Let’s start by dispelling the myths. Although Dropkick Murphys is a Boston-based band, its members are not first generation Irish immigrants scrapping their way through the slums of South Boston.

“I think there’s definitely a lot of romanticism about that,” said lead singer Al Barr. “I mean, I read it all the time: ‘These Irish working class guys from Southie …’ There’s nobody in the band from Southie. We’ve never claimed that. We’re a New England punk band with Irish music and folk influences.”

Barr, who has been Dropkick’s front man for just shy of a decade, represents much of what is false about the Dropkick ethos—and much of what is very genuine about the band’s unlikely climb to stardom. He is not Irish; he’s Scottish-German. And, although he’s been playing music in Boston for a couple of decades, he’s called Portsmouth home since 1977.

“As I always say in every interview, I’m the non-Irishman, the non-Bostonian,” Barr said.

Since joining the band in 1998, Barr has seen Dropkick Murphys explode in a miniature mushroom cloud over New England, with smoke that has wisped across the nation and world. The band gained exposure in an unusual way. While many rock bands do whatever they can to garner the slightest bit of publicity and receive next to none, Dropkick has received a slew of publicity without seeking any. The band got its first big break in 2004, when executives from the Boston Red Sox asked the musicians to rework an old Broadway tune called “Tessie,” which was popular during the first ever World Series in 1903. The song Dropkick recorded as a result became the anthem of the Red Sox’ epic 2004 World Series run, making the punk rockers instant darlings of just about every Beantown faithful.

The band’s fame received another adrenaline shot last year, when Martin Scorsese included the Dropkick song “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” in his Oscar-winning 2006 film, “The Departed.” Set in South Boston, the movie unwinds a gruesome tale about the Irish mafia, full of conniving betrayals and brutal murders. According to Barr, Scorsese’s longtime friend Robbie Robertson, former guitarist for The Band, told the director he knew a song that would be perfect for the film’s soundtrack. Off of Dropkick’s 2005 album, “The Warrior’s Code,” “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” featured prominently in the star-studded blockbuster.

It seemed like a natural fit, as if Scorsese plugged a simple equation into a calculator: Boston + Irish + violence = Dropkick Murphys. But Barr thinks the band’s reputation as a bunch of Irish miscreants from the sordid underbelly of Boston has been overblown.

“It’s so funny how people get wrapped up in this whole kind of romantic imagery, like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are in our band or some shit like that,” he said. “That isn’t the case.”

Dropkick Murphys released its sixth studio album, “The Meanest of Times,” last month. Album sales have been soaring and national tours have come close to selling out, but Barr still thinks of Dropkick as a smalltime punk band that happened to get a couple of big breaks. None of the band members ever expected to attract a mainstream audience.

“Doing the Red Sox thing was an amazing experience, but with ‘The Departed’ thing, it’s just gone to another level,” he said. “We weren’t ever writing to be in a movie, it just happened. That’s a feather in our cap and it’s a great thing that happened and it’s something we can always look back on with pride, but it isn’t what drives us. It isn’t what drives our vehicle.”

Having lived in Portsmouth for three decades, Barr has not allowed his musical success to skew his sense of reality. As he chatted with The Wire at Café Kilim on Islington Street on a recent afternoon, only a couple of customers acknowledged him. As Barr posed for photos in front of the café, a man asked him if Dropkick was playing in town. “No, I live here,” Barr said, chuckling at the fan’s surprise.

Although his full sleeve tattoos, sharp features and gravelly voice can cast a menacing figure, Barr is thoughtful, articulate, intelligent and friendly. Like other veterans of the local music scene, he laments the downfall of the Elvis Room and Portsmouth’s ongoing transformation into a yuppie Mecca.

“There’s really no venues around here anymore, especially after the Elvis Room shut down. I think this place really needs a shot in the arm with that, for sure—not another Starbucks, but a friggin’ proper music venue,” he said.

Barr’s musical career began in the early 1980s, when he was 15 years old. In the latter part of the decade, he formed legendary Seacoast punk band The Bruisers, who remained a staple of the Boston area punk scene for about 10 years. By the late 1990s, he felt it was time to move on. He was married and hoping to have children, and his lousy day jobs were beginning to grate on him.

Dropkick Murphys originated as a four-piece act in 1996 and spent its first couple of years gigging around the Boston punk circuit. Bassist and founding member Ken Casey found himself in search of a new vocalist after original lead singer Mike McColgan left the band in 1998. Having shared bills with The Bruisers, Casey was familiar with Barr’s growling vocal style. He called Barr and asked him to sit in for a few songs that spring. Within two weeks, Barr was recording with a new band. His first single with Dropkick, “Curse of a Fallen Soul,” was recorded in May 1998.

It was not until 2000, as Dropkick was recording “Sing Loud, Sing Proud,” that Celtic influences began to feature prominently in the music. Many of the band members had grown up listening to the Irish folk records their parents played, but implementing these childhood memories into their hardcore sound was not easy.

“We always really believed that if you’re gonna do something in the studio and you can’t recreate it live, it’s kind of cheap. So we didn’t really blow the roof off of the whole Celtic influence until we did ‘Sing Loud, Sing Proud,’ when we actually found kids in the scene that could play accordions, mandolins, tin whistles, bagpipes,” Barr said. “With the ‘Sing Loud, Sing Proud’ album, we found people in the punk scene that play those instruments, so we were able to do that full bore.”

The band’s modified style created a number of challenges, both in the studio and in live settings. The instrumentalists had to figure out how to mike the bagpipes, accordions and tin whistles in live shows, and maintain their raw punk ferocity while embracing Irish folk traditions.

