On discovering my "ur-music"
iTunes keeps track of how many times I play a song, letting me discover that my favorite tracks have been aired 60, 80, 100 times. The most popular song on my playlist - "Einstein's Day" by the immortal Mission of Burma has graced my earphones 147 times.
But I remember the days before I could fit 10,000 songs on my hard drive, when I listened to cassette tapes on a beat-up boom box and had five or ten albums to choose from. Estimating conservatively, I can say that I listened to some of those albums several hundred times as I sat in my high school bedroom. I remember falling asleep to Suzanne Vega's first album, listening to it on a pillow speaker in a dorm room in Pennsylvania at an academic summer camp. I played my copy of Sting's "Dream of the Blue Turtles" so many times that the tape wore through and snapped. Twice.
These are the "ur-albums", the music that shapes how you think about music. It's not everything you listened to as a child or as a teen, but it's the songs you listened to again and again and again, the songs you can still sing now despite not having listened for years, the albums that sound almost as wonderful when you spin them now as they did when you were fourteen.
The Pogues are my ur-band. I figured this out Tuesday night, surrounded by a thousand drunk Bostonians, singing the lyrics of "Streams of Whiskey" at the top of my lungs, pumping my fist in the air and grinning ear to ear. I spent the entire concert jumping, clapping, singing and generally making an ass of myself... made tolerable by the fact that everyone else at the Orpheum was equally making asses of themselves and having a blast doing so... Oh, and that we were all drunk.
I understand that not everyone has heard the Pogues, and while I'd like to personally come over to your house with a small stack of CDs and a fifth of Jameson's, I will simply say that they are the inventors of Celtic Punk music. They play traditional Irish tunes - and originals in the spirit of traditional Irish tunes - on traditional Irish instruments... but as loud, fast and passionately as the Ramones played bass, drums and guitar. Their lead singer, Shane McGowan, has raised drunkenness to an art form - he claims not to have been sober since age 14, and there's really no reason to doubt him.
I never got to see the Pogues at the height of their powers - the late 1980s, when they released their twin masterpieces, "Rum, Sodomy and the Lash" and "If I Should Fall From Grace with God." By the time I was off at college and could see live music somewhere other than Danbury, CT, Shane was so unreliable that the rest of the band (very gently) kicked him out and the band gradually faded from view. I'd always assumed that McGowan - or Spider Stacy, the pennywhistle player and another legendary drunkard - would be found dead in a gutter outside a cheap bar in Dublin or London before the band could get back together.
But something miraculous happened a few years back - in 2001, the lads got back together and played a few shows in London... in venues that sold out approximately ten minutes after the concerts were announced. Last year at Christmas, Shane took the stage with banjo player Jem Finer's daughter, Ella, who joined him in a duet on "Fairytale of New York", quite possibly the most beautiful Christmas song ever written. And this year, the Pogues - the original lineup, minus bass player Cate O'Riordan, came to the US for eight shows.
Needless to say, they sold out moments after they were announced in December. But I had a realization last week: you get a limited number of second chances in life. So I spent $100 on a ticket, ten rows from the front, bought a half-pint of Jameson's and settled in for one of the best nights of my life.
More or less everything I love about music can be found in the two hour set they played. They're technically brilliant - especially James Fearnley, who leads the band while leaping around strapped into his 4-octave squeezebox - but play like their hair's been set on fire. They put out roughly as much energy as a nuclear plant, but they're tight, sharp and precise... even Shane, whose drunkenness and lack of teeth mean that his vocals are incomprehensible, but they're poetry nontheless, in perfect sync with the rest of the band. It's dead obvious that they've played together for almost three decades, and equally obvious that there's very little more fun than standing on stage with seven men you love like brothers, playing songs you know like your mother's name.
I've spent today listening to other music I love - Jawbox, Mission of Burma, Bob Mould, Varttina, Calexico, Iron and Wine, Gogol Bordello, Uncle Tupelo - and hearing the Pogues in their music. Not in the sense that these bands are influenced by the Pogues, but that my gravitational attraction to them is a result of the ways I've been shaped by my ur-band. It's all I can do to prevent myself from going down to the mall, boom box on my shoulder, playing "Sally Maclenan" for the kids in the food court, hoping to warp them in the same beautiful way the Pogues warped me so many years ago.
