How Dropkick Murphys Became Punk’s Loudest Anti-Trump Voice

I
t’s time to get off the stage, but Ken Casey isn’t done talking to the union electricians yet. 

The Dropkick Murphys frontman has been sitting there for 29 minutes and counting, legs dangling off the side of the temporary fixture in the middle of a San Diego street, as he talks with the dwindling crowd on a warm September night. He’s taking selfies, shaking hands, and accepting union challenge coins, small metal disks commemorating the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ 41st annual convention, where Dropkicks just performed.

Nine-forty-five. Ten p.m. He keeps going. His bandmates are long gone; members of his management team grumble to each other that they would like to go, too. The techs clear the stage, and Casey barely even turns around as one of them removes a mic from inside his shirt. There he stays, talking to each and every person who wants to tell him how meaningful his band has been to them. “Cool human interactions,” as he later describes them. “Without those people, I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in, you know?” 

This is the fourth union convention Dropkick Murphys have played this year. He’d be here after any show, since he likes to talk to his fans. But this audience is special to him. His grandfather, who helped raise him after his father died, was a teamster and union organizer in their hometown of Boston, and for most of Casey’s childhood he figured that would be his path, too. Tonight, even as his energy fades, he doesn’t want a single audience member to feel that he didn’t give them the attention they deserve. Dropkicks are a union band, from a union town, built on union values, and that’s a responsibility Casey takes very seriously. 

During their set, Casey, 57, took numerous opportunities to preach to the thousands of electricians who came out. “The truth is that the current president of the United States wouldn’t piss on any of us if we were on fire,” he says, the six other members of his band at attention behind him, his thick Boston accent making him sound like a lost punk-rock Kennedy. “You know it. I know it. But the problem is far worse than even him. It has to do with the wealth gap. It has to do with all these criminals that have taken all the blood, sweat, and tears that we’ve worked for over the years, trying to take away our rights, trying to make it harder for not only us, but for our children and the next generation of people trying to build lives for themselves. Hopefully what comes out of all these horrible times is a much stronger and a much less divided America, and a much less divided working class, and powerful unions. So this one’s for everyone who’s sick of this shit.” Another pause, before he shouts into the mic: “Are you with uuuuus?” 

They launch into “Who Will Stand With Us?,” the lead single off last year’s For the People. The crowd jumps around, bearded men in the front singing along, kids on their parents’ shoulders pumping fists in the air, catharsis at the end of a long summer. If Woody Guthrie had a taste for slam-dancing in a hardcore pit with bagpipe accompaniment, this song would be his jam. 

When Dropkicks formed in 1996, they weren’t known as a particularly political band. Sure, they sang about union life, but they also had a cop-friendly song (“Johnny Law”) and a lot of lyrics about getting fucked up and fighting other kids in South Boston. Their politics were of loyalty, pride, and hard work. It didn’t take long for them to become punk-festival headliners, hometown heroes who opened for the Red Sox at Fenway Park, and even a household name after Martin Scorsese used their song “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” in 2006’s The Departed. But these days, they’ve become better known as the band behind a loud, pissed-off, working-class fuck-you aimed squarely at Donald Trump and his cronies. They’ve gone viral for telling off MAGA fans in the audience, and for calling the president “the greatest swindler in the history of the world.” As their songs and music videos get more pointedly focused on their old-school-blue values, they’ve used collaborations with the Guthrie estate, Billy Bragg, and Bruce Springsteen to drive that point home. 

Casey’s refusal to back down has earned him some powerful friends, like Governor Maura Healey, the chief executive of his home state. “Ken’s never lost sight of who he is or where he came from,” she tells me, noting that she was a fan long before they met. She named Sept. 25, 2025, Dropkick Murphys Day in Massachusetts, and around the same time, she and her wife, Joanna Lydgate, took Casey, his mom, and his girlfriend as their personal guests to the gala where he was named Massachusetts Storyteller of the Year. “He’s tough, he’s direct, he’s irreverent, he’s loyal, he’s deeply rooted in his community,” Healey adds. “That’s something that a lot of people in Massachusetts really resonate with.”

But it’s not just Massachusetts, or even New England. Across the country, more and more fans are identifying with Casey’s overwhelming frustration with the current state of our democracy. “Eighty percent of America, I think, in their heart of hearts, would say, ‘Man it’d be good if we could get back to some form of dialogue,’” Casey says. “Sometimes I’m a source of that, and sometimes it’s me flipping off the guy in a MAGA hat in front of the stage. I’m only human — I don’t get it right every time. But it’s better than staying quiet.” 

