O'Malley's March (Dirty Linen, 2001)

Well, Mayor O'Malley did leave his band, eventually. Can't say what ever happened to him after that.

From Dirty Linen #93 (Apr/May '01)

O’Malley’s March

Featuring His Honor,
the Mayor of Baltimore

by Pamela Murray Winters

The club is hazy, especially around the stage, where green-lit smoke billows down on the band. The front man has his muscle-T on. He’s got the shortest hair on the stage, and a choirboy face, but he can pogo and duckwalk like some unholy combo of Chuck Berry and Joey Ramone. He even strums his six-string behind his head. It’s a hell of a spectacle, and the music’s not bad, either. He’s got his dream gig, opening for Shane McGowan and the Popes, but some of this happy, staggering throng is here to see him, not some ex-Pogue.

After the first number, panting slightly, he tells the crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, my mother and father raised me with three ambitions. Number 1, to serve my country. Number 2, to be a faithful and loving husband and father. Number 3, to open for Shane McGowan.” He’s three for three tonight.

Ladies and gentlemen, the youngest-ever mayor of Maryland’s largest city, a family man, and a kick-ass musician: Martin O’Malley.

A native of Rockville, Maryland, Martin O’Malley has been playing Irish and Irish-based music for 20 of his 36 years. He started performing in junior year of high school, at Washington, D.C., venues like Ireland’s Own, the Four Provinces, and the legendary, now-defunct Matt Kane’s. “When I got into music,” he said, “there must have been seven full-time Irish bars and only about four full-time Irish bands” in the Washington area, so his band, Shannon Tide, got a lot of work.

Somehow, O’Malley managed to combine music with legal studies and politics. He worked on Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign, graduated from Catholic University and the University of Maryland School of Law, and became Baltimore’s Assistant States Attorney in 1988. That same year, he formed a trio, playing “Planxty-type music” with uilleann piper Paul Levin, known then and now as “the Piper of Pikesville.” (Pikesville is a largely Jewish Baltimore neighborhood; O’Malley noted that folks outside the band’s hometown miss the joke.) Levin had become interested in Irish culture in college and traces his own musical career to a trip to Ireland after grad school: “I picked up Planxty’s black album [Planxty (Shanachie, 1973)] on that trip and have been trying to play the music since. It’s a good thing I didn’t know how hard the pipes were going to be to learn, otherwise... Anyway, as Liam O’Flynn’s playing was so effortlessly compelling, I had to try.”

The band’s sound broadened and deepened over the ensuing decade with the addition of new members. “Jamie Wilson, our drummer, keeps it going,” said Levin, “and our electric guitar player, Ralph Reinoldi, adds a lot. He learned my repertoire practically overnight; now he and I trade tunes all the time.” The current lineup is rounded out by bass player Bob Baum and harper/trombonist Jared Denhard.

“The drums, electric guitar, and horn section have let us put more kick and drive in what we do,” Levin noted. Further, O’Malley has become more active in bringing new songs to the band: “Martin has more and more written his own material from out of the Irish-American experience and his response to Irish history.”

O’Malley emphasized that his perspective is Irish-American, not Irish. “My great-grandfather came from Ireland,” O’Malley said. His most recent composition, “Farewell Clonbur,” commemorates the Irish town from which his great-grandfather emigrated. He’s been to Ireland four times, most recently last September with a group of local politicians on Aer Lingus’ inaugural direct flight from Baltimore to Dublin.

The city that O’Malley now helms has strong Irish roots, O’Malley observed. “It’s not as Irish as it once was, when it had Irish enclaves. But in the 1840s, Baltimore was second only to New York in Irish immigration.” In 1827, the nation’s first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, started from the city’s Mount Clare Station. Many Irish immigrants who intended to go West came through Baltimore, and a good number of them stayed.

But Baltimoreans of all origins are loyal to their hometown band, and O’Malley’s election in 1999 has led to more eclectic bookings. “His high profile, and the way he has been so warmly received by the people in the area,” Levin said, “has increased both the size of the audiences that show up at any gig, as well as the types of gigs we have been offered. In this past year, we played two remarkable, sold-out shows with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, opened for the Chieftains and Los Lobos at Pier 6, opened Artscape in front of Patti LaBelle, and played to a great crowd at the 9:30 Club in front of Shane MacGowan.” (At 9:30, when Levin introduced a Turlough O’Carolan tune, someone in the crowd shouted a request. O’Malley replied: “I’m not gonna do ‘Dirty Old Town’—are you frickin’ kidding? Blasphemy!”)

But the City Hall gig has its downside, O’Malley noted. “Being mayor has cut down on opportunities to practice and play.” It’s difficult for him to play bars these days: “If a bar [that O’Malley’s March plays] should do some questionable advertising, the neighborhood association will call to complain that I’ve played that bar.

“One of the things you give up when you’re elected to a high-up office is your alone time. That’s when you typically write stuff. I’ve struggled with this. I wrote ‘Farewell Clonbur’ only because I had a day by myself — I wrote the song outside Queensbridge Housing Project in New York, working the polls [campaigning] for my little brother.”

O’Malley’s March closes the 9:30 set with the closer of the band’s second album, Wait for Me: “Song for Justice.” In his classically Irish tenor, O’Malley croons: “If the nations of the world can rise, so genocide will cease / Can’t we hope that in our lifetimes that Ireland will know peace?” O’Malley is proud of “Song for Justice,” calling it “the most significant thing I’ve done in politics” – besides seeing Baltimore’s notorious murder rate drop 13% over the first year of his administration.

If O’Malley is forced to choose between music and politics, he’ll be leaving the band that bears his name. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be able to keep playing, because of the demands of his office. “But that’s part of the suspense,” he grins.