The new style also presented challenges for Barr as a singer. Whereas he was accustomed to singing punk rock rooted in the blues vein, in which the vocals sit within the beat, the Celtic style demanded that he sing slightly ahead of the beat. It took some getting used to, but Barr has now performed well over 1,000 shows with Dropkick Murphys and written countless songs. Although he was recently diagnosed with a paralyzed vocal chord and must rest his voice on days of shows, he feels at home singing with Dropkick.

Combining punk and Celtic elements in a way that worked in the studio was another matter. At first, there was a noticeable division between the punk songs and the folk numbers. Typically, Barr and Casey write the lyrics, while the other instrumentalists (Tim Brennan on mandolin, banjo, accordion, tin whistle and acoustic guitar; Marc Orrell on guitar, banjo and accordion; Matt Kelly on drums; James Lynch on guitar; and Scruffy Wallace on bagpipes) focus on the melodies. Fusing the two styles successfully is something that Barr does not feel the band fully achieved until its most recent album.

“With this record, I really felt like we were baking the Celtic and the punk in one cake. There wasn’t as much separation,” he said. “I think the veracity is mixed right in with the folk on each song.”

“The Meanest of Times” stands out as a crowning achievement for the Dropkick crew, which has honed its skills and defined its style. The band left its previous label, Hellcat Records, and released the new album on its own label, Born & Bred Records. Most people wouldn’t think of bagpipes and accordion as hardcore instruments, but Dropkick seems to pull it off. Voracious from start to finish, the album has few dull points, and the volume of Barr’s balls-to-the-walls singing is never turned down.
The lyrics are entertaining and, if you take the time to analyze them, insightful. The chorus to the first song, “Famous For Nothing,” features typically violent but clever lines: “Their gang went my way for basketball / My gang went their way for alcohol / When we met it wasn’t pretty at all / Still the bells of St. Mary’s kept ringing.” 

According to Barr, Casey wrote the lyrics about high school turf wars in his hometown, where wandering into the wrong neighborhood could earn you a bruising. But the chorus creates a striking contrast: In the midst of a violent brawl, church bells are ringing. Looking deeper, the image of a fight unfolding in the shadow of a church can be seen to mirror the Catholic church’s violent history, Barr observed.

In a way, the dichotomy of the lyrics has parallels to the band’s image. Although the words are often stark and despondent (the song “Vices and Virtues” includes the lines, “One died from the whiskey / And another in the war / One died by suicide / And the last one by the gun”), the band members stand up for what they believe.

Barr spoke of an incident when Dropkick was scheduled to perform in Pittsburgh during Warped Tour. The local stagehands in Pittsburgh were on strike and were picketing outside the concert venue. As members of the musicians’ union, the Dropkick gang chose to support the stagehands and initially refused to play at the venue. But, the union leaders encouraged them to take the stage wearing T-shirts advertising the strikers’ cause. A brawl nearly erupted when a “scab” grabbed hold of Casey’s shirt, but the band members ultimately took the stage and informed the audience of the stagehands’ plight. They later learned that the strikers had succeeded and gone back to work.

Barr does not believe it’s the band’s job to preach to audiences or educate fans. “People aren’t stupid. They see right through that shit,” he said. He also realizes that many diehard punk fans might accuse Dropkick Murphys of selling out or going mainstream to become popular. But, he says, it is the punk rock industry—and not the band—that has changed.

“It’s now a cog in the wheel of the music industry, whereas before it was something that was just supposed to repulse everything. Punk rock, in its inception, was always something that was supposed to be small. What it’s become now, I ain’t complaining about, because I make a living at it, but it isn’t what it was,” he said.

Barr spoke longingly of the punk days of old, long before fans could go to the mall and buy T-shirts advertising their favorite punk bands (including Dropkick Murphys).

“I saw fuckin’ bands with 20 other kids, and that was a huge punk rock show. When you walked home at night, and you’d wonder if you were gonna get home without getting your head kicked in by a bunch of guys in a pickup truck because you had a Mohawk. That’s what it was like when I was growing up,” he said.

Although the scope of punk rock has grown exponentially, Barr believes Dropkick is keeping the essence of punk music alive by recognizing that the band members are no better than anyone else. (Oxymoronic as it may seem, Barr seems to take sizeable pride in his own modesty.) Bruce Springsteen recently attended a Dropkick show in New York, and Barr remembers contrasting Springsteen’s immense stardom with his own comparatively humble notoriety.

“If I wasn’t doing music, I’d be working in a kitchen. I’d be doing whatever I could do so I could play music, if I wasn’t making a living off of music,” he said. “I never lose sight of that. The minute you do lose sight of those sorts of things, if you’re doing what you think is punk music, you’ve lost the plot. You might as well just hang it up.”

No matter how well “The Meanest of Times” and other studio discs sell, Dropkick Murphys still considers live shows its forte. Barr acknowledges that people go to his shows to be entertained and to escape the rigors of daily life. It’s incumbent upon him and the rest of the band to deliver.

“They paid their fuckin’ money, they want a show, you’re gonna give ’em a fucking show,” he said. “And, when you get that 100-fold at a show, you could be having the worst fucking day of your life, but you can shelf all that.”

When the crowd is responsive, it’s easy for the band to maintain its intensity.

“As soon as you hear people chanting for you before you go onstage—people do this ‘Let’s go Murphys’ cheer—and once you get onstage and you see people’s faces just come alive when they see you, they’re so excited and they’re singing every word that you’ve written back at you … I mean, does it get any better than that?” Barr asked. “That’s the kind of validation that anybody in music wants.”