SAYONARA

Hell’s Ditch.

When it is not simply uninspired, it’s just unremittingly ugly, and to no good end.

Syllables gurgle and drown at the back of Shane’s throat, in a welter of slurs and elision.

Where earlier efforts had seemed a reflected impression of degraded circumstance, the songs here shoot straight through a degraded heart.

I have it in me to excoriate this thing at great length, but I don't have it in me...

THE CRUX OF LIFE’S PHILOSOPHIES

For years I could not track down Red Roses for Me on cassette.

These were the pre-Web days, and I tramped from brick-and-mortar to mortar-and-brick in search of the tightly wound relic, to no avail…

So I was left to wonder what Red Roses was really like, tantalized by the fact that there was a Pogues album out there somewhere that I had never heard.

I finally found a copy on a trip to Boston with my future wife.

Just about all I remember from that trip is finding Red Roses, digging Red Roses, and starting to cede a good portion of my heart to a woman I had been dating for six months…

It was a damn fine trip.

IT'S THE SAME WHEREVER YOU GO

Now seems like a good time to say Peace and Love...

The overall spirit of the album is indicated by the bantamweight pug on the cover, posing bareknuckled and slightly hunched in front of a dirty gym wall, with PEACE and LOVE tattooed across his fingers.

For what it’s worth, I call him Tommy.

There is plenty of fine non-Shane material here. Gridlock rollicks. Misty Morning, Albert Bridge brings the strings. Blue Heaven choogles well enough to have earned some medium rotation at the local alt-rock station back in ’89. Lorelai longs. Gartloney Rats spins until it’s dizzy.

So what did Shane bring to the proceedings? Well, White City showed he still had the pith and vinegar, and trumped Townsend’s concept album with a single line: “And it’s just another bloody rainy day.”

Cotton Fields is autopilot stuff, notable mostly for revisiting the electroshock of Shane’s youth and namedropping producer Steve Lillywhite. Down All the Days is almost... there..., but not quite. USA has some epic percussion rattling all over the place, and some nice imagery doing about the same. Boat Train saddens me.

And London You’re a Lady leaves us with Shane’s last great piece of poetry: “While Chinamen played cards and draughts/And knocked back Mickey Finns”…

GOBBLE GOBBLE HEY

Now seems like a good time to say Peace and Love...

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends. See you on Monday.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THAT OLD SONG

The rampaging scourge of late 80s/early 90s pop was the "special remix" version, which took a previously recorded song from a group's canon and decked it out in shiny new togs in order to help flog a useless best-of comp.

The nadir of this particular genre was likely plumbed when the briefly reunited Police let Sting spray his smooth-jazz jizz du jour all over Don't Stand So Close To Me. Yuck.

The Pogues, however, actually got it right.

They recognized A Rainy Night in Soho for the diamond in the rough that it was, and they recut it to fix the flaws.

The most obvious of these flaws is the fact the original dulls the impact of this verse:

"Now the song is nearly over
We may never find out what it means
Still there's a light I hold before me
You're the measure of my dreams
The measure of my dreams"

For some odd reason, the original does not peak with this, but rather goes into the bridge following this verse and then comes back around and repeats the verse.

But the remix realizes that the song is building to this moment thematically and narratively, and puts it in its rightful place.

And where the original seemed a bit embarassed by its sentimentality, the remix embraces its inner schmaltz and lets us have a nice cry...

THE WORMS CRAWL IN AND THE WORMS CRAWL OUT

If I Should Fall From Grace With God (or IISFFGWG, as the kids call it) is probably The Pogues strongest album as a band, but through all the tightness it is possible to hear Shane’s battered muse occasionally cry “Uncle.”

Nothing here rises quite to the level of The Body of an American or Sally MacLennane, but, to paraphrase Lou Reed, at this point Shane could shit other people’s diamonds.

So is Bottle of Smoke just willfully profane and chugged up as hell? Well, yeah, but then there’s this observation: “But the money still gleams in my hand like a light.”

