St. Patricks Pogues Show

[music | Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Date With The Night]

Pogues at Avalon. Perfect time of year to see a band I've wanted to see since I was old enough to care about decent music. Every 6 months there is another report about how Shane MacGowan should be deader than Keith Richards, and I always worried I'd never get my chance to see this.

We had an extra ticket, so we took along a co-worker of mine. When we got in, he was just gone. He'd been right behind me. Minutes later while looking around my phone
rang, apparently security stopped him and kicked him from the line because of his Vitamins (tm). He dispatched with those and got in finally.

Opening was William Elliot Whitmore, if you can picture Mike Ness solo with a banjo, you've got a go
od idea what this was like. He was good, unfortunately there don't seem to be any tracks available on his site at the moment. That should get fixed. But it was a good
time, he was kind of Mississippi / Delta Blues type stuff.

Pogues themselves were totally as tight as I've seen a band in a while. Shane would wander out on stage when it was his songs, mumble incoherently, and then hit every single mark for the song. The guy is incredible. Even if he did introduce Sunny Side of the Street like 3 times before they actually played it. I think I counted at least one, if not two 750s of Johnny Red (?) and then a big gulp of Makers Mark (like 1/3 of the bottle gone) at the encore. He didn't really seem to want it, but they jammed it in his hand, and it was gone. What can you say about him that hasn't been said? The guy's a legend and deserves every bit of his mystique.

They played a long set, and most everything a fan would want to hear.

After the show, my friend and I were standing across from the club waiting for my wife. It was raining and there was this huge lake of a puddle right next to us that extended about 30 feet down the block behind the Green Monster, and under the water was ice.

He got a couple pictures of drunkards falling in, getting up, falling in again, getting up, shuffling a few feet, falling back down, yelling at people for taking pictures, then falling down again. The pics weren't that great, but that was a definite highlight. Silly Boston.