Dressed in an ill-fitting thrift store suit, scuffed boots, and full beard, his thinning hair swept over to one side, D.C. Berman looked like some slacker anti-hero from a Wes Anderson movie as he took the Webster Hall stage Friday night. It was the first of two sold-out shows, and by his own count only the sixth concert he’s ever given.

Berman has been releasing albums as the Silver Jews since the mid-1990s but has declined to tour until now. By all appearances, he’s warming slowly to his new role as public rock star. After plowing through the first few songs Friday, he addressed the crowd nervously, saying, “I’ll talk more in a minute, I just got to get used to it.”

Berman is better known – or more comfortable being thought of, anyway – as a poet. In 1999, he issued a well-received volume called “Actual Air.” In the tradition of John Ashbery, it is a high-low mix of postmodern imagery and pop effluvia – trying to find meaning and beauty in our cluttered heads and distracted hearts.

His songs use the same fractured imagery, with elusive results. “Girl in a special economic zone / girl in a special economic zone / closed sign swinging in the window of a liquor store / better get inside the kingdom, close the door,” he sang on a new song called “K Hole.”

Berman performed the show behind a makeshift lectern with a reading light illuminating his words. It could have been a poetry reading, but for the five band mates behind him and the pesky guitar slung around his shoulder. This was a prop Berman never really figured out what to do with. He strummed simple chords, occasionally in time to the music, but all the recognizable parts were produced by two other guitarists. Occasionally, he knelt to tune in the middle of a song with no noticeable effect on the sound.

Berman recently released a new Silver Jews album, “Tanglewood Numbers,” his first in four years. But given that the current tour marks the first time he’s ever performed any of his songs live, he drew equally from his entire, five-album oeuvre. The sound was loose, lo-fi, and Nashville inflected. Many of the songs were spare and plodding, an excuse for words delivered in such a low baritone that they couldn’t be made out. Others swelled into rollicking guitar anthems. “Punks in the Beerlight,” another new song, showcased Berman’s penchant for willfully dumb choruses. “I loved you to the max / I loved you to the max / I loved you to the max,” he sang. The crowd shouted the words along with him to express their own affection.

But while genuine, the crowd’s fondness is also partly residual. Most fans discovered Berman and the Silver Jews only because of the off-again, on-again involvement of Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus. He wasn’t there Friday, but when Pavement’s utility-man percussionist Bob Nastanovich appeared onstage to drum and caw, he elicited some of the biggest cheers of the night.

Little do most fans realize that Berman might have been responsible for the demise of that beloved 1990s indie rock band. Malkmus claims to have been so impressed with “American Water,” Berman’s third Silver Jews record, that he became disenchanted with his own work. “It was such a better record than ‘Terror Twilight’ [Pavement’s final release],” he is often quoted as saying. “Much more inspired. After ‘American Water,’ I could no longer make a record the way we made records.”

For most fans, Friday’s show ended too quickly. After slightly less than an hour, the house lights went up, the universal signal that the show was over. But the crowd refused to disperse and stayed to stomp and cheer. Berman reappeared to plead: “Can you come back tomorrow? I’m f-ing lazy. It took me 15 years to even do this. Cut me some slack,” he said. But the crowd wouldn’t budge. After a few more minutes of relentless clapping, Berman was goaded back out for a quick encore. The smile he wore showed gratitude and embarrassment in equal parts.

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New York City was treated to another, equally rare sighting over the weekend with the return of Shane MacGowan to the Pogues on Thursday at the Nokia Theater in Times Square. It was the first time he’s toured with the group in America since the other members kicked him out for perpetual drunkenness in 1991.

The Pogues exemplify two Irish traditions. Their music blends the traditional sounds of the tin whistle, accordion, and mandolin with Clash inspired punk. And with MacGowan at the helm, they also keep alive (if barely) the tradition of the hard-drinking Irish poet with an eye and taste for tragedy.

A romantic figure, MacGowan is also a cautionary one. Only 49 years old, he lumbered around the stage with his knees bent and his feet sliding on the floor like a septuagenarian. His once-slurred speech is now totally unintelligible.

MacGowan formed the Pogues in 1982 in London. The original name, Pogue Mahone, was Gaelic for “kiss my ass,” and that about summed up his attitude. The group’s careening pub-punk won it a quick cult following in Britain and America, one that included such prominent admirers as Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Sinead O’Connor, and Joe Strummer. But MacGowan was determined to be the master of his own ill fate. As the band’s fame intensified, so did his drinking – his erratic onstage behavior soon gave way to absenteeism. In 1988, he missed most of an opening tour for Bob Dylan. Three years later, the band finally gave him his walking papers.

There are those who would rank MacGowan up there with Dylan as a lyricist. And Thursday’s show included much of his best work: “Streams of Whisky,” “The Old Main Drag,” “Dirty Old Town.” “A Pair of Brown Eyes” begins, as all his songs seem to, “one summer evening drunk to hell.” Overindulgence, and the broken dreams that are its cause and inevitable result, is Mac-Gowan’s great theme.

Thursday night’s show ended with one of the best examples along these lines: “Fairytale of New York,” perhaps the most hopeless Christmas song ever written, and certainly one of the best. It begins in a drunk tank on Christmas Eve with an old man who knows it’s his last, and generally deteriorates from there. MacGowan and his female counterpart – in this case Emma Finer, daughter of mandolin player Jem Finer – berate each other: “You scumbag, you maggot / you cheap lousy faggot,” she sang, “Happy Christmas you arse / I pray God it’s our last.” But it ended on a note of redemption – or temporary reprieve, anyway. As she and MacGowan approximated a lurching waltz at center stage under fake snow, Finer stepped nimbly backward to avoid being trampled.