ON A WARM BOSTON MORNING a few days earlier, Casey is sitting in the public library’s main branch in Copley Square. The bright, airy lobby is home to the live studio for GBH, the city’s public radio affiliate, and hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagon are talking with Healey for her monthly “Ask the Governor” segment. A couple dozen retirees, as well as a young guy wearing a Dropkick Murphys St. Patrick’s Day tour shirt, watch her take call-in questions on everything from post-partum healthcare (Lindsay Clancy’s case just ended in a mistrial) to nuclear power, data centers, opioid addiction, and the state’s ties to the Israel-Palestine conflict. She patiently addresses each caller, continually referring back to her commitment to upholding the civil rights of all citizens, no matter their color, creed, or sexual orientation. Towards the end of the segment, Casey joins her to discuss a bill he’s been helping her promote, which would cap resale prices of concert tickets, as well as the recent debacle involving Ed Sheeran, Macklemore, and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. 

On air, his language is significantly less profane than it is onstage, but the message remains just as forceful. “The fact that Ed Sheeran took the knee, no matter what the cause is, and [didn’t stand] with his fellow tour partner, just doesn’t sit right with me,” he tells the audience. “And that’s not how Dropkick Murphys would operate.” He seems confident standing there next to his friend the governor, as well as Eagon and Braude, the latter of whom has become a mentor of sorts as Casey’s public profile has grown. He’s been a guest on their show multiple times, and even guest-hosted on a few instances. After the segment, as we walk across the street to retrieve his car from a hotel valet, he tells me that he hopes to someday start his own radio show, if he can find the time amid the band’s tour schedule. In the meantime, he’s starting a podcast with Michael Fanone, the police officer who was assaulted by rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, who is also a longtime Dropkicks fan. “He was at the very first D.C. show we ever played,” Casey says. 

“There’s still Nazis in the punk and skinhead scene? Who gives a fuck if there are. The president is a fucking Nazi.”

Ken Casey

Casey is a natural podcast host, if for no other reason than his voice — what Springsteen will later describe to me as “his true Irish tenor.” He has a warm presence, and when he smiles his eyes shrink behind his cheeks. Though he gets deadly serious many times during our conversations, he’s quick to laugh and seems to delight at meeting fans wherever they might crop up. Before we leave the library, he says hi to the kid in the Dropkicks shirt; when he’s getting the car from the valet, one of the doormen asks for a selfie. “My dad is going to be so excited,” he tells Casey, who grabs his hand and eagerly poses. He’s the city’s unpretentious mascot, a stout divorcé with three grown kids, a passion for union politics and Celtic-tinged punk, and an almost pathological drive to stand up for what’s right. 

As soon as Dropkicks showed up in the Nineties, it was as if they had some kind of innate knowledge of how to make a punk band successful. “It almost seemed like they had a grown-up idea of how to do this thing that we were all figuring out as kids,” says James Lynch, who joined them as a guitarist when he was 20, but had been playing in Boston punk bands for years. “When the Dropkicks come on the scene singing about union labor and all this stuff, we’re all singing along with it, with no idea what they’re talking about. It was just something special from the jump.”

Back in 1996, Casey was newly married, working construction and tending bar, putting himself through the local UMass, where he was taking classes to be a special ed teacher. “I didn’t know if I’d ever get there,” he says, as we drive through Boston in his giant black SUV, making our way from the ritzy Back Bay to South Boston, the once-working-class part of town that’s since been overtaken by glass condos and rising rents. “I was special ed in high school — not because I had a learning disability. I was an alcoholic. I was a chronic truant, and in an effort to keep me caught up and engaged, they put me in a special ed room.” These days, he notes, that would never fly, “but back then they didn’t know what to do with me. I got out of high school by the skin of my teeth.”

At 26, he was five years sober, and channeling some of that new free time into booking all-ages matinees at the Rathskeller (better known as the Rat), a local institution known for launching generations of Boston bands; putting out singles and splits on his label, Flat Records; and publishing band interviews in its accompanying zine, Flat Magazine.

