Why wasn’t he? It is important to remember that MacGowan, while born of Irish parents, was raised mainly in London, and his cherished construction of Irishness, the Irishness that’s at the center of the Pogues’ oeuvre, the identity politics of the Pogues (if you will), is the diaspora version of Irish culture. A number of Pogues have said as much publicly. The Pogues, in recreating Irish music in London, with Englishmen among them, were recreating a lost thing, a compendium of Irish music for expatriates and second-generation Celts. What’s the relationship between this diaspora and alcoholism, you ask? Well, alcoholism, in my view, is an illness, or at the very least alcoholism behaves like one, and though there is a significant likelihood that it is either genetic or that some disposition to its rigors is genetic, there’s also the melancholy of diaspora, the loss implicit in expatriation. There is the nearly sacramental notion about drinking that is so central to this recreated Irish identity. Diaspora doesn’t cause Irish alcoholism, but it certainly doesn’t help. Irish civil conflict and terrorism—the Troubles—don’t cause alcoholism, but they don’t help. Viewed through the prism of these difficulties, the alcohol problem in the Pogues is more poignant (in addition to being an illness), it’s about losing a culture, wanting to preserve it against great odds, and accepting self-destruction as a reasonable price to pay. This is the kind of Irishness that I sometimes feel in myself, the Irish-American melancholy of my mother’s side, the Flynn side.
When I’ve been in Ireland over the years (and I guess I have been a half dozen times now), I’ve had the Pogues playing on my iPod like a soundtrack, as though they were the only way to articulate this sensation of returning to greensward and barren mountaintops, stone walls, sheep wandering everywhere. I always go scouring the local record stores looking for other Irish bands that offer this romantic essence of the Irish folk tradition that the Pogues convey, whether they want to or not. Back to the Clancy Brothers, or the Dubliners, or Christy Moore, or Ewan MacColl, or even the Horslips or the Boomtown Rats. None of these bands has ever, for me, been quite as moving and reckless and incendiary. As an Irish-American (one with a lot of British and Scottish DNA circulating in him too), I always feel like I can’t put my finger on the soul of Eire, can’t participate in it, can’t be part of it. To my Irish acquaintances and friends, I’m just another American coming over for holiday and buying a tin whistle to take back to New York.
On one such trip to Ireland, I happened to watch a documentary about Shane MacGowan, If I Should Fall from Grace. It was available on the flight over. This is noteworthy. Because Shane MacGowan, as depicted in the film, is a haunted, immobilized, all-but-incoherent husk of a man whose claim to fame seems tenuous, long past, and who, if the documentary is accurate, lives in a hovel with a long-suffering girlfriend and doesn’t do that much besides, well, servicing his addiction. That Aer Lingus should consider this biography a legitimate promotional tool for Irish tourism is surprising, and yet in the end is this not what Irish culture is like, at least on occasion? Irish culture is full of paradoxes. For all its vestigial Catholic (or Protestant) conservatism, Ireland is ravaged by its unstoppable excesses. It’s full of bitterness, mood disorders, self-slaughter. It tolerates more alcohol abuse than any place I have ever been on earth. And yet never does Ireland shrink from the acknowledgment of its shortcomings.
Shane, in If I Should Fall from Grace, the documentary, looks like he could weep bloody rivers at any moment, like he won’t lift a nicotine-stained finger to prevent his next indignity, and just when you think you can’t possibly feel any greater compassion for the man, he offers the kind of stinging vengefulness and offhanded arrogance that you would associate with an artist well aware of his gifts, or at least the gifts he once had. Shane is hopeless, vindictive, but very perceptive. He drinks continuously. That he is still alive, on the basis of the film, seems difficult to fathom. He’s fifty-one, as I write these lines, but he looks fifteen or twenty years older, and he totters around stages like he could fall over at any moment. Which apparently he does.
