Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).
The Body of an American (1986)
It's St. Patrick's Day so it kinda makes sense to write about the Pogues. I mean, I could have gone with U2 or the Mama's Boys cover of "Mama Weer All Crazee Now," but let's stick with the real deal here. I was never a Pogues fan when they were a going concern. I knew about them but didn't really pay attention, but I have come to appreciate them over the years.
Formed in London in 1982, the Pogues combined punk rock with traditional Irish music. Their original name was Pogue Mahone, the phrase James Joyce coined from the Irish phrase pog mo thoin, which meant "kiss my arse." Led by frontman Shane MacGowan, the band played in London clubs before opening for the post-Mick Jones lineup of The Clash on their 1984 tour. Shortening their name to the Pogues to avoid BBC censorship, the band released their first album Red Roses for Me in October 1984, mixing covers of traditional Irish songs with originals written by MacGowan.
Their second album, 1985's Rum Sodomy & the Lash, was produced by Elvis Costello. It put the Pogues on the map, hitting #13 on the UK album chart and featured their cover of "Dirty Old Town" and originals "A Pair of Brown Eyes" and "Sally MacLennane." The band then released an EP of songs recorded with Costello the year before, Poguetry in Motion, in February 1986. In addition to "A Rainy Night in Soho" and "London Girl," the EP included the song I'm writing about today, "The Body of an American."
Written by MacGowan, the song tells the tale of an Irish immigrant named Big Jim Dwyer, a boxer, who is being remembered at his wake.
"When we turned and shook as we had a look/In the room where the dead men lay/So Big Jim Dwyer made his last trip/To the shores where his father laid/But 15 minutes later we had our first taste of whiskey/There was uncles giving lectures on ancient Irish history/The men all started telling jokes and the women, they got frisky/By 5 o'clock in the evening every bastard there was piskey."
The Pogues played the song when they appeared on the St. Patrick's Day 1990 episode of Saturday Night Live, with the apparently drunk MacGowan smoking a butt and drinking while sitting on the drum riser during the final instrumental section.
In the great HBO series The Wire, creator David Simon used the song three time in scenes of wakes for Baltimore police detectives. The dead cop was laid out on a pool table at Kavanaugh's Tavern as his fellow detectives remembered him with an elegy and then sang "The Body of an American." The last took place in the final episode of the series, when Det. Jimmy McNulty was given a "wake" after he left the force, even though he was very much alive. An amazing end to an amazing show.
"Fare thee well, gone away, there's nothing left to say/But to say adieu to your eyes as blue as the water in the bay/To Big Jim Dwyer, the man of wire who was often heard to say/'I'm a free born man of the USA.'"
As for the Pogues, their popularity grew in the late '80s. Their cover of "The Irish Rover" with the Dubliners was a huge hit in '87, followed by their Christmas single "Fairytale of New York," a duet with Kirsty MacColl that was a monster hit (#1 in Ireland, #2 in the UK) and remains a holiday classic in the UK and really, everywhere. 1988's If I Should Fall From Grace with God was a big hit in the UK and an underground hit in the U.S. The band released two more albums with MacGowan before firing him during a 1991 tour after his drug and alcohol use got out of control. The Pogues forged on with Joe Strummer and later band member Spider Stacy as frontmen, releasing two more albums before splitting up in 1996. They reunited with MacGowan for tours starting in 2001 and ending in 2014. Guitarist Philip Chevron died in 2013, bassist Darryl Hunt died in 2022 and MacGowan passed last November.
But the band lives on through its timeless music, especially on St. Paddy's Day.
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