Gaslamp Paddy

I’m sitting off the grid. Way off the grid. It’s dark outside and the wood stove flickers. Candlelight bobs and springs sudden and then receding shadows. Spring comes and goes with clouds that gather, rain, and then depart. The cabin I’m sitting in is up a meandering dirt road. There used to be loads of roads like these on Whidbey Island. Back when I was a kid anyway. We’d walk up them on summer days. Ride down them in the backs of pickup trucks in the autumn. The woods were enormous and boundless and held everything that our imagines could shape, then attack, or run from; dinosaurs, knights, ghosts and Indians. Fields blew scents and colors with buttercups and dandelions. Overgrown homesteads with fruit trees and beaver ponds, blackberries and nettles. Most of these are gone now. Orchards decayed, farm buildings fallen in and carted away. New houses in the clearings. Aimless dirt roads straightened and paved. So sitting in a cabin in a clearing in the woods, by candles and woodstove is a rare and happy returning. Odd how though I type now on a computer. Measuring my time to write by the length of battery life, smiling as the computer tells me that it can’t pick up any wireless internet connection and that I am “not connected to the internet”. Well here’s to that for a change. Alone with thoughts and flickering light. The hoot of two owls out in the woods somewhere. The presence of mind. The feel of the heart beating. The sound it makes inside your ears when you scratch both sides of your head with your fingertips. The oddly incongruous sound of the soft click of the keys. Vowels, consonants. Creating sentences forward. Erasing them quickly back. In all of this silence it’s imaginable yet seems so distant that there are cars racing down the street outside of the house where I live in Portland. The alleys are alive tonight with the eerie sound of slowly pushed shopping carts as people make their way looking for cans to collect and redeem for a nickel each. Imbibe is full of hipsters eating and drinking. It’s after ten so people are smoking inside now. Drinking dollar fifty Sessions lagers or six-dollar fancy mixtures. Bands are setting up or taking down. It’s warm and there are people biking in the streets. It’s Friday so people are out.

It’s been now straight up a week since Saint Patrick’s Day and it’s one St. Pat’s day that I will remember. I won’t remember it perhaps for a good breakfast or lunch, as I can’t seem to recall either. I won’t remember it for the fact that I had to put two hundred and seventy eight dollars into my van in the morning, or for the fact that I played a seven to nine set out at the McMenamins Edgefield St. Pat’s day meltdown. And though I might return another time to that scene of absurd American Irish shamrock-and-green-beer blank, the thing that I’ll remember always about this week-ago St. Pat’s day is seeing some of the most honest and joyously played music that I’ve been witness to in a very long time.

Some of my friends had put together a group to embody and pay tribute to the beloved Pogues. It was the brainchild of Jenny Conlee and Ezra Holbrook and with the help of Pogues accordionist James Fearnley. They named the band K.M.R.I.A. (Kiss My Royal Irish Ass – cheers to James Joyce by way of Colin Meloy for that) and they were completely fucking spot-on and deadly. Casey Neill and Ezra took on guitar and Shane McGowan duties. Jenny played the accordion, keyboards, and sang the Kristy McColl part too on “Fairytale of New York”. Hans Araki covered the flute, whistle, and crashing beer tray on the head parts. Chris Funk looked cool playing banjo and the mandolin, and a touch of accordion as well. Jesse Emerson kept everything in order downstairs on bass guitar, and Derek Brown cleared house on the drums and a fine tour on harmonica during “Dirty Old Town”.

The band wandered on stage at half past ten with Ezra and Jenny laughing over some joke or other. Hanz was smiling and cracked Ezra a laugh and it was well evident that this lot weren’t going to bollix the entire operation by taking it all too seriously. And there in lies the beauty of it all. This crew took the daunting task of creating for two nights a Pogues tribute band (rather than simply a “cover” band) very seriously. Parts were learned (some like the impossible middle sections of “A Bottle Of Smoke” with the help of James Fearnley himself), lyrics were memorized to the level of internalization. Sunglasses were bought. Suits were worn. Jenny spent a day running about looking for a beer tray. She told me during the afternoon of her search that it was hard to think of borrowing a beer tray from the Moon And Sixpence (or some other Irish pub) as she knew that after it being bashed several times over Hanz Araki’s head it wasn’t going return in the same condition that it was lent in. I told her back that the Moon And Sixpence would probably hang it on the wall with a plaque. Rehearsals were had and had over again. I was honored to be asked to shoot video of one of the last full band run-thoughs. And it was there, in Jenny Conlee’s basement, among the amps, organs, boxes of Decemberists gear, hot water heater and garden gnomes, that I began to have the dawning feeling that something very special was afoot. And it was.

