The Drunken Irish Bastard is back! He smiles through rotten teeth, dressed to swill in a baggy black suit. He’s standing there where the dreams end, trying to put his soul into words that match the tempo of his heart. He’s the man who knows too much about something he can’t name and it drives him crazy until the liquor finally rescues him and the ghosts take him home and put him to bed.
– Spin magazine, May 1988
It’s the rock critic’s fantasy — go on tour with your favorite band — and mine came true in June 1988, when Spin magazine called me and said get your shit packed yer going on the road with the Pogues! This was my seat on Led Zeppelin’s private jet, my booty call from Madonna. I think you’d have to go back to the Monkees to find me as crazy about a group as I was with the Pogues in 1988.
Growing up in an Irish-Catholic household, where the Clancy Brothers and “Danny Boy” were sacred, I had an aversion to Irish music. Like a hip hop kid whose parents played the blues. But then, when I was in my late twenties I started hearing about this band of former punk rockers, produced by my hero Elvis Costello, who lit a fire under traditional Irish music. Originally called Pogue Mahone (“Kiss my arse” in Gaelic), the Pogues were led by Shane MacGowan, a songwriting genius who suggested that Tom Waits grew up in Kilkenny, where all the street people were white.
Their second album was my first. Rum, Sodomy and the Lash didn’t do all that much for me, really, until deep into side two and its tale of Gallipolli, “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” MacGowan didn’t write it — Australian Eric Bogle did — but Shane’s telling was like Richard Burton’s Hamlet. The song was his! “And the Band Played…” hit the switch for me on the Pogues. Suddenly, all their songs were better. I went and bought the first LP Red Roses For Me and then the EP that had “The Body of an American” (later used in "The Wire" Irish wake scenes). If you came into China Sea Tattoo at 2712 Guadalupe in ’86, you heard the Pogues blaring from the t-shirt shop in the back. A whole new old world opened up for me. My people!
That was around the time I started freelancing for Spin magazine- Rolling Stone’s hip rival. I mainly did the humor pieces on the back page at first, but then the editors started giving me album assignments and a couple front-of-the-book profiles. I let it be known that I was highly available to review the next Pogues LP and one day I got a copy of If I Should Fall From Grace With God in the mail, with a quick deadline. They wanted it as the lead review of the May 1988 issue, so I had some space. Now I just needed some “talent,” which was the code word for methamphetamine in my circle.
Okay, the usual album review takes two or three hours to write. I started writing my Pogues review as soon as I got off work- 6 p.m.- and didn’t stop for 15 hours. Two lines of speed to start, one more at about midnight and the last one at 4 a.m. Always for work, never in excess- that was my rule with the white stuff that was sometimes brown.
I used to worry that I drank too much, that my gambling was out of hand, that my language was offensive, that I spent too much time daydreaming, that my outlook on life was fatalistic, that I was incapable of sustaining a long relationship, that I would never understand money and that eventually I would go to prison for a crime I did not commit. Then I listened to the Pogues and stopped worrying. Today I stand before you and proudly declare, “Hey, world, I’m a Drunken Irish Bastard and if you don’t like it, well, here, I got something your wife might like.”
That lead graf took about an hour, though it would be retyped at least a dozen times through the night. I went on:
Drunken Irish Bastards used to be hot tuna, man, with guys like Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Damon Runyon, John Huston, Ring Lardner, John McGraw, Stephen Foster and all the rest of them fightin’ and fuckin’ and fallin’ down all the way to the top. Then, I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden it was no longer cool to stagger around, slurring epithets and peeing into the potted palms at the El Morocco while horrified autograph seekers looked on. Christ, look what happened to Declan MacManus (slave name: Elvis Costello) when he tried to revive Drunken Irish Bastardry in the late Seventies. Poor guy got his glasses knocked off by Bonnie Bramlett just for mouthing off. You should’ve heard what Fitzgerald said about Ray Charles.
That night was the most fun I’ve ever had with my fingers. As my girlfriend, a British actress, slept on the other side of the room, I banged that Smith-Corona til the sun came up. She said the typewriter sound was relaxing, and somehow I didn’t marry her.
Shane MacGowan is the new savior of Drunken Irish Bastards. Unstable, boozed-up visionaries of Irish descent are turning up on more and more “What’s Hot” lists, thanks to the songs and brave vocals of MacGowan and the play of his Pogues. I expect this album to do for the proliferation of the DIB what Farrah Fawcett did for the curling iron… This is white boy funk music, the stuff of our ancestors created when they were as oppressed as blacks are now. It’s got guts and soul, and will make poor people dance until 4 a.m., even if they have to be at work at 7.
