Curator’s Note:
The air was heavy this morning with the earthy scent of old newsprint. I was going through my stored research files looking for a phantom article, the loss of which has haunted me every year when I go up in the attic to bring down the Christmas decorations. This year I had set my mind to finding it even if it meant going through every single box up there. After three hours of searching, I finally found the old laser jet print out of the East Side Ride online edition article I had put in a research binder back in 2002. The paper was crumpled and yellow and the ink was smeared but I think I can fill in the blanks well enough to share this one with you.
On November 29, 2001, Shane MacGowan took the stage solo at CBGB in New York. The City was still eerily quiet and sedate, grieving the lives lost in the terrorist attacks on September 11. That Christmas felt more like a grueling march than a celebration as the City, Nation, and world drifted unmoored in shock, still trying to metabolize the depths of man’s capacity for cruelty.
Add to this oppressive atmosphere MacGowan’s lingering memories of his friend and collaborator, Kirsty MacColl, her voice lost to the world almost a year prior in a tragic accident. He had not sung Fairytale of New York since her death. The crowd would want to hear it.
“You gotta do it, mate,” his manager had told him, “they’ll riot if you don’t.”
MacGowan dealt with the emotional conflict in the only way he knew how. He drank. A lot.
This article written by Mitch O’Connell details the night. It could have been another train wreck article like so many others about MacGowan around the same time but a little bit of swamp magic seems to have brought about a Christmas miracle this time.
It’s a little weird that the internet today says the club was dark that night. I have the article right here to prove this happened.
A FAIRYTALE DONE WELL
By Mitch O’Connell | The East Side Ride | Dec 3, 2001
It’s a strange Christmas season in New York. The tree is up and lit in Central Park. The streets are lined with glitter and gold. Santas sit in their North Pole Villages shouting, “Ho, ho, ho!” True smiles are tough to come by, though, the collective grief of the City resisting any effort to distract our minds from the sorrow and fear left with us after the recent terrorist attacks.
It was an unseasonably warm and humid night when the denim jackets and combat boots lined the wall outside CBGB. The occasional brightly-dyed mohawk punctuated the scene as the air crackled with anticipation. The crowd was rambuctious and rowdy.
Shane MacGowan. CBGB. Christmas. It was the kind of holy trinity no self-respecting punk would miss, even if these youngsters were only here ironically. The mostly twenty-something crowd had not come to see the MacGowan I remember. They weren’t here for the poet of the gutter. No, these kids were here to see the caricature of MacGowan, the shadow of Shane routine he had leaned into of late. This crowd came out tonight to spectate disaster.
An hour into his set and they were getting everything they came for. MacGowan took the stage slurring and cursing, wrapped in a gray knit blanket, explaining his strained voice as a bad case of the flu. He spat and sputtered through his set list while the audience mocked and provoked. Not even the Christmas Spirit, it seemed, could stop New Yorkers from behaving like New Yorkers.
“Yeah, the whisky flu!” someone shouted from the back when MacGowan explained away his meandering vocals for the thirteenth time.
“Who said that?” MacGowan mumbled, squinting into the glare of the stage lights, his eyes swimming. “You wanna come up here, huh? You wanna sing ‘em yourself? Come on then! You lot have taken everything else from me. Might as well take the feckin’ songs too.” He took a pull from the whisky bottle on the stool next to him then began to stumble through “Wild Rover.”
“Play Fairytale!” It started with one voice, the whisky flu voice in the back of the room, but quickly grew.
“Fairytale.”
“Fairytale.”
The boots began to stomp.
“Fair-y-tale!”
“Fair-y-tale!”
MacGowan gave up on “Wild Rover.”
“Fair-y-tale! Fair-y-tale! Fair-y-tale!” They weren’t asking anymore.
MacGowan lifted his face toward the ceiling and vented a guttural howl at the heavens.
“Argggggh! You arseholes want it?!?!”
“FAIR-Y-TALE!”
“Feck you, then, you can have it!”
The crowd erupted.
Then fell silent.
His fingers stumbled across the fretboard, trying to pick out the piano notes on his guitar. He couldn’t find the rhythm, couldn’t find the words.
The deathly quiet of the room caused every bum string and forgotten lyric to hang in the air like a haunting specter.
Even this rowdy crowd had lost its appetite for torment. This was just sad.
MacGowan appeared on the verge of collapse, physical and emotional, when a melodic voice rang out from the shadows. Over a simple arpeggiation in D, a cue from the wings sang, “It was Christmas Eve, dear . . .”
“In the drunk tank,” MacGowan growled without thought.
Instinctively, as the lyric connected, his fingers found their marks and his voice found the pitch. He’d veer off and ramble, sure, like a drunk walking home from the pub, but that’s vintage Shane. Now, at least, he knew where he was going. That is - until the first verse ended.
The arpeggiation from the wings continued gently even though MacGowan had ground to a stop.
“I can’t do this.” His whisper was pure pain. Grief. Anger. Fear. Uncertainty.
There were no shouts or jibes from the audience at his tears; there was only an answering echo of empathy. Pain recognizes pain and this room knew pain.
I don’t even know how long time stopped while Shane MacGowan led a room of rowdy punks in a collective weeping vigil.
Into that serenity, carried by the constant gentle arpeggiation, a mockingbird descended and settled upon the mic boom.
She sang.
While the bird might not have formed the words, the pitches were perfect. As they floated across the room, carrying a phantom’s gravity, we heard Kirsty MacColl’s voice and joined the song: “They got cars big as bars, they have rivers of gold.”
At first it was just one or two voices but with each line new voices joined the chorus. By the time we sang, “you were handsome,” the audience was in full throat.
“. . . You were pretty,” MacGowan belted, an automatic response to MacColl’s lyric. When he sang, “Queen of New York City,” the rafters lifted and the heavens listened in.
The song continued like that until its closing lines: Shane’s snarling growl punctuated by a mockingbird leading the choir through their hymn in this cathedral of punk, all of it over a mysterious acoustic foundation I never could locate. As the last note faded, MacGowan reached for his bottle of whisky and, instead of slugging it back, tipped it out onto the stage. “For the lost souls,” he spoke solemnly. He then sat silently for several minutes, his shaking shoulders the only sign of his sobs.
The smoky room bore patient, silent witness until MacGowan struck the opening chord of “Streams of Whiskey.”
I can’t tell you that “Fairytale of New York” transformed the act. No. MacGowan quickly returned to his slurring, cursing, shamble through his set and the punks went back to being punks. The moment, though, seemed to have given the room a few minutes of desperately needed release. It allowed this little corner of the City to express its grief. As I stepped back out into the Bowery, I couldn’t help but notice the lingering smell of orange blossoms hanging in the humid air. Some nights you just have to believe in a little bit of Christmas magic.
**This is a RoscoeKelly.com narrative blending myth, history & fictional sources. Learn more about our creative process here on the about tab or at RoscoeKelly.com.