Album Notes

Black 47 Review by Joel Brown Friday, March 11, 2005 Good news for those planning to celebrate St. Patrick's Day with Irish-American rockers Black 47 at the Middle East on Sunday. The New York band's new album is the catchiest, most accessible thing it has made in ages. It is not as insular and literary as 2004's ``New York Town,'' even though it's the companion album to bandleader Larry Kirwan's new memoir, ``Green Suede Shoes.'' It's first and foremost a collection of excellent songs. ``Far Side of the Wall'' is a melodic hymn to ``bleary days,'' ``blazin' years'' and ``breakin' through'' - like a Springsteen lyric, but with pipes as well as sax and Stratocaster. ``Downtown Baghdad Blues'' is a gritty soldier's lament that dares to rhyme ``land of Giuliani'' with ``Ayatollah Sistani.'' ``Elvis Murphy'' tells of young Larry's rock 'n' roll awakening. And the potent ``Liverpool Fantasy'' imagines the thoughts that might have boiled in John Lennon's brain if he'd never made it out of the old neighborhood (the subject of Kirwan's 2003 novel of the same name). The album is drenched in Kirwan's obsessions: New York, politics, Ireland's struggles, the immigrant experience, boozing, rock as liberation. His passionate bray does put off some. But for those who love this scrappy band, the new album is an excellent early St. Pat's present. http://theedge.bostonherald.com/discReviews/view.bg?articleid=592 St. Patrick's Day 2005: Chapters and Verse Black 47 front man Larry Kirwan can now add memoirist to a list of titles that include poet, playwright and novelist. In memoir, Black 47's Kirwan traces an immigrant's journey Benjamin Franklin once said, "Either write things worth reading or do things worth the writing." To write one's own life story, both of these criteria must be fulfilled. For those who pick up "Green Suede Shoes: An Irish American Odyssey" (Thunder's Mouth Press), the new memoir by Larry Kirwan, best known as the lead singer and guitarist for the rock 'n' roll band Black 47, Kirwan proves worthy on both accounts. "Green Suede Shoes," which Kirkus Reviews calls a "lively narrative," follows Kirwan through his many travels, triumphs and travails: his upbringing in "cozy" yet "narrow-minded" County Wexford; his baptism into the world of sex (a young lass sitting on his lap), drugs (a bottle of Harp) and rock 'n' roll (Wexford's Elvis Murphy) in the backroom of the Catholic Young Men's Society; his immigration to New York City and subsequent discovery of the "cauldron of varying and competing lifestyles" of the Lower East Side; and the countless stories of over 25 years in the music business. If that doesn't seem like enough to keep you busy, Kirwan's writing inspired a new Black 47 album, titled "Elvis Murphy's Green Suede Shoes," that comes out on St. Patrick's Day as well. Each chapter of the book in fact begins with the lyrics to a Black 47 song. When Kirwan couldn't find a song in the band's back catalogue that fit a chapter, he decided to write a new one. Ironically, the songs of Black 47 were suppose to be the inspiration for the story of his life, but, as Kirwan found out, art doesn't always imitate life. "My editor suggested setting a memoir around the songs of Black 47," Kirwan said recently. "But while some of the songs are autobiographical, others are more fictional, so that using the songs at the beginning of each chapter became more expressionistic." In the end, the songs came to serve as poetic introductions to the essence of each chapter of the book. Despite the different realities represented by the songs and the book, for Kirwan the stimulus to write each is the same. "You can turn an original thought into a song, a book or a play; it's just a different way of looking at it," he said. "A song is about condensing one impression into a three-minute shard, but with prose you have to look at the big picture and let the story flow outward." No matter