I didn’t even stop for bathroom breaks, draining into an empty coffee can. I think I burnt a year’s supply of dopamine that night!
After Spin published the review, I was pretty much the hot new critic, no shit, with editors tracking me down at the t-shirt shop and offering gigs. I had been writing for Texas Monthly, too, and even had an agent at ICM wanting to talk to me about representation. At age 32, I was finally becoming the writer I always knew I was going to be. I played myself as having overblown self esteem, when actually the opposite was true. But with some success I started thinking quite highly of myself.
“Get ready to win another award,” I said to my editor at Texas Monthly when I plopped 28 typewritten pages about Vidor, TX “the home of the Texas Ku Klux Klan,” on his desk in the spring of ’88. Corky wasn’t an act anymore.
And then I got the dream assignment to write a feature about the Pogues’ Summer ‘88 tour of the American South. The plan was to meet the band in Austin, before the show at Liberty Lunch, then fly to New Orleans, where they had a gig at Tipitina’s. Then I would board the tour bus with the Pogues to shows in Birmingham, AL and Memphis, and somehow get back to New Orleans for my return flight to Austin. I’d stay in the hotels where the band stayed and have total access for three days. All expenses paid by the label. There was no doubt in my mind that this finished piece would be my first cover story for Spin. I was reading a lot of Flannery O’Connor for inspiration.
But I forgot about the personal side of the work. Conversing with the band, gaining their trust, being the nail in the wall, recording everything. I saw this being my Hunter S. Thompson moment- lessons on human nature while trying to drink the drunkest band in existence under the table. I wouldn’t say I was delusional, because all this shit was suddenly happening in my life after a 10-year struggle, but inflated self-appraisal? Oh, yeah.
When I came backstage before the Liberty Lunch show, I saw one of the band members throwing up outside the window, which was so tall someone had to hold up his ankles. I had, quite literally, gotten in over my head. The show was sloppy, uninspired, with MacGowan so drunk his singing was a constant slur, but the crowd was going nuts. The after-show party was at a suite at the Omni, but it wasn’t fun because every Irish drunk in town was in the hallway, trying to get in, and the band seemed a bit out of sorts. I didn’t help the mood by chiding them about the disappointing Liberty Lunch show. “I know five Mexicans, Los Lobos, who could outplay the seven Irish guys I heard tonight!” I said. Is there a malady called Groupie Tourette’s?
This is the thing I could never figure out about myself. Why am I so compulsively argumentative? It’s almost like I have a verbal masochistic fetish. You would think that, when I meet my heroes, I would tone down the adversarial attitude, but sometimes it even gets worse. It’s like I’m overcompensating for being starstruck.
To Bruce Springsteen on the Tom Joad tour: “I’m so glad you didn’t do ‘Highway Patrolman’ tonight. That’s my song. I couldn’t stand having to listen to it with 2,000 other people.”
But that was small stuff compared to my time with the Pogues, in the band’s classic lineup, except Cait O’Riordan had just left to be Mrs. Elvis Costello and was replaced by a young, good-looking guy.
Let me describe my 24 hours in New Orleans, where I met the fellas and manager Frank Murray at the hotel, and chatted for a bit on the bus with Phillip Chevron, whose “Thousands Are Sailing” was one of the band’s best new songs. Off to a good start. Then I rode with them to the soundcheck and got some good MacGowan color. Shane was the last one on the bus, already shitfaced and carrying a bottle of port. He sat at the back booth and let the bottle slide off the table on the bus’ first turn. He picked it up and slapped it down and the same thing happened on the next turn. Nobody in the band seemed to notice. Port wine drenched the carpet.
Shane was the gravy train and he was a mess. “We know we’ve got a problem,” the accordion player James Fearnley said to me, not caring who heard. “It’s a fucking drag. But at this point there’s nothing we can do.”
A couple of the crew members took me aside at sound check and gave me some mushrooms, which I took about an hour before the show. I was drinking on the record label tab, high on psychedelics, and, guess what, the Tip’s show was much better than the Austin one. The band was in a really good mood afterwards and we all went to a bar called the Dungeon, which served eight-ounce beers and played shitty hair metal music. In his own world, Shane was taken away by the two most beautiful women on the planet.
