March 15th, the date of the 2009 St. Patrick's Day Parade, was a crazy day for us. Playing gigs each night that week, we felt like fish flies trying to suck the argon gas from a neon light, or maybe we felt like the ones that used to clot on the surveillance camera lens at the Tipperary pub where we'd started out three and a half years ago. Much of the time you couldn't tell if anything was being stolen or broken in that parking lot.

There were a lot of drunks watching us down at the Gaelic League on Michigan Avenue that day. Drunks roving in packs, confident, celebratory, tourists in their own metropolis. During our early set, just before we were scheduled to meet with Jared and his Single Barrel crew, one drunk tripped over a monitor in front of the stage and crashed into our accordion player, Steve. Steve was already exhausted and cranky from so many hours of playing. During our practice that morning he had been eating Lindberger cheese and swilling vodka from a ceramic coffee cup labeled "Justice," refusing to play his accordion, instead keeping the beat with a set of castanets he'd stolen from a flamenco dancer at a Spanish restaurant in Canton, of all places. When the fellow finally ambled up from the stage where he had fallen, really just a huge plywood board crudely nailed to a frame of two-by-fours, Steve slugged him in the back. With expensive instruments in our hands, the last thing we wanted was some musclehead coming up there swinging. Luckily the guy's girlfriend (a young woman of about 21 who had a conspicuously good suntan for Michigan in middle March) managed to pry him away from where he stood in a single-finger salute to Steve.

I'm not much for bravado; neither is our bass player, Eric; neither is our banjo player, Tim; ditto Steve (despite the aforementioned altercation, which I can assure you was isolated). Our mandolin player, Matt Baleek, on the other hand, wouldn't shut up about the incident for the rest of the set. After each song he'd start in, "That so-and-so [and I paraprhase]. He's lucky that girl dragged him out of here before I had time to set down my mando and jack his jaw." There were quite a few more expletives involved, but you get the idea.

At about 5:00, after the first set was done and we finally hooked up with the Single Barrel crew in front of the Gaelic League, everyone was a bit unnerved. We had to be back by seven to play our late set, and Tim and I were wondering aloud how we were going to eat with the filming going on. Whiskey on an empty stomach, as has been well-documented by men and women with greater resumes than myself, is rough.

We stood next to the wall of Sam's Exchange, a pawnshop with gaudy dollar signs painted on a background of yellow brick, and strummed a fast and angry version of Billy Bragg's "Power in a Union." Steve's with the SEIU and if you can't get away with the sentiment in Detroit, the trouble's worse than we may think. Despite our pissy moods, we truly appreciated inclusion in Single Barrel's project, and playing The Pogues' "Boys from the County Down" we started to forget our hunger; even Matt's pugilistic impulses seemed to be spent in the world of the songs.

Walking east through Corktown, I sang "Dirty Old Town" and remembered why we learned five hours' worth of tunes to play in the pub. It wasn't so the taps would keep pouring while people beat pint glasses on tables during the choruses of "Whiskey in the Jar" and "The Wild Rover," and it certainly wasn't for the pittance we got at the end of the last set each night. It was because the songs, though Irish in origin in many cases, reminded me more of the Southwest Detroit where I was born than anything Jack White or Kid Rock had ever written.

When we passed Anne Aldridge's house and saw familiar faces from the Gaelic League, Bruce, Ellen Quinleaven, Kathleen O'Neill and others, we were offered beer in exchange for a couple of tunes. So we played "The Leaving of Liverpool," and I couldn't tell you why that particular song. I didn't know who we were saying goodbye to, nor when they would be leaving.