Magazine: Flogging Molly -Part 2 – The Band

Flogging Molly – The Band

Flogging Molly is a seven piece band which came together almost twenty years ago in a bar in Los Angles, California. They play a brand of music which is sometimes referred to as punk, sometimes rock but always Irish. However, if you take time to listen to Dave King’s lyrics, you quickly realise that the message extends far beyond the Emerald Isle…
Grapevine Live sent photographer Tony Bell along to talk to the band’s banjo player, Bob Schmidt, backstage before their show at the UEA in Norwich.

Tony: Dave King is the only Irish born member of the band, is it the power of his lyrics and his personality that makes Flogging Molly an Irish band or have you all got Irish connections?
Bob: A lot of us have Irish connections, but I’m not one of those people who claims to be Irish because my Grandmother was Irish or whatever. To me, to want to claim something that you are not for a silly reason of being included in a group is just… you might as well be Republican or Democrat or Tory or whatever.
I appreciate Irish culture, I love the Irish people and I have a great time when I’m there but I’m American – that’s just how the ball rolls. But I don’t think it really matters where we are from. We all got into this band because we loved the music Dave was writing. He could have been writing Chechen folk songs or whatever and if that’s what turned us on and got us together then that’s what turned us on and got us together.
Everything else was by the wayside. Dave’s writing was what inspired all of us to go and see him and want to play with him and it all took off from there. Once all of us got into the band it then had seven people’s influences, likes and dislikes, get into the mix – it becomes a lot more convoluted at this point.
I think Dave’s voice; his writing voice is distinctively Irish. He has that same poetic voice of Beckett and Shaw and Behan – he has that style of writing. I’m not gonna try and elevate him to that level but for me, he’s as good as it gets.   Where we go musically, the instrumentation helps to a certain point, but where we go musically or anything else is secondary to the lyric line which to me is distinctively Irish.
Tony: Is it fair to say that Flogging Molly revolves around Dave?
Bob: He is the epicentre of what brought us all together so on like a social level I think we are all just more like atoms bouncing off inside of a molecule. Everyone rises and falls at different rates, we are very different people and yet we are all bound by the same thing – that thing that drew us all together.   His lyrics are the centre point for all of the music, so in a sense yes, in a musical band sense absolutely but in a social, friendly sense I think everyone’s pretty equal.
Tony: Tobacco Island is a wonderful example of a rock number that morphs seamlessly into an Irish reel.
Bob: Oh yeah – and that’s all over the place and as we’ve gone further and further we’ve just run out of Irish things to rip off! There is a finite amount of Irish traditional music and only so many allow themselves to be torn apart in a rock environment – you start going and going and going and the list is getting thinner and thinner and at some point you just gotta say: all right, we just not gonna do that anymore.
Tony: After the Austin City Limits gig I hear Dave & Bridget being interviewed and Dave described The Dubliners as “original punk” which many would find strange. (http://itsthedubliners.com/welcome.htm)
Bob: They were as in your face as it got back then, they were not shying away from anything they just didn’t have the same growl or ferocity but the passion and the spirit was certainly there. There was a vast divide between the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners and that’s what makes the Dubliners what they are. It’s more about that classification, people want to pigeon hole music but the entire music industry does that too. It’s a natural human instinct to relate people to this and that by something they relate to and if that’s punk or Celtic or whatever, they grab that label and apply it to whatever it applies.
But the same thing happens with genres – I was reading a Brian Eno article the other day where he was talking about “ambient” music and when he created it, it was a completely free flowing, evolving thing. Now ambients got beats and drums and the techno aspects of it and he was saying that, well that’s not ambient to me but whatever floats your boat. If that’s what gets you interested in music then that’s great. And the same thing happened with punk – people associate punk with fast doo kah, doo kah, doo kah but when you listen to the old Sex Pistols albums or The Dammed or the Actics, those are slow albums – the Sex Pistols is practically classic rock by todays comparisons. So what is it that makes something punk? If you really think about it it’s that spirit of not giving a shit what anybody else thinks about what you are saying and that’s what the real punk ethic is and that’s why the Dubliners and Johnny Cash and… and… Chaucer, all these guys – it doesn’t get more punk than that just laying out the reality of the social situation of your time. Flogging Molly sing about and we play about what we see in the world at any given time or what we see in the world through reading something.
