The Smithereens, five years after.

The Smithereens, five years after.

by

Harold DeMuir

Smithereens frontman Pat DiNizio is enough of a fan to have spent the night before his big CREEM interview out at the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, but enough of a cranky skeptic to have made his exit well before that event’s idol-studded jam climax.

“You had to sit at a table for six hours before the jam started,” explains the singer/writer/guitarist. Still, Pat admits that he got a charge when at some point during the evening, Elton John declared himself a Smithereens admirer and declined Pat’s offer of a copy of the band’s new LP, Green Thoughts. “He said he’d rather buy one.”

The Smithereens can afford to be blase about these sort of occurrences nowadays. In the year-and-a-half since their long-overdue first LP, Especially For You, elevated*the New Jersey-bred quartet from regional semi-obscurity to the AOR mainstream, the Smithereens have gotten to rub shoulders with numerous pop icons—-a job perk that’s particularly pleasing to drummer and resident popculture authority Dennis Diken.

“We’ve become very good friends with Percy Helton’s great-nephew,” Diken beams. “He helped me move the other day. He lives in South Jersey and he had our first album, and he happened to be flipping through the TV dial one night and stopped to check out The Cutting Edge at the very second that I started rattling on about Helton. He wrote us a letter, and he gave me a bunch of great old Helton stuff.

“We also tried to hook up with Bill Cullen while we were in L.A. recording the new album—he was very flattered, but he was out of town. And Bud Abbott, Jr. was supposed to come and visit us in the studio, but he ended up being too busy.”

Especially For You, the record that facilitated the Smithereens’ entry into this galaxy of showbiz glitz, introduced middle America to the band’s moody guitar pop. In an inexplicable attack of good taste, middle America responded enthusiastically. Interestingly, the album’s darkest track, “Blood And Roses,” was also its most popular, followed closely by the obsessive “Behind The Wall Of Sleep.”

The combo’s late-blooming popularity came as a pleasant shock to those who’d watched the Smithereens spend their first five-and-a-half years slugging it out, with limited success, on the Manhattan club scene and the Jersey bar circuit. “Most of our original following is gone,” DiNizio muses. “Most of the clubs that we started out in have gone out of business, reopened under different names and gone out of business again. And most of the A&R people that turned us down the first five or six times aren’t working for record companies anymore. But we’re still around.”

Although the band had been rejected by virtually every major label, not to mention several minor ones, they did manage to score a few small victories along the way. They released a four-song 7” EP (1980’s Girls About Town) and an acclaimed mini-album (1983’s Beauty And Sadness, a surprise hit in Scandinavia), spent a year backing legendary ’50s songwriter Otis Blackwell (with whom they recorded two LPs), and joined original Beau Brummels members Sal Valentino and Dec Mulligan for a one-off Beau Brummels “reunion” gig.

Meanwhile, the four Smithereens continued their alternate identities as respectable citizens. Pat, who’d left the family garbage-hauling business to devote his attention to the band, sold women’s clothing at Macy’s, worked a series of office jobs (one of them in a computer firm as assistant to office manager Suzanne Vega, who fired him but later atoned by singing on Especially For You’s jazzy duet, “In A Lonely Place”), and booked acts at the Greenwich Village clubs Folk City and the Bottom Line. Dennis ran a mail-order pop-art T-shirt business. Guitarist Jim Babjak attended to his New Brunswick, N.J. record and video store. And bassist Mike Mesaros stacked boxes in a Jersey warehouse and worked as a messenger in Manhattan.

For DiNizio, the public’s acceptance of Especially For You was “a vindication, after being told for so many years that these songs sucked and that we weren’t going anywhere. After being obscure for so long, it was a tremendous joy to find out that there’s an audience out there for us.”

“It’s great knowing that people like you,” says Mesaros. “But on the other hand, now we have something that we have to live up to. We’ve set a certain standard with Especially For You, and now anything less than that—both live and on record—is a failure.”

