There’s are two shows this year – one on March 14th, and one on March 17th as well.
Both shows are being held at La Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street.
Buy tickets for the March 14th show here.
Buy tickets for the March 17th show here.
Joe Hurley has been hosting the Irish Rock Revue (with a cast of thousands) in New York for years now, and this coming year will be the 10th annual event.
I’ve seen Joe Hurley perform (at the Losers Lounge Queen Tribute, where he rocked the house with “Fat Bottomed Girls” as though he were to the Freddie-Mercury-born) and I’ve also had the pleasure of singing a medley of songs with him from Oliver in the middle of the day outside a Wall Street Bar on Bloomsday in 2002. Impromptu. His voice is a mix of Tom Waits and, well, Ron Moody. Mixed in with a little Joe Strummer. Boy is a force of nature. Not to be missed.
His band, Rogue’s March, have been together for years now – an emotional and jagged mixture of punk and Irish traditional music (and yeah, with a little “oom pah pah” mixed in there – Joe Hurley is obsessed with the musical Oliver, and why shouldn’t he be, I ask you?) – and you can keep up to date with all of their shenanigans at their website. You know, concerts with the Chieftains and all that.
When I met Joe Hurley, I was sitting in a crowd of crazy Irish people on a sidewalk outside a bar in downtown New York, wearing an eyepatch (in honor of James Joyce), and I was shouting out lines from Molly Bloom’s final monologue in Ulysses at the top of my lungs (and I wasn’t the only one), and I was also drunk at 2 in the afternoon (and I wasn’t the only one in that, either). The “Oliver” sing-along that began soon thereafter was spontaneous, and spearheaded by Hurley – but supported enthusiastically by myself. Other people took up the choruses, but we were the only two who knew the words to, well, everything. Oh, Betsy, if only you had been there. When I burst out in a low bass, all on my own, “Kniiiiives …. knives to grind … aneeeeee knives to gri-ind …” I thought Joe Hurley’s head would explode. I got a high-five from him when I began “Where Is Love”. I didn’t even know him as “Joe Hurley (TM)” at that point – I had no idea who he was or his reputation – all I knew knew was: “Holy shit someone’s as big a nerd as I am!”
It was only years later that I saw him onstage at the Bowery Ballroom, howling out “Fat-Bottomed Girls” as plump drag queens wearing flamingo-pink outfits bicycled around the stage throwing footballs back and forth, that I put it all together. But my response, from the balcony of Bowery Ballroom, was not, “Wow, that’s a big star.” My response was, “Oh my God! That’s that Oliver nerd!!”
This past November, I got an email out of the blue from a Joe Hurley. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I opened it, and there was a Mr. Hurley, saying, basically, that he remembered the chick in the eyepatch from 7 years ago … who loved Oliver … and he tracked me down to tell me his band, Rogue’s March, was doing an Oliver tribute for his birthday at Joe’s Pub, and would I like to come. Of course, he found me through my blog, this post in particular, not to mention asking everyone who was there that day if they knew me and could find me. November was the darkest month of all. I couldn’t go to his show at Joe’s Pub, but it did make me laugh to remember that long ago Bloomsday, sitting on a picnic table surrounded by the canyons of Wall Street, not even a year after September 11th, wearing an eyepatch, and singing “It’s a fine fine life” with this crazy-haired perfect stranger who knew all the words. That took some ingenuity to track me down. We didn’t even know each other’s names!
Anyway, the Irish Rock Revue is now a New York tradition, and I’m finally going, thanks be to God.
It’s being held on two nights this year: March 14, and March 17. Proceeds go to a couple of good causes (Gilda’s Club and the Humane Society), and it looks to be a couple of massive parties. He has guest artists come and sing, people from Broadway, Irish novelists who live in town, poets, performance artists … I can’t wait!
Joe Hurley was just featured in the Irish Echo, there’s a lot of great information about him there – but I also wanted to get the word out to my fellow New Yorkers (and New Jersey-ians and, I suppose, Connecticut-ians) about the Irish Rock Revue, because it’s going to be a helluva show.
