INTERVIEW: A Talk With The Smithereens
- Joe Silva
Two weeks after I watch the Smithereens lunge through their set at one of Atlanta's more modestly sized rock spots, someone from their offices connects me with an uncaffeinated Pat Dinizio for a quick pre-noon chat. His mid-tour voice is coarse and binds well to the black watch cap, Mafia wiseguy look he projects onstage and from the new album sleeve. But as he politely excuses himself briefly to bring his wife a cup of "cawfee," and then settles in to swap daddy stories with me (we both have fairly new baby girls around the house...), I forget for a moment that I wanted to mention how obnoxiously loud they are these days.
"Yeah", he laughs "Mike is probably the loudest bass player I've ever heard in my life. I marvel at the ability of the audience to stand in front of him for the whole set."
What's even more noteable is how the band can move between the more seemingly innocent gestures of their early material and the current stuff, that in concert or on disc, involves a lot of sweat and spitting into microphones. A Date With the Smithereens is launched with the abrasively cast lines "Guess what there's a black cloud inside of my head/Don't mess around with me or you'll find yourself dead." Behind the control board once again is Don Dixon, but the last time he handled the band (_Especially For You), things weren't lyrically quite so dark.
"We start the set with a lot of material from the new album and then we go back and do songs like "Behind the Wall of Sleep" and to my ears it sounds a lot more naive in terms of writing. There was a lot less life experience at that point."
Their dues paid encompass a lot of road time, a severed tie with the record company that they gave a handful of hits to (Capitol) and the possibility that they may have seen the crest of their career a while back and didn't take time to think about investing in car dealerships or real estate when they had the chance.
"I had heard that the new (Capitol) president said that the reason they let us go was because we had peaked. And that's probably true." he says in a straight up, no remorse tone. "We probably did peak with Smithereens 11, but that was no reason to let us go."
The warm verve of A Date With... that Dixon and the band have conjured along the major spike Pat's had in his songwriting, contest to that last statement. With the soft, tender statement of "Afternoon Tea" that follows the opening rockers, the near tongue in chic of "Sick of Seattle" and "Gotti," this already well rounded effort even has a tasteful pair of guest solos by Lou Reed to boost it's hip factor. It make seem like a somewhat skewed connection, but it holds up for Dinizio.
"You gotta remember that Lou came from a Brill Building writer's background before it mutated into that whole Velvets thing and he's a fan of pop songwriting", he explains. "And one of my favorite albums is The Blue Mask, and in my secret heart if I could write like that, I could really dig it."
As a sidebar to the album, Dinizio and the rest of the band consented to contribute a song to the soundtrack for the film Time Cop starring..gulp..Jean Claude Van Damme.
"At first", Pat begins slowly, "I was a little reluctant about the idea, but there was a lot of pressure to do it because the album wasn't doing as well as was expected. But in the end we did it, he was a nice man, and did it hurt anyone? No not really."
The "film" was a hit and the video, which included the band, got to see some MTV time. What's unfortunate is that with the band making a solid second coming of sorts, that it took a Hollywood association for them to warrant some rotation.
But if A Date With The Smithereens can be thought of as a sign that there's still a good amount of pop fire in the Dinizio and the band, there's still a fair possibility that long after Van Damme films are rerouted to the realm of late night cable, the Smithereens will see long term radio play well past the millenium.