And while Fairytale of New York has reached a kind of anti-standard status, if you look closely, the ache is there:

“I could’ve been someone,” he says.
“Well, so could anyone,” she shoots back.

People write entire novels/plays/operas trying to convey what’s in those two lines.

Birmingham Six is righteously pissed, and Lullaby of London is righteous. The Broad Majestic Shannon embraces Irish fiddle-faddle while simultaneously giving it the lie (“For it's stupid to laugh and it's useless to bawl/About a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball”).

The cracks were showing, sure, but in some ways they just lent a little extra character to the whole affair.

I’M A FREE-BORN MAN OF THE USA

Words again.

“The Cadillac stood by the house
And the yanks they were within
And the tinker boys they hissed advice
'Hot-wire her with a pin' “

As much as Shane liked to play that he didn’t care about fuck all, words like this are no accident.

Words like this make it all the sadder that he got ensnared by a mythology as pissant as the whole “bardic Irish drunk" thing.

Because to write a line like “the tinker boys they hissed advice” takes work.

Sober work— not in the dry sense, but in the sense of a serious sit-down approach to a craft.

A line that evocative and metric can only come from someone who gives a fuck.

Go listen to The Body of an American this weekend.

Go read it too…

A HUNGRY SOUND

My father died of cirrhosis at the age of 44. My brother died of the same at 33.

My alcohol intake is limited to an annual St. Patrick’s Day Guinness that I buy and occasionally neglect to drink.

This is just to say that my love of The Pogues was never fueled by a misguided romanticization of auld sod drunk blarney. Mostly it was the words.

I bought Rum, Sodomy and the Lash on cassette when it came out in 1985. The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn started out the album all stately and slow, and then suddenly shifted into this torrent of words, each bound to the next by phlegm and piss and wisdom and genius…

It took weeks for me to believe that Shane MacGowan had actually written the likes of Sally MacLennane. I was convinced that it had to have been drawn from some deep well, where it had steeped for ages, periodically bucketed out and improved by a generation’s poets:

“Well Jimmy played harmonica in the pub where I was born
He played it from the night time to the peaceful early morn
He soothed the souls of psychos and the men who had the horn
And they all looked very happy in the morning

“But Jimmy didn't like his place in this world of ours
Where the elephant man broke strong men's necks
When he'd had too many Powers
So sad to see the grieving of the people that he's leaving
And he took the road for God knows in the morning”

Billy’s Bones was the other MacGowan original that stood out, partly for its humor (I especially like that Billy knew an “Arsenal from Tottenham blue” and to start the Solomon Grundy-esque ending with “Have a Billy holiday” was pretty inspired), and partly for the way it manages to encapsulate The Pogues’ sense of hard-edged pathos:

“Now Billy's out there in the desert sun
And his mother cries when the morning comes
And there's mothers crying all over this world
For their poor dead darling boys and girls”

It helps to know that the last line there is spit out with a smirk.

This then was the stuff of life…

AMERICA’S BOY

I really hoped that Broadcast’s Tender Buttons would pull me into a new obsession.

The Noise Made by People had some moments of admirable melancholia, and weird forward/backward sonics. It dragged a bit in spots, but overall it was several ticks above simply distracting.

I had high expectations for Ha Ha Sound, and they were met. The sonics remained weird, in a different, percussive way, and the songs were more illuminated. This was lushness with hard corners…

So when Tender Buttons rolled around, I was ripe for the plucking. But while I find it to be a logical evolution from Ha Ha Sound, there is a clinical air that is keeping me at bay. And secretly I wonder if the cover— a mirror close-up of singer Trish— is a bit of a cry for help.

I suppose a move from Stereolab to Broadcast would’ve been pretty lateral, in the end. Not like the last shift, from The Pogues to Stereolab.

Ah, The Pogues. Let me tell you a little about The Pogues…

HOLD YR TERROR CLOSE

If you can't extract any joy from The Go! Team's Thunder, Lightning, Strike, I'd say your joy-extracting abilities are well-nigh fucked.

