The Late Shane MacGowan Once Drunkenly Heckled Me at a Literary Festival in Ireland. That Was Weird/Awesome
My life is full of experiences so crazy, out there and preposterous-seeming that if they hadn’t happened to me I would have a hard time believing them.
This happened more when I worked for The A.V. Club and had power and success. Power and success lead to opportunities and invitations. Powerlessness and failure, on the other hand, lead only to sadness and regret.
The three craziest, most amazing invitations I received while working at The A.V. Club or The Dissolve were as follows:
I was invited to spend a magical weekend with Robert Evans, advising him on how best to market his poorly received follow up to The Kid Stays in the Picture.
I received an invitation to spend an all expenses paid week in Brazil at a film festival as a pampered guest of the ministry of culture.
A lovely person invited me to be a speaker at a literary festival in Dublin
This third invitation came with airfare and hotel accommodations in Dublin but also with an honorarium.
How crazy is that? Most people would walk across the street to avoid interacting with me and now they were somehow somebody was possibly going to pay actual cash money to hear me speak.
It was a wonderful, surreal weekend, in part because it was the weekend Prince William and Kate Middleton got married.
I was, unsurprisingly, in a very strange place emotionally at the time. The book that would become You Don’t Know Me But You Don't Like Me was kicking my ass. I had no idea how or even if I would finish it, and Scribner was waiting patiently for me to get my shit together so they could publish a book about everything falling apart.
I could very well have been in one of my deep, dark depressions. I could be misremembering, but it sure felt like the moment I stepped off the airplane someone handed me a Guinness. They seemingly did not stop handing me Guinness until I departed.
So I was a little buzzed when I gave my big speech. I’d had maybe a Guinness and a half so I figured that I would be loose without being sloppy.
I’d had a successful speaking engagement at a university in North Carolina (possibly The University of North Carolina) that gave me unearned confidence in myself and my speaking abilities .
I figured that I would go up there with an outline/series of bullet points and wing it. That was a mistake. It was a big mistake.
Things got off to a terrible start. They did not laugh at what I thought were jokes. Instead they just looked at me with a look of concern that implicitly said, “Are you okay? Because you are REALLY screwing up and we don’t want you to have some manner of public nervous breakdown.”
When you’re trying to give a funny speech laughter is like oxygen. Without it you die. They were not laughing at my speech and I was fucking dying.
I thought I’d have them Dublin over with laughter. Instead I mumbled my speech to confused silence. Later, one of the nice folks who helped run the festival said that the Irish weren’t big laughers, so I should not take the disastrous reception my speech received personally.
I was relieved that my speech was over but mortified that I had bombed in a whole different continent than where I usually screwed up.
I was relieved because the pressure of giving a speech for money was over but my responsibilities at the festival were not over.
I then headed over to a tent where I participated in a panel discussion about memoirs or music journalism or memoirs about music journalism.
I felt much more comfortable in that context. I was just one of a number of writers talking about the same subject. I felt very at ease when a member of the crowd started drunkenly insulting me.
I should probably mention that this all happened at one in the afternoon.
By that point the heckler in the audience, legendary singer and songwriter Shane MacGowan, was blackout drunk. Oh, but he was inebriated! I’d seen him stumbling around the festival earlier.
He was kind of like a dog that had gotten off his leash and away from his owner but that everyone indulged because they had a soft spot for him and he didn’t seem to mean any harm.
I should also mention that MacGowan didn’t heckle the entire panel. No, he singled me, Nathan Rabin from the group home, out for a drunken tongue-lashing.
I don’t remember what he said but I remember what I was thinking. “Holy fucking shit!” I enthused inside, “I’m getting drunkenly heckled by one of the greatest songwriters Ireland has ever known. The anecdote I will get out of this will more than make up for the minor embarrassment I felt at being insulted publicly for no discernible reason.”
I paradoxically was not insulted by McGowan’s insults. Instead I was flattered and I have low enough self-esteem that when someone starts fucking me with, I assume that I must have done something to deserve it.
I must have irritated McGowan by being a pretentious American know it all, or, worse, a music writer.
It also felt extremely on brand for McGowan to be drunk and belligerent at a literary festival in Dublin. There was part of me that felt sorry for McGowan because he was clearly a man in a lot of pain, with a drinking problem that is the stuff of legend, and the folks around him just seemed to accept that he would drink himself into an early grave.
Shane MacGowan made it to 65! A hard-living libertine synonymous with alcoholism and self-destruction lived as long as my grandfather, who fell asleep after drinking a beer.
So RIP Shane McGowan. I’m weirdly grateful that our strange lives overlapped for at least one crazy hour.
Now I assume that he’s up in heaven, drunkenly heckling the angels.
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