Larry Kirwan has left his pugnacious punk band Black 47 behind him, but with Donald Trump about to enter the White House, he has only begun to fight.
Kirwan came armed with his acoustic guitar to Cafe Nine Sunday, and revved up a packed late-afternoon, early-evening crowd with the spirit of resistance for hard times to come.
For a quarter century Kirwan made anthemic, power-chord driven political punk rock suffused with traditional Irish music with Black 47. He has now embarked on a solo career.
Approaching the latter years of his seventh decade, Kirwan hasn’t lost the will to shout, stomp ,and strum with abandon in the name of “the working man.” Onstage alone for most of the set at Cafe Nine, he could clearly still hear, in his head, the drums pounding, the bass thumping, and electric guitars wailing around him. And we could hear them too, filling in silences, driving the rhythm, or emerging from the distortion on Kirwan’s guitar.
A longtime collaborator from these parts, SNL R&B frontwoman “Beehive Queen” Christine Ohlman, joined him onstage to set the tone with a rendition of Stephen Foster’s classic “Hard Times.” (Click on the video at the top of the story to watch them perform it.)
Hard times are indeed back, Kirwan, a native of Wexford, Ireland, reminded the crowd in between songs. “I grew up with [Conservative Prime Ministers] Major and Thatcher,” he said. Transplanted to the United States, he sang out against the Iraq wars of both Bush presidencies as lead singer of the Big Apple-based Black 47, unapologetic about his socialist views and Irish Republican leanings.
“Things got a little quiet” for eight years under President Obama, Kirwan noted. Now it’s time to kick back up the volume, in a tradition of working-class resistance that goes back centuries.
He told tales and performed songs about descendants of 17th century Irish slaves known as “redlegs” whom he tracked down in Barbados; about the Irish immigrants who integrated the African-American “Five Points” section of New York in the mid-19th century and, with their intermarriages, scandalized the proper uptown Protestants.
It all came to a climax, thematically and musically, when Kirwan sang “James Connolly,” a tribute to the Marxist Irish Republican union leader who toured the world before he was killed by a firing squad for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising.
“My name is James Connolly, I didn’t come here to die,” he sang, “But to fight for the rights of the working man, the small farmer too / Protect the proletariat from the bosses and their screws / So hold on to your rifles, boys, don’t give up your dreams / Of a republic for the workin’ class, economic liberty, economic liberty.”
Along the way, Kirwan had that moment common in touring musicians who play Cafe Nine: that realization that this isn’t just any bar.
“This,” Kirwan informed the crowd, “is one of the great live music places in the country.”
Kirwan closed by inviting friends onstage to help him sing Black 47’s rousing “Funky Céilí,” the group’s breakout hit. The crowd in Cafe Nine joined in with gusto. Even in hard times, joy isn’t hard to find.