Dave's Smithereens Page
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The Smithereens at B.B. King’s Blues Club & Grill. New York City, NY 1/17/03 by DSP Staff Editor Todd Sinclair
B. B. Be Good
Just suppose that B. B. King’s Blues Club & Grill actually named a sandwich after The Smithereens. What would its ingredients be? Judging by tonight’s performance, it would have to be a giant “party sub”…very meaty (meaty, beaty, big and bouncy?) but with most of the excess fat trimmed off. They’d definitely have to layer on some “Zesty Italian” DiNizio dressing or some spicy “Tex Mex” Babjak flavorings. Be sure to add lots of Mesaros’ “beefy bass fillings” “with relish” and lay it all on top of a tasty “Diken drum roll”. Serve this delicacy sizzling hot and/or rare depending on this particular B.B. King BBQ’s room temperature. Anyway you slice it, the band’s “Chef’s special” this evening contained seasoned pros dishing out a sumptuous main course meal garnished with all the fixin’s - including a few surprising concert condiments as well. Hold the baloney. Feeds a full house.
But enough with all of these tiring “platter platitudes”. In plain English, this was simply a great concert. It might have even been among the best shows of theirs that I’ve ever seen and that’s saying quite a lot. Reportedly, the band had agreed that it was time for a change and therefore some modifications had been worked out so that the live sound could more closely reflect the sound of the original recordings. Included back into the live instrumental arsenal are the 12-string electric and acoustic guitar. I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out just how the band can actually sound like it’s rocking even harder than ever when Pat DiNizio’s strumming an acoustic onstage now. It must be some kind of mystical/musical “wall of sound” thing.
Pat has obviously been honing his acoustic skills on the road with his ongoing solo “Living Room Tour 2” these days. It shows. Playing the acoustic guitar apparently opens him and the band up to exploring some tunes that the band might not otherwise attempt as often during their typical tandem electric guitars concert setting. Anyway, in this case it seemed to add some more subtle shading to “Something New” and “Especially For You” when these songs were performed live this evening. At times, DiNizio almost seemed like an oblivious and musically absorbed “Nero” fiddling away on acoustic while Babjak’s electric guitar burned. Here, Pat’s acoustic “Yin” seemed to perfectly complement Jim Babjak’s electric “Yang”. (Or should that actually be “Din” and “Twang”?)
The other noticeable difference in this performance was the way that the Smithereens pushed forward throughout the evening like a runaway steam engine. One number led immediately into another while accelerating at breakneck speed. This seems to be a conscious decision on their part in order to move the pace along somewhat more quickly than it had been recently. The stage patter was kept minimal to the point of being nearly non-existent. Their sometimes leisurely onstage joking banter of years past seems to have been abandoned almost entirely this go-round. Dennis Diken’s frequently freestyle musical medley bit that often ended their shows had vanished as well. The only lasting remnant of this departed portion of the program this evening was Dennis’ “Shop Rite” shirt that he often wore during his closing routine. Rather than coming off as merely sterile or rote, these reductive measures actually seemed to enhance their playing skills by allowing their communal adrenaline to pump continuously and redirect all of this added energy back into the show. The pace never lagged. This momentum kept building up to the point where it was truly a thrilling sight to behold the band during all of this no holds barred concert activity.
“Top of the Pops”, for instance, rolled out like a juggernaut to the point where the guy standing next to me had that incredulous look on his face that I recognized more and more frequently amongst the audience as the night wore on. In fact, right out of the gate, the whole audience seemed to be the high octane fuel in The Smithereens’ engine…the wind beneath their wings…or the wind behind their sails as the case may be (pick a cliché and discard two). As the crowd’s heads started bobbing along in time to the music and they sang the words to nearly every song like a possessed chorus of banshees, it became increasingly obvious, judging by the band’s satisfied smirks and boldly empowered playing, that they were definitely thriving on all of this interaction. B. B. King’s is a beautiful concert venue but it is also extremely large. The combination of a packed (possibly even sold out) empathetic audience seemed to be just the musical mojo that the witch doctor ordered this evening.
