Dropkick Murphys interview
March 15, 2010
Beatweek talked to lead singer and bassist Ken Casey who, through a thick Boston accent, described them as family men. They still encourage heckling from beer-bottle-wielding New Yorkers, as long as it’s not at the shows they bring their grandmothers and daughters to.
It’s that special time of year for Dropkick Murphys. For their annual celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, Dropkick is playing seven shows in six days at Boston’s House of Blues and releasing their second live album, Live on Lansdowne, Boston MA. It’s a 20-track jaunt through their career that shows off the band in the only way to truly appreciate them: with the live energy that’s fueled tons of raucous shows over the years.
“Over the course of fourteen years, we’ve played thousands and thousands and thousands of shows and we’ve recorded six albums, so it feels like the more natural thing to do is play live,” Casey said.
He called the audience the “8th member of the band,” saying that, “With the nature of the music, and the intensity, we feed off the audience and they feed off of us. This music is so much more conducive to being played in front of people.”
After ten years of St Patrick’s Day shows in Boston, at seven shows a clip, Boston has seen around seventy Dropkick Murphys shows in mid-March over the last decade and it’s become an event, to say the least. It may be in Boston every year, but he says fans come from all over the world, listing Europe, Australia and Japan.
“It’s become kind of like an asshole convention,” Casey said, lovingly. “There’s a lot of camaraderie. It’s kind of cool to see people make those connections.” He said that fans come year after year and he sees the community develop. His own memories of the annual week seemed to overwhelm him.
“As far as memories go, I mean, oh, man. Tons of different crazy things throughout the years,” Casey said. He choose to hone in on his family memories, mentioning that his daughter is on the new DVD, dancing on stage, and that he brings the whole family along.
“One year we had both my grandmothers, my mother, my wife and my daughter. It’s four generations of women in my life. It’s nice to be able to play a form of music to have grandma come to.”
Having seen their March show in Austin’s Stubbs BBQ, it didn’t seem like a grandma-friendly concert – at least not if you got too close. The legendary outdoor venue was packed with hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, green-shirt-clad men crowd surfing and moshing in a way the venue hadn’t seen since Metallica came through the year before. And Austin is a neutral venue. You should see what happens when the Boston heroes go to New York.
“We always, from the early days of the band, had gone down to places like New York City and bad mouthed the Yankees from the stage and had bottles thrown at us,” Casey says proudly. In the weeks and months after the Red Sox won the world series in 2004, they were playing for a pissed off Yankee nation, but that didn’t stop them from doing what they always do.
“Halfway through the show, we killed the lights and had a video screen drop on the stage, and it was the ‘Star Wars’ music comes on (dun dun dun dun) and you just hear ‘The most epic collapse in sports history!’ and we showed all the highlights. They were in shock. As they threw the bottles, all I could say was, ‘You don’t wait eighty-six years to rub it in and then not rub it in.’ As much as New Yorkers hate when we do that, they respect that we have the balls to do it.”
Sports are essential to Dropkick Murphys’ success as they’ve been a part of huge moments in defining moments of their beloved Red Sox and Bruins. They played at five “nail-biter” games in a row where the Red Sox won on the last at bat and are undefeated at any Boston sporting event they’ve played.
“Our first kind of foray into officially touching that kind of stuff was a song about being Bruins fans, called ‘Time to Go.’ That kind of led us down that path of playing at Bruins games and playing at some Red Sox games. “The nature of the kind of music we play is all about being intense. Certain moments in sporting events are intense and they go hand in hand. We’ve had a good run. Every time we’ve played live at a Bruins game or a Red Sox game the home team has always won. We’re 10-0.”
“It’s pretty awesome to be a part of it. It’s awesome to play in the parade. Those are the types of things a kid that grew up here as a big sports fan that you never dream could happen to you. To me, that’s personally a greater experience than any success the band could have in the music world.”
It’s easy to call them a bar band because of the heavy drinking fans with sing-a-long anthems, but Dropkick Murphy makes the connection easy. They own their own bar, McGreevy’s, a re-creation of an old Boston staple.
“It’s been a landmark for Dropkick Murphys fans to go in Boston. I was more into it for the history of replicating McGreevy’s,” Casey said. “It’s full of Dropkick fans from open to close.”
They’ve got a bar and a stage, but they don’t want to to get too political and divide their fans, despite their appearance on the “Rock against Bush” soundtrack.
“As a band we’ve always been political. Probably going on that ‘Rock Against Bush’ thing is the most overtly political thing we’ve ever done. Sometimes I feel if a band is too outspoken off the stage, people tune them out because to a lot of people music is an escape. We try to not soapbox.”
Live on Lansdowne, Boston MA comes out March 16th, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, in the middle of their run. What can we expect from the week of St. Patrick’s day shows?
“We always have a few surprises up our sleeves, but we can’t say that because then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
Learn more at DropkickMurphys.com • iTunes • Facebook • Twitter
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