War/Peace: The Warrior’s Code

Dropkick Murphys: The Warrior’s Code

[purchase]

I suspect that many of you who read this blog also attend live music performances—or at least, you did before that stopped being a thing (temporarily, I hope). Musicians have been trying different ways to get live music out to their fans, some for free, some charging, some seeking “tips,” and others seeking charitable donations, while some are trying to use Patreon or other similar subscription type programs to try to partially replace the revenue lost from cancelled tours. I think that it is pretty well known that these days, most musicians make the bulk of their living from touring and merch, and not so much from streaming and music sales.

Since the pandemic closed most venues, I’ve watched some of my favorite musicians from the comfort of my house—Richard Thompson, Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires, Dan Bern, Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi, as well as her fellow Native Daughters, Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla, Ben Nichols of Lucero, Jeff Tweedy, Raul Malo, Lucy Wainwright Roche, Indigo Girls, and I’m sure I’m leaving some out. Most of these performances have come from the performers’ homes (or, at least where they are sheltering), except for an Isbell/Shires album release show from the stage of an empty Brooklyn Bowl in Nashville. These performances aren’t the same as being at a live show, but on the other hand, they are also more intimate—as one friend mentioned to me after we separately watched Richard Thompson, her husband was excited to be able to see the master’s hands close up while he played the guitar.

Last Friday, I watched most of an unusual performance—Dropkick Murphys, a band that is closely associated with the Boston Red Sox (they even were given World Series rings by the team one year), playing live on the field at an empty Fenway Park, with the band members all more than the now traditional six feet apart. The concert was organized to promote a number of charitable organizations, which is common for the band. For nearly two hours, the band ripped it up with their trademark Celtic flavored punk, and they were amazing. It wasn’t the same as when I saw them live at Warped Tour 15 years ago, but then again, what is? I had to reluctantly step away after two hours for a virtual college reunion Zoom session, but the next day, I found the video, and watched the end, when Bruce Springsteen appeared on the giant video screen in centerfield and performed two songs with DKM—one of theirs (“Rose Tattoo,”) and one of his, “American Land,” an appropriate anthem for our times, with its message of an America made up of immigrants and people of all races. Remarkably, considering the logistics, the entire concert sounded great, and I give much credit to whoever did the sound.

One of the songs that they played that night was “The Warrior’s Code,” which technically isn’t about war, but about a boxer, "Irish" Micky Ward. But since boxing and war often use each other’s metaphors and terminology, I’m OK with this. Also, back in 2016, I wrote about a different DKM song, a cover of “Fields of Athenry,” which is about World War I (and it is far from the only song by the band that references actual war, for example “The Fighting 69th” (Civil War) and “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye” (anti-war song written in Ireland in 1867), all of which were played at Fenway, along with a cover of The Standells' “Dirty Water,” which has nothing to do with war, but which I wrote about, here.)

The video of the show is still available here, among other places, so check it out, and send a few bucks to the charities.

History/Again:Green Fields of France/No Man’s Land

Dropkick Murphys: Green Fields of France
[purchase]

I was a history major in college, and continue to enjoy reading about and discussing historical topics, so this theme is a natural for me. Over at my new blog, I’ve recently written about Civil War and Revolutionary War related things, and my wife’s family’s genealogy, and have occasionally plumbed the historical record in writing here. So, I didn’t want to repeat myself (again) despite the apparent invitation to do so in the theme. Instead, I thought, how about writing about World War I, which seems to have been overshadowed by its more recent and more horrifying sequel. However, beyond the trying effect of the war on the Crawley family, I think it is fair to say that most people don’t recognize how much that war, which ended nearly a century ago, still has a profound influence on the world today.

To the extent anyone thinks of the First World War, you probably have in your head an image (probably in black and white) of trenches, or pointy German helmets, or maybe poison gas, or those cute, if deadly, airplanes. Turn on any of the TV channels that have history shows, and it seems to be about 80% about Nazis, with a smattering of Civil War and American Revolution programming, and maybe a rare Vietnam show. Not much about the War of 1812, for some reason. In a recent listing of the top news stories of the 20th Century, the outbreak of WWI only placed 8th, behind both the assassination of President Kennedy and Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. Both of these were important, but as important as WWI? I don’t think so.

According to Wikipedia, more than 17 million people died, and 20 million people were injured during the war, making it one of the deadliest conflicts ever. More remarkably, the war, and its aftermath, resulted in social and political changes that echo to this day. You can trace much of the turmoil in the Middle East, for example, to the arbitrary borders that were drawn after the war as well as the promise made to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The wars in the Balkans were a delayed reaction from the post-war breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Bolshevik Revolution was certainly abetted by the war’s turmoil. The rise of the United States as a predominant world actor stemmed from its relatively unscathed position after the war, while the British Empire’s decline was accelerated. And of course, the short-sighted and punitive Versailles Treaty led to chaos in Germany, and was used as a rallying cry that helped vault the Nazis into power. That’s just for starters. Add the Armenian Genocide, the Great Depression, an influenza epidemic, the decline of hereditary aristocracy, weakening of colonialism, the League of Nations, the increase of the use of technology in war, improvements in medicine and surgery, and the expansion of the franchise to women in some countries, and you begin to see how the 21st Century is, in many ways, the product of the War to End All Wars (That Didn’t Even Come Close). And there are even more effects, but this is a music blog, not AP European History.

