An interview with Dennis Casey
by Jason Walsh
photos by Jez Beasley
The city of Detroit was a once thriving manufacturing powerhouse, home to the “Big Three” in the automobile industry, Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors. A large percentage of the city’s workforce was employed by these three industrial giants until the economy plummeted. Chrysler declared bankruptcy and was bought by Fiat, General Motors filed Chapter 13 as well and was bailed out by the Federal Government, and Ford remains on life support. The people of Detroit have not fared well over the last few years and their once proud community lies in ruins.
Dave King and his wife, Bridget Regan, from Flogging Molly moved to Detroit prior to the recession. It was Regan’s hometown and the newlyweds watched as the city crumbled around them. When the time came to write the latest Flogging Molly record, the band came together at King and Regan’s home in the former Motor City, drawing inspiration from their surroundings. “Speed of Darkness” is the band’s fifth studio release, with stories and observations about the struggles of not only Detroit, but the entire world. The record’s first single, “Don’t Shut ’Em Down” is a battle cry for the blue-collar worker, in a time when they need a pat on the back.
I had a chance to speak with guitarist Dennis Casey about the new album and his experience in the city, as well as the band striking out on their own with their new label, “Borstal Beat Records.”
So tell me about the new record.
Casey: Well, it was recorded in Asheville, North Carolina and in El Paso, Texas. It’s called “Speed of Darkness.” What else can I tell you about it?
A lot of this record revolves around Detroit. Tell me about the Detroit influences.
Casey: Well, Dave, our singer who writes the lyrics and the majority of the songs, moved to Michigan with his wife, Bridget (Regan) who plays the fiddle. So, they have a house in Detroit and they bought this house a couple years ago and then the economy collapsed. Dave was very moved by what he saw, living in Detroit and seeing the effects of an economy collapsing has on a city like Detroit, which is pretty much a blue-collar city. He was inspired by that but he was also inspired by home because Ireland started having their fair share of problems as well.
On the record, you guys have a lot of songs that are talking about basically what everyone has been going through for the past couple years. Detroit is kind of like the model of what’s going on all over but just on a larger scale, and then you talk about Ireland. I mean you’ve got a lot of songs on here that talk about the perspective of what’s going on in the world right now.
Casey: Yeah, Dave actually said “it’s a record I had to write, it’s not a record I wanted to write.” I was of the same mind, I was like “how come nobody else is singing about this stuff, nobody’s writing about it?” I thought I’d hear more about it, but now I am. But for a while there, I was like “Jesus, isn’t anybody going to write about this, talk about this.” There’s a lot of people out there that are in a bad way, and as you know, lost their jobs, lost their homes.
I have family that live outside of Detroit in Kalamazoo and I go up there a couple times a year, and just seeing, even on the outskirts of the city, just how bad things are. But then again, you go around the country, I mean you guys travel a lot and go to different cities, and you can see the breakdown all over country over the last few years.
Casey: Yeah, we as the band got together in Dave’s basement in Detroit and we actually wrote and rehearsed the record there, so we spent a lot of time in Detroit and I’ve never spent that much time there. We did like three different writing sessions, each session was about two weeks, and I have to say, I’ve never seen any city quite like Detroit. It’s very unique unto itself, how it’s all spread out and it was just pockets of areas that are thriving somewhat and then there’s pockets of areas where it’s just completely run down, houses are boarded up, buildings abandoned. The city is so spread out. I didn’t realize how far and wide Detroit was. It just keeps going. I’ve never seen, in all my travels, a city quite like that.
That had to be a big influence on you guys being in that environment, and a lot of the tones of the songs being about that city and what’s going on there. What did you take away from your experience being up there?
Casey: The way things get destroyed, at the speed of which things get destroyed, like the train station there. We took a band photo there. We all thought that would be a great idea, because we were going to call the album “Speed of Darkness.” It just shows this beautiful structure that’s probably 50-60 years old, is in complete ruins, completely abandoned, completely destroyed, vandalized, and you look at this mammoth structure that’s just sitting there, not being used, and I just walk away with my head in my hands, just like “how can this happen? How can this be?” This is the richest country in the world supposedly. And this building, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Detroit train station, it’s beautiful, it’s like 25 stories high and just mammoth, and it’s done, it’s gone. It’s just sitting there, and that’s the other thing, they just leave things sitting there. But I will say this, there’s been a lot of artists moving into Detroit. I did notice that, because it is so affordable and artists usually don’t make a lot of money. What they’re talking of doing is just getting rid of a lot of the houses. There’s just a lot of houses that are sitting there abandoned, nobody knows who owns them, can’t find who does own them, and there’s talks of just leveling the houses and planting gardens so people can grow food. I think like that’s a solution. These are things that I’ve taken away from spending all that time there.
And that’s the thing. When you have a community that’s been demolished, how do you make the best of it? And like I said, a lot of themes I’ve seen on these songs are talking about resilience in the face of hardship. And you know, how do you overcome, when you’ve come all the way to the bottom?
