MacGowan

No one could have done his role in The Pogues so perfectly and ably, brilliantly as Shane MacGowan. We all have genetic differences, and the differences of nurture on top of nature, and his constitution and being dovetails so neatly the music. Whatever to say of MacGowan’s particular DNA, his background, his life, he was perfect for the job he helped create for himself with a bunch of ragtag London musicians. MacGowan decided early on that to make a living as a writer you had to go through a new way of reaching people, and he found music. He knew full well poets don’t make a lot of money being poets, and so he found a place in contemporary music, eventually a folklore-steeped literary punk of Irish beat and tradition and romance and gritty modern worldliness. And he gets it right, perfectly, every time, with a broad range. His performances are gems.

MacGowan's success is one of the great and brave acts of deep self-understanding in recent times, understanding himself and where he comes from and envisioning himself through the creative act of the musical band, The Pogues. He looked right, he sang right, he wrote the right kind of songs, brought words to music, he dressed right, he lived right, one of the truly brilliant creations of modern times, unquantifiable in any one box, like say “composer of classical music,’’ or “Romantic poet.” His lifestyle, plain and obvious, was more or less visible in the music and performances of The Pogues. MacGowan is a writer. He recites. He is a poet. He is a musician. He is a drinker. He is an excellent singer. He is a songwriter so remarkably fresh to the scene of modern music, bringing to it a richness rooted in literary and common traditions. He lends a tone to his music that no one else could. He brings it alive as no one else could.

All the greats, one supposes, have been distinctive. It would be impossible for anyone else to take over, at any point, for Shane MacGowan. And he has survived. Shane MacGowan was born a strong man of stature, in order to belt out and shout, and to survive the life of a professional musician. Of course, the constant touring drove him crazy, more than he wanted to handle, and he was right.

If you watch enough taped performances on YouTube, you can piece together a picture of something of Shane MacGowan’s deterioration, which too is part of a story of survival. You see him start to shake in concert in Japan in ’88. At this point, despite the tremor, he is still singing quite well. He refreshes from his cup and his cigarette. But maybe at a certain point, as he will admit, it wasn’t just the booze anymore. Acid. One can imagine, a basically shy person—we all are, maybe creative types more prevalently so—having to face a performance every night, every night getting whipped up, particularly to sing as richly as MacGowan does. To get into such a voice, you have to drink, and maybe you have to smoke too. Tired of hangovers from mixing everything, beer, wine, sake, gin, together, maybe you get into drugs to numb the pains of constant touring.

Drinking is a lovely thing for an artist. It is liberating. Undeniably. It helps with performance anxiety. It seems not so far away from putting us in tune with a creative part of ourselves. It helps smooth over being too sensitive and sharp for one’s own good. There’s the Boston Opera House, September 1989, an outdoor venue, with the wind blowing too hard, and hard to get good sound, but it appears as if he’s had a bit too much, even as he gets through it, able to give us Rainy Night in Soho okay.
There’s the Pink Fest in Amsterdam with The Popes, 1995. He’s not doing so well. He can’t sing. A great voice sqweaking and unable to catch the key or to be in the right verse. Big Charlie takes him off the stage against his protests, “I don’t want to go off.” Enabled? The heroin taking hold, after the 50 hits of acid a day during the Japan tours?

A writer can write all he wants. But I get MacGowan’s point about being a musician, as a way of getting your poetry across to people, rather than going off on long effete tangents that reflect other literary traditions that go beyond story-telling, or rather than thinking that you can just sit on your ass in front of a computer and come up with something that has a real chance of earning your keep. There's a 'getting directly to the point' you just have to admire about him. Creating the music of the Pogues from a collective vision and from the musical and literary acts of Ireland is a great work of art. Life now encompassing poetry, as in fact it always has. I hold The Pogues’ music as one of the monumental acts of the turn of century, the creation, or rejuvenation of an art form that has great depth.

I used to try not give a shit
but everyone would get nervous (yeah?)
so sometimes I got nerves, you know, (right, you know,)
and as everyone knows
I had a few drinks to settle my nerves,
and, you know,
I’m not apologizing for it, yeah.

(MacGowan interviewed for a remembrance of Ronnie Drew for Irish TV.)

To not give a shit really is the only way to get things done sometimes.