Somewhere between the end of the show and leaving the Dungeon, there was some cocaine, but I don’t really remember the details. I only know that coke “turns me into” an abrasive motormouth know-it-all. We’re all lucky I could never afford the shit, but when it was offered…
The guys I ended up drinking with until the sun came up were tinwhistle player Spider Stacy and drummer Andrew Ranken. Spider was as nice as could be, but Ranken and I butted heads early and often. We even argued about whether Spain or the U.S. was a better country to live in. Somehow, I worked my story about Vidor into the discussion, how it had remained an all-white town, even though it was six miles from Beaumont, which had a large African-American population. Spider got close to my face and said his wife was Black, but I missed the message to shut the fuck up and went on. I compared Vidorians to Vietnamese who fought against American soldiers, and recalled that scene from Apocalypse Now where Col. Kurtz talks about finding a pile of children’s arms the day after they were vaccinated by U.S. medics. In Vidor, rather than integrate the town’s swimming pool, which had been the center of summer activity, they filled it in with dirt. My point was that wars are lost when the enemy will go to greater lengths, but sounding as scattered as the Dennis Hopper character in Apocalypse didn’t help.
“You’re a loud-mouth cunt and we want you to leave,” Ranken said, and I went to another table and sulked. On the way out, Spider came by and said, “You’re an all-right guy. But you talk too much.”
I came by the next day to tell the tour manager that I didn’t think I could ride on the bus with the guys, but he spoke first. “The band decided they don’t want you around.”
It wasn’t unexpected, but still crushing. I had enough color and quotes for a nice feature, but I didn’t want to write about the Pogues anymore. Spin was cool with it but what was I going to do in New Orleans- on my own dime- for three days until my plane returned me to my rightful perch? I didn’t have a credit card. I called a New Orleans friend, Bill Davis of Dash Rip Rock, who I met at the first SXSW a year earlier. They had a couple weekend shows, and invited me to come along. It was a blast, especially the $45 motel in Lafayette, where the great Warren Storm played in the ballroom, and the TV had a free porn channel.
By the end of their jaunt, which also took them to Baton Rouge, where Dash destroyed like a swamp rock AC/DC, we had decided that I would move to New Orleans and manage the band. They were fucking fantastic, especially drummer Fred LeBlanc, and lots of fun to hang around with.
The whole Pogues fiasco was the alarm going off on my existence in Austin. After four years writing for the Austin Chronicle, I’d become so full of myself that even I didn’t want to read what I had to say. I was getting into a pretty big substance abuse problem, so what better job than to sign up with a rock n’ roll party band that brought Nawlins craziness to whatever Midwestern shithole they were playing that night?
I was working out the details with the Dash guys, thinking I’d need a month to get out of Austin, when a couple friends came by my hovel on the Drag behind a shoe repair shop. “Why don’t you move to San Francisco with us?” they said. Both Brent and Scott had managed or worked closely with bands and they said I wasn’t cut out for management. The exhausting daily scenario they described boiled down to “none of the credit, all of the blame” and so I called the Dash guys (who seemed relieved) and headed in the opposite direction.
I could afford the move only because a couple days earlier I had unexpectedly received a check for $2,000 from Texas Monthly, the full fee for my Vidor piece. The story never ran and it didn’t win any awards. But it got me out of Austin. Haven’t done speed since 1988, though I did need a couple bumps of coke to make it through that afterhours Guided by Voices set at SXSW.
I got to reconnect with Frank Murray 25 years later, when he was living part time in Austin with his girlfriend Kay Gourley. Over coffee at the Spiderhouse, I reminded Frank that I had been a drunken asshole in New Orleans, which got me tossed off the tour. “It wasn’t that,” he said. “They thought you were a supporter of the KKK.” That was horrifying to hear. I guess in my fucked-up state I trampled the nuances of my Vidor- Vietnam analogy. I tried to impress my favorite band with bold edginess and came off as a segregationist. Talk about a swing and a miss!
That night in New Orleans was a pitiful, yet pivotal time in my life. My favorite band met my worst behavior. I was headed to a bad place and the Pogues snapped me back with their tough love. Next stop: San Francisco.
Pogues setlist at Tipitina’s 6/9/88: 1. The Broad Majestic Shannon 2. Medley / The Rocky Road to Dublin / The Galway Races 3. Repeal 4. Kitty 5. If I Should Fall From Grace With God 6. Boat Train 7. Metropolis 8. Rainy Night in Soho 9. Thousands Are Sailing 10. N.W.3 11. Bottle Of Smoke 12. Streets of Sorrow / Birmingham Six 13. Lullaby Of London 14. Johnny Come Lately 15. Dirty Old Town 16. Turkish Song Of The Damned 17. Sketches of Spain 18. Fiesta 19. Sickbed 20. Sally MacLennane 21. A Pair Of Brown Eyes 22. The Irish Rover 23. Honky Tonk Woman