Not that one could ever imagine a situation similar, say, to the one that found Neil Young being sued by Geffen in the 1980s for releasing a string of middling, genre-hopping albums that the label deemed “unrepresentative” of his sound.
“We are what we are,” Casey says. “The AC/DC of Celtic punk rock.”
Barr echoes him. “We are who we are. You can’t polish a turd.”
He’s being modest. It’s a fair wager that Dropkick Murphys will not be releasing an alt-country album or a dub remix any time soon. They’re a band who simply do what they do. But they do it very, very well. And on The Meanest of Times they’re in fine fettle and fighting trim.
The CD starts with a bang. Or, rather, a bell. “Famous for Nothing,” a song Casey says is about “parochial life . . . being stupid enough to raise hell in the shadows of church and grammar school,” kicks off with a school bell before tearing into a ferocious, hurtling roar.
And if “State of Massachusetts,” an explosive number about a broken family whose kids are absconded with by the DSS, brokers the Celtic influence even more successfully than “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” then “Fairmount Hill” goes straight to the source, cribbing the melody from the traditional Irish ballad “Spancil Hill” for a stirring tribute to the locals who’ve stood by them.
“We’re not from Ireland, so it seemed fitting to give it a local spin,” Casey says. “And I get some good digs at friends in there.” (On The Meanest of Times, the songs are about all kinds of families, both good and bad.)
For the recording of “Flannigan’s Ball” a hard-charging, many-versed litany of drinking and dancing and donnybrooks, the band traveled to Ireland to record with the Pogues’ Spider Stacey (whose voice is gravelly) and the Dubliners’ legendary Ronnie Drew (whose voice sounds like gravel being puréed in a blender). The song is a stunner, with Casey and Barr trading verses with these two titans of Irish music, three generations demolishing Dorchester’s Florian Hall from across the broad Atlantic.
The collaboration was especially magnanimous of Drew, 74, who’d just lost his wife of more than 40 years and was in the midst of a pitched battle with throat cancer. “Most humble, greatest man I’ve ever met,” says Casey. “He took a cab over, took the train home. Said, ‘Whaddya want me to do, boys? I’ll do it a thousand times to get it the way you want it.’ It’s different for him. He’s not used to fast-paced songs, loud drums, and electric guitars. But in five minutes, he caught right on.”
“Echoes on A. Street” is a bit slower than the rest of the album, but it’s still a powerhouse, with deeply emotional lyrics and a heart-tugging melody. “It’s a love song,” says Barr.
With a secret. “We want people to think we wrote it about a chick. ‘Those pussies, they wrote a song about a chick.’ And then later [they realize], ‘Oh, it’s about a dog.’ We weren’t gonna give that one away, but the whole theory of how much our family is there for us and supports us — metaphorically, what represents that better than the family dog?”
Nostalgia sells
The family support is there, even when the Dropkicks are not, spending as much as half of every year touring the globe, from Los Angeles to Amsterdam, Tokyo to Sydney. It’s a grind. But it’s got to be done. “I equate it to being a merchant marine,” says Casey. “It’s great to be home, but when you gotta go, you gotta go.”
And as the band has conquered the globe, a funny thing has happened. Via their sprawling, booze-soaked concerts, those excoriating shout-alongs, Dropkick Murphys have found themselves a sort of roving revival show, inadvertent ambassadors of Boston-Irish culture. “We’re in Sydney, Australia, and you see people in Red Sox and Bruins shirts,” says Casey. “They ain’t from Boston.”
And in the cities in Florida and California and elsewhere, where the Massholes have moved in droves, the Dropkicks are a lifeline. “Where the transplants are, we get a big contingent of Boston people and make them feel at home for the night,” says Casey. “Other people, I think they like the camaraderie we represent from the city, and they wanna be a part of it, even if they aren’t from Boston.”
In a Boston that’s gentrifying inexorably, a city that’s changed arguably more in the past 20 years than it had in the previous 50, the band’s blue-collar lyrical tropes are something of a throwback: odes to stouthearted and rough-handed immigrant forebears, to bar brawls and drunken weddings, to horse races and boxing matches and hockey fights (Casey deserves big props for being one of the last Bruins diehards around). But the vitality of the music breathes fierce life into these faded conceits. And through it all are the omnipresent reminders of the importance of community.