Family values

The Dropkick Murphys tie one on for the old folks

by Carly Carioli

NEW YORK CITY -- It's St. Patrick's Day on St. Mark's Place in the East Village, and for what must surely be the zillionth time in the history of St. Patrick's Days in the Village, the band on stage are playing "Finnegan's Wake." Several things, however, would distinguish this version from all the others before it. For one, it's been refitted as a razorwire assault vehicle, with enough power-chord muscle to fuel several Sex Pistols reunions. For another, the ethnicity of the over-capacity audience mobbing the stage isn't just (or even mainly) Irish: you got skinheads leering savage and preppy in their Izod shirts and suspenders, old-school-style punk kids with flawless sunburst mohawks and tattered jigsaw patches. Oh, and the band -- the Dropkick Murphys, celebrating the previous day's release of their new The Gang's All Here (Hellcat) -- have just dedicated the song to "all the Italians in the audience."

"The Sopranos is my favorite new show," explains Murphys bassist Ken Casey, speaking a few hours earlier in the basement of the all-ages hole-in-the-wall club Coney Island High. Recently, a song performed by the Murphys -- perhaps the most successful Boston punk band this decade -- had been used in the HBO comedy-drama series, which concerns the day-to-day trials and tribulations of an Italian Mafioso, Tony Soprano, as he tries to reconcile "Family" business with raising his own family. The song used in the episode was "Cadence to Arms," another traditional Irish song that in the Murphys' version -- the leadoff to their 1997 Do or Die (Hellcat) -- begins with solo bagpipe and then bursts into a rampaging pub/oi anthem.

"I figured, 'This is gonna be awesome.' I figured the scene would be in an Irish bar and all these Italian mobsters would go in and shoot the place up," says Casey. "But it ended up that he took his daughter away to New Hampshire to look at schools and colleges, and she went to some frat bar and our song's playing in the background, and I'm like, 'Noooo! Come on!' "

The Dropkick Murphys know a thing or two about family values. "We're all boring family guys," admits singer Al Barr. Guitarist Rick Barton has a 16-year-old son who's already playing in a hardcore band on the North Shore. ("Am I worried?" he chortles. "No! I think it's good. Let him make all the same mistakes I made for the next 20 years.") Don't get them wrong: the Dropkick Murphys are punks. They like to have a few drinks now and then. But they're also married, with children, and more often than not their songs espouse the kind of old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes ethics you'd associate with the post-war father-knows-best era rather than with the screw-everything spirit of '77.

"I'm just sick of hearing bands talking about 'Smash the state' and, you know, 'Anarchy,' and they can't even friggin' take a shower," grimaces Casey.

"And they gotta be home by dinner," adds Barr.

"If I was a parent and my kids were going to be listening to a band," says Casey, "what with a lot of today's kids talking about rap, about shooting cops and stuff, I mean our message -- even though people think a lot of our songs are just big pro-drinking songs, which is fine, music is open to the interpretation of the listener -- but a lot of our lyrics are about the flipside, about us being a little bit older. Like, 'Hey, this is where we went wrong in our lives and had some struggles.' We sing about hard work, the loyalty and unity that this scene supposedly revolves around -- and I don't think those are necessarily bad values to have.

"The only reason that we're leaning a little more toward branching out now is not because we want to get the jock crowd, but because we think we could reach a lot of older people. There's an AC/DC influence, a rock influence in our music, plus the fact that we do traditional Irish covers and [an update of] 'Charlie on the MTA.' So many kids have said to me, 'My parents like you guys.' And that's cool. If we're gonna be on the radio, I'd rather be on 'ZLX than 'FNX. Not that it'll ever happen."

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With its jacket photo of hardhat-and-lunchbucket construction workers, the "Finnegan's Wake" cover, and songs like "Boys on the Docks" (written by Casey about his grandfather, a hard-nosed union organizer), Do or Die established a party line of sorts on the Dropkicks: blue-collar Irish hooligans. A near-riot outside their first sold-out record-release party at the Middle East and the subsequent departure of original singer Mike McColgan (who'd paid union dues as a Boston Globe pressman and later decided to pursue a career as a fireman) made it almost inevitable that they'd become emblematic, as if they were the punk rock version of Cheers, the Celtics, and Good Will Hunting wrapped up into one.

