The Pogues at the Congress Theatre

I admit to being a bit of a purist when it comes to the Pogues. I caught them four times between August 1985 and June 1988, first in Paris, then another time in Glasgow a couple of months later, then in L.A. the following year, and finally at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago as a birthday celebration in what at the time had just become my new hometown. At least two of those shows, the ones in Glasgow and Chicago, I consider among those special, transcendent moments of my life.

I intentionally avoided the Pogues on later tours, not wanting to hear them slog through lesser material, or to watch MacGowan stumble around in self-destruct mode, and especially not to watch the band, sans Shane, make their stab at a career as a second-rate rock ‘n roll act, dishing out covers of “Honky Tonk Woman” with Joe Strummer as a hired hand.

It is common wisdom that the Pogues popularized the melding of Irish folk with punk. And while that may now, 20-odd years down the road, seem an obvious thing to have done, it was neither obvious nor inevitable at the time. Also lost in that equation (folk+punk=____ ) is how good the songs were on those first three albums, that these are songs that stand the test of time, that they are qualitatively in a higher realm than those written by the band’s musical descendants, the Flogging Mollies and the Dropkick Murphys.

Also lost in the standard narrative of the Pogues is the magic of Shane MacGowan. At least when he’s coherent, MacGowan joins Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Johnny Rotten as a sort of Four Musketeers of Celtic soul, four contemporaries, each tapped in to a different vein of that dark and angry, maudlin yet joyous spirit of the Gaels. And that’s what we like about the Irish, that they are soaked in cornball emotion, that they take pride in saying what most folks, or at least most white folks, want to say but never will, because it would be just too embarrassing. So we hire the Irish to sing to us, which they do with unabashed fervor, about drinking, and misfortune, and God. And thank God for them, because, along with the great black bluesmen, they saved America from its musical torpor. Imagine if all we had were Broadway show tunes, Sinatra, and “How Much is That Doggy in the Window?” It just might have gone that way if it were not for that great Scotch-Irish hillbilly, Elvis Presley, lovin’ us tender, like a hound dog. MacGowan is in the same vein.

“’The boys of the NYPD all sing the words to ‘Galway Bay’, and the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day.”

It’s just so fucking cornball. But for some reason, it sounds legit coming out of MacGowan’s mouth, so he gets away with it. Just like Johnny Rotten got away with growling “We mean it, man!” and no one laughed. Or like Tom Waits can sing, “Isn’t it time that you loved, isn’t it time, time, time,” and it brings a tear to my jaundiced eye.

I greeted the Pogues spring reunion tour with ambivalence. I knew that they had played several gigs in Europe and a couple on the U.S. West Coast in 2006, but I was kind of glad that they hadn’t toured the Midwest so I wouldn’t be faced with the lady-or-the-tiger dilemma of whether to see them, either choice liable to leave me wrestling with my own regret.

Like I said, two of the greatest times of my life have happened at Pogues shows. In Glasgow, I hung out near the back of a hall of 4,000 crazed Celtic fans chanting at the top of their lungs, several of them noting my ungainly Pogues cap, essentially two pieces of cloth sewn together in an awkward square, making the wearer look like a flaccid Conehead, but with the all-important Celtic green-and-white front and center, which all of these Scottish lads were quick to pick up on, telling me where I could find Big Rick, I assume to engage in a bit of ultraviolent soccer hooliganism after the show. I never found Big Rick, but my Aussie hitch-hiking buddy Ken, who had invited me to Glasgow in the first place because he had family there, talked us into a cab that was just hired by a couple of cute Scottish girls, who took us to an all-night party.

The Chicago show in 1988 was two days before my birthday. I piled into my girlfriend Patty’s Olds 98 with her crazy brother Billy and his equally off-balance girlfriend, who hailed from Memphis and had a lazy eye that made it look like she was perpetually aroused, and we headed to Uptown, downing a couple six packs of Guinness in the alley behind the Riv, sharing them with the stew bums and offering James Fearnley, the bands’ accordionist, a slug of the brew as he got out of a cab, and then chanted at the top of our lungs for an hour-and-a-half, the crowd swelling above the band on the chorus of “Dirty Old Town”: “I’m gonna make me a big sharp axe, Shining steel tempered in the fire, I’ll chop you down, Like an old dead tree, Dirty old town”. I walked out of the club into the hot summer Uptown night, knowing I had found a home.

It has been a long time. Eighteen years to be exact. And in those years, I had time to go full circle, from youthful adulation, to disappointment and a bit of betrayal at the band’s inevitable fall back into the world of mortals, to the warm appreciation of a hundred and one nights singing lines like: “There was nothing ever gained, By a wet thing called a tear, When the world seems dark, And I need a light inside of me, I walk into a bar and drink fifteen pints of beer.”