Despite the pressures inherent in following up a successful debut album, Green Thoughts (produced, like its predecessor, by new-pop godfather Don Dixon) is a winner, striking a balance between garagey crunch and polished pop, and brimming with emotion, intelligence and hooks. Tracks like “House We Used To Live In” and “If The Sun Doesn’t Shine” demonstrate substantial lyrical growth, and “Something New” (no relation to the Fab Four) and “Especially For You” (no relation to Especially For You) turn inside jokes into resonant statements.

“I think we rose to the challenge and made a good album,” says DiNizio. “We’ve been referred to as a singles band, but we’ve always thought of ourselves as a group that could make really strong albums if gfven the chance. That was the goal, and I think we succeeded. I think everything on this one is just a little better, and I think it’s a little more subtle. Our playing’s gotten better from touring for 15 months, and I think the lyrics show a little more experience.

"Most of the clubs we started out in have gone out of business..." -Pat DiNizio

“The songs were all written in November. We had two rehearsals in New York and no rehearsals with Don, and we just went into the studio and banged it out. It has more of a sense of unity to it, perhaps, than the last record, just because it was all written in one sitting and recorded and mixed in 16 days.”

“And under budget,” Babjak interjects.

“That’s almost unheard of in this day and age,” DiNizio continues, “and a lot of people just don’t know how to work that way. But we’ve always worked that way, just out of economic necessity. And now we find that that’s the best way for us to work, because our instincts are usually correct and excessive pre-production can make it stale.”

Didn’t he panic, having to write the crucial sophomore LP in the space of a month, after having six years to come up with the first one? “No more than the usual panic any writer experiences. Perhaps I was experiencing some jitters personally, and maybe the rest of the guys were wondering if I was gonna come up with some good songs. But it wasn’t really the kind of thing we stayed up nights worrying about.”

“I wasn’t worried at all,” says Mesaros. “Pat throws away songs that other people would be happy to put on their records, so I had a lot of confidence.”

In addition to the 10 DiNizio originals on Green Thoughts, and an 11th which appears on the CD version, the sessions produced versions of Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Something Stupid” (performed as a duet with Marti Jones), “Harlem Nocturne,” the Beatles’ “One After 909,” the Yardbirds’ “Psycho Daisies,” the Who’s “The Seeker,” Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life,” Irma Thomas’s “Ruler Of My Heart” and the surf instrumentals “Misirlou” and “Back To Balboa.”

“We also recorded a really great song of Jimmy’s called ‘Say Goodbye,’ which didn’t get on the album because we didn’t have time to finish it,” says DiNizio. “We’ll either save that for the next album or put it on a B-side.”

“Or it’ll come out 10 years from now on Smithereens: From The Vaults,” says Babjak resignedly.

The band also found time for a visit from Harry Belafonte, who was recording across the hall and dropped by to listen to “Only A Memory.” Another guest was underrated pre-Beatles pop god Del Shannon, who sings on “The World We Know.” “It’s such an injustice that he’s playing oldies shows with lame-ass bands,” Mesaros says of Shannon. “He’s so much better than that.”

Though the Smithereens adhere to the old-fashoned values of hard work, honest songcraft and jangly guitars, they staunchly reject the revivalist tag that bedeviled them in the wake of Especially For You. “What we do has nothing to do with nostalgia whatsoever,” Diken declares. “It’s just a matter of standards, and how it makes you feel.”

“The sound of the band has never been a deliberate attempt to sound like anything" says DiNizio, “and the band has sounded virtually the same since we started playing in 1980, with certain modifications that came about through natural evolution. I just don’t think in any musical terms other than the Beach Boys and the Beatles and Duane Eddy and Buddy Holly—those are my reference points, just in terms of what I hear in my head. Production, to me, is Brian Wilson and George Martin and Phil Spector.

“We use technology in the studio as much as anybody, but it’s real people playing real instruments. The only problem we have is that the audience that’s listening to radio now is developing ears that are used to hearing slick, artificial production, and that makes it a little more difficult for groups like us to do what we do without being labeled retro.

“If you listen closely to the new record,” says Pat, “you might find a few little mistakes here and there, but those things were left in intentionally, because we’re more concerned with the overall feeling and atmosphere of the track than having it sound letter-perfect.”

