Published at 4:45 PM on March 16, 2009

The Pogues - Atlanta - The Tabernacle - 3/9/2009: Beer, Brawls and Potcheen-doused Brilliance

Ctrl-V

Browse Ctrl-V

photos by Mack Williams

Page 1 of 2

pogues_shane_macgowan_smoking.JPG

Even though it’s officially still winter, this is Hotlanta, and inside converted church The Tabernacle, it feels like it’s 100 degrees, 100 percent humidity. The venue’s defining feature, an enormous pipe organ, protrudes from behind the stage backdrop and light scaffolding, a remnant of the place’s holier days. 

I check my phone. It’s just before 9 p.m. The floor is getting crowded. Roadies meander about the stage, setting up gear. After a while, a rather interesting item is carted out. Sitting ominously, tragically (tragicomically?) at the center of the stage is a lone, padded bar stool—Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan’s seat.

Over the years, MacGowan has been known as much for his unparalleled drinking and drug use as his brilliant songwriting. That he’s got a barstool ready if he needs to take a load off is charming, if not a little shocking in its lack of self-consciousness. 


IT WAS MONDAY EVE, BABE, IN THE DRUNK TANK
Many of the diehards in the crowd—inspired by the anticipation of their favorite band’s rowdy booze-fueled songs, and perhaps MacGowan’s own penchant for strong drink—arrive three sheets to the wind. The show hasn’t even started yet and, already, some burly, bearded, proud-to-be-Irish musclehead punks about 15 feet from center stage are getting restless. Looking for a fight, they flail about, shoving people, knocking over their neighbors’ drinks and hollering for Shane. 

“Shane!!!” screams the mean looking bastard next to me. “Hey, motherfucker…” I look up, at first confused as to whom this meathead is talking to. 

“Yeah. You. Do you love Shane?!” I realize that the wrong answer, perhaps even the wrong inflection in my answer, could mean a Hell’s Angels-style beating. Luckily, though, I do—I do love Shane. Sincerely. So I tell Bobby O’Brien as much. 

“That’s right. You damn well better,” he says, grabbing me uncomfortably tightly around the shoulders. Suddenly, I feel like an extra in Gangs of New York. ’Ol Bobby turns and looks me straight in the eyes, tightening his grip even more, summoning his inner lie detector to see if I’m a true Pogues fan or a gutless pretender. 

“You know,” he says, whiskey on his breath, “most people here don’t even care about this band.” 

“Fuckin’ poseurs,” I agree, for reasons of self-preservation. 

While my instincts in this situation have helped me avoid a black eye, I’ve now been singled out as this guy’s little buddy—he’s hanging on me, giving me goddamned noogies and spine-cracking back slaps. Oh, Jesus, I think. Fantastic. The biggest asshole here wants to be my friend. 

Finally, Bobby O is summoned by one of the other inebriated steroid swallowers in his gang, and loses interest long enough for me to free myself from his Celtic death grip. But no sooner have I gained respite than the biggest, meanest, most tattooed beast of the bunch starts ramming his way through the crowd toward the stage, throwing aside everyone and everything in his path. 

A feisty brunette with a few of her own tats materializes. “Asshole!” she screams as she clocks him repeatedly in the face. After a few stunned seconds, he actually goes after her, grabbing her face and slamming her to the ground. We jump in to restrain him, but it takes a half-dozen of us to hold him back. Once we do, though, he shakes it off and shifts his focus. “Shane!!!” he shouts, just in time for the lights to dim and the band to walk onstage. 

FOR WHEN I RETURN, UNITED WE WILL BE
The Last time The Pogues were in Atlanta, George Bush was president—George H.W. Bush. A release of tension like I’ve seldom felt at a concert sweeps across the room, accompanied by a deafening roar. Everyone dances furiously as the band shakes the rust off “Streams of Whiskey,” from its 1984 debut Red Roses for Me. MacGowan blows kisses to the crowd between brilliant, mumbled lines.   

I never got to see the band in its heyday, they hung it up when I was a junior in high school, and MacGowan had been kicked out even before that, when I was still playing little league and riding my bike to the neighborhood pool in the summer. Judging from the near-riot going on around me, and the sounds pumping with abandon from the speakers, there’s no way the band has lost a step. Ever since being shot out of the cannon of that first song, they’ve been running on kinetic energy. Whenever Shane screams into the mic, the crowd screams back in unison at him and his seven bandmates. 

pogues_atlanta_1.JPG
The Pogues dig into material spanning their catalog—maritime romp “Greenland Whale Fisheries,” vigorous waltz “The Broad Majestic Shannon,” “If I should Fall From Grace with God,” “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” “Cotton Fields,” “Sayonara,” “Tuesday Morning” (sung by tin-whistle player Spider Stacy, who briefly took over lead vocals when MacGowan was booted from The Pogues in the early ’90s). 

When the band breaks into whirling, menacing Eastern-tinged rocker “Turkish Song of the Damned,” the Tabernacle’s wooden floor begins pulsing up and down with the crowd’s ferocious stomping. It feels like the venue could collapse on itself at any moment. But as MacGowan, Stacy and Co. play on, goodwill seems to spread over the room, slowly erasing the initial feeling of impending violence and replacing it with unbridled joy—and lots of clapping and pogo-ing. 

By this point, though, something becomes painfully apparent to me—my decision to come straight to the venue instead of going home to change out of the flip-flops I’d been wearing all day was not a wise one. In a situation like this, acceptance of your fate is key. Best not to fight it. Toes crushed and throbbing? Girl with the spiked heels dancing a little too close? Feet sticky with spilled beer? Who cares? This is a Pogues show! 

On “Sayonara,” as on every other song the band plays over the course of the night, the whole room sings every word: “I walked into the nearest bar / I sat and gazed across the sea / I wandered lonely on the beach / The waves just whispered misery!” 

Nine songs in, MacGowan leaves the stage temporarily, taking a break in a small, black tent at the side of the stage. (My guess is that this Bedouin-like setup was cooked up by Stacy and the rest of the band some years back to keep their frontman from wandering off backstage and getting too sauced to finish the show.) Stacy moves front-and-center for his brilliant, sad-eyed pop song “Tuesday Morning,” which—melodically if not lyrically—is as good as anything MacGowan has ever written. 

When it ends, The Pogues lead singer returns to the stage, cigarette in hand, clutching the mic—in a black sweater and jeans, his slightly graying hair frizzy from the humidity, he sways from side to side as he sings. There’s a good chance he’s the coolest frontman I’ve ever seen. 

Comments

Privacy
No Facebook? Click to comment.

Most Read

+more