Fairytale of New Orleans

With the passing of Shane MacGowan, let's revisit the time a journalist got tossed from the tour of his favorite band. It's my Pogues story, a cautionary tale.

The mighty Pogues circa 1987.

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, my aversion to Irish music was 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 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.

James Joyce in the middle.

The usual album review takes two or three hours to write, but I started 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. for the home stretch. 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.” - Spin May 1988.

I got Drunken Irish Bastards from an Austin stupor group featuring Joe Doerr and Rich Brotherton, and just ran with it. That night writing the Pogues review was the most fun I’ve ever had with my fingers. As my girlfriend, a British actress who fueled my “Irish writer” identity, 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.

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 even had an agent at ICM, Luis Sanjuro, 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. Mr. Sanjuro succumbed to cancer just months after his letter found me, but I had no doubt other agents would follow.

“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. This would be my first cover story for a national magazine and it would blow people away. I was reading a lot of Flannery O’Connor and Brendan Behan 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’m him!” is the brag of today, but that was me in ‘88. As long as the talent didn’t run out.

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 him up by his ankles. I had, quite literally, gotten in over my head. The show was sloppy, wild, with MacGowan so drunk his singing was a constant slur, but the crowd was going nuts. “The last time I saw you was down at the Greeks/ There was whiskey on Sunday and tears on our cheeks” he opened on “Broad Majestic Shannon,” and everybody else just jumped in. I wanted the Pogues to sound better, but they were more punk than Irish.

The after-show party was at a suite at the Omni, but it wasn’t much fun because drunk fans crowded the hallway, and the band seemed a bit out of sorts. Is there a malady called Groupie’s Tourette’s? “I know five Mexicans- Los Lobos- who could outplay the seven Irish guys I heard tonight!” I told a couple of the Pogues.

This is the thing I could never figure out about myself. Why am I so compulsively argumentative? 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. But I wasn’t going to be a sycophant the next few days.

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.

Pogues at Liberty Lunch. Photo Laurie Greenwell

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.” Except to get the writer as fucked up as their leader.

First there were mushrooms at sound check and drinks on the record label tab, 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 is more willing to die, 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. This was before I realized that the c-word does not have the same “don’t go there” power as in the States. 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, and only a couple hundred in cash, so I called Bill Davis of Dash Rip Rock, an N.O. band 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 the 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 powerhouse 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? The Dash Rip Rock gig would be disaster averted

While I was working out the relocation details with the Dash guys, a couple friends came by my hovel on the Drag and asked if I wanted to move to San Francisco with them. I told them about the Dash deal, but Brent and Scott had both managed and worked closely with local touring bands, so they talked me out of it with an exhausting daily scenario that boiled down to “none of the credit, all of the blame.” When are they leaving, I asked, and they said Friday, so I called the Dash guys (who seemed relieved) and headed in the opposite direction.

Frank Murray, second from the left, used to manage Thin Lizzy, featuring his best friend from boyhood Phil Lynott.

I got to reconnect with Pogues manager Frank Murray 25 years after my aborted Spin story, 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 was San Francisco, the only city in the country that had more meth than Austin, but I was done with that shit.

Pogues setlist at Tipitina’s 6/9/88 (and probably Liberty Lunch, too): 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 Train7. 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