I had heard good things about the Congress Theatre, but I had no idea that it was such a beauty. I go by it every day while riding the Blue Line on my way downtown, and from the outside it looks just like any other old theatre, more ungainly than most, a crumbling outpost in the midst of a civic no man’s land between the hipsters of Wicker Park and the merengue joints of Logan Square. Inside, it is dark and cavernous, big chips of paint having flecked off the domed ceiling in the center of the room. These faded ladies, with their combination of grand pretense and decay, tend to fill me with a mixture of foreboding and awe, the buildings a reminder of the temporality of life, that you better appreciate the glories of both nature and man, that they, like our own time in the sun, are fleeting.

The Pogues began with a classic, “Streams of Whiskey”, off their first album, which was appropriately rousing and revved the crowd into good form. But I’ve become a picky audience in my middle age. I expect a band with a sense of purpose, a sound person who understands this intent, and a crowd that intuits what is going on and responds appropriately. I’ll also say that I’ve remained in Chicago for almost 20 years in large degree because of the way Chicago audiences respond to live music. A Chicago crowd tends to be enthusiastic, sometimes to a fault, granting its heroes on stage some slack, but it also tends to be a knowledgeable crowd, singing along with the choruses, seeming to get the nuances of the set list or a different instrumentation, which I imagine comes from filling the hall full of fans who had spent many a winter’s night with the solace of their favorite songs while those in more temperate climes were out enjoying a balmy March evening under the palm trees or amongst the kudzu. And Chicagoans, or at least music loving Chicagoans, tend to be friendly, presumably a consequence of the city attracting freaks and weirdos from across the upper Midwest, as anyone who has spent time traveling through the region can attest that these folks are among the most innocently kind and friendly in the nation, if not the planet. There was a time when it was like that in L.A., when all of us punk rockers and assorted other weirdos felt the need to stick up for one another, when you’d drive 20 miles out of your way to make sure some wayward kid you met leaving the club got home that night, but that time has long since past. But that spirit was alive and well in Chicago during my club-hopping days of the late 80’s and early 90’s and, from best I can tell, it still lives on here today.

I note this to help explain why I was at least a bit disappointed at the audience response on Tuesday, that it kept me from fully enjoying the first half of the show. Sure, the crowd got into it, but more as a way to get their Irish on ahead of St. Paddy’s Day. There was lots of jumping and jigging and clapping, but only scattered bits of chanting, mostly from old guys like myself, and it was this collective chanting, the rock ‘n roll equivalent of a soccer riot, that made the Pogues so much fun in the old days.

Then there was MacGowan himself, not quite in full throat at the beginning of the show, the mic too low in the mix, like for some reason the sound man thought it was as important to be able to pick out the arpeggios of the tin whistle or the chord changes of the rhythm guitar as it was to hear the words and melody. To be heard above the din, MacGowan would let out a yowl, half tom cat and half hillbilly, which was guaranteed to get at least a small cheer from the audience, but which became kind of sad after the third repeat, reminding me of the time I saw Screamin’ Jay Hawkins back in Holly wood during the late 80’s, and he was a parody of himself, having gotten used to bringing out his voodoo/womanizer shtick for the frat boys for so long that he had forgotten how to be real.

Despite 20 years of evidence to the contrary, it seems the auxiliary members of the Pogues still suffer from the delusion that they all deserve their time in the spotlight, with no less than four band members besides MacGowan taking a turn as lead vocalist, the results ranging from soullessly competent to teetering on embarrassing. It was like the Pogues collectively imagined that for some reason what the world needed was another jam band, while MacGowan was doing his best to stay in touch with what made them the real deal in the first place. And the crowd seemed just as happy to hop around to a fun little jig or to cheer Philip Chevron’s rendition of “Thousands are Sailing”, a piece of romantic hokum about the Irish coffin ships of the 19th century redeemed on record only by MacGowan’s growled delivery, as it was to cheer the achingly beautiful tunes that peppered the set.. As a matter of full disclosure, I should note that I find the popularity of the American jam band scene incomprehensible, other than to guess that a lot of people must not need energy, melody, or rhythm in their music to make a night of it. And while I love a lot of global folk music, from Sweden to Croatia, from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe, I find the American hippy version, where someone strums on an acoustic guitar and sings about his political beliefs or his feelings, to be pure purgatory.

But towards the end of the set, the sound man had finally figured out how to mic MacGowan, and the great melodies, from “Kitty” and “Body of an American” to “Dirty Old Town”, filled with those quintessential Irish sentiments of reminiscence and defiance, reigned down from the stage, and this power was magnified by a band that was as tight as ever. It climaxed during the encore, when Shane MacGowan stood tall, belting out “The Auld Triangle”, one long chorus of a ballad backed by a single mournful chain of minor chord changes repeated for several minutes, the crowd having reached a static frenzy, tossing full cups of beer and empty cans of Guinness at the stage in true punk rock appreciation for a job well done. This was one of the band’s less celebrated songs, but a great one nonetheless, and it underscored that, despite my quibbles, these guys can still deliver the goods.