Tony: Seeing Flogging Molly play live is an amazing experience for the fans. This is day four of the UK tour, then you are off to Germany, then back to the UK then radio shows in the US before Christmas do you ever tire of generating all that energy?
Bob: The day to day of it yes, absolutely. We are all away from our kids and our wives and we live in a bus and sleep in coffins on the road and get our guts rattled to death by the road every night and yeah, all of that, after ten, fifteen years of doing it you get weary of it, but of the show, never.
If it wasn’t for the show, we wouldn’t do it. Being able to connect with people on that level, to be able to share that kind of passion and that degree of passion with people every night is a gift, and it’s a privilege to be able to do that. That’s what makes all the other mundane and gruelling aspects of it do-able
Tony: You have a big following in Croatia. That strikes me as odd place for a group with traditional Irish roots to have a fan base.
Bob: You would think, yes. The first time we went there we sold out like a 2,000 seat outdoor thing – we’d never been anywhere near there – I think the closest we’d gotten was Greece before that.
I can’t explain why, except for the fact that I think they relate to hearing a song that’s real, about what’s really happening , not having it to be so much of a history lesson or a socio political lesson but a lesson about how people are, how we relate to each other. There’s just not that many acts out there that are talking about how people inter-relate and the importance of that.
Tony: The acts singing the protest songs, who sing about things we should be doing something about, are few and far between today.   The angry young men like Dylan and Seager are not about any more – would you see Flogging Molly filling that void?
Bob: There are bands like Anti Flag that are doing it but when it becomes a purely political statement it has a tendency to really polarise people and really turn people either on or off about it. Although with this occupy Wall Street thing it’s something we thought about, like “why don’t we go down there and play” and to me that is not quite a political thing it’s more of a social thing where people just feel wronged by what people have gotten away with, it’s an injustice thing.
But I think when you talk about the relationships of people to these things, how it effects your life and your family’s’ and your loved ones and stuff there is something about that that galvanises people into a community. That’s what I feel our shows and our fans are all about. A community of people who feel passionately about the connections they have with the people around them.
Tony: I’ve been at a Flogging Molly show where, on the edge of the mosh I got whacked in the back. I was amused on turning around that the pierced, Mohawk topped punk who’d bumped into me couldn’t stop apologising – there was no aggravation, he was just having a good time.
Bob: That’s one of the things I’ve always noticed about our crowd. I’ve been to shows where the energy in the pit is just angry and destructive but the energy at our place, yes the pit is going ape shit crazy down there, but people are always reaching down and helping people up.
Nobody’s trying to deck anybody, nobody’s tying to flatten anybody, they are there to let it out and have a good time and if somebody goes down everybody reaches down and gets them back up and that to me is what that’s all about – you get your aggression out, you build up a good sweat, you can jump up and down and have a great time. As soon as you stop caring about the other people around you it’s not fun for anybody.
Tony: Flogging Molly don’t produce albums to a schedule, they come out when you are ready.
Bob: Yes, but the timeline still presses on you.
Tony: You now have your own label; does that help ease any of that pressure?
Bob: No. Because the machine is the machine. The reason we started the label is so that we could own our music. When you put all this work into something… the music industry is kind of like a backwards car dealer – you borrow money from a label to make an album, you pay them back and they still own the album. It’s like you borrow money from the bank to buy this car and you pay them back but they still own the car. It doesn’t happen like that in the real world, it’s only the record industry – to me it’s always been a backwards model. With owning our own label, we put all the money up, we sell it and we own it. This will be the first album where all that creative energy we put into it is ours, we don’t have to buy it back from anybody.