Mighty Mighty Bosstones Earn Some New York City Love

In the unlikely event Red Sox and Yankees fans agree to peace talks, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones should play the summit. Tuesday night at New York City's Irving Plaza, Boston's bastard-ska kings received a warm, riotous welcome. Mohawked kids crowd-surfed. Shirtless fat guys knocked each other over. Skinny dudes in suspenders and pork pies jogged in place. Best of all, no one in the sold-out club yelled anything about baseball or accused any sports team from the Northeast's other great city of sucking.

The ever-gracious Bosstones returned the goodwill. During 'Hell of a Hat,' one of the older tunes in their 23-song career-spanning set, lead singer Dicky Barrett gamely fielded a flurry of hats thrown from the audience. At one point, he found himself holding a yellow Yankees cap in one hand and a plaid scallly cap -- the type worn by dock workers, Dropkick Murphys fans and other assorted Beantown miscreants -- in the other. Although Barrett opted to wear the latter, he didn't stomp the former into a pancake, as a less enlightened Sox fan surely would have.

Later in the song, after he'd chucked it back into the sea of moshing bodies, the Yanks cap came back to him, and this time, he slipped it on.

"It's yellow," Barrett said with a puzzled look on his face, tossing it into the crowd a second time. The cap was only on his noggin for a couple of seconds, so he probably won't need to purify himself with a dip in the Charles River.

The semi-reunited Bosstones are five shows into a quickie eight-date summer tour, and since the New York City performance was to have been the closest to Boston -- a Connecticut date with Aerosmith has since been added -- Irving Plaza was a fine place for the octet to take on a ninth member and welcome back into its ranks original guitarist Nate Albert. He came dressed for the occasion, sporting the kind of dark suit that long ago replaced thrift-store plaid as the Bosstones' official uniform, and tore through 'Kinder Words,' a 1994 ska-core corker that allowed him to play both spazzy offbeat chords and crunchy hard-rock riffs.

Barrett hugged his former band mate, and if he'd had time, he'd have done likewise with every person in the room.

"It's good to be back," Barrett told fans early in the evening, his heart pinned to his sweat-soaked shirtsleeve. "It's good to be back because you're here. If we came back and you weren't in here, that would suck."