and musical talents, perhaps that can be tiresome and unmagical. Let he or she who would want to have all the time they can to follow such pursuits, and let them do it without worrying about much beyond what they feel they have to say.

Anyway, I didn’t feel so good. Perhaps part of that speaks to the strength of Amherst, which is that, as liberal arts is supposed to do, an education puts you in touch with your dreams, who you really are, what sort of thing you might be good at and thrive upon. President Kennedy said it himself, not in his speech, but in his remarks at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Frost Library, that a student’s greatest opportunity is sometimes in neglecting his studies, something he would have understood, and probably could have explained better than the rest of us, brave man that he was. Maybe a kid discovers something about poetry, as from reading “Preludes” for instance, that leads him to healthy distraction. For who can answer, but himself, what he will need in life. There is the contrast, which suggests your uniqueness in the world, and the gift you will bring to it. Remember that Lincoln felt a bit depressed after Gettysburg. He had a cold, but maybe he wondered to himself, why had he gone on about all that stuff about government ‘by the people’ and other such mystical rot when all the crowd of the day wanted was something more of the day, maybe a story from the battlefield of blood and lust, just sort of stood there blinking at him when he finished.

I didn’t pick up the guitar as much as I had after I left Amherst in the shock of graduating. There was something about the way of an academic institution that sort of seemed to kill off a part of me, that bright hard-working kid who wanted to learn about everything under the sun, reduced him to a sort of survivor, unable to write his papers anymore. But at least I took to writing. That I did do. Maybe as a matter mainly and principally as a matter of survival. I’d go and sit outside in my lunch hour from my crap job as office clerk and if I wasn’t too tired from that or from the tables I bussed at night and the bar, if I wasn’t too depressed, I’d write, and writing felt good, and it was good for me. It felt some days like I had put together a song, and what I wrote, maybe was a bit like that masterpiece of The Pogues, “The Old Main Drag.” Simple old moaning, set meaningfully to some form of music and instrument. And every now and then I’d go treat myself to reading something I found was beautiful, like that early two-parted story of Ernest Hemingway from the collection In Our Time, about a guy who goes on a camping trip to fish a river when he comes home from something he doesn’t want to go into, having the courage to face himself, even all alone, whether or not that’s easier or harder one never knows.

You can’t really choose so much what your genes are, except in accordance with karmic law, if you believe in such things. But you’re born with a certain set of talents, instincts, desires for a way of occupying your time, and more encouraging than anything is not the word of those you might find around you. It’s great if they are encouraging, if they are kind, and seek you out, and corroborate with you. No doubt that is great. We all need to find in life people like ourselves. But it is often the case that you will find the best encouragement in your own feedback, in your own response to that which you are exposed to. And if you are lucky, you will learn who you are, even if it comes from a strange surprising night, a living Irish poet walking past you, as if to say, ‘it’s alright, kid,’ leaving in your heart a memory that grows upon you and shapes you quietly in the years of your adulthood, something that lets a kind of industriousness, a kind of energy, a kind of a guide come active in your life.



So my praise to The Pogues for their expression of matters of the heart and of life their music can bring to the listener. To me it is capable of warding off the discouragement that comes of encountering the differences people from different places bring with them in their attempt to state their own or understand another. For poetry speaks of the effort of graciousness, trying to understand, trying to be understood, without judgment. We don’t chose who we are, or where our talents lie, and to follow them is a brave thing, and something that makes you always feel good.