Still together, still playing, and still totally enjoying it after 43 years, the Smithereens are a New Jersey icon. Formed in Carteret in 1980, the band has earned a loyal and world-wide fan base. The stripped down sound and joyful energy of a Smithereens show makes it feel like everyone is a kid again, in the crowd and on stage.
“We had lot of success back in the ’80s and played so many colleges,” says Smithereens drummer Dennis Diken. “But what’s really cool is that many of these same folks who came to see us back then are now empty nesters, and they’re coming back to our shows. It’s like those times never ended and they’re reliving the glory days. And now they’re bringing their kids, so we’re spanning the generations.”
“Plus, we feel like we’re playing as well as we always have, in fact we put the energy of teenagers into our playing,” he says.
The Smithereens will be at Artie’s Bar and Grill in Frenchtown on Saturday, August 5, with special guest Marshall Crenshaw on lead vocals. (The group’s original lead singer, Pat DiNizio, died in 2017). In addition to Diken, the band includes original members Jim Babjak on guitar and bassist Mike Mesaros.
Singing lead with the Smithereens is a perfect fit for Crenshaw, who has been doing his part for the last couple of years, along with Robin Wilson, front man for the Gin Blossoms.
“We met Marshall around 1981 or ’82, through the late Alan Betrock, who produced our ‘Beauty and Sadness’ EP,” Diken says. “Through Alan we got to know Marshall and started opening shows for him as early as 1981 and ’82. He also came in to play keyboards on some of our recordings, and has always been a member of our extended family.”
“It was at (late lead singer) Pat’s tribute concert when Marshall first sat in, and it felt like an old, comfortable shoe,” he says. “It gave us hope that the Smithereens could continue after Pat died, and Marshall does a great job interpreting our music. We’ve also had a long friendship with Robin from the Gin Blossoms.”
It’s a no-brainer that Crenshaw would fit like a glove with the Smithereens, as both he and the band love Buddy Holly and many other ground-breaking figures in rock and roll.
The Smithereens also have a love for ’60s Mod-influenced British groups, such as the Small Faces, the Move, and the Who. Diken says the Clash, Elvis Costello, and Nick Lowe are also longtime favorites.
The band officially formed in 1980, but most of the guys in the group had known each other for years before that.
Babjak, Diken, and Mesaros are all from Carteret and graduated from Carteret High School in 1975. They were seriously influenced by punk and New Wave and went into New York City all the time to hang out at legendary clubs like Max’s Kansas City and, especially, CBGB.
Diken remembers the first time he stepped into CBGB in 1976 and saw the late Tom Verlaine and Television on stage.
He and his friends had just come from a huge Paul McCartney and Wings concert at Madison Square Garden and the contrast between Wings’ arena rock and the no-frills atmosphere at CBGB was ironic and life changing.
“We walked into this dank, stark room, saw Television there, and loved it,” he says. “That was the moment that suggested to us, ‘OK, we don’t have to play big concerts, but we can do this, we can play clubs.’ We went back to CBGB many times, to see the Talking Heads, the Dictators, the Shirts — it was a big part of our life.”
A few years later, the band was formed with DiNizio, from Scotch Plains. He had placed a classified ad in The Aquarian Weekly looking for a drummer to help on a demo tape, and Diken answered it and later introduced his schoolmates Babjak and Mesaros as well.
Their name derives from the cartoon character Yosemite Sam, who had the expression, “Ya better say your prayers, ya flea-bitten varmint …I’m-a-gonna blow ya to smithereens.”
Growing up in Carteret, with parents who liked music but didn’t play any instruments, Diken never took lessons or played in school bands.
“None of us have any formal training,” he says. “We just had a passion. We got the music bug and willed ourselves to do it, to have a band. We wouldn’t say no.”
Influences may be too many to name, as Diken, born in February 1957, has been absorbing music since toddlerhood.
“I caught the music bug early on, earlier than when the Beatles hit the U.S.,” he says. “I remember watching ‘American Bandstand’ in 1960 or ’61, and I taught myself to play drums around age 3 and really went bonkers.”
“I loved the records that were coming out, the Beach Boys, all the girl groups, the Brill Building songs out of New York,” Diken says. “Then the Beatles hit and that pushed it even further. I knew I wanted to be a DJ and play drums.”
Both ambitions have come true, and Diken uses his encyclopedic musical mind to host Denny’s Den, a retro radio treat on independent station WFMU out of Jersey City.
Diken is also a music historian and a researcher for album reissue projects.
He has recorded or toured with such legendary performers as Dave Davies (Kinks), Nancy Sinatra, Ben E. King, Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las, and Ronnie Spector, who first came to fame in the Ronettes. Her music was in Diken’s DNA, in fact Diken played along with the songs as a child, emulating session musician Hal Blaine on drums.
So when Diken got the chance to play with Ronnie Spector, he knew the music by heart. It was one of the highlights of his career.
“There was only one Ronnie Spector, and I played with her for 10 years,” Diken says. “I learned to play drums from listening to the great Hal Blaine with the Ronettes, so playing with her was full circle. But now, there she was in person, with ‘the voice,’ that very special voice.”
With more than 40 years’ worth of music, the show in Frenchtown will draw from all the Smithereens incarnations, “new stuff, stuff everyone loves, album tracks — we strike a nice balance live,” Diken says.
They’ll be serving up some songs from “The Lost Album,” a compilation of previously unreleased original tunes, which came out in 2022 on Sunset Boulevard Records.
The story goes that, in 1993, the Smithereens were in between the end of their contract with Capitol Records and the beginning of their deal with RCA. There had been a management change at Capitol Records and a number of artists, including the Smithereens, were let go. But since the release of their 1991 album “Blow Up,” the band had written a batch of songs they wanted to record.
In early 1993, the group went into a New York recording studio and recorded two albums’ worth of songs. “The first time we went in with the intention of producing a full album by ourselves,” Diken says.
“We paid for everything. RCA took 12 of the songs but the other 12 just languished in our archives,” he says. “A couple of years ago, we came across the stash of material and thought, ‘these still really hang together.’”
As with much of the Smithereens catalog, the songs draw from ’60s influences like the Beatles and the Kinks, with strong, catchy melodies, lyrics that actually say something, and lots of layered guitar, bass, and drums.
The Smithereens enjoyed a touch of the “big, big time” in the late ’80s when the song “A Girl Like You” seemed to be everywhere. It was originally written to be the title track for the 1989 Cameron Crowe film, “Say Anything.”
Diken doesn’t really miss that kind of spotlight. He is just happy to be drinking in the jovial energy of the audience and playing with his old friends.
“When I give advice for young people going into music, I say make sure you practice your craft, make good contacts, etc., but also make sure you like the people you’re playing with because you’ll be traveling, eating, and sleeping together in addition to being on the stage,” Diken says.
“One of the greatest things about doing this, is that we’re still friends, we like each other,” he says. “That’s one of the greatest things about being in the Smithereens, we can really continue together as a family.”
The Smithereens, Artie’s Bar and Grill, 1121 N.J. Route 12, Frenchtown. Saturday, August 5. Doors open 6:30 p.m. Tickets cost $30. Available through www.ticketweb.com. 908-996-1203 or www.artiesbarandgrill.com.
The Smithereens on the web: www.officialsmithereens.com.