Knowing all of this, knowing what I knew about the Pogues, having heard recordings of him in the latter days, mediocre recordings, in which he can barely get through the lyrics and is incomprehensible during stage banter, I nonetheless greeted with enthusiasm the news that the Pogues had begun playing reunion gigs. Why? Because when you revere a band, when you have that fervent connection with a band, you always believe the romance can be renewed. As with absent lovers. There have been other rock-and-roll bands for me, wherein the inevitable loss and heartbreak have long been delayed. The Who, whom I saw play as recently as the last tour before John Entwistle’s death. R.E.M., whom I kept expecting to be vivid and uncanny in the nineties and who just were not. Big Star, whose recent reunion album is one of the great disappointments of such efforts. With these experiences in mind, I had few illusions about the Pogues. I thought Shane would probably be awful. But the Pogues still seem to stand for something, not only for an idea of music, but for a culture. As such, in an era of mannerisms, they are alien to what rock and roll is now, to a form airbrushed, stylized, corporate.
So: on March 16, 2007, the four of us who had convened the night before got back in the line at Roseland to try to see the Pogues play again. Could the gig possibly come off as planned? We had our doubts. Still, upon our arrival, fashionably late, the opening band was to be heard in the distance, some indie rock aspirants, whom we immediately recognized, in fact, from our own shows the prior fall in the Hague. These guys had played there too. Nina Katchadourian, in fact, had been forced to sit in front of these whippersnappers on the plane home, all of them unshaven, unwashed, none older than twenty-eight or -nine. Really strange to see these youngsters up on the stage before the Pogues, in a packed house, a house with the kind of great anticipatory nervousness that I don’t often find at shows anymore.
And then the lights went down. Out the Pogues came. It was the whole band, understand, the band from its peak, all eight of them. Spider Stacy was the first to seize the microphone and to venture an overdue apology: “Sorry about last night. Shit happens.” A mocking simulacrum of the rock-and-roll entrance. Then the band launched into a couple of numbers to warm up the crowd, and the band was as tight as a band can be, full of cocksure vitality. Then, when the players were situated, exercised, and the crowd was ready, they wheeled out Shane. Yes, they wheeled him out in his wheelchair. There was a handler, a Shane handler, an old biker sort of a guy who seemed as though he wouldn’t have been out of place at a Hawkwind reunion, and he was wheeling out the injured Shane MacGowan, as if Shane were some kind of gerontological specimen who could only be witnessed under controlled circumstances. You see, ladies and gentlemen, there is no reason this fellow should be breathing.
We’d managed to get close to the stage, stealthily, during the opening act. I’m not sure how we managed to accomplish this exactly, since the median age in our posse was probably forty-two, and there were many other eager Pogues fans, kids from Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, who’d probably come to the Pogues via the Dropkick Murphys, and they were more eager. Still, somehow we managed to get near, and the only problem was that once near you could make out Shane’s waxy, gray pallor, and his matted hair. Everybody else in the band looked pretty good. Older, to be sure, sporting a few extra pounds, but stylish and mean. Then there was Shane. When he tried to talk between songs, you couldn’t understand one word of it. I don’t know how the man chews. And there is a weird, ghostly cackle that issues forth from him when he’s told some mandarin one-liner that he finds particularly compelling. Something between a snicker and a wheeze.
Very sad. Very hard to watch. Excruciating in some ways. But you know what? It was also an amazing show. Probably one of the best gigs I’ve seen in a few years. In fact, a number of nostalgic “reunion” gigs I’ve witnessed in the last three or four years were compelling: Rocket from the Tombs (featuring members of Pere Ubu, the Dead Boys, and Richard Lloyd from Television), Red Krayola (in which David Gru
bbs, another member of my band, occasionally serves), even Aerosmith at Madison Square Garden a few years back. Fleetwood Mac at a big stadium event in Washington, DC. But the Pogues were better than all of these.
