I first heard the Pogues one weekend in the mid nineties, while watching the old SNL reruns that Comedy Central used to play in the midday, after an hour block of Kids in the Hall. It was from 1990, Rob Lowe was hosting, and the faded videotape made the warm glow of the stage lights look yellower than they should have; perhaps my fading memory helps fill in those gaps. A haze of fog and cigarette smoke wafted around the band as they launched into the half-time intro of “Body of an American”. The live version is faster than the studio recording on the Poguetry in Motion EP, and the freewheeling band barely holding it together adds a magic to the song.
On its surface, the song is about the wake for a professional boxer descending into chaos as his friends and family get drunker and rowdier. Digging deeper, it seems to be more about memory and how people choose to recall those they've lost. Partying at a wake is a fairly common subject in Irish music (see: “Finnegan’s Wake”) so not surprising Shane McGowan used it as the frame for a story about how idealism clashes with reality.
The song starts in Ireland, with a group of children, probably the offspring of Jim Dwyer’s friends, admiring an exotic Cadillac hearse sitting in the driveway, overhearing Travellers nearby discuss ways to steal the car. The children enter the house and peek into the room with the coffin, seeing the man the wake is for, and start to understand the connections between his life and theirs.
While singing the song live, Shane McGowan would sometimes use the singular to refer to the children, implying that it was an individual’s memories instead of a group. I like the “we” becoming “I” as the wake begins, letting the listener know that we’re now hearing about the memories of one child, as they reminisce from adulthood. Split off from “the children” as a group, it’s clear the memories being revisited are heavily filtered through the lifetime of one person.
As the party erupts, the child wanders through the crowd hearing snatches of conversation from the adults. Big Jim Dwyer was a professional boxer on the East Coast of the United States, with a winning record and rock-solid morals. The thing is, at a funeral you only hear the best things about a person, so to the child this Jim Dwyer was a god amongst men, punished for his refusal to throw a fight and sent off to die in a war (take your pick).
Did Big Jim Dwyer really have a perfect knockout record? Did he vanquish both “the champ” and an Italian boxer? That’s how his friends remember him, and that’s what’s passed down to the children, with all the sharp edges sanded down, and the story polished until it shined. He wasn’t just a boxer, he was the representation of all the idealism of Irish immigrants. Considering he made his living in the disreputable world of boxing, maybe Jim Dwyer’s life really didn’t go the way he intended.
Nevertheless, his life becomes the stuff of legend as it’s shared among increasingly inebriated mourners. Unlike Tim Finnegan, there was no resurrection for Big Jim Dwyer, who suffered the lonely death of a soldier, was repatriated back to Ireland for burial, and lived on in memory.
Indulging in drink can loosen lips, so by the second chorus the mourner’s more passionate preoccupations let slip: Irish independence, the Catholic Church, and the ongoing Troubles. The party is a full reverie at this point in the song, and the offhand remarks by adults become foundational to the memories of the children around them. It’s those little bits of memory that the narrator has pieced together into a picture of the world inhabited by adults, the world they will one day have to be part of.
The last verse switches to the first person, and in poetic fashion could mean many different things. I like to think it’s Jim, from beyond the grave, remembering the promises he made to return to Ireland. But then again, it could also be the narrator of the previous verses, now a grown man, making the same promises. The song can mean many things to many people, like how it gained a second life in The Wire, played during the wakes of fallen police officers. There’s something clarifying about death, and the attendant rituals, that makes one think of happier times, and perhaps how they’d like their own memory to live on.
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