On a human level, though, it was the death of an entire generation of (mostly) young (mostly) men, and the disillusionment of the survivors that led to the dubbing of this period as the “Lost Generation.” (Compare that to how the WWII era is recalled—as the “Greatest Generation.”) Never before had so many been killed in so many countries in such a wide swath of the world. Huge cemeteries were created, or existing ones expanded, to provide resting places for the dead and memorials for the missing. Eric Bogle, a Scottish folksinger who emigrated to Australia in 1969, visited one of these cemeteries in Northern France, and wrote a song, “No Man’s Land,” reflecting on the (apparently fictionalized) gravestone of one soldier, and the pointlessness of war. Bogle, who likely was also reacting to the futile conflict in Vietnam, also wrote another famous WWI song, “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda,”

The song owes much to the American song, “Streets of Laredo,” which itself is derived from earlier English and Irish songs (gotta love folk music!), particularly in the use of the line “Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the pipes lowly?” (Also the source of the title of the baseball novel, Bang The Drum Slowly). It has been often covered (and modified), sometimes under the title “Green Fields of France,” or “Willie McBride.” The lyrics are clear and unsparing in their sentiment:

And I can't help but wonder now, Willie McBride, 
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, the dying, it was all done in vain, 
For Willie McBride, it's all happened again, 
And again, and again, and again, and again. 

The featured version is by Dropkick Murphys, best known as a rollicking Celtic punk band from Boston, who don’t do the expected thing and speed up the song. It is from their excellent album The Warrior’s Code which also included “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” which featured lyrics written by Woody Guthrie (who wrote his share of anti-war songs), and was used in the movie The Departed (and in beer commercials, at sporting events, and on TV shows, including The Simpsons), and strangely, by two Republican candidates in Wisconsin, leading to denunciations by the band.

Since the armistice that ended the fighting of World War I, at 11:11 am on 11/11/18, and the subsequent treaties that formally ended it, there have been more than a few more wars—way too many more, unfortunately, some of which are happening even as you read this. Bogle was, tragically, right.

Water/Wet: Dirty Water

The Inmates: Dirty Water
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Over at my other blogging home, we periodically contribute to “Q&As,” where the editor poses a question, and the staff responds. One of the questions was, “What was a song that you didn’t know was a cover?” and I wrote about Johnny Cash’s version of “Ring of Fire.” Back in the pre-Internet days, it was not always easy to learn musical factoids like whether a song was a cover or not, especially if it was a relatively obscure song. Unless you heard the original, or heard a radio DJ mention it, you had to rely on word of mouth, or reading something in a magazine or book. Seems pretty damn quaint, doesn’t it?

As I have mentioned before, starting to work at WPRB in 1979 was not only a huge thing in my musical life, but has influenced my whole life. And having access to the massive, somewhat annotated, record library, and other musical obsessives to talk about music with definitely increased my musical knowledge, but there were, and still are, many gaps.

When I first heard the Inmates’ song, “Dirty Water” when it was released in 1979, I immediately liked its raw energy. It was clearly a retro-garage band sound, with a bit of early Stones, and it was, it seemed, about the dirty water of the Thames and London. I remember playing it pretty often, never once mentioning that it was, in fact, a cover of a song by the Standells, which was about the Charles River and Boston. Because I had no idea that it was a cover. Here’s the original.

Frankly, I have no idea when I learned that, probably when I heard it played on the radio somewhere, and it clicked in. And look, in my defense, it wasn’t like the original was a big hit. It was released in 1965, ran up the charts, peaking at #8 and pretty much faded away, except maybe in Boston, where I am not from, and have never lived, although it later became acknowledged as a seminal rock song.

The Standells were from Los Angeles, and the song is actually not particularly positive toward its subject city. (A few trivia asides—The leader of the Standells was Larry Tamblyn, the younger brother of actor Russ Tamblyn, who was, among other things, Riff in the movie version of West Side Story and Dr. Lawrence Jacoby in Twin Peaks. Lead singer Dick Dodd was a former Mouseketeer who was a dancer in the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie. For brief periods, Dewey Martin, later of Buffalo Springfield, and Lowell George, later of Little Feat, were in the band. And they appeared on The Munsters.)

According to the Internet, despite the negative references in the song about the bad water, frustrated women and crime, including a Strangler, in Boston, the Boston Bruins, a team I don’t root for in a sport that I barely follow, began playing the Standells’ version in 1991, 1997 or 2007, depending on what you read (and there are probably other cites, too, but I got bored looking). The Red Sox, a team that I sort of like, mostly because they are the sworn enemies of the Yankees, also started playing the song, as did the somewhat deflating New England Patriots and the Celtics, who I haven’t liked since the late 1960s.

This has led to a revival of interest in the song, and it has become often covered (and stolen—the Buffalo Sabres play a version substituting the Niagara River). Boston based Celtic punks Dropkick Murphys, big sports fans themselves, cover the song, as has former Red Sox pitcher Bronson Arroyo, a fair rocker in his own right. Other bands often play it it when appearing in the city, including local boys Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, who, as you might be aware, is from New Jersey, Dave Matthews Band and Steely Dan.

Although the Inmates had a minor hit with their cover, and have continued to record and tour to this day, I've never heard from them again.

Sports: Tessie

Dropkick Murphys: Tessie

[purchase]

In 2004 DKM released Tessie. They made a prediction that year too. "We recorded this song in June 2004 and after giving it to the Red Sox told anyone that would listen that this song would guarantee a World Series victory."

The lyrics of this song give the history of how Tessie became the anthem of the Royal Rooters. During the 1903 World Series, the Royal Rooters led by Michael "Nuf Ced" McGreevy, taunted the opposing Pittsburgh Pirates. The Boston Americans were down 1-3 in the series and the Rooters knew their team needed a rally. So, the Royal Rooters began to change the lyrics to any song that they could think of. But it was Tessie that helped win the day. Interestly, the Royal Rooters stopped singing Tessie after Boston won the World Series in 1918, which began Boston's 86 year drought and the rest is history. Nuf said.