A massive bus-like limousine carrying 100 revelers tore through Austin, Texas on St. Patrick’s Day three years ago. Onboard, the members of Black Irish Texas were being carted from pub gig to pub gig, with a slew of their closest friends and an unlimited supply of Guinness Stout and Jameson Irish Whiskey in tow. The representative from Jameson, the sponsor for this party on wheels, was the first to go home.
“She drank too much and hit her head on the bus,” James Fitzsimmons said, only slightly muffling his laughs. “She was fine but I think she went to the hospital.”
Fitzsimmons is the 28-year old singer, guitarist and principal songwriter of Black Irish Texas, a hard-swinging, floor-kicking, whiskey-fueled Irish rock band. And, though the banjo, the booze, and the mischief are all there, do not mistake this crew for your average Irish drinking band.
For starters, Black Irish Texas cut its teeth in Austin, a city as cutthroat as it is cutting edge in the music world. And the 5-member band has not only survived there but flourished.
“We kill it there actually, man,” Fitzsimmons said. “We play the biggest venues. When I was a kid, that was my dream. We do that stuff all the time now.”
They’ve played iconic Austin clubs like Stubb’s and Antone’s and have shared the stage with Flogging Molly and the Dropkick Murphys, feats that are far out of reach for even the most lovable Irish cover band.
Fitzsimmons didn’t set out to start an Irish band. He grew up partially in Huntington Beach and, in the heydey of ska and reggae, moved to Austin to start a rocksteady band.
“I had a trombone player, Buddy Shively,” Fitzsimmons said. “But, well…he ended up being a lot better at the banjo than he was at the trombone.”
Shively’s instrumental shortcoming turned out to be fortuitous.
“We started playing Irish songs I grew up on,” Fitzsimmons said. “Since I was in diapers, I was listening to IRA music. The Clancy Brothers and Dubliners and the rest.”
Though Shively didn’t stick around for long, his impact did. Fitzsimmons found his groove once he tapped back into the songs of his childhood.
“For me, these were the songs I’d been singing along to my whole life,” he said. “Luckily, I found probably the only other couple of people in Austin that also grew up doing this stuff.”
Those people were fiddler Mark Maughmer II, drummer James Sheeron and upright bassist Shannon McMillan, all core members of today’s Black Irish Texas. The final piece is banjoist Chad Fitzsimmons, James’ younger brother, who just moved to Austin from Los Angeles last year to join the band.
“Chad was still in LA when we were writing songs for the album,” Fitzsimmons said. “So he started writing songs and playing them for me over the internet. I went back and arranged them with the band. When he came out to Austin, we played them together for the first time and they became our songs.”
The frontman talks about his little brother with unabashed pride.
“He is quite the little prodigy,” Fitzsimmons said. “He is a virtuoso on about ten instruments and he has been quite the songwriter lately.”
Jameson Irish Whiskey fully funded the band’s debut album “To Hell With the King” and the aforementioned St. Patty’s Day debauchery after a chance meeting between a Jameson rep and Black Irish Texas barflies. These guys just tap into something.
Fitzsimmons attributes the band’s success to its widespread appeal.
“Our demographic is really whoever. We’re really lucky that way,” he said. “We had a set up in Washington last week and we had a night off that we didn’t want. And we ended up playing for this awesome group of older people.”
“We throw a party that people respond to. There are a lot of rock, hip hop, and punk roots in our music. We try to pull people from all of those roots if we can.”
Black Irish Texas brings their party to the beach Friday night at 8pm at South Bay Customs, 115 Penn Street, El Segundo. LA band Black Diamond Strings will also be performing. Tickets are $6 and are available online at www.southbaycustoms.net.
