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This site includes the postings from the Irish Aires email list. This includes a listing of Irish/Celtic events in the Houston area and other information that the Irish Aires radio program posts.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Dropkick Murphys in Houston Thurs Night
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/3697473.html
Loud And Proud, With Bagpipes
Fusing Irish music and punk rock, Dropkick Murphys stumble
upon a sonic pot of gold
By GEOFFREY HIMES
For The Chronicle
----
IRISH FEVER
• Who: The Dropkick Murphys and the Tossers
• When: 8 p.m. Thursday
• Where: at Warehouse Live, 813 St. Emanuel.
• Admission: Tickets are $19.50, call 713-629-3700 or visit
www.ticketmaster.com .
----
The latest Dropkick Murphys album, The Warrior's Code,
opens with bagpipes blowing a melancholy melody, the sound
you often hear in a cemetery whenever an Irish cop is laid
to rest. After 20 seconds of that, however, a punk band
barges into the track with galloping drums, staccato bass
notes and an onslaught of guitars. But the bagpipes aren't
chased away; they join right in with the faster, fiercer
music.
The song is Your Spirit's Alive, and if you listen to the
lyrics, you understand why the tune opened with funereal
pipes. "Farewell, my brother," Al Barr sings over the
raucous beat, "you're off to the big rink in the sky." The
song was inspired by a funeral where the DKMs played for
Greg "Chickenman" Riley, a longtime friend and fellow
hockey fanatic who died in a motorcycle accident. The
chorus, "And through it all, your spirit's alive," has the
bouncy, sing-along quality that would make it perfect for
an old-fashioned Irish wake if it were played at one-third
the speed. Or it could have been an old Clash track if not
for the bagpipes.
That's the secret of the Dropkick Murphys, who perform at
the Warehouse Live on Thursday. They have recognized and
exploited the overlooked overlap between Irish drinking
songs and punk rock. The Boston septet has been around
since 1996, but The Warrior's Code is their best album by
far, because the catchy melodies and punchy beats are more
tightly woven than ever, and the themes of death and war
raise the stakes.
"Greg was my best friend," says Ken Casey, the band's co-
founder, bassist and producer. "We played in the same
hockey league and had season tickets to the Boston Bruins
together. He worked for the telephone company, and when he
was recuperating from a bad fall, he came out on tour with
us and became like an eighth member of the band. If you
became too whiny, he'd put you in your place in a minute;
he always made you see how fortunate you are.
"We played at his funeral, because we knew it was something
he would have wanted. Did his older relatives like our
music? Probably not, but they understood, and the music
actually made everyone feel better."
CASEY and his bandmates didn't set out to write Irish wake
songs; they just wanted to be a punk band playing the all-
ages clubs around the Boston area. For months, they'd just
count off, "One, two, three, four," and play their favorite
tunes. But when they wrote their first song, Barroom Hero,
they were surprised to hear how much the vocal melody
sounded like the old Irish songs their parents were always
singing. They thought they had rejected all that.
"It dawned on us that Irish music was a bigger influence on
all of us than we'd realized," Casey admits. "Growing up in
Boston, every time you went to a wedding or a wake or your
grandparents' house, you heard that music. I went through a
phase of hating it just because it's what my (folks)
listened to.
"But as I got older, I came around; I began to notice that
people were enjoying themselves listening to that music.
... And when we heard the Irish music with the punk rock,
we found they went together hand in hand. Punk is a kind of
sing-along music with a rousing energy. And Irish music is
the same thing."
The Dropkick Murphys weren't the first musicians to attempt
this fusion, but they brought something new to the
combination. Their best-known predecessors were the Pogues,
the London band that performed old Irish folk songs and new
Irish-folk originals with a raw, raucous delivery. They
were essentially a string band that incorporated punk
elements, while the DKMs were a punk band that borrowed
folk elements. The Pogues' lead singer Shane MacGowan would
later make a guest appearance on the DKMs' 2000 album, Sing
Loud, Sing Proud, but the Boston band was always louder and
rougher than their London colleagues.
