Life according to Larry Kirwan
![](images/nh11drawing2.jpg) Larry Kirwan: an '80s survivor
Larry
Kirwan
Readings from
Rockin’ the Bronx. 6 p.m., March 11. Labyrinth Books, 290 York St.
203-787-2848, labyrinthbooks.com. Black 47 with Mighty Ploughboys, Country
Caban and Myopia. 8:30 p.m. March 11. Toad’s Place, 300 York St.
$12.50-$15 203-624-TOAD, toadsplace.org.
You’d
think that for one of the country’s premiere Irish rock bands, March would
be busy enough. For Larry Kirwan, at this time of year “you’re the
beautiful girl of the year. Everybody wants you in March. I don’t knock
it. It’s good to be wanted.”
But desirability knows no season
when you’re not only fronting one of the toughest Irish bands in existence
(new album: Bankers and
Gangsters) but releasing a new novel
(Rockin’ the Bronx), getting a New York workshop of the musical you co-wrote
with novelist Thomas Keneally, writing regularly for the Irish Echo newspaper (which
excerpts Rockin’ the Bronx in its March 3 issue) and hosting the Sirius radio show
“Celtic Crush.”
Connecticut has been a major
beneficiary of Kirwan’s multi-media hyperactivity. Last week in Hartford,
Black 47 played the Half Door and Kirwan gave a reading at the Mark Twain
House. On March 11, the band gigs at Toad’s Place while the reading is
just down the block at Labyrinth Books.
Black 47 shows are exhausting
reveries where the band’s fans and countrymen pound their fists in the air
to strident songs about injustice, Irish history and culture and the funky
Ceili. If you haven’t aged as gracefully as Kirwan has and can’t handle
the raucous club scene anymore, Kirwan’s Labyrinth reading provides a
gentler, though no less thought-provoking or “rockin’,”
alternative.
Kirwan’s literary side tends to blur
with his songwriting proclivities. His first novel, Liverpool Fantasy, imagined
if the Beatles had broken up in 1963, never getting their chance to change
the world. The scenario was inspired in part by Kirwan’s own dire and
dreary dealings with the record industry. His next book was more detailed
about those struggles in the Irish neighborhoods and New Wave hotspots of
1980s New York City. That full-blown, 400-page autobiography,
Green Suede Shoes: An Irish-American
Odyssey, was augmented with a Black 47
concept album, Elvis Murphy’s Green Suede
Shoes.
Rockin’ the Bronx, likewise,
springs from a Black 47 tune, “Sleep Tight in New York City/Her Dear Old
Donegal,” from the band’s 1993 album Fire
of Freedom. The song was later expanded
into a one-man show (with Kirwan doing solo acoustic versions of Black 47
songs), and now a multi-cultural coming-of-age recent-historical novel. He
still remembers the image that inspired the original song:
“I was in Donegal, looking out at a
beautiful landscape, and I realized I knew so many [Irish] people in the
Bronx, and how hard it must have been for them to leave Ireland to come
there.”
Kirwan makes the urge to travel easy
for the novel’s kindhearted, toughened protagonist Sean Kelly: The
romantic young idealist is chasing a girl.
“I contend the ’60 died in the
spring of 1982,” Kirwan says. “That’s when AIDS was first identified as a
major disease, and when Ronald Reagan began to become this cherished icon.
In Rockin’ the Bronx, I wanted to deal with that particular period between 1980
and 1982 — in the country as a whole, and in the life of New York
City.
That era also provided a political
awareness wake-up call for the Irish, Kirwan says, who was born in County
Wexford, on the Southeast end of the country. “If you look at it from a
Southern/Northern Ireland point of view, many in the South were completely
unaware of what was going on.”
Kirwan’s delighted fellow immigrants
seem to have taken to Rockin’ the
Bronx.
“It brings back those times, the
area, to them. Now it’s totally gone, but then it was a vibrant area with
dozens of pubs. This was a tough, real, working-class culture. And in New
York especially, there was a lawlessness. It was an exciting time. When we
brought Black 47 there, it was like ‘If we can survive this, we can
survive anything.’”
|