Shane MacGowan the muse
Timothy P. Carney
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My head was ringing with the lyrics “And a-rovin, a-rovin, a-rovin, I’ll go/ for a pair of brown eyes,” yet still I managed to finish the first draft of the Evans-Novak Political Report by the time I laid down on the office couch at 4 a.m., but the deadline was 9 a.m. So I set an alarm for 6:30.
I was washing my face in the sink when my boss Bob Novak walked in at 6:35, and the coffee was brewing, but Novak could still smell the whiskey and the sweat.
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“Late night, Carney?” Novak asked with a chuckle.
“Yeah, boss,” I replied. I didn’t tell him where I was because he would derive too much pleasure from confirming his ethnic stereotypes: I had been drinking Jameson at the 9:30 Club, catching a live show by Shane MacGowan, the Irish punk singer.
Modern American life typically includes what I call the “free agent” years. These are the years from when you finish school until you get married — no parents, no school, no spouse, no kids. You come and go as you please, and your life is your own.
My free agent years were spent living, drinking, and working in Washington, D.C. — and some nights never making it home — and the soundtrack of those days was the never sweet, but always beautiful, voice of Shane MacGowan.
MacGowan, surprisingly, lived until Thursday, when he died at age 65.
My best friends in those free agent years mostly shared my love of MacGowan and the Pogues. In our cars, MacGowan’s lyrics were the constant background music. At our St. Patrick’s Day parties, Shane MacGowan and the Pogues was the soundtrack. Heck, at our Christmas parties, our favorite song was “Fairytale of New York.”
His lyrics were perfect for our free agent, Irish American, carefree lifestyle. That 2002 show at the 930 Club opened with a raucous number, “Streams of Whiskey.”
Because I am going, I am going Any which way the wind may be blowing I am going, I am going where streams of whiskey are flowing.
This rambling and roving was the theme of much of his music. MacGowan and the Pogues sang one of the most memorable versions of the traditional ballad, “The Irish Rover.”
“Fairytale of New York” is perhaps MacGowan’s best original song because it boils his whole oeuvre down to a single song. It’s got alcoholism, sadness, women, whiskey, police, partying, beauty, anger, and love all in one.
My friends and I, we’d bellow the lyrics:
“Sinatra was swinging/ All the drunks they were singing/ We kissed on a corner/ Then danced through the night.”
The song was a duet, which MacGowan recorded with singer Kirsty MacColl. I had a friend, a somewhat snarky girl, who loved MacColl’s witty retort to MacGowan’s line, “I coulda been someone.”
“So could anyone,” MacColl sings in the song’s darkest, most angry moment. “You took my dreams from me, when I first found you,” she continues.
This is not the high point of the song, though. The real climax is MacGowan’s response:
I kept them with me babe I put them with my own Can’t make it all alone I’ve built my dreams around you.
In a few lines, it’s the arc of MacGowan’s music. Yes, he wallows in depravity, and like any Irish poet, he dives into the depths of sadness and death. But when you listen to the entirety of his work, it points you toward love and our dependence on one another.
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“Shane died peacefully at 3 a.m. this morning … with his wife Victoria and family by his side,” his family announced on Thursday. “Prayers and the last rites were read which gave comfort to his family.”
MacGowan was the muse of our wild youths, but his roving, it turns out, had a destination.