Some Kind Of Punk Rock Satyr From Under The Bog

Pogues at Roseland; St. Patrick's Day! I'd been in kind of a bad mood all day, but not really for any good reason. I guess I was a little disappointed because some people I'd had extra tickets for had canceled on me, including my dad and Joel and Liz, the three of whom'd been sort of central to my idea of how the night was supposed to go. I suppose it was to be expected -- after all, I had eight tickets, not counting the ones for me and Nina. Why so many, you ask? Well, when it came to my attention that tickets for this show were available, I thought I might snag maybe four. But the page where you say how many you want had two drop-down menus: One for tickets and one, as it turned out, for tickets plus donations to a Hurricane Katrina relief fund. For some reason, this was hard for me to figure out, and, being a generous soul, I ended up getting four regular tickets and four Katrina tickets. (In my defense, I'm a software author, not a software user.) The roster, by showtime:

• Nina and I
• Eve
• Squick
• Katharine and her dude
• Tom
• Tom's friends Eric and Sarah

We'd all agreed to meet at O'Connor's, but by the time people started showing up, the place was unbearably packed, so we headed across the street to The Black Sheep and drank whiskey and Guinness until around 8:00. The drinking picked me right up.

The Pogues were already on stage by the time Squick and Katharine and Nina and Eve and I got there -- strains of what I think was A Pair of Brown Eyes were wafting through the lobby. The ballroom itself was huge, and complete packed with people, most of them big and fat and Irish. (As per my usual insecure macho boyfriend bullshit, I tried to suss out whose ass I could kick if it "came down to it" -- I estimated no one's.) We got to a place under one of the balconies where we could sort of see the stage and started insinuating ourselves into the crowd. Shane was in a wheelchair -- probably because of the ligaments in his knee that he'd torn a few nights earlier, but maybe, you know, just because -- and he presided over the pit in front of the stage like some kind of dyspeptic, half-comatose monarch. Everyone else on stage looked about twenty years younger than him, except for the roadie who wheeled him, presumably, back and forth from the bathroom / bar ("It's a long way to Tipperary," explained Jem Finer at one point, "but it's an even longer way to the toilets"). I couldn't understand most of what he said besides the names of the songs that he called out, and I think I did better than most people. The songs, from what I can remember, in no particular order:

• A Pair of Brown Eyes
• A Rainy Night In Soho (dedicated to Victoria)
• The Repeal of the Licensing Laws
• The Sick-Bed of Cuchulainn
• Poor Paddy
• The Irish Rover
• The Auld Triangle
• Streams of Whiskey
• Sally MacLenanne
• The Old Main Drag
• Dirty Old Town
• Bottle of Smoke
• Thousands Are Sailing
• Fiesta
• The Broad Majestic Shannon
• The Body of an American

The downsides: We missed Turkish Song of the Damned, quite possibly the best song ever; nor was there any Fairytale, but I can understand if they've gotten right sick of that one; Shane didn't do his own "Yearggghs!" On the plus side, Spider brought out a tin baking tray and bashed himself over the head with it in time to several of the songs, just like in the video for Waxie's Dargle.

I guess what appeals to me about the Pogues is that their aesthetic -- the implication that they're a bunch of sleazy, itinerant pub types whose drummer just happened to start playing in double time without taking the cigarette out of his mouth -- suggests that punk rock is a potential branch in the evolution of every musical genre, instead of something that Malcolm McLaren and a bunch of art school dropouts actively cooked up in a clothing store in King's Cross. That is to say, the same way The Ramones are 50s pop "infected" by the punk bug, queered and twisted and made dark, The Pogues are Irish folk "punked," Irish culture itself being maybe a punk version of England's, Shane MacGowan some kind of red-headed Tony Blair rotted out and jagged around the edges. Unfortunately, seeing one of these bands in their twilight years (cf. The Buzzcocks) kind of kills this line of reasoning, because all the dudes in the band are into wearing comfortable clothes and the idea of "putting on a good show" for the "fans." I'm not complaining, really. This is the only way I get to see them.

I should point out that the title of this post refers not to Shane, although it could, but to a dude that Nina and I were standing behind at the show, this weird white-dude-with-dreads guy who was wearing a stitched-together leather jerkin. Nina coined said phrase and also observed that he looked "very Renn faire." So.

I think I'm gonna clean the toilet tonight. Not sure; I'm psyching myself up for it, drinking a too-strong Jameson's and ginger ale.

You guys remember the scary janitor on The Office -- the one who was played by Stephen Merchant's dad? I saw a guy on the subway on the way home who looked like a droopier, crazier version of Ron Merchant. He was kind of rifling through a pile of old newspapers that he was holding between his legs. The papers kept slipping off his lap and the seat next to him where he'd piled them and onto the floor. He leaned forwards to grab them. "Oh, no," he'd say. "Oh, God!"