Dropkick Murphys on "Proto-Punk" Woody Guthrie, Who Wrote "Shipping Up to Boston"

When Woody Guthrie emblazoned “This Machine Kills Fascists” across the top of his guitar in the ’40s and belted out tunes such as “All You Fascists Bound to Lose,” he became the first punk rocker.

Dropkick Murphys guitarist Tim Brennan says that both musically and culturally speaking, Guthrie is a big influence for the Irish music-infused Boston punk band. The fact that Guthrie wrote the lyrics to “I'm Shipping Up to Boston,” Dropkick Murphys' best-known song, imparts an even more personal connection between the two.

“He’s sort of like the proto-punk,” Brennan says. “Even if you aren’t aware of who he is, you’re aware of the kind of spirit he had. … He was absolutely sort of an early version of a punk.”

Even though Guthrie wrote and sang from the 1930s to 1950s, most of his songs still resonate with people today. Brennan says that Guthrie’s songs show us that, unfortunately, bad things such as fascism come in cycles. Guthrie even wrote a dis track of sorts in 1954, about a certain former president’s father Fred and his racist housing practices in New York City.

“He’s talking more about aspects of society and people,” Brennan says. “Those sorts of historical things are the sort of crap that’s going around again and again.”



In September, Dropkick Murphys released This Machine Still Kills Fascists, a collection of new music written with pieces of Guthrie’s poetry and lyrics. It’s the first of what will be two volumes, and the band is currently playing a series of seated shows, a change of pace for what is indisputably a show you stand up (and mosh) for. Dropkick Murphys plays a seated concert at the Paramount Theatre on Thursday, November 3.Brennan has noted that at some venues, half of the crowd is showing up to see the band for the first time.

“I don’t know if there are people who have waited to see us until they could take a seat,” he says. “We are super psyched to to have people that either weren’t entirely aware of us or hadn’t come to see us before.”

Brennan says he doesn’t pay close attention to the words that frontman Ken Casey comes up with as songs are coming together, because he implicitly trusts Casey’s lyricism. But as he heard Casey’s takes in the vocal booth while recording the album, the continuing relevance of Guthrie’s words began to resonate more fully. A phrase that explicitly recalls something that happened in the 1930s or 1940s only needs to be tweaked a bit to sound like it was written yesterday.

“They’re talking about all these different aspects of politics, or people just trying to live,” he says. “You can’t believe all these negative parts are coming back around again, all of these things we should have learned the first time. That’s what’s most striking to me about these lyrics.”

His mind goes to the blatant racism that remains dyed into the wool of American life. “You can never truly say there wasn’t any racism left in this country,” he says. “But if you look at the civil rights era, you could probably easily convince yourself that things are different now. But it all gets kicked up again, and you realize it’s just as bad now as it was back then.”

Dropkick Murphys have now established their connection to Guthrie, who left behind thousands upon thousands of unpublished lyrics. The link between the two began nearly twenty years ago, when Guthrie’s daughter Nora Guthrie discovered the band through her son, Cole Quest, who has since become good friends with the Dropkick Murphys and plays dobro on This Machine Still Kills Fascists.

“They seemed to agree that we shared a similar spirit to Woody Guthrie, as far as our message and everything,” Brennan says. “At the time, she was finding people to put music to these unheard lyrics.”

Brennan says Casey visited with the Guthrie family and took two sets of lyrics that ended up becoming "Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight" and "I'm Shipping Up to Boston,” the latter of which became popular through its use in The Departed. For the record, Nora thinks it’s the dumbest set of lyrics her father ever wrote, but it helped to instill a deep appreciation of the singer in members of Dropkick Murphys.

“Most people didn’t know those were Woody Guthrie lyrics,” Brennan says. “We talked about how it would be nice to do some more Woody stuff.”

The opportunity presented itself when co-lead singer Al Barr took a leave of absence from the band to care for his ailing mother, who has been struggling with dementia. Brennan says the band needed a way to proceed with recording another album without one of its lead singers.

“We thought this would be to do that, sort of keep the whole thing alive,” he says. “Ken and Nora got together and picked out a bunch of lyrics that had never been heard or put to music, and we started working on them.”

The band recorded at Leon Russell’s newly refurbished The Church Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and spent time in Okemah, Guthrie’s birthplace. They continued to seek input from Nora as the songs came together.

"She couldn’t not have been more supportive,” Brennan says. “There was not one thing we wanted to try that she said 'no' to.”

It’s difficult to say how much the band's Guthrie pilgrimage affected the songs, but Brennan supposes the “very idea of Oklahoma informed the way the songs went a bit.” The band’s original idea at first was to record electric songs, but the members gradually shifted their approach to keep more in spirit with the original writer.

“That’s when we set about turning all these into acoustic songs,” Brennan says. “Going into it (we realized) very quickly it’s a much different thing when you are recording electric guitar songs versus full acoustic songs.”

The record has all the energy one would expect from a Dropkick Murphys album, and they worked hard to avoid the pitfalls of a punk rock band going acoustic. Brennan says that, musically, it was a rewarding experience to crack the code, so to speak, because they couldn’t fall back on their old tricks that might work on an electric album.

“We did our level best to make sure it wasn’t a wicked quiet sad acoustic album,” he says. “That was a pretty fun thing to figure out in the studio to try to figure out ‘how do we play all these acoustic songs but give them the same amount of gumption.’”

The band left the studio with twenty songs using Guthrie’s words, an unusually high number of songs to actually make it to the end of the recording process, so another volume is in the works. He is equally excited about the next set of songs and loves that the band was able to take a bit of a musical side journey. He adds that anyone worried that the band is on a permanent change of musical direction shouldn’t be.

“Don’t fret,” Brennan says. “The electric guitars are still primed and ready to go.”

Dropkick Murphys, 8 p.m. Thursday, November 3, Paramount Theatre, 1621 Glenarm Place. Tickets are $42.50-$79.50.