The only time that they seemed to come up for a breath of air, was during the band introductions late in the evening. Pat gave a sort of brief “Cliff Notes” version of how the band came into existence by answering an ad in the New Jersey Aquarian music paper nearly twenty-three years ago. After introducing and extolling the talents of Dennis Diken and Mike Mesaros, Pat went on to sing (well, not literally) Jim Babjak’s praises. Pat related how he himself had begun writing all of these songs which were missing their lead guitar parts and how Jim had then come up with all of these amazingly brilliant “George Harrison-like” parts to accompany them. After an appropriately timed vaudevillian beat, “Shecky” DiNizio then turned to his perennially deadpan comedic foil, Jim Babjak, and added something along the lines of how Jim had been with this band for all of its twenty-three years without ever having been formally asked to join the band.
Some poignant moments occurred during the course of the evening when Pat made very brief dedications before two of the set’s songs. Pat introduced the rarely played “Life Is So Beautiful” with the brief preface: “For Chopper”. Kevin “Chopper” Weremeychik was the beloved and longtime roadie for the Smithereens who had very sadly died earlier that week from cancer. Pat also prefaced the familiar opening chords to the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” by uttering: “For Pete Townshend”. This was obviously a show of support for the “innocent until proven guilty” songwriter. Later on in the show, the band also launched into a cover of The Who’s “The Seeker” which was met with ecstatic whoops from the crowd and with sustained fervor throughout.
It was a very good night to catch the Smithereens putting their stylistic spin on some other cover tunes you probably never heard them play before in concert. They gave their onetime “AC/DC meets the Beatles” (meets the Smithereens) credo a good workout this evening with inspired performances of The Beatles’ “I’m A Loser” and “Hold Me Tight”. (In fact, “tight” might have been the operative keyword to describe the band’s playing this entire evening.) They even played an Everly Brothers tune, “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad) as their first encore, which would have seemed like an exceptionally odd selection for the band to play had it not sounded so terrific when performed live by them tonight.
All in all, the Smithereens seemed to be a much more cohesive unit this evening and even more energized than I can recall them being in quite a while. There appeared to be genuine enjoyment and smiling looks shared amongst them as they got their rocking “rocks off” playing their music as only this particular band can do on a good night. And this was clearly a good night.
At one point near the end of the show during a jolting version of “A Girl Like You”, Pat looked over at one of the two mini “Diamondvision-like” viewers on either side of the stage. He laughed as he nudged Mike Mesaros to look over at Jim’s close-up projected image onscreen. There you could see Jim obliviously playing a guitar solo while an arty 60’s-style special effect of dynamically pointy lines framed his magnified face. As the music swelled throughout the room and these “blown up” (no pun intended) trippy images of rockin’ ‘Reens were shown alongside the stage like a kind of oldtime “Joshua Light Show” experience, maybe one could be forgiven for imagining what it might’ve been like if the Smithereens had been around sharing a bill alongside Hendrix or The Who at the Fillmore during the 1960’s. “Monterey Power Pop Festival”, anyone?
Even four encores and three chords later, the audience still wouldn’t let the Smithereens get off the stage. That was okay, though, because it didn’t really look like the band wanted to leave anyway. Pat simply nodded to his bandmates at this point and they simultaneously broke into a repeat performance of their powerhouse ending to “A Girl Like You”. When that still didn’t seem to be sufficient, they launched into a “Time and Time Again” redux for the dramatic conclusion.
A woman standing on the stage’s “front line” who was apparently a Smithereens concert veteran from “way back when” just shook her head in awe after the show saying that the band still never ceased to amaze her in concert. The rest of the admiring throng seemed to share this opinion as they muttered descriptions of the show like “awesome” that somehow seemed less like a tired old cliché and more like the only proper word one could use in this case. Can the resulting “hero worship” of “the band that would be king” really be that far off on the musical horizon?
Come to think of it, maybe they should just name that imaginary Smithereens menu item a “Hero sandwich” and be done with it. That sounds about right to me.
Set list:
She’s Got A Way
Encores:
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