Around that time, a fellow bartender who was enrolled at the prestigious Berklee College of Music offered Casey a proposition. “You’re always talking about starting a band,” Casey recalls him saying. “My band has a show in three weeks, I dare you to open for us.” So he took his coworker up on it. “Just out of pride and wanting to win the bet.” 

Casey called up another friend, Joe Koonz, guitarist for the 1980s Cape Cod hardcore band the Freeze, who offered to play drums and teach Casey to play bass. “We had three weeks to come up with a name, so we did the first show under the moniker of the Snots,” Casey says. “Needless to say, had we stuck with that, I probably wouldn’t have just been on public radio with the governor.” But he wasn’t sure of his chops as a singer, so he recruited Mike McColgan, a Gulf War vet and fellow Boston punk, for vocals. 

By their second gig, the band were calling themselves Dropkick Murphys. By the third — opening for a Freeze reunion show — they were playing for a whole room of strangers. Soon, they had an “undeniable buzz,” Casey says, selling 200 copies of their six-song EP, Boys on the Docks, at each show. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones tapped them for tour, and by the middle of 1997, Rancid’s Tim Armstrong had asked them to record an album for his new Epitaph subsidiary. All four members quit their jobs to focus on the band full-time. “I don’t know that everyone thought it was going to be a career, by any means,” Casey says. “We just thought, ‘We’re going to quit our jobs at the same time, and all go back to our jobs at the same time.’” 

It didn’t hurt that the Boston punk scene was thriving. “The Rat at the time — and Boston in general — the mid-Nineties punk scene here was just unbelievable,” Casey says, reeling off local bands they came up with: the Unseen, Showcase Showdown, the Ducky Boys, the Trouble. “We were all drawing more than what you would have thought.” It helped on the road, too: Bands that visited Boston would be virtually guaranteed a packed house, so when Boston bands went to their towns, those bands went out of their way to make sure folks came out.

“At the time, if you started a band and you were from Boston, you had someone waiting to put out your record,” says Lynch. “I remember being at the Rat one time, at a Ducky Boys show, and [singer] Mark [Lind] was like, ‘People were always talking about what it was like to be at CBGBs in the Seventies. Someday, people are going to be talking about the Nineties at the Rat.’ It was like some big, never-ending summer camp.” (Last year, for their 30th anniversary, Dropkicks got a handful of the old bands to reunite, filling out the bills for three nights at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway. “People just fucking loved it,” Casey says.)

Being in Dropkicks, though, was not a vacation. Used to working labor jobs, Casey wanted this new gig to feel real, meaning practice would often start at 7 a.m. “It’s this work ethic thing,” he says. “It’s like, how can I have a job if I’m not doing my job?” The band members could handle it, but the property manager who lived above their first rehearsal spot was less enthusiastic. “He’d get up: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ ‘We practice in the morning because it makes us feel responsible.’ He’s like, ‘No no, that’s why you get in a band, so you don’t have to do that.’ And I’m like, that’s not how we think of being in a band.”

When they weren’t rehearsing, they’d be writing, or helping out in the community, like going to play an acoustic set at a hospital. They made their own merch, pressed their own records, did their own promo. “Being in a band can sometimes feel self-indulgent,” Casey says. But keeping things DIY made it feel like a career. 

Though Casey is the only founding member still in Dropkicks — the others left, he says, largely because they weren’t up for the intense touring schedule — the core group has been pretty steady for the past 20 years. Drummer Matt Kelly joined in 1998, Lynch came on in 2000, guitarist Tim Brennan came on in 2002, and multi-instrumentalist Jeff DaRosa came on in 2007. Rounding out their onstage ensemble are touring bassist Kevin Rheault, who’s been with the band since 2017, and touring bagpiper Campbell Webster, who joined in 2002. From the get-go, bagpipers proved the hardest musicians to keep. “Sometimes the bagpipe [player] that we had might have been in a pipe band at home and had a civil service job,” Casey says. “Sometimes they were just not built to last in a band with seven people.”

But the blend of Celtic music and punk was a surefire hit. Even before they brought in banjos and bagpipes, the musical phrasing hinted at their influences, and fans loved it. Not surprisingly, all the band members cite the Pogues as an influence; singer Shane McGowan even guested on the 2001 track “Good Rats,” about a group of rodents getting drunk at a brewery off-hours. (In November, their cover of the Pogues’ “Body of an American” will appear on the compilation 20th Century Paddy – The Songs of Shane MacGowan.) From the start, blending the two felt natural to Casey: “Celtic music was in my fucking genes, and punk rock was my teenage music of choice.” When he first heard the Pogues, he felt like the band “was genetically engineered for me,” he says. Lynch felt similarly about Dropkicks. “My grandfather played Irish music; my dad played punk rock,” the guitarist tells me. “It’s like I was grown in a petri dish to be in this band.” 

