Dropkick Murphy’s music is good for fighting times

Boston’s Dropkick Murphys rocked Austin on Tuesday night at Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater.

Under a March sky, the Celtic punk band packed the venue that feels like an old Western corral. Between the neon-lit beer sheds and a few oak trees, we stood on the dusty gravel and nodded our heads at the stage under its dome roof.

The Dropkick Murphys are one of the bands I became an adult with. During leave in the summer of 1997, I bought a Hellcat Records compilation CD at a California record store. The album featured the Dropkick’s song, “Barroom Hero.”

As young military men, the song quickly caught on with my friends. A few of us paid $12 each to see the band in their first Denver concert on Oct. 2, 1998. They opened for Agnostic Front.

We loved the Dropkick’s driving guitars, strong voices, quick drums and bagpipes as much as their lyrics that lionized the working class, underdogs and fighters.

The original tracks and old Irish songs fused with hardcore riffs told stories of family, friends, loyalty, war, boxing, baseball, booze and bouncing back from hard knocks.

Those early albums, “Do or Die,” “The Gang’s All Here,” and “Sing Loud, Sing Proud” held anthems for us.

From CDs to MP3s and LPs, the Dropkick’s have seen heavy rotation in my playlists. At home and abroad, their songs followed as those around me shifted from a pack of buddies to a wife and children. Their music is part of our kids’ growing-up soundtrack.

We brought them to shows and bought them T-shirts.

Solid albums with classics like “Rose Tattoo” and “The State of Massachusetts” kept coming.

For me, 2005’s “The Warrior’s Code,” was a war album. Most famous for “I’m Shipping up to Boston,” the album’s title song is about a fighter. The band dedicated “The Last Letter Home” to Marine Sgt. Andrew Farrar, a fan who’d written a letter home asking the band to play “The Fields of Athenry” at his funeral if he died. Farrar was killed in Anbar, Iraq, on Jan. 28, 2005.

The band’s cover of Eric Bogle’s “The Green Fields of France (No Man’s Land)” — a heartbreaking narrative about a young soldier killed in World War I — was part of some of the college English classes I taught.

The lyrics from that song still echo: “And I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen / When you joined the great fallen in 1916 / Well I hope you died quick, and I hope you died clean / Or Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?”

And also: “Do all those who lie here know why they died / Did you really believe them when they told you the cause / Did you really believe that this war would end wars / Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame / The killing and dying it was all done in vain / Oh Willie McBride it all happened again.”

By my count, I’ve attended at least eight Dropkick concerts. Amid the ragbag audience clad in everything from jeans and flannels to kilts and top hats, I noticed the crowd looked older than we used to.

The feeling was probably the Generation X version of what the baby boomers experienced when they see their ’60’s or ’70’s bands 20 or 30 years later.

Nonetheless, each track took me to a different time and place. Some revived long-dead family and friends for a few beats. Certain refrains or riffs sent our grown children back to kindergarten for a moment.

Early in the show, the stage lights flashed and shined in Ukrainian blue and yellow. Throughout the night, Ukraine’s colors dominated.

Emotions and memories tied to the old songs jabbed me, but the simple, bold gesture of solidarity with Ukraine was a gutpunch.

During “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ya,” a cover of the mid-19th-century anti-war song, my thoughts went to Oleksiy, a Ukrainian soldier I worked with in Baghdad more than a decade ago. He was part of the NATO mission in Iraq. We lost touch, but I’ll always remember his jokes, low-key demeanor and the time we almost got roughed up at that Iraqi checkpoint.

I wondered about his safety and whether he ever listened to the Dropkick Murphys.

If not, he should. It’s good fighting music.