To celebrate the Little Womedievalist passing her exams tomorrow, she and I will be treating ourselves to a concert. We'll be in Anaheim come Sunday, listening to genius drunks:
If you're not convinced of Shane's drunkeness, genius, or drunken genius, I beg you to listen to the demo of "Turkish Song of the Damned" [.mp3]. (Found on the official Pogues website, via a link from the Pogues' guitarist, and thus kosher.) It captures the band's charms better than anything I've heard before. For those unfamiliar, I'll enumerate them:
- Haunting melody
- Shane's drunken "one, two, free"
- Shane audibly knocking over beer bottles to grab the mike
- Shane forgetting half the lyrics
- Shane singing anyway
- And beautifully
- But hacking constantly
- The tape ending abrup—
Mary Lou Lord, herself no stranger to the powers and dangers of the bottle, told a story in concert about using the pictures of Shane's teeth from his autobiography to inspire her kid to maintain proper brushing habits.
Congrats to the Little Womedevalist!
I was going to write something earlier related to cultures of ordeal and in sympathy with your "absofuckinglutely nothing" position (or as my minor field director put it, "When, in your career, are you going to be expected to sit in a room without access to reference or research materials and conjure up the semblence of knowledge of the field?") but felt the moment had passed.
Posted by: JPool | Friday, 26 October 2007 at 07:18 AM
Oh, the Pogues...! That's excellent. The LW has great taste in music. I knew a guy once who met Shane McG in Ireland and sort of threw himself (metaphorically speaking) at the guy - "Shane, Shane, I came all the way to Ireland to meet you! I want your autograph! Sign this dollar bill!" McG wrote "fuck off Yank" on it.
Posted by: Nate | Monday, 29 October 2007 at 08:32 PM