“I was a high school dropout type of guy,” he says. Luckily, neither Ken nor I cared much about high school sports and, as Ken puts it, he wasn’t much into high school itself, either.

Maybe they’d suck, maybe they’d be great-but, oh my God-they’d all have dreams of playing Great Woods or the Worcester Centrum, and opening for a future band like Dropkick Murphys someday.Īlso Read Pretty Good Year: My Top Stories of 2022 And, finally, if you yourself weren’t starting a garage band, the kid down the street was, and so was his cousin, and they’d all cover Aerosmith’s “Dream On” and Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” and surely the Standells’ “Dirty Water” would find its way in there somewhere. Whereas if you were in New York, there’s probably a little more anonymity to life.”īack then, you simply accepted that no one, literally no one you knew acknowledged an esoteric “r” in a sentence, and if they did they were nerds or from-Lord help us-“out of state.” You also accepted that you or someone you knew well, very well, both boys and girls, would end up in a fistfight, usually on school property and usually on lunch break while onlookers gnawed on white-bread Flutternutter sandwiches. It’s such a small big city that everyone knows each other. “I always felt like I had a ton of friends and things to do and places to go. I was an only child, and I never felt alone,” Ken tells us. There are a few things you accept when you’re raised in the Boston area, which Ken and I both were. This Celtic punk band formed originally in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1996 is as Irish-Boston as they come, defined by their shit-kicking special brew of passion and sentimentality, even when they’re singing about getting drunk or punching you in the face. Or maybe, quite possibly, the Dropkick Murphys are the most Boston thing ever: their accents, their influences, their continued devotion to community, defined by undying loyalty and a heart as complex and intricate as a Boston downtown cobblestoned street map. It’s all the same freaking road, which may very well be the most Boston thing ever.

But our high schools were, less than eight miles apart or about 20 minutes away-if you take 93 South, Route 1 South, 95 North or Route 128, as the locals still call it.

Leaked dropkick murphys albums