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Intrepid Rock Journalism: ShamRock Fest

Note: This article appears in the March 12 edition Fredericksburg's bastion of news and information, The Free Lance-Star. This marks the first time in my intrepid rock journalism career where I devoted multiple paragraphs to beer. Enjoy:

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This St. Patrick’s Day, all you need is some music, beer and 35,000 of your closest friends.

With more bands, more green and plenty of age-appropriate beverages, the ninth annual Shamrock Fest in Washington promises to be the biggest St. Pat’s celebration in the area. The one-day festival will be held this Saturday at the Metro-accessible RFK Stadium in downtown D.C.

“[Shamrock Fest] is probably the best Irish entertainment lineup in the country,” said event coordinator Mike Harrigan.

The festival will feature a cavalcade of Celtic-inspired entertainment throughout the day, from the melodic riffs of Carbon Leaf to the more traditional Irish music of the D.C. Fire Department’s Pipes and Drums Band.

Besides Irish music, Shamrock Fest will also host DJs spinning dance music, a carnival-style “sideshow,” Irish dancing, pub games, rides and a myriad of other attractions.

“It’s an overload for your senses,” Harrigan said, who added that 100 kegs of green-colored beer will be on hand just in case someone gets thirsty.

Headlining the show will be Irish rock stalwarts Flogging Molly, who return to the festival after appearing in 2007. Bob Schmidt, the group’s mandolin and banjo player, said that the band is able to bring the raucous fun of an intimate bar show to the big festival stage—with a little help

“I think at places like Shamrock Fest it’s a lot easier because there’s already an enormous amount of booze involved, which is probably the main ingredient to bringing the pub feeling to a large crowd,” Schmidt said. “By the time we get to them, they’re pretty well pickled. They’ve been drinking since noon.”

Since coming together at Molly Malone’s pub in Los Angeles in the late ’90s, Flogging Molly has risen to prominence with foot-pounding anthems and an earth-shaking live show as their calling card. While Schmidt said that Irish music by its nature is brimming with energy, he also feels lucky to have an energetic and supportive fan base at their concerts.

“They feed all this energy into us,” Schmidt said. “We’re able to play our songs, and it excites them, and their energy is contagious to us—it’s that communication going back and forth that keeps whipping everything into that higher and higher level of frenzy.”

Many bands at Shamrock Fest advertise themselves as high-octane live performers, including The Pubcrawlers, a Celtic punk band from Portland, Maine. Making their third appearance at the festival, the group integrates traditional music from across the Celtic landscape with aggressive rock elements, combining guitar and drums with tin whistle, fiddle and a bagpipe.

“The music itself is very fun, is very melodic, is very sing-along, and when you add the punk element to it, it just kind of naturally makes it very energetic,” said the group’s drummer “Andy Pubcrawler,” who added that many bands in his area take their band’s moniker as a quasi-last name.

Like many bands of their ilk, The Pubcrawlers also invite the audience to participate with the traditional call-and-response—in other words, encouraging the audience to give a timely shout or to sing along with the band.

“You throw that stuff in, and no one needs to know the words—they know when the “heys” and the “hoys” are coming, and everybody is singing along and chanting along,” Pubcrawler said. He added that when listeners don’t sing along, “I’ve been known to drag people up onstage and make them.”

Beyond the drinking and the shouting, Shamrock Fest, though, is more than just a day-long concert. Amidst the shared economic troubles, the festival is a celebration, a coming together to hear Irish music, which, in all of its forms, calls the listener to make the best of hard times.

In fact, Schmidt said that creating a sense of community—a sense of “we’re all in this together”—is ultimately what Flogging Molly tries to do on stage.

“Let’s forget about the hard stuff for a little while and remember that what you feel right now—with all these people around you who love the same things that you love—is what will get you through,” Schmidt said. [Click Here to Read More]