That being said, I don't think there's room in my life for more than one of these, so I'm not necessarily planning a long-term relationship. Go ahead and surprise me Team...

TOO AULD TO RAWK AND ROLL

Back from vacation, I’ll ease in by shooting some fish in a barrel.

There was an amusing story in the Washington Post this morning about today’s teens and their newfound love of Classic Rock.

Some kids from TJ HS started a club called the Classic Rock Appreciation Society, with no apparent indication that the resulting acronym is meant to be ironic…

Ian Anderson got wind of this and flamingo hopped his way over to the school when he was in town playing a supermarket opening. He regaled the children with some of his fluttery flutery, and told a minstrel’s tale. Yea, verily.

There’s a priceless quote in the story by one Charles Cross:

"But maybe the ultimate offense -- the new, best way to offend your parents -- is to listen to the music they were embarrassed to listen to. Like Jethro Tull.”

Crap, does this mean my kids are going to subject me to a steady diet of Stone Temple Pilots ten years from now? Because I assure you, that will really piss me off...

IT'S SELF-LOCKING

If your X IQ does not go beyond the totally appropriate cover of Breathless and/or the totally inappropriate cover of Wild Thing, I implore you to dig deeper.

I'd suggest that you download Under the Big Black Sun for starters. The album of the same name was informed in part by the death of Exene's sister Mary, and this particular song is a dizzying conflation of adultery, death, and Jesus:

"If it isn't men it's death
It's the same old testament
At the cross her station keeping
Stood the mournful mother weeping
Where my man extended hung
Driven with nails to wood"

Then this passage hits me like a sucker punch, I think because it seems so painfully verite:

"The sly brown fox pulled up a glass
Pulled up a chair
And yanked out my hair
When I tried to sit I fell down
When I woke up he was gone"

And then the ending is just so damn existentially pithy:

"The man is gone, Mary's dead
Good morning midnight"

The rest of the album is pretty sweet too, but this song comes from another planet.

I'm vacation-bound, so no posts for a week or so. Enjoy your X...

LETTERS

In honor of day 3 of my conference, and the attendant alphabet soup being ladled out 'til dusk, I give you the best strictly alphanumeric bands ever. No room for after-the-fact acronyms (or Electric Light Orchestra, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer so would've dominated) or interfering articles (The B-52s are grounded). I'm a reasonable man, so I will let a little stray punctuation slip by...

5.
AC/DC

4.
XTC

3.
U2

2.
R.E.M.

1.
X


See, I always preferred Sandy Koufax to Phil Niekro. I'll take five years of white-hot shit over 25 years of floating knucklers to a .537 winning percentage any day...

WHAT'S YOUR NAME?

In the post 9/11 chill, the concept of "disaster recovery" gained serious traction. Providing businesses with a fallover operational model in the face of cataclysm became a growth industry.

All things considered, disaster recovery falls about dead center between corporate forethought and throwing money down a hole.

I was at a conference today, and it appears that the linguistic shift is on, with movement afoot to rename the concept "business continuity plan."

I guess they're hoping for some of the same magic The Bangs rang up when they became The Bangles, or when Southern Death Cult became Death Cult became The Cult...

NOW WITH 50% MORE NOUGATY GOODNESS!

Watching my son puke up a small package of M&Ms, half a mini Milky Way, and a single Milk Dud last night got me thinking about candy songs. So now, without any further filigree: Best. Candy. Songs. Ever.

5. (tie)
Candy Girl, New Edition
The Candy Man, Sammy Davis, Jr.

4. (tie)
Some Candy Talking, Jesus and Mary Chain
Candy's Room, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

3.
Candy-O, The Cars

2.
Candy, Iggy Pop/Kate Pierson

1.
I Want Candy, The Strangeloves and Bow Wow Wow


Number 1 slips by Iggy and Kate on the combined strength of its two primary versions, which perhaps isn't fair... but who ever said candy was fair? The Strangeloves rock an Eric von Zipper wetsuit dream, while Bow Wow Wow richocets Burundi beats all over the beach.