“I DON’T KNOW WHETHER it’s pride, or some kind of neurological disorder, but I want to push a rock up the hill and get it there,” Casey tells me, digging into a cardboard tray of fried clam bellies, sipping a Diet Coke from a waxed paper cup. We’ve made our way to Castle Island, where we sit on a bench, looking over a serene Boston Harbor, where a handful of pissed-off Bostonians once dumped a boatload of tea to protest British taxation. Now a state park, the first fort on this peninsula was established in the 1630s. It functioned as a strategic outpost through World War II, defending the city and the nation from Axis attacks. Casey, however, is talking about the enemy within. 

For the past decade or so, Casey has been a hard voice against Trump, ever since “he fucking came down the escalator.” The band had always been outspoken in a 1990s-punk sort of way, contributing the song “We’ve Got the Power” to the 2004 Fat Wreck Chords comp Rock Against Bush, Vol. 2, covering the union classic “Which Side Are You On?” on their 2001 album Sing Loud, Sing Proud!, beating up any Nazi that dared to come into their pit. But it wasn’t until the modern far-right started coalescing, and Trump used that anti-immigrant, anti-worker momentum to launch his campaign, that Casey’s political rhetoric turned more public. 

Dropkicks’ first moment of this type of virality came earlier in 2015, when then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who’d run for office on his intent to weaken collective bargaining, used “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” as his walkout song for a speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit. Casey was enraged. “Using a Dropkick Murphys song as an intro is like a white supremacist coming out to gangsta rap,” he wrote on Facebook. But it was his tweet that really got people talking. “Please stop using our music in any way,” he wrote, tagging the governor. “We literally hate you!!! Love, Dropkick Murphys.” 

Casey was surprised by how much attention it brought them. “It just goes to show how many of those fucking Republican politicians are so out of touch,” he says, “using the song by someone who does, in fact, literally hate you.”

A few years later, in Clearwater, Florida, they had another moment when Casey called out an audience member in the front row who was wearing a MAGA shirt and hat. “In the name of dialogue and discourse — and I appreciate you being here — would you agree to a friendly wager?” Casey asked from the stage. The man agreed. Casey pulled out a Dropkicks T-shirt, and noted to the crowd that the band only sells merch made by American workers. 

“If you lose the bet, [you] switch shirts. If you win the bet, I give you $100 and the shirt,” he said. “You can’t lose!” The audience member took the bet. Their tour manager checked the tag on the MAGA shirt and shouted up to the stage. “It’s made in Nicaragua!” Casey announced, before giving the guy the band tee and thanking him for being a good sport. 

“Sometimes I feel like being in the band keeps you young. Other times, it’ll make you feel old if you’re not ready.”

Ken Casey

“A lot of people are like, ‘Why are you wasting your breath talking to MAGA?’ I usually don’t, but it was nice to feel like, fuck. I made a point,” he says now. Even better, it gave him a glimmer of hope. “The reaction online shows that deep down in their hearts, the country wants to believe that some element of us can come back together again.” 

Long before phrases like “replacement theory” made their way into mainstream politics, Dropkicks had plenty of experience dealing with people on the far right. Nazi skinheads had been a thing since Britain’s National Front party started recruiting punks with shaved heads in the 1970s. Two decades later, the tradition was still strong in the U.S. Though they weren’t really present in Boston proper — the local anti-Nazi skinhead group FSU, short for Friends Stand United (or Fuck Shit Up, depending on who you ask), would beat up anyone suspected of harboring far-right views, or really “anyone they didn’t know,” Casey jokes — they were definitely an issue on tour. “Our shows would oftentimes be the breeding ground for Nazis coming looking for S.H.A.R.P.s,” or Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice, Casey says, particularly in places like Colorado and Florida. 