"It's a fine line you have to walk when you're combining
musics," Casey points out. "The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are
a perfect example of how to adapt roots; they bastardized
ska the way we bastardized Irish music. They upset a lot of
ska purists the same way we upset a lot of Irish purists
and we both upset a lot of punk purists."
BOSTON'S Mighty Mighty Bosstones gave the DKMs their big
break by taking the younger band along as the opening act
of a 1997 tour. That helped the Dropkick Murphys develop
enough of a following that they could expand their lineup
to include the bagpipes and mandolin they were featuring on
their studio recordings. This year, the DKMs are extending
a similar helping hand to the Tossers, the Chicago septet
whose latest album is The Valley of the Shadow of Death.
With a lineup of guitar, bass, drums, fiddle, mandolin, tin
whistle and banjo, the Tossers are more acoustic and folk-
rooted than their Boston benefactors.
"I like a few of the bands that are combining Irish music
and punk — the Tossers, the Neck from London and Fogging
Molly from L.A. — but there are a lot of crappy bands out
there, too. You can't just take an electric guitar and a
mandolin and be good; there's more to it than that."
Like their heroes, Stiff Little Fingers and the Clash, the
DKMs have always included political songs among their
drinking songs and girl songs. Their working-class numbers
attracted the attention of Nora Guthrie, the mother of a
diehard DKMs fan and the daughter of Woody Guthrie.
As she had with Billy Bragg and Wilco, Nora invited the
DKMs to look through Woody's unrecorded song lyrics and
pick out a few to set to music. After donning white gloves
at the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, Casey leafed
through the 60-year-old manuscripts in Woody's own
handwriting. He picked out Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight,
which became the title track of the 2003 DKMs album,
Blackout, and I'm Shipping Up to Boston, which is included
on The Warrior's Code.
"The minute I read Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight," Casey
recalls, "I knew it would be perfect for some music we'd
already written. That was a pretty heavy song, about the
air raids in London and how, if you don't shut your lights
off, you might be responsible for a lot of people dying.
I'm Shipping Up to Boston, is at the opposite end of the
spectrum; it's a very silly song about a guy with a wooden
leg who lost it when he got drunk in Boston.
"It showed the broad spectrum of Woody's songwriting. ...
To me, when a band is too political, they seem too serious
and lose me as a listener, just as they do if they're too
silly or too cynical. ... We want our records to reflect
our lives, sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes silly,
sometimes tragic."
The tragic reappears near the end of the new record. The
band had already written a song called Last Letter Home,
based on letters from U.S. soldiers in Iraq, when they
received an invitation to play at another funeral. This was
for someone they didn't know, a Sgt. Andrew Farrar. The
dead sergeant's brother shared a letter from Farrar to his
mother, a note that said if anything should happen to him
in Iraq, he'd like the Dropkick Murphys to play Fields of
Athenry at his funeral. So they did. And they rewrote Last
Letter Home to quote from the soldier's final epistle: "I'm
gonna be home soon; it's time to watch the children grow
up. I wanna be more than a voice on the phone."
"I hope to God our next record doesn't have so many songs
about death," Casey says. "It's a strong emotion, and if
you're going through that phase when you're writing, the
songs can have an added passion to them. But, hopefully,
I'll find my enthusiasm somewhere else next time."
Comments:
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Thank you for your information regarding Dropkick Murphy’s. I will be there. It’s Irish/punk for those unfamiliar.
By the way, what are the celebrations planned for the St. Patrick’s Day weekend?
I’m particularly interested in celtic music.
Thank you for any help,
And keep up the good work.
By the way, what are the celebrations planned for the St. Patrick’s Day weekend?
I’m particularly interested in celtic music.
Thank you for any help,
And keep up the good work.
We keep a fairly up-to-date listing of Irish events (including of course, those for St Patrick's day) on this blog. I am about to update that, but the most current posting is at:
http://irishairescurrentevents.blogspot.com/2006/02/current-events_25.html
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