Mesaros: “The way most records are made now is almost inhuman, and missing the point of what music is supposed to be. So many records today have great production and the songs suck. But our songs stand up on their own; you can hum them. Can you hum ‘Shake Your Love’?”

“Maybe people are getting tired of that slick stuff and they want to hear real songs again,” Diken offers. “Maybe that’s why they like us.”

“I don’t see how anybody could play

rock ’n’ roll and not be a fan,” says Mesaros. “At times, I’m totally outraged by people’s lack of knowledge of music. Rock ’n’ roll, in general, sucks today, because people don’t have that love of it and that sense of history. I met somebody in Los Angeles—somebody with an important job in the music industry—and he didn’t know who Del Shannon is. That’s like The New York Times sending the opera critic to cover a Mets game.”

The Smithereens’ other image, as intense gloom-mongers, neglects such formative influences as Joe Franklin, Uncle Floyd, Abbott & Costello (the TV show, not the movies), Famous Monsters and Mad magazines, and White Castle burgers. That side comes out in their live shows, harder and funnier than the records, where the band often trots out selections from the repertoire of ’60s covers they developed during their bar-band days.

“I don’t think we’re a particularly morose band,” DiNizio opines. “Some of the more minor-key material might give people that impression, but there’s also material that’s more optimistic and upbeat, especially on the new record. The main crux of the band is the more serious lyrical side, but we don’t take ourselves so seriously that we can’t make fun of ourselves.

“There’s nothing worse than seeing an artist who has no sense of humor about himself and is so deadpan and dry onstage that it makes you nervous to watch. We’re human beings, and we’re subject to various moods, just like everybody else. We’re just ourselves, really—there’s no rock-guy image or attitude, because that’s just not what we’re like as people.”

DiNizio, whose friends describe him as both an inveterate romantic and a neurotic control freak, shies away from explaining his songs. “The'lyrics should be open to different levels of interpretation, so I don’t like to state plainly what they’re about. Like, ‘House We Used To Live In’ could be about a couple whose marriage breaks up, or it could be about an adolescent’s feelings towards his parents, or it could be about something else entirely.

“I’ve also been trying consciously to write things in an open-ended way, rather than ‘girl’ this and ‘girl’ that. I could have written ‘Girl, it don’t matter to me if the sun doesn’t shine,’ but the line ‘How it don’t matter to me if the sun doesn’t shine’ opens up the possibility of it having meaning to more people.”

Now that they’ve finally found their place in the scheme of things, the Smithereens can look back philosophically on their lean years. “When you’ve been togetherthis long,” says Mesaros, “you play intuitively, and there’s very little talking necessary. It’s like in hockey, if the guys in the forward line have played together for a long time, you instinctively know where the other guy’s gonna be when you make a pass. That’s why we were able to do this record as fast as we did.”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 61

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 35

“We can salvage just about any sort of situation,” says Babjak. “We played in a 500-year-old opera house in Reykjavik, Iceland, and they couldn’t get any pick-ups for the acoustic guitar, so we had to do our acoustic songs totally acoustic, with no microphones, and we made it work.”

“We did a live radio broadcast from the Stone Pony in Asbury Park,” DiNizio adds, “and everything broke down, so we did an a capella version of Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah.’ ”

The musicians exhibit little bitterness over the lengthy spate of rejections which kept them out of the game for so long. “We never really thought about it too much at the time,” says Diken. “We always just kind of forged ahead the best we could.”

“We never allowed ourselves to dwell upon it,” says DiNizio. “We just maintained this blind faith, which was severely tested at various points. We started out very naively, thinking we’d have a record deal in six months, and we really didn’t understand how things worked. On the Bleecker Street scene where we started out, there were a lot of people who’d lost their record deals and were still hanging on. At the time, I looked at that and decided that we should exit with some dignity if it didn’t happen for us, but then six months turned into a year, and a year into two years, two years into three, and pretty soon it was five years and there was no turning back.”

“You take a hell of a risk when you do this,” says Mesaros, “especially with the way American society is so money-oriented and success-oriented now. Every one of us had had opportunities to start a normal life and work a normal job and move up the corporate ladder. But when you make the decision to do this with your life, you throw that away, and after you reach a certain point it’s too late to go back.” ©