Posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 08:46 PM
Black 47 in rocking form with "Bankers and Gangsters"
![](images/black 47.jpg)
“I always resisted being pigeonholed and limited to this genre. But what the hell,
it just won’t go away and I suppose we have a lot to be responsible for in
popularizing it. Like every other original idea it inevitably becomes a victim
of its own clichés. This is what it looks like from the stage with a couple of
shots aboard; now let’s take it to the cleaners.”
Larry Kirwan might be
talking about the origins of “Celtic Rocker,” one of the many instant classics
on
Black 47’s new
Bankers and Gangsters album, but it is typical of him to give that nonchalant,
self-deprecating wink to his long legacy and cultural impact on Irish
Americana.
Bankers and Gangsters opens majestically with “Long Hot Summer
Comin’ On,” a rock and roll novella about the
CBGB scene in the
eighties where Kirwan had a ringside seat. It is a character-driven ditty with
characters like arsonist
Gasoline
Gomez, “whose got kerosene in his soul.”
The record is the first
since
IRAQ, the band’s
politically charged disc that offered scathing criticism of the war and
heartbreaking accounts from fans fighting on the front lines. Kirwan says he
felt pressure to get the story straight on that record, which freed him up
creatively to write different stories for the band’s current work.
“IRAQ
was such a focused record,” Kirwan says. “I wanted to capture the feeling of the
country so that if you went back and listened to the album 10 years from now,
you would get a feeling for what our national mood was at the time.
“When
that was done, it gave me the freedom to go wherever I wanted to. There are a
lot more pipes and brass in this album on purpose because musically, I wanted to
focus on the strengths of this great band I have working behind me. You are
playing with these great musicians and I wanted to have them shine.
“Not
many people mix the brass and uilleann pipes the way we do, and when you are
focused on the guitars or words you might miss this onstage. For this CD, I
wanted what I heard onstage to be front and center.”
The band flexes their
formidable musical muscles throughout the disc, most notably on “Izzy’s Irish
Rose,” a hilarious tale of interfaith temptations that finds the band juggling
both Irish reels with snippets of “Hava Nagila” without missing a
beat.
The band is capable of whipping up whiplash for the listener as
they swerve from rock to reels to reggae in a dizzying mixture of Irish and
American influences, Celtic rebellion, domestic heartache and furious reels.
Kirwan and the Boys have made another winner!
Any good mix of Black 47
songs would not be complete without a nod to Irish history, and Bankers and
Gangsters keeps the memories of
Rosemary
Nelson and Red Hugh.
“He was my boyhood hero but I could never
capture him in song up until now,” Kirwan explains. “His days were just far too
distant.
“And then I became intrigued with
Ahmad Shah
Massoud, leader of the
Northern
Alliance in Afghanistan, and it all clicked. Both were fundamentalists,
battling much stronger armies on the borders of great empires, with time running
out and modernity is encroaching.
“We do issues songs but we don’t ram it
down your throat,” Kirwan says of the band’s political oeuvre.
“If you
don’t like the issues songs, go to the bar and wait for the fast and lively
reels. We play over two hours and if you came out to be informed or to be
entertained, there will be a spot in the set list for you.”
Kirwan has
been looking back on his youth a lot recently, and the songs on the new CD are
not the only evidence. Kirwan will also release Rockin’ the
Bronx, a brilliant
tale set in the gritty streets of the Yankee borough that was the epicenter of
Irish Americana during the early eighties.
“The book is about what it was
like to be an Irish immigrant on 204 and Bainbridge during that time. I used to
live in the East Village and play the Bronx at night. Everyone was Irish up
there, and I would go home to the
Puerto Rican
drug dealers downtown,” he recalls.
“ The
Irish Echo and
Irish Voice
wrote about games at
Gaelic Park, but
other than
Terry George
(Irish Voice), no one wrote about the scene I was in. A lot of Irish Americans
don’t know about it, yet it was the center of life for the Irish American
culture that we still have today, this scene.
“‘Living in
America’ and
the song ‘Rockin’ the Bronx’ approaches a description, but a song can only take
it so far. I wanted a novel to describe it on another level, really give people
a sense for the fabric of what the sheer wildness was.
“You get off the
plane on a Friday, got a job by Monday, worked all week, spent it in the pub on
a Friday night and went to work broke on Monday again. That’s what it was like
to be Irish American at the time.”
As the Irish American rock scene was
hatching, another musical genre was gestating a few miles away. Kirwan recalls
going back and forth between the Bronx and CBGB’s to watch the birth of punk
rock.
“I was dealing with this particular period of time from 1980 to
1982 in
New York City
in the book,” he explains. “I was there the first night
the Ramones came
on, and this English bartender I knew thought they were fascists in their yellow
jackets,
“I said, ‘You know, I think they might be Jewish!’ It was a
classic time, seeing Television and Blondie there, and it breaks my heart to see
it’s a f***ing clothes store now.”
The band keeps it fresh by trying out
new things. For Bankers and Gangsters they brought a slew of Irish singers from
Celtic Cross and Screaming Orphans to give the backing vocals an earthy
feel.
Celtic Cross lead singer
Kathleen Fee is
the feisty foil to Kirwan’s curmudgeon during “The Wedding Reel,” a furious
country-tinged rocker and hilariously caustic tale of marital tension between
two disparate spirits. “ I bet you didn’t notice the highlights in me hair/they
weren’t put in for you to pay attention anyway,” she snarls to her husband as
she applies the war paint in the mirror to hunt for new prey at the bar, the
husband more concerned with pints than passion.
“The song I fashioned
around it is a tribute to the Irish countrywoman’s spirit and the banter I used
to hear while picking fruit every summer on the farms of south
county Wexford,”
Kirwan explains.
“I didn’t have to explain the saucy sexuality of the
woman to Ms. Fee. She stepped right into that character.
“There are
really some inherently funny scenes in Irish romances. There is an edge in most
romances, but there is a particular set of barriers where these poor women have
to go an extra mile to break the Irish man down a bit, and I like writing about
the dynamic. It is comedy with an edge.
“She is going out to look for a
younger man and if I don’t find him, I will come home and the man is saying ‘off
with you.’ But you know in the end, they are going to end up with one another
and they will be fighting with one another into the moonlight.”
For Fee,
recording with Kirwan and the band was a thrill.
“We both happened to be
at the
Catskills
and we were having a drink at the Blackthorn and he told me how he wrote the
song and how perfect he thought I would be for it. I was flattered to say the
least!” she says.
“He is such a pleasure to work with. He gave me
complete creative control and encouraged me to improvise. He sees things and
hears things and knows exactly what he wants, yet he is open to surprises and
new ideas.
“The back and forth was complexly improvisational. He doesn’t
over-think it. The deliveries that come naturally really work and I am going to
try that out on the new Celtic Cross album!
While Bankers and Gangsters
looks fondly at the past, Kirwan is already looking at the future with a musical
and more Black 47 music in the future. As Kirwan sees it, challenging the band
and its fans with new material is essential to a band’s survival during these
dicey times in the music business.
“You have to come out with something
new all the time because you have to keep the band fresh onstage,” he says. “You
introduce the new song every night to keep the edge.”
Copies of Bankers
and Gangsters are available at Black47.com or at band gigs like February 19 at
Stone Pony in
Asbury Park,
New Jersey, or
the following night at Connolly's in New York.