And on that note, I went and played a few songs down by the metro last night. Maybe out on the street is where MacGowan’s songs belong. I had a few Guinness at home to warm my voice up and give me some Dutch courage. I played by the fountain on my street to get over the initial embarrassment, letting myself sing louder. (The upstairs neighbor’s sister was sleeping down in the basement, so I had to take my guitar playing outdoors where I might normally just use the backyard.) Then once I get out and warm up some, it’s ‘what the hell.’ So down to Dupont Circle. Luckily I was completely ignored. Maybe at 2 AM people are just trying to catch the train home, but it amused me how no one even turned a head at the spectacle. They were right. The main point I had was just to get down there. That itself is an exercise. I didn’t care for any praise.

So I sang a few, tried to get through the words of ones I don’t know so well, and generally did my best to sing. It would have been nice to have one of those portable little amps street musicians use that run on batteries to catch some attention, but maybe some day. The experience did make me empathize with those who busk, the street musicians who open their cases for coins and dollar bills, those who play a song out of nothing without benefit of the best acoustics situation. Just to be acknowledged on some gut level.

Of course, obviously, it goes without saying, I am no Shane MacGowan. I don’t have his voice, in the broadest sense of the term. (I'm not strong enough. I'm the younger brother rather than the older one.) He invented it. He is its proprietor. His songs are him. But still, I think it makes perfect sense to play Pogues songs out in public. They hold a commentary on modern life I find true and useful. This is the root of my own deep obsession with MacGowan’s songs, the Shakespearean element, the observation of the things we keep with us as we encounter modernity, the tensions within and without.

And the car-parks going up, and they’re pulling down the pubs.
Just another bloody rainy day.
Oh, sweet city of my dreams,
Of speed and skill and schemes,
Like Atlantis, you just disappeared from view,
And the hare upon the wire,
Has been burnt upon your pyre,
Like the black dog who once raced out from Trap Two.

Many of his phrases drift through my mind now and again. Maybe it’s the country kid coming to the city and all its spectacles, the vivid metaphorical language of being ‘spat on and shat on and raped and abused,’ ‘picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls,’ which fortunately is not the case for us, which again are metaphorical more than real instances, one hopes anyway. Transformations like the one of White City, quoted above, are things we notice.

His words pack an emotional power that I find common to my own thoughts. Rainy Night in Soho, it just speaks to me. “The wind was whistling all its charms.” The ballads, old yet new, the sea shanties, original ones and those dragged back to the port city streets, his use of form is nothing short of genius, and even one of the better definitive examples of that queer term. And while his songs might strike one as being punk and outrageous, well, what if you begin to see them as poetry?

"Life is full of humor even in the most desperate circumstance, you know. Sometimes it's very hard to have a... to laugh at it. It's easier to laugh at in in a song then it is to actually laugh at it in reality."
Shane MacGowan. Interview on MTV, 1987. (In which he also discusses Elvis Costello's 'cleaning-up' of the Pogues' sound. From the raw video of "Body of an American" as it is played live with great vigor and emphasis and sound seems far better than the canned recording Costello's production gives us, thank you.)

Early humanity made up songs, sang them, played them, for cathartic reasons. Their songs were about the things that cause anxiety, frightening things, and when people sang them, they felt better and sensed they had company in their fears. They sang songs about long sea voyages, about hunting fearsome animals, about being away from family for a long time. They sang songs about scary stuff and things that worried them in any manner of ways. The songs abated their anxieties, at least temporarily, and provided some perspective, some relief from a pounding heart and queasy stomach. The songs were written and played by brave people who saw the fears as they were and who knew how to capture them and make them tangible.

To make loud music against painful death and being lost at sea, lost in the city, mugged, beaten, raped, there is something human, as we say, about that. And in the process of singing of whale fisheries, and of leaving Liverpool, of Patty on the Railway, of Waltzing Mathilda, of NW3, of the Old Main Drag, MacGowan and the Pogues have come up with many of the few gems we've had in recent music, a music that reaches far into our psychology, songs like Rainy Night in Soho, A Pair of Brown Eyes, Summer in Siam. And so is such music listened to uneasily by a general public.

Was it my buddy Dennis, who met the guy St. Patrick's Day night here in DC after the 9:30 Club show (I was not so lucky, though I saw the show), yes, who told me an interesting response.
Who do you play for?
I play for myself.
Shane MacGowan, the best critic and director, confidante, instructor, of himself.
It makes perfect sense.
That's how you get good music.

That makes a lot of sense.