The Smithereens
SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — Dennis Diken went to Seton Hall University for only one semester, but he’s happy to be returning to South Orange to play with the Smithereens at the South Orange Performing Arts Center on March 6.
“It’s a really cool venue,” Diken, the band’s drummer, said in a phone interview with the News-Record on Feb. 20. “We’re from Carteret, so it’s all kind of local turf for us.”
The SOPAC show is the first that the Smithereens will play locally without their founding lead singer, Pat DiNizio, who died in 2017. Marshall Crenshaw, a longtime collaborator and friend of Diken, guitarist Jim Babjak and bassist Mike Mesaros has taken over duties as the band’s frontman.
“It was a shock to our system to lose Pat, but once we found a kindred spirit it worked,” Diken said about the addition of Crenshaw. “We never wanted to replace Pat, but with Marshall it felt like an old comfortable shoe. We’d been working with him for a long time. We’re really good friends, and there’s no breaking up this family.”
Crenshaw played on the Smithereens’ first album, “Especially for You,” in 1986, covering the Hammond organ and six-string bass parts.
“We’ve always been fans of classic song writing,” Diken said. “So Marshall was coming from that same place.”
When the Smithereens are making a new album, Diken said, the songs come together in different ways each time. The band has been together since 1980, so there’s a shorthand they have with each other when they’re writing.
“Playing together is easy, because we can anticipate what the others are going to do,” Diken said. “Playing music is a language; you’re speaking to each other. Sometimes the music comes first, sometimes the lyrics. The process works in mysterious ways sometimes. You’ll see a person or an animal walking down the street and that will inspire you. You just flesh it out, which is the way Lennon and McCartney wrote.”
According to Diken, playing in places like South Orange is exciting for the members of the Smithereens because there’s a larger concentration of fans in the area.
“We love playing in our home area because a lot of our fans are here and we’re hometown boys,” he said. “There’s a lot of great places to play, like Los Angeles and Boston and Chicago. Tulsa is a really great city. It’s nice to have a job where you get to see different parts of the country, but we love playing here. We could play for each other in our basement, but having fans makes it all worthwhile. It’s wonderful to have people like what you do.”
One reason that Diken said the band has stayed together for so long is that all of the members genuinely like spending time together.
“You have to be really passionate and find other musicians who you enjoy hanging out with,” he said. “If you’re with people you like, you’re doing a lot more and you’re going to make better music.”
Photos Courtesy of Neil Seiffer and SOPAC
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