They played every song you would want them to play. Without remorse. All of the best stuff from Rum Sodomy and If I Should Fall from Grace. They played at their usual breakneck tempos. And the members of the band were obviously having a great time, enjoying themselves, because they all got to take turns singing lead, in order to permit Shane his frequent breaks. The audience knew every word and sang along ceaselessly. And, best of all, there was a churning, writhing mosh pit in front of the stage throughout. I don’t know if people mosh to the Pogues in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but they do in New York City. The strategic decision for the older members of the audience was: do we participate?
Though I sound like an obsolete appliance in saying so, I did like to get into it when I was younger. Once upon a time. Moshing, pogoing, generally causing trouble. But the last show at which I really tried to mosh was a Ramones gig in the early nineties. Dee Dee Ramone had already retired to shoot dope somewhere. The Ramones played by the numbers. I was wearing eyeglasses in those days, and I got worried about someone knocking my glasses off, and I moshed for a few songs, and then I decided that I was too old for moshing.
Despite the fact that I am in my later forties, I somehow felt, on this memorable occasion, that I wanted to dip my toe into the edge of the maelstrom, just as, independently, my friends were being borne away into that undulating mass of Irish-Americans. Even Hannah Marcus, who doesn’t have a punk-rock past, and who is Eastern European by extraction (in fact, our group consisted of two Jews, an Armenian, and an Irish-American—a who’s who of diaspora), drifted off into quarters where I couldn’t see her any longer, except during the ballads.
I found, as I hadn’t since my twenties, that the mosh pit is a caring and loving community. If someone falls, he is picked up. No pushing is more than affectionate, and when you are pushed you are invited, or even compelled, to push back. No one’s ass gets grabbed nonconsensually, and when a song stops, so does the madness. From “A Pair of Brown Eyes” to “Thousands Are Sailing” to “Rainy Night in Soho,” the Pogues played everything, and everyone got sweaty and covered in beer, even if they didn’t drink, and they danced.
So why this horrible feeling the next day? What was this hangover feeling after the Pogues, when I hadn’t drunk at all and had got to bed at a reasonable hour? Thus do we come to the subliminal layer of this essay, which is perhaps no longer terribly subliminal at all.
Remember the common witticism about Eric Clapton, that he played better high? People have been saying this for a long time, that Clapton played better high, that the best Clapton shows were the ones in Cream when he was probably smacked out and drifting in some psychedelic blues-rock ether. Later, when he got clean, the theory goes, Clapton started recording the horrible pop songs like “Wonderful Tonight” or “Tears in Heaven.” Personally, I don’t much like Eric Clapton either way, no matter his blood alcohol level, but whatever your feeling about him the witticism is inhumane. Thoughtless. Rude. Unfeeling. Historically shortsighted. Dim-witted even. And it’s not only Eric Clapton whose mythology is thus inscribed. How many great rock-and-roll personalities have been encouraged in their ability to self-immolate before the audience? Lots and lots. Certainly any number of punk rock icons—Sid Vicious, Iggy Pop, Stiv Bators, Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell, Kurt Cobain, Bob Stinson. Plenty of older, more established players—Jerry Garcia, Brian Jones, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, Syd Barrett. Sandy Denny. I’m leaving out the cartoon players in their hair metal bands who all seemed to thrive only with needles in their arms. Nikki Sixx, e.g. Not to mention the jazz world: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday. Did they all play better high? Did Miles Davis play better high? Is it possible to utter a sentence like that without being shamed by the perception?
The same conundrum presents itself in literature, where the examples are legion too. William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, John Berryman, John Cheever, Anne Sexton, Frederick Exley, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs. Many, many others.
The problem with impairment, the problem it raises for the discerning enthusiast is: can you love the artist despite what he or she has become? Or must you love them in the process of unbecoming? Can you bear witness to impairment without participating in it? Is it possible to love the drunk and hate the drink? Recognizing the infirmity, can you love an artist nonetheless?