He remembers a tour where they had the “bright idea” to bring street hockey sticks and nets on tour. “We were still young and thought, well, in the venues we can have street hockey games after sound check,” he says. The games were largely a punt, but the gear ended up coming in handy for other reasons. One night after a show, as they waited to load into their bus, he says, Nazis started circling the venue. The band sent a roadie out as a decoy, and the Nazis stopped the car, ready to give him a beatdown. “Little did they know, all of us — our crew, whoever we had on tour — were around the other side with hockey sticks,” Casey remembers. “We came running around and smashed all their windows out, and may or may not have hit a few people.”  

While on tour with the British Oi! band the Business in 1998, they were supposed to play a show in Florida, but had to cancel after McColgan quit the band. The Business canceled too, but for another reason: They found out the day before that the venue they were set to play was a white power clubhouse. “So all the bands they had playing are all white power bands,” Casey says. “The fans start showing up for Dropkicks and the Business, and they don’t even tell them we’re not playing. They take the money, [the fans] all come in and it’s all these Nazi bands playing. This kid went back and said, ‘It’s not what I paid for, give me my money back.’” An argument broke out, and the 25-year-old fan was beaten nearly to death, his throat slashed with a broken beer bottle. “What happened wasn’t even fair,” one witness told the Tampa Tribune. “There was nothing I could do. They were all over this guy.” 

Casey wasn’t surprised when he saw these fascist elements start to encroach on non-punk spaces more recently. In 2022, members of the now-defunct neo-Nazi group NSC 131 rolled up to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade with white masks and a banner reading “Keep Boston Irish”; the Nazis later did “a little highlight reel,” as Casey calls it, setting images from the parade to Dropkicks’ song “The Boys Are Back.” “Stop using our song for your little dress up party video. We will SMASH you,” Casey tweeted, before serving the group with a cease and desist. He then sent them an invitation of sorts: “I’ll be down M street park walking my dogs if [y’all] are looking to discuss,” he wrote, referring to a nearby public park, and gave them a date and time. 

“I didn’t want to, in a public forum, say I’ll be down there with a bunch of guys, because then the cops would come,” he tells me. “I had probably 200 guys down there. Friends of mine. The ironworkers sent 40 guys down. Of course, [NSC] never showed up. All these groups, doing their little marches. They’re just fuckin’ nerds. Who thinks khakis and a blue shirt is a threatening outfit?” 

He takes a bite of a french fry. “For the most part, there are no Nazis in the scene,” Casey says. “Nowadays, no one needs to try to convince some young kids with shaved heads to be their foot soldiers. It’s the college campuses now, these nerds that are the young Republicans or whatever — you see their group text leak. They’re the fucking white power people now.” They don’t have the same intimidating look, maybe, “but they’re sure scary at what they’re doing politically.” He sees a fascist takeover that has happened “from the ground up,” from school boards to the presidency. When it comes to Nazis in the punk scene, then, the worry seems almost quaint. “There’s still Nazis in the punk and skinhead scene? Who gives a fuck if there are,” he says. “The president is a fucking Nazi.” 

Being this outspoken about the president, however, has made him a target for MAGA. “No one ever threatened me for speaking out against George Bush,” he says. “A lot of people threaten me for speaking out against Donald Trump.” This only really happens online, he notes. No one is coming up to him on the street to tell them they’ll kill him for what he said or wrote. “I think it’s because, as they’re writing a death threat from their basement on a fake account, so their wife doesn’t know it’s them, they know deep down in their core they’re on the wrong side of history,” he says. “I’m not here to tell people they got to agree with me on politics — what makes America great is a strong two-party system. But that other party is not a political party. That’s a fucking psychotic cult.” 

Casey says that friends have joked with him about whether he plans to run for office. But he has no interest. “I have a distrust of it. I don’t know if I have the patience to deal with people,” he says. “It’s pretty easy to be a spectator with opinions, as opposed to the people trying to actually do it. It makes you realize, like, who that’s really smart and and good would fucking want that job?”

Though the other members of the band noticed him becoming more political, they tend to see that as a good thing, even if it sometimes causes onlookers to walk away during their set, which they say happened at a recent Rocklahoma gig. “We’re so lucky that he’s the mouthpiece,” says Brennan. “There’s a lot of people who have no idea about the political leanings of the band. They’re coming to the show because they know ‘Shipping Up to Boston.’ It was a surprise, apparently, to a lot of people, that we leaned to the left… All of us were like, ‘All right, let’s weed out the people that we don’t really want to be here.’”

