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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The life-embracing, death-defying founder of the Pogues is a king hell drinker, a writer and one of the last of a vanishing breed.
Jul 31, 2001 | Shane MacGowan, the Irish Charles Bukowski, known for a craggy set of teeth that has inspired more similes than Stonehenge and a liver that would've made James Joyce weep, is one of the few remaining practitioners of a literary tradition that fuses an angry lust for extremes with the exploration of same in poetry or prose. Once upon a time, aspiring writers dived face first into fleshpots, saloons, drug dens, streets and abattoirs, both foreign and domestic. Those gritty, violent, experience-driven universities of transgression produced the likes of Henry Miller, Jean Genet, Malcolm Lowry, Fyodor Dostoevski, Brendan Behan, Knut Hamsun, Paul Bowles and Alexander Trocchi, among others. Shane MacGowan is one of the last of their dying breed.
MacGowan's gargantuan exploits in the realms of substance abuse have been well documented by admirers and detractors alike. Apparently, he was fired from the Pogues, the legendary, London-based Anglo-Irish rock group he co-founded in the early '80s, after his band mates decided in 1991 that they could no longer abide his missing tour dates because he was incapacitated by drink. In doing so, the Pogues signed their own death warrant. MacGowan, the apotheosis of the inebriated Celtic rebel, was the one the crowds wanted.
It was his whiskey-inspired antics and his snarling delivery they craved, and every gig he missed only added to the mystique. I remember a Pogue show at Manhattan's old Beacon Theater where Joe Strummer of the Clash filled in because MacGowan was "sick." The experience was lackluster, to say the least. But to MacGowan's devotees, such disappointments were part of the package. Throughout the '80s and '90s, it was common to be in an Irish pub in New York and hear the often-told myth that MacGowan had six months to live. So when he missed a gig, we were all just happy to hear that he was still alive the next day.
"I'm just following the Irish tradition of songwriting, the Irish way of life, the human way of life," MacGowan explained in 1997 to British men's magazine Loaded. "Cram as much pleasure into life, and rail against the pain you have to suffer as a result. Or scream and rant with the pain, and wait for it to be taken away with beautiful pleasure."
MacGowan wears pain and pleasure on his sleeve, along with beer stains, cigarette burns and the remnants of some long-forgotten curry. In Chicago, he once threw up onstage in midset fronting for his new band the Popes, and resumed singing without a hitch. When he broke up with the Pogues, U2's Bono, one of a passel of celebrity admirers that includes Bob Dylan, Johnny Depp and Nick Cave, let him dry out at his Martello tower in Dublin. Just over a year ago, the Guardian reported that MacGowan was admitted to a fancy rehab facility after his pal, Sinéad O'Connor, called the cops on him -- allegedly because he was hooked on heroin, a rumor MacGowan later denied after he was ejected from said dry-out program for reasons unknown. O'Connor told reporters that she feared for MacGowan's life, but MacGowan shrugged off the whole incident as if that sort of thing happens every day in his world. "I might as well clear up the fact that she [O'Connor] has made out that I was lying on the floor in a coma," he told the Guardian. "Whereas in fact I was sitting on the sofa having a G and T and watching a Sam Peckinpah movie, 'Cross of Iron.'"