What's your ur-music? And what has it done to you?
But I remember the days before I could fit 10,000 songs on my hard drive, when I listened to cassette tapes on a beat-up boom box and had five or ten albums to choose from. Estimating conservatively, I can say that I listened to some of those albums several hundred times as I sat in my high school bedroom. I remember falling asleep to Suzanne Vega's first album, listening to it on a pillow speaker in a dorm room in Pennsylvania at an academic summer camp. I played my copy of Sting's "Dream of the Blue Turtles" so many times that the tape wore through and snapped. Twice.
These are the "ur-albums", the music that shapes how you think about music. It's not everything you listened to as a child or as a teen, but it's the songs you listened to again and again and again, the songs you can still sing now despite not having listened for years, the albums that sound almost as wonderful when you spin them now as they did when you were fourteen.
The Pogues are my ur-band. I figured this out Tuesday night, surrounded by a thousand drunk Bostonians, singing the lyrics of "Streams of Whiskey" at the top of my lungs, pumping my fist in the air and grinning ear to ear. I spent the entire concert jumping, clapping, singing and generally making an ass of myself... made tolerable by the fact that everyone else at the Orpheum was equally making asses of themselves and having a blast doing so... Oh, and that we were all drunk.
I understand that not everyone has heard the Pogues, and while I'd like to personally come over to your house with a small stack of CDs and a fifth of Jameson's, I will simply say that they are the inventors of Celtic Punk music. They play traditional Irish tunes - and originals in the spirit of traditional Irish tunes - on traditional Irish instruments... but as loud, fast and passionately as the Ramones played bass, drums and guitar. Their lead singer, Shane McGowan, has raised drunkenness to an art form - he claims not to have been sober since age 14, and there's really no reason to doubt him.
I never got to see the Pogues at the height of their powers - the late 1980s, when they released their twin masterpieces, "Rum, Sodomy and the Lash" and "If I Should Fall From Grace with God." By the time I was off at college and could see live music somewhere other than Danbury, CT, Shane was so unreliable that the rest of the band (very gently) kicked him out and the band gradually faded from view. I'd always assumed that McGowan - or Spider Stacy, the pennywhistle player and another legendary drunkard - would be found dead in a gutter outside a cheap bar in Dublin or London before the band could get back together.
But something miraculous happened a few years back - in 2001, the lads got back together and played a few shows in London... in venues that sold out approximately ten minutes after the concerts were announced. Last year at Christmas, Shane took the stage with banjo player Jem Finer's daughter, Ella, who joined him in a duet on "Fairytale of New York", quite possibly the most beautiful Christmas song ever written. And this year, the Pogues - the original lineup, minus bass player Cate O'Riordan, came to the US for eight shows.
Needless to say, they sold out moments after they were announced in December. But I had a realization last week: you get a limited number of second chances in life. So I spent $100 on a ticket, ten rows from the front, bought a half-pint of Jameson's and settled in for one of the best nights of my life.
More or less everything I love about music can be found in the two hour set they played. They're technically brilliant - especially James Fearnley, who leads the band while leaping around strapped into his 4-octave squeezebox - but play like their hair's been set on fire. They put out roughly as much energy as a nuclear plant, but they're tight, sharp and precise... even Shane, whose drunkenness and lack of teeth mean that his vocals are incomprehensible, but they're poetry nontheless, in perfect sync with the rest of the band. It's dead obvious that they've played together for almost three decades, and equally obvious that there's very little more fun than standing on stage with seven men you love like brothers, playing songs you know like your mother's name.
I've spent today listening to other music I love - Jawbox, Mission of Burma, Bob Mould, Varttina, Calexico, Iron and Wine, Gogol Bordello, Uncle Tupelo - and hearing the Pogues in their music. Not in the sense that these bands are influenced by the Pogues, but that my gravitational attraction to them is a result of the ways I've been shaped by my ur-band. It's all I can do to prevent myself from going down to the mall, boom box on my shoulder, playing "Sally Maclenan" for the kids in the food court, hoping to warp them in the same beautiful way the Pogues warped me so many years ago.
What's your ur-music? And what has it done to you?