Dropkick Murphys ready to turn up that dial on Rancid tour
Dropkick Murphys had just shipped up to Boston when the world shut down.
The Boston punk band, which plays Wild Things Park with Rancid on Tuesday, was in Milan, Italy, when the virus hit there hard in mid-February and, from there, rolled on to play Vienna and Munich before wrapping up the tour in London at the famed Alexandra Palace.
“We finished the tour and heard a little bit of news about stuff going on,” recalls drummer Matt Kelly. “Then, in mid-March, we were preparing for our big St. Patrick’s Day run, our big homestand, and it was like, ‘ Hey, guys, bad news. This show is going to be canceled because they’re going to close the place up. They don’t want people to get sick.’ It was like, ‘Oh, that’s terrible,’ and then it was, ‘OK, the rest of the shows are canceled, too.’ It was a blow because we had just come off tour, we were fighting fit and ready to go.”
It did make for some interesting experiences, though, in the early part of 2020. While most bands could just pack it in for a while, that wasn’t an option for the Dropkicks, who are bound by tradition to make some kind of noise on St. Patrick’s Day. A few days after Pittsburgh’s Code Orange did its stream from the Roxian, the Boston band assembled at Events United’s production facilities in Derry, N.H., for a St. Paddy’s Day livestream.
Absent was bagpiper Lee Forshner,
who was in Florida and was the one member who had gotten sick from the Europe trip, Kelly says.
A few months later, in May, the band got an unprecedented opportunity to stream a show on the field of an empty Fenway Park, where their songs “Tessie” and “I’m Shipping up to Boston” are rowdy staples for the Red Sox.
“We didn’t care if we were playing in front of nobody at Fenway,” Kelly says, “’cause it was so cool to just play together again. It seemed like so long, those two months. It was so special playing on the diamond. My drum set was on second base. You know, you’re not supposed to even look at that grass, never mind walk on it or put a drum riser on it. It was just a joy to
be playing together, on top of it being on hallowed ground.”
The show, while raising money for Boston Resiliency Fund, Habitat for Humanity and Feeding America, also offered the first tastes of “Turn up That Dial,” the 10th album from the band and its first since 2017.
The Dropkicks laid down most of the basic tracks in 2019 and were then tasked with finishing the vocals in the midst of the shutdown.
“Most of the stuff was in the can already as far as the music goes, but, vocals, Al [Barr] was stuck in New Hampshire, and he did his lead vocals from a studio up there remotely. And Lee was stuck in Florida. We had to send him the music to put his tracks on it.”
While they would normally gather in the studio with a bunch of friends for the gang vocals, this time they cut them separately in vocal booths and blasted the audio in the studio to get ambient sound.
“With everyone being really cautious, it was a challenge,” Kelly says. “They had to utilize tricks that we never had to encounter before.”
One of the first singles to emerge from the album, and one that raised an eyebrow, was “Mick Jones Nicked My Pudding” — a song that’s literally about the former Clash member eating producer Ted Hutt’s snack from the fridge.
So far, there’s been no reaction from Jones on the matter.
“He’s always come off as a really nice dude,” Kelly says. “Our friends in the band The Unseen, from Boston, they were on tour in London, and they were on the cheap. So they were at a McDonald’s, and they look over in the corner and there’s [expletive] Mick Jones. He was really nice and down-to-earth, putting on no airs or graces at all, just really chill.”
The rollicking song, Kelly says, “is obviously tongue-in-cheek. There’s no harm intended. So, what are you going to say? Put out a cease and desist order?”
Coincidently, the last time some of the Dropkicks got together in 2020 was to play “Tommy Gun” for the streaming event “A Song for Joe: Celebrating the Life of Joe Strummer.”
“A star of that magnitude, it bears celebrating every year because of the musical wealth he gave us,” Kelly says. “How many bands were influenced to start by The Clash? Even as late as 1996, they were some of the main meat and potatoes for the Dropkicks. In the early days, we did ‘Career Opportunities,’ ‘White Riot,’ we did a really weird version of ‘Guns of Brixton.’ So they were a huge influence on us.
For the Boston to Berkeley II tour, the Dropkicks are once again paired with Rancid, another ’90s band that took its cues from The Clash. The two bands have a long history, with Rancid having signed Dropkick Murphys to its Hellcat label in 1996.
After 18 months, Kelly is thrilled to play to live crowds again, but, he says, “Just playing is amazing. We’ve been practicing a lot lately. And our practice space doesn’t have air conditioning, so it’s like 110 degrees in there and we’re banging away and sweating and looking like we’re all dying, but at the end, it’s like, ‘That was great!’
“I don’t know what I miss more, playing gigs or going to gigs. That’s a big part of life, always has been, ever since I was a kid. The people I’ve talked to over the last year or so, people just miss it, man, miss it so much, just the interaction with the band, with other people. You’re all focused on being there and having a good time — it takes you away from your typical 9-to-5.”
Dropkick Murphys, Rancid and The Bronx perform at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Wild Things Park in North Franklin, Washington County. Tickets are $55; druskyentertainment.com.