What Casey and the other members of Dropkicks can’t quite comprehend is why so few other bands are taking a stand. “Before TV, radio, the internet — a song is how you told the story,” Casey said on the Jim and Margery Show. Meaning, music is how you share your values, your message. “There’s a lot of people that are keeping their heads down,” he tells me. “Bands like us have made the choice to speak out.” 

THE DROPKICKS’ REHEARSAL STUDIO is a massive warehouse space a few blocks from M Street Park that could moonlight as a Dropkicks museum. Walking in, we pass a four-foot plastic Santa Claus, a relic stolen from one of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ annual Christmas shows that famously featured the statuettes. (“I would go in and steal one of them and do ransom videos around town,” Casey says with a smile.) There’s a rack of Dropkicks hockey jerseys, gifts from the minor-league arenas they often play, which he plans to eventually sign and raffle off for charity. There are amps and half stacks and touring crates, a walk-in closet full of LPs and seven-inches, and along the back wall, above a cluttered stage, there are printouts of the track listings for each of the band’s 13 studio albums. “When we’re practicing, we can be like, ‘Oh, let’s try this one.’ I’m not saying we go through all that in any one practice, but throughout the course of practice, we’re trying to be able to pull out any song at any time.”

Casey had to learn to sing a fair amount of those songs solo. About five years ago, Al Barr, who’d been the band’s lead singer since McColgan left in 1998, decided to take an extended break to care for his mother. Casey had been tag-teaming singing responsibilities since a surgery forced him to give up the bass in 2019, but Barr’s exit fully made him the face of the band. “We stay in contact, and I assume he’ll come back,” Casey says. “Then again, if you took me off the road for five years, I ain’t getting back out there.” He laughs. “Sometimes I feel like being in the band keeps you young. Other times, it’ll humble you and make you feel old if you’re not ready.” 

One way that Casey and the rest of the band keep sane amid their relentless tour schedule is the Claddagh Fund, a 501c(3) charity that Casey launched in 2009 as a way to centralize the charity work they were doing, but also keep his hands busy. These days, they raffle guitars or signed merch on tour, or play one-off benefit gigs. DaRosa even ran the Boston Marathon for the Claddagh Fund earlier this year. The money they raise goes to a variety of charities, like South Boston Special Kids, which funds days out for children with disabilities, or Massachusetts Fallen Heroes, which helps support the families of service members who have died in the line of duty. 

A lot of the work, though, has to do with helping people get clean. Casey got sober at 21 — “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired,” he says, quoting an old adage — but others in the scene weren’t so lucky. “Sadly, one of the main things that we needed to get involved with over the years was addiction treatment recovery,” he tells me. I know this for a fact, because an old friend of mine, a former member of one of those Boston bands who came up with Dropkicks, was given an all-expenses-paid trip to a top-tier rehab facility during the pandemic, when his drinking hit a wall. He reached out simply looking for advice, and was immediately told they’d foot the bill. Without their support, he wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Now, thanks to Dropkicks, he’s still sober — and, frankly, still alive. 

Casey has seen a lot of the guys from the old scene need help with booze, but about a decade ago, he began witnessing a terrifying new kind of scourge. “There was a period in my life where I would be at two funerals a week of either friends or children of friends that were dying of overdoses,” he says. “Not always someone who was down and out on their luck. When the fentanyl came, it might have been someone whose child had anxiety and took a Xanax they bought off the street, not knowing what it was.” His own experience as an addict, he adds, shaped his feelings around recovery. “Nobody should die of addiction. But if you’ve gone down that road already, you know what you’re risking. You know you’re rolling the dice. When these people were dying from fentanyl — just kids that might have thought they were taking some party drug — it’s like…  I don’t know. It’s even that much more sad.”

Sobriety has long been a thread in the band’s history. Back in 1996, when Casey had three weeks to put a group together, the first song he wrote was “Barroom Hero.” The opening lines — “Face down in the gutter/Won’t admit defeat/Though his clothes are soiled and black/He’s a big strong man with a child’s mind/Don’t you take his booze away” — are sung as a sort of chant; from there, it jumps pace, rushing through a litany of lyrics that pepper in warnings. “His wife and his kids sing a different tune as they worry ‘bout their daddy dying,” he sings. “Won’t someone please step in.” 

