I'm doing this far too much lately. Saying goodbye to a friend I never met.
The man in the striped shirt is Shane MacGowan, first lead singer and songwriter for The Pogues - the first Irish punk band anyone had heard of widely in the USA.
He died today, November 30,at the age of 65. With Shane if you didn't know him the first things you might think is, " Oh he passed pretty young" . If you did it was, "Wow he made it that long?"
Shane was a towering talent, a junkie, a poet and often a complete bastard. His own band had to put him out because of his drug problem and general arsehole behavior - supposedly he said, "What took ya so long?"
In the early 80's there were rumbles in the music magazines about a band who went by Pogue Mahone ( which my mom used to yell at people who cut her off in traffic). They had to change it to just The Pogues because too many people knew the same phrase and they could not get any television spots or be on MTV.
Elvis Costello was a fan and helped produce their first widely played USA album "Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash" in 1985. I was in my punk/proto New Wave phase at the time and was able to get someone to drive me to the nearest large city in order to buy the LP in a ratty little store next to a CBGB wanna be bar. I'll admit that the title was the big selling point for my immature self and I had no idea what to expect (as Mr. Joel said, you can't get the sound from the pages of a magazine, even if that magazine was CREAM).
The 5th track was "A Pair of Brown Eyes" and Shane's plaintive not quite on key voice caught me as he mourned the cost of death and hate while staying intensely human. On Side 2 was "Dirty Old Town" by Ewan MacColl. For an Irish American kid from a dying mill town who didn't even have a word for her sexuality the lyrics and Shane's voice put words to my experience even an ocean away from the trauma and violence of Ireland in the 80's. "Dreamed a dream by the old canal. I kissed my girl by the factory wall... " that was me, a bumbling scared girl in a tiny canal and mill town hiding to kiss a girl because it just made more sense even if I knew it would make life even harder.
And that album has never left my possession, changing formats but bringing me back to who I once was when I owned that first LP. Nostalgia is sweet when you know you will never have to be that self in that situation ever again. But good music is good music.
I kept up with Shane through the wild swings of his career and life . Though I don't think his post Pogues music was ever up to the level of those albums - "Red Roses for Me" to "Hell's Ditch" set the standard and pointed the way for bands like Dropkick Murphy's and Flogging Molly with the blending of Irish traditional influence and modern storytelling.
And he made it to 65,changing music, writing the song "Fairytale of New York" ( will somebody explain to me why this is considered a Christmas song staple? Has anyone besides me actually listened to the real lyrics which require cutting on broadcast radio? Just because Christmas is mentioned several times doesn't make this a happy Christmas song!)
I'll stop clutching my pearls and get back on track.
I needed to write this to just get my feelings out . Shane and the other members of the Pogues were the soundtrack to a vital part of my life where I found love, lost it, and found that love had never really gone , I just needed to get my self in good enough shape to accept it.
Thank you Shane, you magnificent, miserable , romantic, drunken junkie of a poet and music maker. Your voice is always in my memories of a muggy summer evening by an abandoned paper mill in Nowhere , New York.
If you haven't heard anything by Shane besides "Fairytale" go now and give a listen to " Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash" and its follow up "If I Should Fall From Grace with God".. You will see that even punk Irish bands during the IRA's height - with all the anger, sorrow and joy that life means, can make you want to get up and dance.
