Keeping Punk, Adding Folk

The Dropkick Murphys have learned to be patient. Their fellow punk rockers always seemed to understand and appreciate the band’s fiery mix of punk and Irish folk, drawing on the Murphys’ Irish American roots in Boston. Others needed more time.

The band’s first trips to Ireland were no different. During one tour there, the Dropkick Murphys were booked to play a pub in Cork, where singer-bassist Ken Casey had family. “They thought they were going to see some acoustic guitars and fiddles,” Casey remembers. “They were a little shocked when it was kids with Mohawks and kids diving off of speakers.”

That kind of confusion is a rare occurrence these days, as the band moves deeper into the Irish folk sound while surrendering none of its punk identity. The Murphys, who perform tonight and Friday at the Palace, have now added a sizable number of older, Irish folk fans to their core audience of young punks. Fathers and sons often arrive together, singing along to the band’s tales of celebration and despair, history and boozing.

“That’s pretty cool,” Casey says. “That’s always what we hoped the band could achieve.”

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The Murphys’ mixture is not unlike that of the Pogues, whose rollicking, drunken blend of Irish culture and Clash-like fury earned much acclaim during the 1980s. The Dropkick Murphys offer a harder brand of punk in their blend of old and new, setting fiddles, bagpipes and tin whistles against the unchecked aggression of electric guitars.

“It catches some off guard at first, but in the end people come around and realize what we’re doing,” says Casey. “We’re putting a modern-day twist on an old form of music, and a lot of kids can relate to that.”

On the band’s new “Sing Loud! Sing Proud!” album, that commitment has only grown deeper, with the increasing influence of the Irish folk music Casey first heard at family gatherings while growing up in Boston.

“As a kid I knew Irish music like the back of my hand, but almost like osmosis, being raised in the environment,” says Casey, 31. “It was when the Pogues came along that I realized that music was for my generation too, and not just for my parents and grandparents. It gave it a new twist for me.”

On the new album, ex-Pogues singer Shane MacGowan makes a guest appearance on the song “Good Rats,” a festive tune about the alleged secret ingredient of a famous Irish brew. The band met MacGowan at a festival in Boston, where Casey brought his old Pogues singles for him to autograph. MacGowan lived up to his reputation.

In colorful language, he told Casey to forget it, he recalls with a laugh. “He’s rough around the edges, but that almost made the legend. If anyone else told me [that] when I asked for an autograph I would be crushed, but with Shane MacGowan that somehow made it that much cooler.”

Despite the band’s prominent Irish flavor, Casey insists that his songwriting has been equally influenced by American folk music, and the examples of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. The new album includes a high-octane reading of the old labor-movement song “Which Side Are You On?” and the confrontational lyric, “Will you be a lousy scab or will you be a man?”

Elsewhere, the song “Fortunes of War” recounts the murder of a young punk rocker in Amarillo, Texas, and the alarming probation of his convicted killer. “The message in a lot of that music is what moves me,” says Casey, the Murphys’ chief songwriter.

With “Sing Loud! Sing Proud!,” and the recent departure of founding guitarist Rick Barton, the band has added several new members, including mandolin and bagpipes players, which wasn’t easy. The Dropkick Murphys had long searched for a bagpipe player equally fluent in both folk and punk. They found one in 18-year-old Spicy McHaggis, known back in Boston for playing at local soccer matches.

“We’d always been looking,” says Casey. “We had plenty of guys who wanted to join the band who weren’t into the punk rock side so much, and that was our main requirement. It just wouldn’t have been right to have some 300-pound, 40-year-old bagpiper from the local bar, you know.”

At the Palace, the Dropkick Murphys will be assisted by Rancid’s Lars Frederiksen, an early champion of the band. In addition to opening the show with his side band, he will fill in for injured Murphys guitarist James Lynch. After hearing the Murphys’ early singles, Frederiksen signed the band to his Hellcat label, an imprint of Epitaph. He also produced the group’s previous two full-length albums, helping to find their audience.

That fan base now includes Casey’s own family.

“My mother says she used to hate 90% of our music, but loved 10% of it,” he says. “Now with the new record she says she likes it all. I guess that’s success if your mother likes it. But then again in punk rock it could be failure too. I haven’t figured that out.”

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* Dropkick Murphys, with the Swinging Utters, Lars Frederiksen & the Bastards, others, today and Friday at the Palace, 1735 N. Vine St., L.A. 7 p.m. Sold out. (323) 462-3000.