Many listeners didn’t catch the meaning of the song back then. “Ironically, a lot of the lyrics were actually about the troubles that I had,” Casey says. “It’s like I always say, only the Irish can take a song about death and destruction, famine, alcoholism, and raise a glass like it’s an anthem.” 

Even future Dropkicks didn’t pick up on it. “I thought the band was a hard-drinking band,” says DaRosa, a longtime Massachusetts punk whose group the Vigilantes had opened for Dropkicks many times before he joined the band. “Now, as an adult with children, and almost four years of sobriety under my belt, I can look at those lyrics for what they are and really appreciate them.” 

When Kelly was told he made it into Dropkicks, in fact, he worried that he might not be able to keep up. “I’m like, ‘Just one thing, guys. I don’t know if I’m expected to go out and fucking rage and drink with you guys,’” he remembers. “Like, ‘I don’t drink a wicked lot. I can’t drink before I play.’ They’re like, ‘We’re all sober.’ I had no idea.”  

Sobriety became an unspoken undercurrent in the group. “It’s so intrinsically tied to what the band is,” Casey says. The band’s name comes from an old “dry-out” spot run by a former boxing coach by the name of John “Dropkick” Murphy, housed on a farm in the Massachusetts countryside, west of Boston. Many of Murphy’s prospects showed up hooked on alcohol, so he came up with a program to wean his athletes off it, and had taken to paying cab drivers a full out-of-town fare to pick up unsuspecting vagrants. “Guys would be sleeping on Skid Row, and the cabbie would throw them in the back. They wouldn’t want to go there at all,” says Casey. By the time Casey came under the wing of other recovering alcoholics in the 1990s, Murphy was a local legend. “You’d hear guys say, ‘I would have never got sober, but this cabbie snatched me,’” he says. “All the old guys are like, ‘I ended up at Dropkicks.’ I’m like, ‘That’s such a cool name. I’m going to take that.’”

Casey rarely spoke about it in interviews back then, but he made room for others to find sobriety on their own terms. By the time they got to touring in earnest, Dropkicks members and roadies had two options for transportation. “I used to call it the party bus and the family bus,” he says. “It was a combination of sobriety and bringing our kids. Al and I were both sober and had young children at the time, and the other guys just wanted to rage. We’re like, ‘This is the life! Two of us on this one bus, and there’s 12 guys packed on the other.’ As time went on, slowly but surely, guess what? Our bus is more crowded than the other.” 

For Lynch, getting sober has meant being able to set an example for others from the scene who need help, too. “It became, ‘Well if James did it…’” he says. “I love being there for my friends who need that, and need a comfortable place to say, ‘I think I might need help.” 

“All the old guys are like, ‘I ended up at Dropkicks.’ I’m like, ‘That’s such a cool name. I’m going to take that.’”

Ken Casey

THE FINAL STOP ON Ken Casey’s tour of Boston is the Wang Theatre, home to the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame, which is putting on a temporary exhibit called Chimes of Freedom, a look at the history of protest song in the United States. Dropkicks are featured prominently in it, as are Springsteen, Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. 

Dropkicks got hooked up with the Guthrie estate more than 20 years ago, thanks to Cole Quest, Guthrie’s grandson. He was a fan of the band in high school, and introduced their music to his mom, Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter and the president of Woody Guthrie Publications, which owns the rights to his lyrics and music. “Cole was a teenage punk rocker and had a poster on his wall, and one day she said, ‘Who’s the poster?’” Casey says. “He didn’t know his grandfather, but he says, ‘Grandpa would have liked these guys.’” Around 2002, as part of a broader push to revitalize her dad’s catalog — Billy Bragg and Wilco released Mermaid Avenue, a collaboration using Guthrie lyrics, in 1998 — Nora invited the band down to New York, where the archives were housed at the time. Casey got to search through piles of lyrics Guthrie had written but never recorded. “I was just like, ‘Holy shit, I’m holding history,’” he says. 

One of the first sets of lyrics he noticed was called “Shipping Up to Boston.” “My first reaction was, ‘What the fuck?’ Because the other [lyrics] were so deep and thoughtful, and then this is so short and random,’” he says. Lynch had written a riff a while beforehand, which they’d worked into an arrangement, but it had no lyrics to go with it. “We don’t often write music without any lyrical melody,” Casey says. “It was odd that we had this one random song. I just never got around to writing it.” 

