Ken Casey gets lyrical help from a friend

The Dropkick Murphys begin a series of shows around Boston tonight just in time for St. Patrick’s Day. If you’re one of the lucky locals who wind up with tickets to their performances at the TD Garden (tonight), the Brighton Music Hall (Saturday), or the House of Blues (Sunday), know this bit of trivia: The song “Jimmy Collins’ Wake,” off their new album “Signed and Sealed in Blood,” was actually co-written by Richard Johnson, curator of the New England Sports Museum at the TD Garden. Dropkicks frontman Ken Casey explained to the Globe, “Dick from the New England Sports Museum actually wrote those lyrics. He knows everything about anything that has ever happened at Fenway Park. You want to know about East Boston playing South Boston High in the football championship of 1944, he’ll tell you what the weather was that day. He wanted to submit some lyrics to us and we were like, ‘Ah, I don’t know.’ So he sent some lyrics and it was like, ‘. . . this is great!’ So we put it to music and that was that.” Casey (inset) also told us about how it went down when he and his bandmates worked registers at various Newbury Comics locations in January when the album was released. He says he believes he raked in the most cash. “I definitely did, I kept track. But I also gave the worst incorrect change back, so I think in the end my store did the worst. When you haven’t worked the register in a while and someone comes up and hands you 80 bucks and the bill is $51.74 and there’s 20 people and they’re all taking pictures and someone is trying to have a conversation with you. I literally had a panic attack ‘just take it, I don’t know!’ (Laughs.) It was fun.”