![]() The Del-Lords had an almost military precision to their playing, while The Pogues were always something of a gloriously fiery shambles the tightest Pogues show I ever saw was the November 1987 one at NYC’s Ritz with Joe Strummer deputizing for the ill Philip Chevron on rhythm guitar - the former Clash frontman’s ceaselessly stomping left foot seemed to keep everyone on point for once. I saw both bands several times in the 1980s, and both of them always delivered, albeit in very different ways. ![]() Both bands would make good-to-great records in years to come (and Red Roses for Me, The Pogues’ thrashy 1984 debut, is worth grabbing as well), but none would hit me quite as squarely, or as wonderfully, as these two. Their songs were fueled by the righteous rage of outcasts who were doing whatever they could to survive in their respective cities - whether driving a cab on the streets of Manhattan, or giving old men “a swift one off the wrist” in a London alley - but also radiated a profound sense of “in the gutter but looking at the stars” romance. Both albums fused the energy and no-bullshit attitude of punk with respect and admiration for earlier, more traditional sounds. For me, their music was really all about the joyous and riotous clash of folk roots and punk rebellion, topped by Shane MacGowan’s drunken-poet slur it was a combination that felt impossible, nay foolhardy, to even try and replicate.įrontier Days and Rum, Sodomy & The Lash sounded nothing like each other, but their spirit was remarkably similar. While I also learned to play and sing a few tracks from that album - their arrangements of the traditional “I’m A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day,” Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town” and Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” - I never attempted to figure out any other Pogues songs on guitar. I’d bought the Elvis Costello-produced Rum, Sodomy & The Lash almost as soon as it arrived on these shores as an import, having been hipped to the band’s brilliance in the pages of UK music papers Melody Maker and New Musical Express. “Up there with Springsteen, Ramones and the Byrds?” he replied, grinning like I’d totally made his day, but with one eyebrow raised as if he wasn’t entirely sure that I wasn’t yanking his chain. He mostly wanted to talk baseball - I was wearing some throwback jersey or another at the time - but I managed to work my love of Frontier Days into the conversation, and tell him how important the album had been to my development as a guitarist. Many years later, I was pleasantly surprised to find Scott Kempner working behind the counter at Amoeba Records in LA. Up until that point, Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, the Ramones’ Rocket to Russia and the Byrds’ Greatest Hits were the only albums I owned that I could semi-convincingly strum along to all the way through Frontier Days, which in retrospect was kind of a blend of those three records, became my fourth. Scott Kempner, who wrote the bulk of the album’s songs (though everybody in the band got at least one turn at the mic), clearly loved classic rock n’ roll chords, and he and lead guitarist Eric Ambel played ‘em cleanly enough that I could make out exactly what they were doing. Just a few days later, Rolling Stone Records (which may or may not have changed its name to Rock Records by then) in downtown Chicago came through for me, as it did so often in those years.īest of all, for a budding guitarist like myself, was the fact that the album’s songs were all pretty easy to learn and play along with. My knowledge of music history still far outstripped my actual listening experience at this point I hadn’t heard the Dictators or the Flamin’ Groovies yet, but I’d heard of them and knew they were considered “important” - so when both of those names were referenced in the album’s review, I made a mental note to keep an eye out for Frontier Days in the bins. I came relatively late to Frontier Days, not finding out about it until the autumn of 1984, when I read a review of the album in (I think) the pages of CREEM magazine, a rock rag I read religiously in those days. And now that the sad passings of the former’s Scott “Top Ten” Kempner and the latter’s Shane MacGowan have both happened this week, they will be henceforth further fused together in my mind. But I always associate them as being from the same period of my life, a period of insatiable hunger for new music that was both fed and further stimulated by my equally insatiable reading of whatever music-related periodicals I could get my hands on. If the internet is to be believed, these two albums came out nearly a year and a half apart from each other - the Del-Lords’ Frontier Days on March 20, 1984, and the Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy & The Lash on August 5, 1985.
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