In Praise of The Smithereens’ Especially For You

It’s right up there with The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, Zoom and I Saw Her Standing There. In fact, if we’re talking about songs that both evoke and simulate the hot mercury surge of love at first sight, I’d say that The Smithereens’ Behind The Wall of Sleep just about edges it. I’ve had thirty years to revise that opinion, but nothing has come along to unsettle it. Indeed, it’s measure of the degree to which Behind the Wall of Sleep simulates the feeling it describes that, in 1987, I became as obsessed with it as quickly as its protagonist becomes obsessed with the subject of his crush. The song came to Smithereens’ frontman Pat DiNizio quickly. His band were playing in Boston, sharing a bill with a group called The Bristols, whose bassist Kim Ernst immediately caught DiNizio’s attention. We don’t need to imagine what he saw in her because it’s all there in the first verse of the song.

“She had hair like Jeannie Shrimpton, back in 1965

She had legs that never ended

I was halfway paralyzed

She was tall and cool and pretty

And she dressed as black as coal

If she’d ask me to, I’d murder

I would gladly lose my soul”

Nursing a hangover on a People Express plane back from Boston, DiNizio wrote down the words on a cocktail napkin. The melody came at the same time: “I’m singing the thing to myself for the whole flight, like a mantra, so I don’t forget it. Then I get stuck in traffic for two hours and I’m nearly losing my mind, because I knew I had a good song.”

Pat DiNizio might have been terrified that he’d forget Behind the Wall of Sleep by the time he got home, but the first time I heard the song, it stayed in my head of its own volition. The band had been booked to appear on British Friday night TV show The Tube early in 1987. I got it instantly. It was a song that not only described what I wanted love to feel like, but it did so in the context of one of the few other things that got me out of bed in the morning: pop music. It’s also a song about being a fan who wants to be more than a fan to the person who has just changed their world, yet remains aware that they have an almost impossible mountain to climb.

“Now I know I’m one of many who

Would like to be your friend

And I’ve got to find a way

To let you know I’m not like them.”

It ought to be creepy and stalkery, and yet it’s a long way short of either. Behind the Wall of Sleep inverts the conventions of most fan/rock star songs. The fan is a guy and the rock star is a woman. Within the song, the power is with her. We don’t even know if DiNizio ever gets to meet her (it seems he hadn’t when he wrote it). I think part of what I responded to as a 17 year-old watching them perform the song was a sense that this wasn’t a predatory alpha guy confident that he can just turn on the requisite charm and woo the object of his affections. DiNizio was no Josh Homme or Jim Morrison. Before he fronted The Smithereens, he worked as a garbage disposal man in New Jersey. He wasn’t classically good-looking. He was losing his hair and, with his 20s behind him, he had convinced himself that he was too old to secure his band a record deal.

Indeed, in desperation for something to happen, he briefly agreed to let a 16 year-old girl he had never met become the band’s manager. Joyce Linehan went on to become Chief of Policy for the City of Boston, but at the time, she was a fan who somehow wanted to help The Smithereens get to the next level. “We didn’t know [she was 16]”, recalled DiNizio, “until we stayed on her living room floor and her parents freaked out.” For all of that, Linehan’s brief tenure managing The Smithereens yielded the desired effect. She suggested they send a demo to a like-minded label called Enigma. DiNizio did as he was told, and a week later, his band were offered a deal. “I was already 31 and nobody’s idea of what a rock star should look like,” said DiNizio, “We weren’t Bon Jovi or the Hooters. So it was an epic struggle to keep Enigma from seeing us live, but it all worked out.”

They did one other song on that maiden British TV performance, the brooding bittersweet Blood and Roses. I figured that any band with two songs of this quality must have plenty more comparably great songs on their album. I rarely allowed myself to buy full-price albums if waiting for the sales was an option, but the compulsion to hear more Smithereens songs led me to Tempest Records in Birmingham city centre one Saturday afternoon. From the very opening song, Strangers When We Meet, Especially For You made light work of repaying my faith. They played with the toughness of a rock band, but at their heart they were pop through and through. The extra years that DiNizio feared were a handicap to securing him a deal were, in fact, his greatest asset. The imperial era of the Brill Building and, in particular, the British invasion soundtracked his formative years. In The Smithereens’ music, you can hear not just the sonorous jangle of A Hard Day’s Night-era Fabs, The Searchers and The Hollies — but also the American bands that emerged as a result of those groups, The Monkees and The Byrds. Indeed, just as it’s impossible not to chip in with the harmony on the words “feel a whole lot better” in I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better, it takes superhuman restraint not to weigh in on the “sometimes I even weep” harmony on Behind the Wall of Sleep.

There isn’t a weak song on Especially For You. Not even close. Groovy Tuesday is one of those from-the-title-down humdingers about a theoretically bad day in which, actually, nothing can get to you — not even the indifference of the woman you love: “And I can’t help it if I’m not the one you need/It doesn’t matter if I’m still the lost ball in the weeds.” Both on Groovy Tuesday and Cigarette, you almost feel as though you’ve been parachuted into a scene from an unmade musical, where the action stops and we’re invited to momentarily reflect on the quandary of its lead characters. “Just like this Cigarette, our time is running down,” sings DiNizio, on the waltz-time separation lament, “Only one hour till you’re leaving this town.” On the album’s other standout ballad, In A Lonely Place, Suzanne Vega chips in to harmonise. Again, unrequited love seemed to bring out the best in DiNizio’s writing, although he wasn’t averse to a little inspired borrowing from time to time. Using lines from the 1950 Humphrey Bogart film of the same name, the chorus had DiNizio singing, “I was born the day I met you/Lived a little when you loved me/Died a little when we broke apart.”

But it was a fully plugged-into-the-mains Smithereens that really made your heart race. The ease with which catchy tunes came to DiNizio was evidenced by the compositional tightness of the songs on Especially For You. By way of example, scoot to the delicious transition into the middle-eight of Listen To Me Girl — less scrupulous bands would have used a mini-melody like that as the basis of a whole new song, and really who would blame them? Time and Time Again was probably the apotheosis of their Fabs obsession on Especially For You, with its crunchy Cavernous eight-note circular riff and irrepressible harmonies, as loving a pastiche as anything on the first Rutles album. Like The Beatles’ debut album, which they covered in its entirety in 2007, The Smithereens’ first sortie in a recording studio was preceded by years of playing in small venues.

And, as with Meet The Beatles, it was the sound of a band who Knew What Worked. Those opening bass thumps on Hand Of Glory, that give way to a jackhammer snare rattle and then straight into the soaring harmonic abandon of the chorus — it wasn’t complicated, but the celebratory brio in the execution told you that The Smithereens had formed exactly the sort of band that they themselves would have wanted to see at the end of a long working week. For DiNizio, it was enough to be able to give up the day job. For the rest of us, there are plenty of reasons to be grateful that he did — beyond the unsurpassable Especially For You, right through to their most recent resurgent set, titled 2011. Interviewed two years after the release of the latter, Pat DiNizio seemed no less amazed that the demand for his music was sufficient enough for him to not have to go back to picking up litter. “Here we are, 33 years later; March 2013 was the 33rd anniversary of the band. And did I add? We have no job skills for anything else at this point?”

In memory of Pat DiNizio (October 12, 1955 — December 12, 2017)