Casey: Right. The one thing I will say and the other thing I noticed, it’s all coming to me as we talk (laughs) is that there is a lot of local community pride and ambition to keep things going, to build the city up again. And the people, almost all the stores I went into advertised “locally grown food” or “locally made clothes.” They really pride themselves in keeping businesses local. You know, they have breweries there, we’d go out to bars and the bars carried the local brews. I think that’s the sense of pride and perseverance that is still prevalent there among people that live there. It was really inspiring for me, because like you were saying, this is a city that, I mean I don’t know what a bottom is for a city, but it’s certainly not thriving and doing well. It’s in a transitional phase and it’s taking people that are living there and sticking it out, putting their hard-earned money and time and effort into making the best of it. I guess my hope is that it will flourish in a different way. It will be a different city, it won’t be this big automobile manufacturing city.
It sounds like you were definitely moved by your experiences there.
Casey: Yeah. It’s like you can’t not be. You’re spending all that time there, you know you go out to the pubs and the bars and talk to people. It’s just all around you. When you drive, you know we would drive, we didn’t stay close to where Dave’s house is so we had a fairly long commute and we’d go through neighborhoods and you just get a sense of it. You can’t not be moved by it.
Let’s talk about the record. There’s some great songs on there. I’ve had the chance to listen to it a couple of times. I’m really happy to hear what I heard, and you know, it’s not a your typical Flogging Molly record, but then again, what is a typical Flogging Molly record? You guys have always kind of evolved to different things through the course of years you’ve been doing this.
Casey: Yeah, I’m stealing your quote. I’m going to use that one, it’s a good one (laughs). It’s not a typical Flogging Molly record because what is a typical Flogging Molly record. Yeah, we always try to expand our comfort zone or challenge ourselves, because we’re a band of seven very different people that come from very different places and we’re different ages, different sexes, and completely different backgrounds and there’s a lot of musical influences in that and this band. It’s going to take a long time to exhaust them all. Having said that, it’s never a conscious decision to decide how you are going to maybe play on a song. For me it’s just, Dave plays it and whatever comes to me comes to me and I think playing in the band for almost 15 years now, it lends itself to that. We’ve just grown so much closer as a band, all the touring we do and the time we spend together. There’s just a sense of each other and what we do is get in a room and just do what you do. It’s not really that mathematical or thought out, so to speak. We tend to make different sounding records because we’ve also been doing it for 15 years. It’s no fun to make the same record over and over. I can’t imagine doing that.
When you guys first come together and start working on new material like this, is that still exciting for you? Is that a favorite part of doing this or more a labor of love?
Casey: I don’t really have like a favorite part about being…well, I think playing on stage for an hour-and-a-half or two hours is probably my favorite part. But I will say that, we don’t do it enough, make records, so I think it’s real burst of creativity and energy when we do, and I do think that’s another reason why the records maybe sound different. We tour so much, it’s hard for us to be in the studio as much as maybe we’d like to, maybe three years in between records. Personally, I just have a ton of ideas, bursting at the seams of all this music that you want to get out so I like the process. It is…don’t get me wrong, it’s not always easy. Sometimes it’s super easy, it takes like a half hour to write a song with the whole band, sometimes it takes a couple days.
One of the songs on there I noticed, “The Power’s Out,” it felt like you were channeling some Delta Blues on that one.
Casey: Yeah, actually that’s one of the one’s I’m most proud of because it is a song that has that Delta Blues but it’s got this traditional Irish part to it as well and I think we pulled it off, I mean if I say so myself. It isn’t like that it doesn’t sound like it fits, it fits perfectly and it sounds good and I think that just like kicked a whole new door open for Flogging Molly. I think it just turned into that. Dave is a very sparse guitar player so his songs are really open to interpretation.
Now you guys had been on Side One Dummy records for a long time. What made you to decide to start your own label, Borstal Beat Records?
Casey: It goes back to being in the band for almost 15 years and we were with Side One I think for 13, and we decided that it was maybe time to try and stand on our own and see what happens. I mean this could be a complete flop or failure, we don’t know, but we just thought it would be nice to try and go on our own. With the music business changing like it has, it seems like the right thing to do. We’d also like to maybe sign some our bands that we like, some of our friends, and then bring them out on tour with us, which we did with Side One quite a bit, brought along a lot of Side One bands, so we just thought why don’t we do this for ourselves.
And that’s a good thing. You’re creating your own home, but then somewhere that other people you admire, a home for them as well.
Casey: Yeah, because we all know, well everybody in the band knows, how hard it is to just get a tour, to be in a band that can tour, to get your foot in the door maybe for something like that is so hard, so very hard for so many bands, and how great would that be to offer that to someone. I mean I think that inspires us a lot.
The record comes out the end of May. For the rest of the year, it looks like you guys are booked here, then overseas, then back here, then over there. You guys are going to be doing a lot of touring and a lot of traveling.
Casey: Well, I’m on tour right now and we’ll finish up at the end of the week, take a couple weeks off, and go back and do a tour when the record comes out of the West Coast and then we’re going to head right over to Europe for the whole month of June. July, regroup again, then July we’re going to do more touring in the U.S. Then August, I think we go back to Europe and then, uh, you can just go back and forth with that. We’re going to be on tour now for a couple years. That’s what happens when you put a record out and that’s basically what we’re going to be doing.
