I’ll never forget the first time I saw Shane MacGowan’s teeth

It was sometime around 1987 when I first set my eyes and ears on Shane MacGowan. In an instant, I was mesmerized by his voice, his band and, of course, his unholy teeth. The magic of that first late-night meeting never left me. It still guides much of what I attempt to write and sing to this day.

For those not in the know, MacGowan was the frontman and main songwriter for the Irish folk-punk band The Pogues. He died this morning, Nov. 30, 2023, at age 65. 

His passing is sad, though not unexpected. For decades, MacGowan famously abused his liver, his teeth and the rest of his body with drugs and alcohol. But what he lacked in self preservation, he more than made up for in soulful artistry. MacGowan leaves behind an iconic body of songwriting which inspired an original genre of music which has somehow never quite lived up to his example.

I’m not sure what the genre can be properly called but its a particular mix of heartfelt, literary poetry centered around the working class experience, wrapped in ancient Celtic melodies, delivered with punk-rock energy and unadorned vulgarity.

In other words, MacGowan invented something damn-near perfect.

It’s a miracle I ever heard The Pogues at all.

It’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t around back then, but in the 80s, when I was a kid, finding non-mainstream music was almost impossible in Maine. On the radio, much like today, you had classic rock, country or top 40. That was it. But unlike today, we had no internet, no Spotify, no Youtube.

In my home town, we didn’t even have a record store.

To hear anything out of the ordinary, I relied on copied (and re-re-copied) mix-tape cassettes passed around amongst my teenage cronies. Often, you wouldn’t know the names of the bands or even the songs. But hearing the Dead Milkmen or Mojo Nixon for the first time this way was definitely exciting. It had a semi-elicit vibe I miss. 

This peculiar method of music discovery changed somewhat when I was in junior high school (they hadn’t invented middle schools yet). That’s when a truck came down my street, wiring folks up for cable TV. All of a sudden, the big world outside of the sticks was piped into my house.

MTV became my main source of music consumption. It was still pretty mainstream but it played hip-hop, heavy metal and alternative music you weren’t going to hear on Maine’s commercial radio stations.

But that’s not where I found MacGowan and The Pogues.

That bewitching moment came late one Friday night when I was watching the USA Network. At that time, USA was a low-rent, basic cable channel which mostly played 1970s gameshow reruns and cheap knockoffs of better-known TV shows. I particularly enjoyed “Dance Party USA,” an American Bandstand clone broadcast from the Jersey Shore. I may not have loved the music but the dancing high school girls were a definite draw.

Also on USA, late on Fridays and Saturdays, was a crazy, four-hour show called Night Flight. It was a wild mashup of sci-fi shorts, public domain movies clips, experimental cinematic art and music videos. The various, disparate components were usually grouped around a theme. Each segment informed the others. 

Much like the internet (which used to be run by a mix of independent, creative minds but is now ruled by a few corporate behemoths set on crushing nonconformist thought) cable TV used to have thought-provoking creations worth watching, like Nigh Flight. There’s nothing like it on TV today. 

Anyway, there I was, in the darkness, my eyes, ears and mind open to the flickering possibilities on the screen before me, when Night Flight did an entire hour-long segment on Irish music.

One after the other, Van Morrison, Boomtown Rats, Cactus World News and The Chieftains paraded through my small-town living room. Also in that musical Irish pageant were The Pogues, playing “Dirty Old Town.”

Though the song was written by Scotsman Ewan MacColl, and is an ode to a post-industrial English town, there was no mistaking the band’s Irish sound. I’d heard the Irish Rovers before but this was something quite different. The Pogues had a sneering energy which made the lyrics less maudlin but also more serious.

And his teeth. 

The camera circled, panned through and lingered on MacGowan’s mangled, green chompers. Here was a man you’d never hear on Maine radio and never see on MTV. He was no teen idol. Like a fascinating car wreck, I just couldn’t look away.

I wanted to hear the song again, of course, and watched Night Flight many more times, hoping to see the video. But that never happened. After a while, it felt like I’d had a supernatural experience — emotionally searing but hard to describe or put into words afterwards.

It was several more years before I located my first Pogues record in England. After that, I couldn’t get enough. At that time, I was reading a lot of poetry, playing the banjo and trying to write my own songs. I didn’t understand all of MacGowan’s lyrics, with their complicated Irish-American references to drinking and grownup heartache. But I knew they were beautiful and much more emotionally complicated than anything else I’d ever heard.

In “Dark Streets of London” he wrote of the immigrant experience, as he often did, how it was exciting until it turned lonely.

“I like to walk in the summer breeze
Down Dalling Road by the dead old trees
And drink with my friends in the Hammersmith Broadway
Dear dirty delightful, old drunken old days.”

Then…

“Now the winter comes down, I can’t stand the chill
That comes to the streets around Christmas time
I’m buggered to damnation and I haven’t got a penny
To wander the dark streets of London.”

In “Broad Majestic Shannon” he sang of an old love, long gone.

“So I walked as the day was dawning
Where small birds sang and leaves were falling
Where we once watched the row boats landing
By the broad majestic Shannon.”
Often, he was hilarious and sad at the same time, as in “Sally MacLennane.”

“Some people they are scared to croak but Jimmy drank until he choked
And he took the road for heaven in the morning.”

MacGowan’s best-known song is,“Fairytale of New York,” which he wrote with Jem Finer and sang with Kirsty MacColl. It has become an unlikely Christmas tradition on both sides of the Atlantic.

“It was Christmas evening
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won’t see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you.”

MacGowan’s flinty lyrics, along with The Pogues’ cacophony of banjo, tin whistle, accordion and drums have inspired a host of other Celtic-punk bands including Flogging Molly, The Pubcrawlers and Dropkick Murphys.

None have ever quite matched MacGowan’s authenticity, energy or emotional honesty.

For my money, MacGowan’s name deserves to be intoned along with other Irish literature greats like Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Seamus Heaney. But not everyone loved him.

Irish folksong legend Tommy Makem once called The Pogues “the greatest disaster ever to hit Irish music.”

Still, MacGowan had many admirers.

Joseph Cleary, a professor of Irish literature at Yale, writing in The Irish Times in 2018, extolled MacGowan’s “songs of hard labor and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss.”

In 2020, on Irish TV, Bruce Springsteen said, “I truly believe that a hundred years from now most of us will be forgotten. But I do believe that Shane’s music is going to be remembered and sung.”

I agree with the Boss’ assessment. MacGowan’s lyrics are already passing into the folk tradition, becoming standards, joining the same deep-rooted Celtic culture he drew upon. So let’s raise a glass to Shane MacGowan tonight (before we brush our teeth and go to bed) and toast him with some of his own lyrics.

“If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me,
If I’m buried ‘neath the sod
Still the angels won’t receive me.
Let me go, boys, let me go, boys,
Let me go down in the mud, where the rivers all run dry.”