The Gang's All Here -- which includes an ode to a bareknuckle street fighter prone to kneeing opponents in the groin; more bagpipes; a couple of late-night pub-room sing-alongs, including a version of "Amazing Grace"; and a chorus that goes "Who's gonna save us from this lonely picket line?" -- probably won't do much to change that perception. Except this time there's a new variation on the tragic hero: instead of the boys on the docks, it's the working-class boys in uniform in battlefield hymns like "Devil's Brigade" and "The Fighting 69th" -- in other words, Cheers, the Celtics, and Saving Private Ryan. Which would be a shame, because neither scenario does justice to a song like "Upstarts and Broken Hearts" -- a remorseful look back at romantic indiscretion and the possibility of forgiveness, and at a complicated love that perseveres as much through duty as through fate. Besides, no band short of Social Distortion make meat-and-potatoes punk sound quite this good.

Casey, who along with Barton writes most of the music and lyrics, recalls, "when we wrote our first song, 'Barroom Hero,' me saying to Rick and Rick saying to me, 'Sounds like the Ramones meets the Pogues. Think anyone will get it?' Now wherever we go people are like, 'Irish! Irish! Irish! Irish!' " As he says this, he's wearing a blue mechanic's-style jumpsuit embossed with Oi! patches, and Barton has donned a lime-green suit that'd make a leprechaun blush. "Personally, I don't think we lean so heavy in that direction," Casey continues, "but then again I'm the guy with the Boston accent and the bad leprechaun tattoos and stuff. So to your average guy in Minnesota it probably seems that way. But we meet so many people at our shows who are like 'Yeah! IRA! Irish!' and all that. I'm probably to the far end of being conscious of my Irish heritage, and even I think a lot of people are morons about it.

"But the music's universal in the sense that, like in LA, we have a huge following of Mexican skinheads that are first generation, that are actually from Mexico, and they can relate to our songs probably even more than us, because they just came here."

Over the past 15 years, the crucial question confronting punk as it's practiced by bands like the Dropkick Murphys and their fans -- i.e., punk as a subculture replicating the look, sound, and feel of the music circa '77-'83 -- is, "What's so punk about punk?" When Rancid came hurtling onto the radio a few years ago like the ghost of the Clash, they answered that question by proclaiming punk as the promised land -- or, as they put in on "Radio": "When I got the music, I got a place to go." The Dropkick Murphys have taken this idea a step farther: punk (as much as Irishness or working-class-ness) is the place they're from -- a place with its own traditions to be respected, a heritage to be honored, less a philosophy than an ethnicity in its own right. And so in their songs their Irishness becomes a metaphor for their punk-ness, with punk's perseverance as a subculture playing out like an extension of a much older archetypal American scenario: the push-and-pull between the hunger for assimilation and the desire to retain an autonomous cultural identity. Which is why it makes sense that the Dropkicks and a bunch of Mexican skinheads and a television show about a Mob family are all on the same page. Punk is the Dropkicks' eternal immigrant's song -- they've blurred the lines between punk and ethnicity to the point that the two are almost indistinguishable. When on "Going Strong" they sing about "a new breed of kids brought together by a movement with a sense of tradition," the tradition they're talking about could easily be class, or ethnicity. In fact, they had neither in mind.

"No, we're talking about roots within the punk rock scene," says Casey. "Respecting those that came before you. But also, the style of music that we play has had a bad rap. When we played with the Business, from England, they said, 'Bands like you are giving it a good name again,' and it's like, let's change the perception of the outside world to this music. Respect what we have, and not, like, flavor-of-the month bands. Rick's a prime example of it. He's still playing punk rock and his kid is too. And his kid knows the roots of the music, and that's how it's gonna stick around and have some value."