All music has a vibe. Be that what it may it’s always there. In this instance it’s the Pogues; arguably the greatest Irish rock band of all time. The thing of it is though is that the Pogues are more than an Irish band. The Pogues are an immigrant band. They’re a fucked-over-Irish-in-America band. A fucked-up-Irish-in-London band. A band with literary weight. The sheer sweep of the Pogues covers both sides of the Western Ocean. And that ocean in this case is full of beer and whiskey and gin and blood and tears and monsters, ghosts, venereal diseases, toothlessness, fights, heartache, and exile. The songs “Thousands are Sailing” and “Fairytale of New York” are the greatest songs of immigration for their sheer romantic/non-romantic honesty, and the minutia of emotions that twist and turn in every verse. “London Girl” is a post Clash masterpiece. “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn” is Shane McGowan at his impossibly fucked up best. While “A Pair of Brown Eyes” shows his true genius as a songwriter as he twists and turns his lyric from, in the first verse, “In blood and death 'neath a screaming sky
I lay down on the ground, and the arms and legs of other men were scattered all around” to the crowning glory as he ends it all with “And I heard the sounds of long ago, from the old canal and the birds were whistling in the trees, where the wind was gently laughing”. And that’s not to mention the thread that connects the beginning to the end. Or to mention one of the greatest opening lines of any song. It’s a rare band. If not an impossibly unique one.

Back in the basement club of the Doug Fir Lounge Jenny and Ezra and Chris are creaking into the opening lines of “Hell’s Ditch” While Hanz is staring down at his shoes. The band are all on stage with the exception of Casey who is waiting, smoking in the wings until the right moment of appearance. That moment comes, and with a stagger and a lurch he grabs the mic, leans the stand sideways, ciggie between fingers, and launches. “Life's a bitch, then you die, Black Hell, Hell’s ditch - naked howling freedom…”

The band played the Pogues hits parade and the room was one hundred and eighteen people over capacity. It was hot, squeezed in, half drunk and drinking, and completely fucking glorious. People watched, moshed in the middle, mouthed along with the words and sang along with every line of Dirty Old Town. One of many crowning moments was the shout back during “Fairytale of New York”: “I could have been someone – WELL SOooo could ANYone!” The snow machine started raining down white flutters all over the stage. Ezra pulled a girl from the cowd and danced. People cried and raised their glasses. And somehow I thought to myself that the fact that there is a band playing Pogues songs on a stage in Portland with a snow machine blowing a gentle shower of fluff, during “Fairytale of New York” and it isn’t hokey (or really even close) means that this is actually happening. There was a certain all night transparency to the spectacle. Even though the monster was on stage and firing on all cylinders, the band was there and not there at the same time. That transparent vibe is the embodiment of the respect that the band held collectively for the music they were playing, and the love of music that’s stitched into their individual DNA’s. They understand enough not to get in the way of the music; and they know enough to give it 100% plus a few shovels full more and a drink to boot. This once-removed immediacy allowed the crowd at the Doug Fir access into the party. It gave everyone in the house (rather than simply on the stage) the chance to feel like participants in a magic thing, rather than simply (and predictably) a boatload of club-goers, wavering under the weight of varying states of intoxication, a one way watch at a St. Pat’s Day band playing Pogues songs. It is the thing that separates tribute bands from “cover” bands. Add into that that heady mix the smiling humility of the crew on stage, and the effects of beer and whiskey on the crowd below, and it’s no wonder that there were tears in a few of the eyes of the leather and London, shite and onions piss crew down in front – breaking it down with every song and by degree. Just as we all did. Until one by one the players left the stage teetering perhaps a bit more than they were when they walked on. But then so were we all. Sweaty. Two-thirds drunk and drinking. Smiling. Bursting. Shaking hands with strangers. “Glad I got to see that with ya’”

So cheers to the Waxie’s Dargle brigade. Top honors. Hats off. Glasses raised aloft.
KMRIA is dead. Long live KMRIA!