"So when those bands had us in their city, they didn't care if they had to drag their grandmother out of bed to fill that room, because they were so blown away by how many kids were coming to shows here. It created this 'Band from Boston is coming! Band from Boston is coming!' thing. It probably didn't help the stereotype that we pulled up in an MBTA handicapped convertible."
Nowadays, the Dropkicks can arrange swankier transportation than an auction-bought van that, after a low airport awning peeled its roof off, required someone to hold an umbrella over the driver whenever it rained. What a bunch of sellouts.
"We had a funnel that went out the back window," Casey recalls of the erstwhile jalopy, "so you could piss whenever you wanted, and watch the cars behind us turn their windshield wipers on."
He's the last original Dropkick standing, but that's a moot point by now. Barr replaced Mike McColgan (currently fronting Street Dogs) sometime around 1999. Barr famously lacks Irish lineage, and he lives-free-or-dies in New Hampshire, but that's not his most intriguing paradox. It seems his bandmates keep asking restaurant staff to give him the tacky birthday-song-and-cake treatment whenever he eats out on tour (unless it actually is his birthday), just to fuck with his head. On stage, it's a completely different story, but dude totally hates being the center of attention in real life. Of course, attention is hard to dodge when you have Bruce Springsteen singing on your new release.
"It wasn't like, 'Who do we know who's got naked pictures of Bruce Springsteen so he'll have to be on our record? " Barr says, clarifying the Boss's much-publicized cameo on Going Out in Style. Although not at all playing down the verses of "Peg o' My Heart" that their legendary Jersey buddy belted out, Casey says he's equally stoked about his daughter's contributions to the record via violin.
Prior Dropkicks albums came together over the course of a few years between and during tours, but for Going Out in Style, they tried writing the whole thing during a series of eight-to-nine-hour sessions that began in August. The result, some of their most celebratory tunes yet, leans much harder on the folky side of their spectrum than their last two studio efforts did. In place of any floor punchers, we get "Sunday Hardcore Matinee," which is too fun and nostalgic and not pissed off enough to be a hardcore song. I'm cool with this. "Memorial Day" works like a grown-up version of "Sunshine Highway." Another song, "Take 'Em Down," has been pressed into service as their unofficial anthem in solidarity with labor activists in Wisconsin. They have just posted the song on their website and announced a T-shirt to benefit the Workers' Rights Emergency Response Fund, and they'll be playing a show in Milwaukee on Friday. It's as if the devil-may-care self-awareness that used to get kind of hoky every now and again had evolved into the wisdom of sages.
They owe some of this to their muse. The narrative of Going Out in Style hinges loosely on the legacy of Cornelius Larkin, an immigrant, Korean War vet, and family man who went tits up this past New Year's Day. Casey recruited like-minded memoirist Michael Patrick MacDonald to flesh out a backstory for Larkin, an everyman amalgamated from bits and pieces of the Dropkicks' grandparents and relatives. (See Clea Simon's interview with MacDonald, opposite.) He never existed, but he's not exactly imaginary, either.
