Posted on Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 10:37 AM
Black 47: 20 and Still Going Strong
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The
French poet Jean Cocteau said, “Americans are funny people. First you shock
them, then they put you in a museum.”
Nowadays, you can’t swing a cat at
an Irish festival without hearing some band doing their best to blend
traditional Irish melodies with bone crunching power chords nowadays.
For
some of our younger readers the idea of mixing traditional Irish melodies with
rock and rap would be considered dangerous, but I really thought the world was
coming to an end when I first saw Black 47 in the Village almost two decades
ago.
I first remember being assaulted by their music back in 1990. I just
came from a cousin’s wedding in Galway, and
everyone was mad for this new band called the Saw Doctors. I was thrilled when I
heard Black 47 were coming to the Big Apple,
and got their nice and early to soak in the soda bread sounds of
home.
With a screech of feedback, Larry Kirwan, an impish redhead,
hurtled toward the audience, guitar in hand, provoking the crowd, while Chris
Byrne, a Times Square
cop, hunched over uilleann pipes that screamed over the urban
beats.
Before my eyes (and ears), the music of my heritage was shot
through a grinder of rock, reggae and rap and transformed into a product
uniquely Irish American.
With surgical precision, they sliced the British
establishment in lyrics that were sung, rapped and spat about the likes of Michael
Collins and Bobby Sands,
translating the history of our heritage in an urban language I could understand.
My life has never been the same since.
We haven’t gotten around to making
a national Irish American museum yet, but once it is built there must be a Black
47 exhibit. Unlike other musical museum pieces like McCartney and Jagger, who
trot around their musty warhorses in stadiums, Kirwan and the lads are as
vibrant as ever.
They have released one of their best albums, Bankers and
Gangsters, expanding on the formula of sharp social commentary and genre-bending
sounds. Kirwan is touring bookstores as well, reading passages from his gritty
story about Irish Americans in the Eighties called Rockin’ the Bronx.
He
still hosts the wildly popular Celtic Crush on Sirius XM, and if that weren’t
enough he is workshopping a new musical at the Irish Arts Center this
weekend.
Kirwan is a man always looking forward, so it is rare indeed
that he would stop to celebrate an anniversary.
“The owners of Paddy
Reilly's have been asking us to do a one-off reunion there for some years now,”
explains Kirwan of the band’s 20th anniversary show on May 7 (Paddy Reilly’s is
at 519 Second Avenue) at the bar that gave birth to this legendary live
act.
“There's always been something in the way, but we are on a bit of a
break to allow everyone in the band to do their own thing for a while when I got
a call from the producers of a Horslips documentary.
“The Horslips doc is
about the emigration story of a Gaelic speaking guy who traveled from New York
City to the Yukon, and they want to get footage of us playing in New York and along
with some footage of the old Irish areas like Bainbridge/Kingsbridge as featured
in Rockin' The Bronx. They were going to be filming in Reilly's anyway, so we
decided to kill two birds as it were.”
Irish American rock might not
shock anyone now, but I am still in shock that I’ve been following the band
around for 20 years! Happy anniversary!
I spoke with Kirwan over the
weekend about the many moving parts of the man and the band. Here’s how it
went.
What kind of show can fans expect at the 20th anniversary
gig?
As regards the kind of show we'll do, I would imagine that we'll
perform a lot of the old songs from the nineties, ones that we first played in
Reilly's on those adrenalized sweat-soaked nights. There was an intensity back
then because many people were refusing to accept the type of music that the band
was creating. It was very defiant and aggressive.
I don't think we've
ever really lost that. We just came through five years of playing songs about Iraq, not everyone's
favorite topic. So we don't have to reach too far back to re-capture the
attitude, which is always the basis of great rock and roll.
And we'll do
some songs from Bankers and Gangsters to bring us right up to the present.
Musically, I don't think the band has ever sounded better. Should be a
blast!
Are there any surprise guests planned?
Surprise guests --
who knows? But Jim Lockhart and Barry Devlin of Horslips will definitely sit in.
Black 47 will be playing a Horslips song for this documentary, probably “Wrath
of the Rain” or “Speed the Plough.” That should be interesting.
We very
rarely do other people's material -- a bit of Dylan, Marley, Strummer -- but it
will be fun to give a B47 interpretation of Horslips. And they're such great
guys. Jim is a particularly under-rated keyboard player, and Barry is that voice
of seventies Ireland.
What
advice would you give the Larry Kirwan who played Paddy Reilly’s back in May
1990?
Musically, artistically, I don't think there's anything I'd do
differently.
When we last spoke, you were about to release the new CD,
Bankers and Gangsters. What has been the reaction from the fans now that they
have had a chance to listen to it on record and on stage?
Critics and
fans are calling it our best album since Fire of Freedom, Home of the Brave or
Green Suede Shoes. I don't know -- to me, the songs have been top shelf all
along and we've done our best on every album, but I really like the sound of
this one.
Sometimes you know just exactly how you want something to
sound, and we succeeded this time. A number of people seem to like the fact that
we've gone back to the "Black 47 formula." That is, some political, some
humorous, some songs of regret, some songs of relationships, etc.
You
also released a novel, Rockin’ the Bronx, which paints the picture of the Irish
American scene in the eighties. How do you think the scene has changed since
then?
A lot of things have changed since the eighties. Rockin' the Bronx
is set between 1980-82. New York City changed dramatically at the end of '82.
AIDS was finally identified and people began taking Ronald Reagan
seriously.
I always maintain that the sixties lasted until 1982. The city
was much more lawless through the eighties. It was possible to live very cheaply
in New York back then. Thus people had time to go out at nights, socialize much
more and be in bars.
From our inception in late 1989, Black 47 was
playing three to five nights a week. We did our rehearsing onstage and we became
tight within the first months -- also fearless.
Within six months we were
playing pretty much all original music and taking it into bars where before
they'd only previously heard cover bands. Your own songs had better be
top-of-the-line and distinctive if you're going to do that.
You can't
play five nights a week anymore so bands can't take that risk. Consequently
bands can't develop their own material because they're constantly falling back
on popular songs by other artists.
You're got to develop your own sound
-- there's only one Pogues, one
Dropkick Murphys, one Flogging Molly and one Black 47. If you're going to be
yourselves, then you should drop everyone else's song no matter how popular.
You'll suffer for it, but it's the only way to make it.
You also have a
new musical coming out. Tell us about how Transport came about?
For over
10 years Tom Keneally and I have been working on Transport, a musical based on
his wife's great-grandmother who was sentenced to penal servitude in Australia back in
1838 for stealing a bolt of cloth.
Transport tells the tale of four such
women on a convict ship during their voyage from Cork to Botany
Bay. Tom is a great storyteller and one of the few men who can really create and
bring to life women characters.
My job was to turn this story into music
and song. I would say that the music is a mix between Irish trad and Broadway
show tunes, if you can imagine such a dichotomy. We'll workshop it for five days
and then put it up onstage at the Irish Arts Center (553 West 51st Street),
Friday, April 30, Saturday, May 1 and Sunday the 2nd. Tony Walton is directing
and Aidan Connolly and his team at the Irish Arts Center are very much behind
it.
It will be a great opportunity for people to see the birth of a large
scale musical in a very intimate setting.
Log onto www.black47.com for
more information.