Blaring of the green
The crowd at the ever-secretive Spy Bar slowly filters in as
members of The Shannanighans drag equipment through
the back door. Rick Yogis, singer and drummer, sips a Guinness at the bar as he
waits for the band’s PA to arrive; it’s still tied up from the band’s earlier
acoustic show at O’Callaghan’s. During acoustic sets, the group’s swagger and
overwhelmingly punk sound can’t help but yield to its more traditional Irish
elements. Tonight, though, they plug in and the floor shakes, evoking a packed Dublin bar in the shadow of HighFalls.
In the past, both punk and Irish music have addressed the
problems of the day, such as alcoholism, poverty and unemployment. So it’s only
fitting that The Shannanighans don’t shy away from Rochester’s own troubles.
“12 Horse River,” a track on the band’s forthcoming Ale’s What’s Good for You, for example, deals bluntly with the
causes and casualties of youth violence in our area.
“It’s the truth
about Rochester.
We have such a great city here. The violence is just dragging it down, and
unfortunately it happens every fucking night,” says Yogis. “I remember
listening to the playback [while recording the song], and I was actually
crying, it actually brought me to tears.”
The tune is a dirge that Yogis calls “kind of
uncharacteristic. We’re not a slow band. If anything I’d say we play too fast.”
Tonight’s concert is no exception, as the band flies through standards like
“Finnegan’s Wake” and “Seven Drunken Nights”at a rapid, north-bound pace.
The Shannanighans are NickCostanzo
on guitar, OJ Sandgren on bass, Stinky Burton doing
backup vocals, fiddler Nate Kishman, and Karl Heberger on mandolin and guitar. Rick Yogis, “Tom Foolery”
himself, fills out lead vocal duties from behind the kit. About half went to
high school in Rochester, while the rest are
upstate New Yorkers drawn by college and work to the FlowerCity.
The band’s Rochester
pride comes through in the lyrics and at live shows, where the crowd-audience
relationship devolves into essentially a pub session.
“So many people I know trash talk this city up one side and
down the other. But I don’t seem them leaving. There’s something that’s keeping
them here,” says Yogis.
Though social issues factor into the group’s approach, the
“political” label doesn’t really fit the band. “I don’t think we’re very
political, so to speak. I certainly write songs about what pisses me off,” says
Yogis. Before the last election the band was angry enough to set up a “RockesterAgainst Bush” concert,
the proceeds from which went to the Voters’ League.
Ultimately, “I think we’re more of a party band,” Yogis
admits, recounting the Shannanighans’ first show, a
St. Patrick’s Day gig at Maddy’s. “Just the band,
five of us at the time; we racked up a $300 bar bill. [The owner] waived it,
and we got paid on top of it.”
The “party band”‘s working-class
attitude comes through in topics like Guinness (“it’s my favorite”), pub
culture (“you always see someone you know”), and Rochester’s Spirit of Ontario
(“way too big of a ferry-o”), all of which provide fodder for sing-a-long shows
and rowdy crowd participation at locals like the Bug Jar and Monty’s. With
Yogis stuck hitting the skins and the other four instrumentalists keeping up
with double-time Irish melodies, the band’s stage presence falls largely on one
man: Stinky.
“He says he’s had it since he’s been in third grade,” says
Yogis, referring to Stinky’s pungent nickname. At
each show Stinky stands, positioned at the bow of the stage, one hand on the
microphone, the other pumping syllables of gang vocals into the crowd, moshing even into friends and acquaintances lining the
front of the band.
“He does backups and gets the crowd riled up,” says Yogis.
“Kind of like the dancing guy in the [Mighty Mighty] Bosstones.”
On the band’s ode the fast ferry, Stinky sings the lead,
documenting the trials and tribulations that faced Rochester’s favorite mistake, and evensuggesting that perhaps “the men in charge were on the drink.”
Yogis
puts together the band’s
arrangements and commonly incorporates traditional Irish motifs into the punk
rock context of the music. He says that Irish purists tend to be “kind of
snooty about it for some reason.” But people are becoming more and more
welcoming of Irish-influenced punk.
“In America
today there’s a resurgence of this whole Irish pride. It’s cool to be Irish,” says Yogis, himself of Irish descent. He
emphasizes the word “cool,” highlighting his distaste for the possible gimmicks
and fronts that might come from being associated with the whole Irish trend.
“We don’t tailor our music to that,” says Costanzo, the band’s guitar player. “We’re not out to be
labeled an Irish band at all.” Like most of the band, Costanzo
earned his chops doing punk and mentions one of the band’s side projects, a
Misfits cover band that comes together around Halloween.
Groups like The Misfits, Bad Religion and NOFX remain heavy
influences on The Shannanighans, but so are
Irish-punk acts like the Dropkick Murphy’s and The Pogues.
In fact, the band pays tribute to the latter two groups at the TheShannanighans’ now annual St.
Patrick’s Day show at Monty’s Krown.
“Two years ago we covered all of the
Murphy’s’ Do or Die, and last year we
did Rum Sodomy and the Lash,” Yogis
says.
The band’s name comes from typical teenage study hall boredom at FairportHigh School.
“In high school we always used to come up with funny band names. We always
thought it would be a great name for a ska band,”
Yogis says. The unorthodox spelling, stemming from a slapdash phonetic attempt,
just stuck.
Misspellings and all, the group remains steadfastly relaxed;
its members seem more concerned with having a good time with friends than
making it big.
“We’re all pretty much established. We love playing big
shows, little shows. If some national band wants to play with
us, if we can do it, yeah. If not at least we can say we had the
opportunity,” Yogis says.
The group draws widely from Rochester’s various bar
and music scenes. “They’re pretty diverse in age and music taste,” says Costanzo of the band’s fanbase,
citing gigs like a self-promoted “Punk Rock Picnic” at Genesee Valley Park that
are as much about community as music.
The band has found Rochester
to be a great place for its old-country sense of camaraderie. And the members’
optimism in the face of Rochester’s
declining jobs and higher-than-average crime rate is refreshing. Rochester, an
underdog city at odds with the 21st century, is still a place where, Yogis
points out, “you can drive 15 minutes in any direction and be in some beautiful
fucking country” — country that doesn’t look so different in the character of
its people and the problems they face than that of Ireland. Plus, it’s a great
place to grab a beer.
“Some of the friendliest places I’ve been in the whole
world, some of the friendliest pubs, have been right here in Rochester,” Yogis says.
Tom Foolery and the Shannanighans will release a new album, Ale’s What’s Good for You, early this
fall. Visit www.myspace.com/tomfooleryandtheshannanighans
for information on upcoming shows.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2006.
