E-Mail This Article to a Friend The Clear Channel juggernaut rolls on (continued)

The punks are playing baseball

"The game was enlivened by music, and the familiar mascot tune of ‘Tessie,’ " wrote Tim Murnane in an article headlined "Boston Americans Are Champions of the World" in the Boston Post of October 14, 1903. "The Boston players could fully appreciate the meaning of this tune, for it was a solace and comfort to them . . . . ‘Tessie’ will evermore stand well with the admirers of the American League, and the Royal Rooters who took such a prominent part in landing Boston a winner."

When you can’t beat ’em, annoy ’em. That was the idea at the old Huntington Avenue grounds, when the Royal Rooters, a boisterous crew of diehard hardball fans, kept warbling an old show tune about "a maiden with. . . sparkling eyes." An anthem for the Boston faithful, it also vexed the Pittsburgh Pirates enough to help the Red Sox’ forerunners secure victory in the first-ever World Series. Singing loud and proud to bug the bejesus out of the bad guys. How punk! And how appropriate that Dropkick Murphys have re-recorded "Tessie" with new lyrics, an amped-up tempo, and backing shouts from Sox players Johnny Damon, Bronson Arroyo, and Lenny DiNardo. Just in time for the All Star break, it’s being released as a five-song EP from Hellcat, with proceeds going to benefit the Red Sox Foundation.

When I reached the Dropkicks’ Ken Casey in Denmark, the band were seconds from going on stage at the Roskilde Festival, where they would play "Tessie" live for the first time. Besides making the day of every Danish Red Sox fan there, they hoped to give the Olde Towne Team the transatlantic kick in the keister it needed after being swept by the Yankees. (It seems to have worked: the Sox went on a five-game win streak and were positioned at the top of the wild-card race at the All Star break.)

The Dropkicks have always supported their home-town teams. Legendary Celtics announcer Johnny Most can be heard at the end of 2000’s Sing Loud, Sing Proud, and "Time To Go," from 2003’s Blackout, is a Bruins fight song. So Casey was pleased to see Damon, Arroyo, and DiNardo supporting their local punk-rock band. "I always enjoy it when teams support what goes on in their city. It makes you feel like, maybe they’re not in it for just the money, when they take part in things outside the game. Johnny Damon is not a singer, and he still had the guts to get right in there and belt it out. We were pretty amazed by that."

Even more amazing, the Dropkicks are set to play "Tessie" and the National Anthem at Fenway before the Yankees game next Saturday, July 24. If you don’t have tickets for that game already, you’re not likely to get them. So satisfy yourself instead with streaming the "Tessie" video, which was filmed in the "lyric little bandbox" that is Fenway Park, at the Epitaph Web site, www.epitaph.com.

Then there’s Chris Wrenn — you may know him as the founder of Bridge Nine records, whose releases include titles by such seminal hardcore acts as Slapshot and Sick of It All, but he’s also the proprietor of Sully’s Tees (www.sullystees.com), the apparel manufacturer responsible for such Yankee-baiting T-shirts as "Steinbrenner Ruined Baseball," "Take Your 26 Rings and Shove ’Em Up Your Ass," and, of course, the classic and classy "Yankees Suck."

The Connecticut native is a lifelong Red Sox fan, though he admits, "I fell out of it when I went to high school because all I did was skateboard, and I was very anti organized sports." Maturity, however, brought the realization that punk rock and sports are not mutually exclusive — especially in Boston, where in addition to Dropkick Murphys there’s Slapshot, for whom punk and puck are almost synonymous, and Ten Yard Fight, with their football obsession. As he notes, "There’s always been a strong correlation between sports themes and Boston hardcore."

They also share a similar graphic sense and a knack for provocative sloganeering. "The original ‘Yankees Suck’ shirt is a ripoff of Boiling Point fanzine from the ’80s. Their logo was the same font, same style." Wrenn adds that "Yankees Suck" was originally conceived as a so-long shirt for Ten Yard Fight, who had their last show in ’99 during the Sox-Yankees ALCS. "Our ‘Yankee Hater’ T-shirt, the one that has the crossed baseball bats, was borrowed from a Right Brigade shirt. . . . The "Drink Beer and Fight" shirt [done up in Bruin black and gold] is a great shirt for fans of Blood for Blood."

The newest design from Sully’s Tees is "Ortiz Has a Posse," which pays tribute to the gargantuan Sox slugger with a witty take-off of Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous "Andre the Giant has a Posse" street-art phenomenology experiment. "While maybe three out of four people who see that shirt might not recognize the reference, the 25 percent of people who do think it’s amazing and have to have it."

And if you find yourself forking over green beneath the Green Monster for a "Damon Is My Homeboy" or "This Is Our Year" shirt, take a close look as who’s doing the selling. "You’d be surprised how many bands have sold T-shirts outside Fenway Park," Wrenn says, revealing that members of Give Up the Ghost, Hatebreed, and In My Eyes have all moonlighted as hawkers.

— Mike Miliard