VIDEO: An excerpt from an interview with the Dropkick Murphys. Video by Rod Webber. Courtesy of Greyson Welch, Ketchabrick Productions.
On Boston Harbor’s Long Island, two miles out in Quincy Bay, the Curley Building stands hulking and decrepit. In the library, books tumble in piles, blanketed with dust and mold. The Art Deco auditorium is musty and rusted; holes in the roof illuminate a floor strewn with chunks of ceiling. It’s as if the place was evacuated in a hurry sometime in the 1930s and simply left to the raccoons, one of which decomposes unbothered in a corner.Standing on a weatherworn stage framed by faded crimson curtains, the seven members of Dropkick Murphys are arrayed in stark tableau, black clad and casting long shadows on the piles of junk behind them. They’re here to film the video for “The State of Massachusetts,” the single from their new album, The Meanest of Times (Born & Bred, released on September 18), and as tall Tim Brennan plucks a tricky Celtic melody on his banjo, they lurch into motion.
Marc Orrell leaps and writhes, manhandling his heavy accordion. Guitarist James Lynch slouches stage left, unflappably cool. As drummer Matt Kelly roils with martial precision, adamantine Scruffy Wallace stands stolidly next to him, his bagpipes lacing the tumult with a piercing, mournful keen. Frontman Al Barr coils the microphone cord three times around his wrist and screams in bloody fury. Ken Casey, bass slung low, is the booming ballast.
It’s a mighty noise: the sound of seven men with an elemental, effortless working dynamic.
Nearby, a bunch of kids are playing. They chase each other in the shadows near the back of the auditorium and tiptoe trepidly into the maw of the stygian tunnel beneath the stage. Outside, they paw through a box of T-shirts, and grab at the McDonald’s trucked in for lunch. Given the dark decay of the locale and the deafening noise blasting from within, one might wonder what they’re doing here.
Dropkick Murphys are not your typical punk band. They’re a Boston punk band, an Irish one, with enormous families and armies of friends. And they always roll deep. Anyone who’s been to their mammoth, multi-night Saint Patrick’s Day shows and seen the stage ringed with mothers and fathers and daughters and sons and grandparents and godparents and cousins and friends of cousins knows this.
Those kids, scowling in scally caps and clip-on ties on the cover of The Meanest of Times? A pretty safe bet they weren’t hired from Central Casting.
In fact, Casey says, sitting in an air-conditioned trailer on a break from the video shoot, the theme of the record, woven throughout those thunderous chords, is family and friends — loyalty to them and loyalty from them. It happened almost by accident. “Al and I were talking one day [and realized] 11 or 12 songs on the album deal directly or indirectly [with] family.”