The problem gets more reflexive, and paradoxical, when you attempt to consider whether the work itself somehow depends on the intoxication. In the documentary If I Should Fall from Grace with God, Shane MacGowan’s girlfriend, Victoria, says, “Maybe he was put here on earth to write about the experience of drinking.” In just the way that Frederick Exley, in A Fan’s Notes, has the one purpose only, the purpose of delineation and articulation of drink, and having discharged it magnificently he is all but blocked from that point on. If Shane MacGowan is drunken precisely so that he can give the best rock-and-roll account of blackouts and cirrhosis and dementia, then have we a right to complain about his investigations? To lament them? Imagination would suffice, you’d think. Shane might have written “Boat Train,” e.g., or “The Sunny Side of the Street,” in which he boasts that he will never reform (“I will not be reconstructed / Gonna stay right here on the sunny side of the street”), without having to destroy himself, his voice, his livelihood. But in this case, for reasons I cannot articulate, imagination did not, does not, will not suffice.
I remember meeting John Barlow once, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, at a party, and I remember asking him about the band, because the band was still trudging along at that point, and I remember a cloud passing over his face. Someone told me later that evening that “everyone was worried about Jerry.” What to do about Jerry? Jerry Garcia stayed on the road until he died of it, just as John Entwistle, who went into cardiac arrest in Las Vegas, in the company of two hookers, died on the road, died from being an artist, died of the inability to do other than he had always done. The other members of the Grateful Dead couldn’t do anything to stop Jerry, just as they hadn’t been able to do anything to stop keyboardist and vocalist Pigpen, who predeceased him.
And if the extended Pogues family can do nothing about Shane, we can rest assured that the casual fan, or even the extremely partisan fan, can do nothing either. But it makes the experience of watching the Pogues perform a bittersweet thing. I, for one, don’t think anyone ever, at any time, has made their best work high. I think people have made great work despite their shortcomings. I think most artists make their best work when they are sober, well rested, and able to take in the complications and crosscurrents of the world happening around them. And these artists will make more of the work we revere them for if they aren’t poisoning themselves day after day.
Impairment, in the end, knows best the drama of itself. The truth about Shane MacGowan’s lyrics is that by the end they stopped conveying the Irish heartbreak they had in the earlier records. They became mannered, silly, occasionally even embarrassing. As in all cases of impairment, what I hear after a point is the illness talking, and what the illness says is that it has seized control of the organism, and the organism henceforth will not have volition with respect to its wishes, its ambitions. And now when you hear the organism speak, not to mention when the organism makes its art, you will hear this other voice, and therefore the organism has these two voices, and the two voices are the voice of the organism and the voice of the illness, and the illness may be forced, where its needs are not being met, to cause the organism to dissemble, to act contrary to itself, to berate loved ones, to neglect itself, to confuse things deliberately; the illness may even cause the organism to fail, generally speaking, because the illness requires that the organism first attend to the requirements of the illness and only when there is time left over (and there is less and
less time left over), should the organism concern itself with the facts of its daily life. What is this thing that inhabits me but is not myself? Which is somehow inimical to myself? Let’s not romanticize the travails of the organism, yes, but neither should we shrink from an honest appraisal of the organism’s impaired state. It is not that we want to watch, nor that in watching we are complicit, but that sublimity is such a rare thing that we ought to honor it even when the artificer is unable to do so himself.
Beef
Edie Meidav
WE TAKE ADVANTAGE OF that friendliness that Southerners are supposed to have, you know, the gentleman thing. What happens is I come up close to the door, press my nose to the glass everyone has out here, and one of these people comes to the door, could be an old lady, could be a guy, it doesn’t matter. I start talking real fast, sort of snowing it over them, which is why the guys call me the Tongue, as in, you want something, get the Tongue. Meat, beef, I’ve got a lot, I say, I’ll give it to you, I’ll give it to you, cost me three hundred but I’ll give it to you for one hundred fifty, I’m almost shouting, I’ll give it to you—and behind me the other guys are holding these black cardboard boxes we use, and our van is puffing steam, our van which is also painted black, paint so thick we can’t even use the rear lock and have to open it from the inside.
Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 18
