Boiled in Lead to perform at Mississippi Waterfront in Bemidji

BEMIDJI — Legendary Minnesota Celt-folk-punk band is set to perform at 6 p.m. Wednesday, July 16, in Bemidji as part of the Mississippi Music concert series.

Before their show, founder Drew Miller joined KAXE producer Andrew Dziengel to discuss the band’s 40-plus year history.

Edited for length and clarity.

Drew Miller: So Boiled in Lead is 42 and a half years old, and I've been to all the gigs. Started in 1983. [The] first gig was playing eighth out of 12 bands in a punk rock bar now demolished for a parking lot called the Upper Deck. And it's kept evolving from there, I guess is the short answer. And here we are with the show tonight by the waterfront.

Andrew Dziengel: So what interested you in Celtic folk in the first place?

DM: I started hearing the music, and it just grabbed me. Ancient music of all kinds, music from all over the world. It grabbed me. I don't know what to say other than that the thing that makes a piece of traditional music, something that the band's going to do, is that it's got some fire in it. It's got some juice. It's often got sex or death, and same with the instrumentals. ... There's something that we can't really describe that grabs us, and it's something that we want to play in a rock band format.

AD: Did it seem like an easy fit having the punk influence on that sound?

DM: It seemed normal to us. I mean on the second album Hot Heads, there's a very kind of hackneyed pub song called “The Gypsy Rover.” (singing) The Gypsy Rover went over the hill. ... And we decided to play it very fast, very punk rock, and I think we used a circular saw and the toilet on that one. So, each tune is different. Each tune kind of gets what it deserves or needs.

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Boiled in Lead

AD: So, you have a couple new members performing with you these days. How has that changed the direction of the band?

DM: Every time the band personnel changes, it changes its sound, but it still feels like Boiled in Lead to me. We've got Todd Menton on guitar, vocals, tin whistle, and Todd and I have been together for many, many years. He joined on the second album, Hot Heads, where we did the pub song with the circular saw.

Then on drums we got Morris Engle. Mo and I also play together in a rockabilly band called Kinda Fonda Wanda, and in that context, we kind of figured out we have that almost telepathic bass player and drummer linkage, where we can raise an eyebrow and the music will change, or he'll stop and I'll stop. I mean, there's always kind of an improvisational aspect to the way the music happens

Then on violin, we've got Haley Olsen, who is a colleague of Todd's from the Center for Irish Music in Minneapolis, and she and Todd lock together on the ornamentation of the Irish tunes really well. So, we've got these two telepathic duos operating in full force.

AD: On your website, you mentioned that with this new band, you made radical rearrangements of the song, and I was wondering for you, what was that like revisiting the old songs and making a new sound out of them?

DM: It's good. I like it. Each piece is different. We approach each piece of music on its own, and I realized that I had a very set way of playing something. I was able to think about it differently and play it differently.

Teaching all these tunes to Morris on the drums. I mean, his background is in rock and roll, and he'd never played this kind of stuff before. So I said, “Are you crazy enough to play Balkan music in 15?” He said. “Well, yes, I am.” (laughs)

So, some tunes I'm kind of locked into the way I played them before, and other tunes I really welcome the ability to try to find different ways to do it. This four-piece doesn't have a rhythm guitar, so that frees me up more to play whatever bass part I want to, rather than having to be locked into the chord structure of any particular song or tune.

AD: Since the band has been going for 40-plus years, has there been anything that you have noticed has gotten easier? Has anything gotten more difficult? Has there been any changes you've noticed throughout the years?

DM: Well, all the technology has changed. Everything has changed, and no, it's not easier today. We're kind of a four-person operation. We have people that work with us, but having to generate the image, having to do your own TikToks, which we're not on. The amount of content that you have to produce that isn't the actual music is huge, and there are only 24 hours in a day. So, it is difficult.

We're working up to the release of a new record called King of the Dogwoods that will be out this fall. We have a record release show in October, and I was able to do a number of overdubs here in my house, but also, just the tech of releasing it is even more complicated and complex. It's good that I was able to do the live record couple of years ago, so I'm more up to speed with all the different things that have to be done to self-released music in a professional way.

I guess the other thing now too, is that it's so much more difficult to make an impact. In the '80s and '90s, that was the era of paper fanzines and actual thoughtful reviews of music rather than 5-second takes on whatever it is. This band has a lot of aspects to it, and that doesn't really fit with the times.

AD: Did you ever get nervous before shows, and do you still, to this day, still have the butterflies in the stomach before going on stage?

DM: I'm most nervous when I'm not there yet. Once I get my equipment set up and I know that I'm producing sounds, then I get relaxed. I don't like being late. What's the phrase? “Being on time is being late.” I like to show up early with enough time to be able to set up in a relaxed way and deal with whatever problems there are. But once we're playing, it's my happy place.

AD: How can people keep up to date on news updates for Boiled in Lead?

DM: Boiledinlead.com. We're on Facebook. Probably the best thing is to follow us on Facebook because pretty much everything we do gets a tag there. We've got some good shows coming up. We're playing in Madison next weekend, and we're also playing a trio show at the Trempealeau Hotel.

We'll be playing as a trio for the Minnesota Irish Fair in August, and then we'll have that record release show in October. There'll be a lot of things coming out. We'll be doing an Indiegogo to pre-order for the album and hopefully get a video out for the lead track, which is called “King of the Dogwoods.”

AD: You'll be performing at the Mississippi waterfront tonight at 6 p.m. What can we expect at the show tonight?

DM: Well, loud things and quiet things. Traditional things and original things. For example, the song we're going to play is called “Bold Lovell.” It's a different version of the song “Whiskey in the Jar,” which Metallica and Thin Lizzy covered. It's an Irish traditional song, but this is a different version of it. Same story where a thief gets captured by the cops because the woman that he's hanging out with filled his pistols up with water, so he was unable to shoot the cops. So these traditional stories of sex and crime and passion and death, that's what keep us going.

We even have a song called “Hard Times” about the assassination of the President of the United States. That was McKinley. That was in [1901]. When McKinley was shot, there were songs that documented the event, and they went all over the country. In fact, we do two different versions of the song. One is called “Hard Times” the other is called “White House Blues,” so there's a fast and a slow version of that [song].

[We’re] not a band that's easy to describe. It's not a band that's easy to fit into genre boxes. We refuse to do that. We go all over the place. That's our joy.

In between sets, come on up. Say hi. It's ethnomusicology that has loud guitars.

Here is a link to their latest album.