There in the Guthrie archives’ temperature-controlled room, holding a yellowing page in gloved hands, Casey knew he’d found it: “I’m a sailor peg, and I’ve lost my leg/Climbing up the topsails, I lost my leg/I’m shipping up to Boston/I’m shipping off to find my wooden leg.” Many of the stanzas came with dates or annotations, but not this one. “Unfortunately, there was nothing, because I’d love to know what ‘Shipping Up to Boston’ is about.”

They tried pairing Guthrie’s lyrics with Lynch’s riff. Because those words were so sparse, it left a buildup between the verse and the chorus. “If I was writing the lyrics of that song, I never would have left all that empty space. I would have been like, ‘We need some words in there.’ But we couldn’t because there were no other words.” Casey says, calling that instrumental gap “the secret of that song’s success.” 

Dropkicks stayed close with the Guthrie estate, eventually putting out two albums, 2022’s This Machine Still Kills Fascists and 2023’s Okemah Rising, both featuring acoustic songs using Guthrie’s lyrics, recorded during the same sessions at the Church Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the archives are now housed.

We walk over to the section of the exhibit dedicated to Springsteen (the exhibit was produced in partnership with the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music at Monmouth University). Casey tells me that he met the singer thanks to another teenage punk fan: Springsteen’s eldest son, Evan. Casey had heard rumors that Evan, then attending Boston College, was a Dropkicks fan. Then, one night, backstage at a Dropkicks gig in New York, the band got a visitor. 

Almost two decades later, Springsteen still remembers the show. “It was just this incredible, chaotic, shambolic, inspirational, wild sort of experience,” he tells me. “They were a great live band, and they had an audience that invested themselves in the band in a way I felt my audience had invested themselves in me. I felt a good deal of commonality with them.” 

Springsteen and Casey quickly hit it off. A few years later, he recorded parts from the road for their song “Rose Tattoo,” which Dropkicks worked into a version of the track on a charity album. In 2020, when the world shut down, Dropkicks livestreamed a concert from Fenway Park, and Bruce remotely joined that, too.

“Ken is a guy who fundamentally believes that if you have a platform, you have some cultural obligation to use it in some socially positive fashion,” Springsteen continues. “We are living through such awful times — the dismantling of American democracy in front of our eyes, while everybody simply seems to be asleep at the wheel.” Casey and his band, he says, are very much awake. “He just has a level of authenticity that really resonates. He’s a lovely guy, and the band are great guys, one of the few groups out there at this moment who are willing to step in front and talk about what’s going on.” 

Casey points me back to the Dropkicks section of the exhibit, where a monitor plays the video for “Who Will Stand With Us?” It starts with a wall of “missing” posters, then cuts to the band playing over a montage of people in Boston being bagged with black hoods and kidnapped by an unknown force. “This [came out] right before ICE really started the campaign of snatching people out of the street,” Casey says. “We were just saying your freedoms are getting snatched. And then it started to have this realer-than-life vibe to it.”

When a band makes any sort of change, that can provoke a negative response from fans. “When it comes to punk rock, it doesn’t matter how you get successful — if you get successful, you’re gonna get hate,” Casey observes. Dropkicks have dealt with their share of backlash on this level, punks seeing them play a World Series game or standing onstage with Springsteen and writing them off as sellouts. In theory, Casey points out, one could see the fact that they never signed to a major label, and never really got radio play, as proof that they weren’t. In the end, it’s been their pivot back to their punk roots — to telling an unjust government to fuck off — that has brought old fans back around.

“It’s bringing a new energy to the shows,” Lynch says. “Anytime it feels like things are about to plateau for us, something comes up and gives us a little bump. It’s new life again, out of nowhere. It feels exciting. It feels alive. It feels dangerous. It feels like doing something.” 

They might not have started as an overtly political band, he says, but the drive to fight injustice was always at its center. These days, as they play benefits for the AFL-CIO, or stump for Troy Jackson in Maine or Brian Poindexter in Ohio — whom Casey describes as “an ironworker running for Congress to try and unseat that shitbag Max Miller” — it’s the natural extension of the values that have been with them since the first EP. 

“You know how they say the acorn has the whole tree in there, and we’re just waiting for the right causes and conditions for it to become what it’s going to be? The Dropkicks have been what they are since day one,” Lynch says. “Causes and conditions have come together in such a way that the band is now everything that it was ever supposed to be.”